Ayende @ Rahien

Toys for geeks

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

I just got myself a UFO Mini Helicopter, it looks like this:

This is the first helicopter that I got, and for a 30$ toy, it is an awesome amount of fun. The only complaint that I have is that this has only about 5 minutes of battery life.

I am really bad at flying it, too.

As mentioned, this is the very first helicopter that I bought, and I think that I would like to have a better one for the next time. Any recommendations from you guys?

I would like a better battery life. 30 minutes – 1 hour would be what I want.
Should be pretty resistant to crashes. I know that I am going to crash it a lot.

Any recommendations?

Today’s comic relief

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:52:00 GMT

You are not allowed to understand us, it is the LAW!

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

It is not just developers that are making life interesting. Here is an exchange from today:

I am very happy to sell you whatever you want, but I would really like to know what it is that you want.

Elections

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 06:32:00 GMT

So today we had elections, and by tonight you will have a lot of people doing a lot of electoral math.

I don’t like elections, because of an assumption problem. It isn’t linear. This is how we usually portray the choices in elections. You pick a candidate / party that fit where you are on this line.

In reality, this isn’t nearly as simple. Mostly because this one line assumes that there is a central idea that is important being anything else. But let us take a few examples:

Tax policy
Security policy
Gay marriage
Religion
Social justice
Climate change

Now, they don’t fit on a single line. Your position on gay marriage doesn’t impact what you want with regards to tax policy, for example. The real scenario is:

Now, usually there is some concentration of ideas, so it is typical that if you give me your idea about gay marriage, I can guess what your ideas about climate change are.

By the way, I am taking gay marriage and climate change as examples that are common in more than a single country.

But that is guessing. And in many cases, people are a lot more complex than that. We are limited to choosing a candidate, but what happens when we have someone who we support on issue X and oppose on issue Y? We have to make tradeoffs.

So you are limited to one vote, and have to choose something on this line. Yes, as a result of that you get commonalities, a lot of people that like position X also like position Y, but not always, and sometimes I find it abhorrent that someone with whom I share the position on X also have an opposed idea on Y.

My absolute favorite feature in VS 2012

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 08:13:00 GMT

When working with stuff that throws exceptions (like Lucene), this is a god send.

Businesses that are a joy to work with: Skills Matter

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

I don’t believe that I ever did this, but I was just completely blown away by Skills Matter.

Please note, I never actually dealt with them as a student, although I got great feedback from the people I taught about them in that capacity. I am talking here solely about dealing with them as a service provider.

I have been working with them since 2008, and we have a great working relationship. I am routinely dealing with many businesses, and almost always you have this… friction. I usually have great rapport with the technical people with whom I work, but then it comes to dealing with other departments, it can be… annoying.

With Skills Matter, not only was it never the case. They go out of their way to make it easy and fun to work for them. I can’t talk about the “straw that broke the camel’s back” and was the trigger for this post, but I can talk about some other things.

From spreading the word about RavenDB and NHibernate by organising talks with me for the Skills Matter community to helping me with a payment dispute that I had with a hotel (that I reserved, but they took care of all the details of getting my money back and saved me tons of international calls an angst) to being willing and able to accommodate screw ups (oops, I missed the plane) in the most pleasant way possible and all the stuff they do for the developer community.

In my time working with them, I found them to be honest, hardworking, professional, ethical and in general Very Good People.

Sorry, we are out of bytes, try again tomorrow

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:00:00 GMT

I mean, huh?! How could an ebook be unavailable?

Strange production errors

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:00:00 GMT

The following code cause a really strange error in production:

new MailAddress("test@gmail.com");

The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address.

Huh?!

Obviously it is!

After immediately leaping to the conclusion that .NET is crap and I should immediately start writing my own virtual machine, I decided to dig a little deeper:

Character	Code
t	116
e	101
s	115
t	116
@	64
g	103
m	109
a	97
i	105
l	108
.	46
?	8203
c	99
o	111
m	109

8203 stands for U+200B or zero width space.

I guess that someone with a software testing background decided to get medieval on one of our systems.

I am turning 0x1E tomorrow

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

In hex, I am still a teenager .

To celebrate that, starting from the 20 Dec all the way to the new year, I decided to offer a 30% discount on all the profilers. All you need to do is to use the following coupon code:

01E-45K2D46V6K

The offer is valid for:

Time Traveling emails, and async operations

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:00:00 GMT

One of the more important aspects of Message Based Architecture is the fact that messages can be re-ordered. I am used to that, but this still had me chuckling.

The customer is always right?

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:00:00 GMT

When you get this sort of an email, you almost always know that this is going to be bad:

Let us start with: Which product? What license key? What order? What do you expect me to do about it?

At least he is polite.

Hm, I wonder what is going on in here…

This error can occur because of a trial that has expired or a subscription that has not been renewed.

He attached a Trial licensed to this email.

It is like a Greek tragedy, you know that at some point this is going to arrive at the scene.

I mean, we explicitly added the notion of subscriptions to handle just such cases, of people who want to use the profiler just for a few days and don’t want to pay the full version price. And you can cancel that at any time, incurring no additional charges.

Sigh…

All the Rhinos in the World, Unite!

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Update: You can see all the photos here

Well, I might have gone a bit overboard, but I do like Rhinos.

Say hello to my crash of rhinos.

And here is a nice family of them:

I don’t get this way very often, but AWESOME!

Entering to the office…

And just to give you some perspective:

The Big Event is just a week away

Sun, 22 May 2011 05:31:00 GMT

I am getting married on the 29th May, which is just a week away. You may notice a decline in the number of posts to this blog (and general activity for work related stuff) around that time frame.

For quite some time, I had to… endure certain types of jokes about what would happen when I would get married. Given the choice between my own happiness and the desires of some members of the development community to see me in a dark room eating pizza and working at all hours, I know what I would take…

Never the less, as a consolation prize to those people, and as a way to spread my happiness, the following coupon code with give you 29% discount for all the profilers (NH Prof, EF Prof, L2S Prof, LLBLGen Prof, Hibernate Prof): WDG-45K2D467C5

The coupon works for single license purchases, and it is only valid until the 1st of June.

More on the joy of support: My trial expired!

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 10:00:00 GMT

I got the following very interesting email:

You might have noticed that I have kept the email address of the sender public. That is an important clue.

The email was sent from a public email gateway, one of those places where you have a disposable email address.

I suspect that there isn’t actually a bug, but that the system is working as planned

And there is this complaint:

Executing TortoiseGit from the command line

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Originally posted at 1/6/2011

I love git, but as much as I like the command line, there are some things that are ever so much simple with a UI. Most specifically, due to my long years of using TortoiseSVN, I am very much used to the way TortoiseGit is working.

I still work from the command line a lot, and I found myself wanting to execute various actions on the UI from the command line. Luckily, it is very easy to do so with TortoiseGit. I simply wrote the following script (tgit.ps1):

param($cmd)
& "C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\bin\TortoiseProc.exe" /command:$cmd /path:.

And now I can execute the following from the command line:

tgit log

tgit commit

And get the nice UI.

Please note that I am posting this mostly because I want to be able to look it up afterward. I am sure your git tools are superior to mine, but I like the way I am doing things, and am reluctant to change.

Google vs. Bing

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:29:00 GMT

I was trying to find my office in Google’s Maps:

And then I tried Bing’s Maps:

Dear Microsoft, there is a good reason why you are less successful than Google…

Psychic Debugging

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:18:16 GMT

I think that I am getting too much of those recently:

Enough is enough: iTunes got to go

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:45:00 GMT

Here is the story, the only reason that I am using iTunes is because I want to sync books that I buy from audible.com to my iPhone.

I am still fighting this problem. And I have installed / uninstalled, danced the mamba and even try some chicken sacrifice on the last full moon. Nothing helps, oh, it will works once, immediately after I install it, but on the next reboot, it will show the same error.

Right now I have uninstalled iTunes from my system, and I am currently building a VM specifically so I would be able to sync new audiobooks to my iPhones. I think that this is insane.

Anyone got a better option than that?

Unstable

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 10:00:00 GMT

Originally posted at 10/20/2010

Currently…

RavenDB has an unstable fork
Which has an unstable branch (too unstable to be the master branch of the unstable fork!)

And then there is what I am working on locally…

I hate making big changes.

The other side of chasing the money

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:49:00 GMT

When I started doing my own consulting, I realized that sometimes I would have to chase after a client in order to get paid. Luckily, it hasn’t happened often.

I did not expect the reverse to happen, but it did. I just had to send the following formal notice to someone who does work for me:

Hi guys!
I am pretty sure that I owe you money. Would you mind terribly if I paid you?

And yes, this post is here to serve as a kick to the people in question.