Flash Mind Reader. Speculation below.

 


 

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Yesterday was my first anniversary working in the Belly of the Beast. As is traditional I brought in a pound of weed M & Ms for my coworkers. Digging around the K5 archives I found my first day of work diary from last year which brings back memories.

More below on the results of my last poll, scalable APIs, tester jokes, cool fellow B0rg retiring, and processing semantic HTML.

Poll: Favorite Open Source Licence?

 


 

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In yesterday's K5 diary I mentioned a site that aggregates 'Microsoft blogs' and described it as unnerving. Today the site author asks if I want to be taken off the list. Well, since I'm not on the list I can't ask to be taken off can I?

More importantly my Corrolla is almost paid off and I'll soon be turning twenty five. Time to buy the phat whip. Any suggestions folks?

Poll: What car should I get?

 


 

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A little while ago Joshua Allen started keeping a list of bloggers who work at MSFT. I always thought it was a grand joke and highlighted the kind of GroupThinktm you see at B0rg Central since you don't see lists of IBM bloggers, AOL bloggers or AT&T bloggers on various other personal weblogs do you?

This grand joke is now a joke on me. There are now [alleged] news sites that eagerly track the weekly brain farts posted to the InterWeb by myself and other B0rg. This is not to disparage my fellow B0rg employees but really 90% of the stuff in blogs [mine included] is brain fart material that is only of interest to yourself, some friends and the overly voyeuristic. I'm not sure which unnerves me more; reporters who are reading B0rg blogs hoping that some poor slob leaks some confidential shit or people who create websites to aggregate all the B0rg blogs.

More rant below.

 


 

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February 7, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

The only thing more chilling to expressing yourself in your online journal than the thought that your co-workers and manager may be reading your brain farts posted to the InterWeb is when Ziff Davis websites have links to your online journal on their front page. The previous link doesn't point to the front page which at the current time doesn't have a link but did this time yesterday. The front page currently does have a plea for people to send them more links to blogs by MSFT folks.

What an irritating way to start the morning.

More below on the source of Christ's healing power, the hundred worst things about 2002, getting Slashdotted, and the fact that Michael Jackson has lost his marbles.

Poll: Worst Thing About 2002?

 


 

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February 5, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Recent discussions at work have gotten me thinking about abstractions and how they sometimes help or hinder our understanding of how certain mechanical or electronic processes work. Virtual Memory, the Relational Model and the XML Infoset are examples of abstractions that have been useful to me while working on software. On the other hand certain abstractions [described below] have caused more problems than they have solved.

Below are my thoughts on both kinds of abstractions with examples.

Poll: Favorite Kind of Meat?

 


 

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Yesterday I added a couple of features to RSS Bandit. The one I am happiest with is that hitting the space bar now jumps you to the next unread item. This is such a neat feature, thanks to Joe Beda for repeatedly asking me to add it. I'll upload the latest installer when I get to work which means it'll be a day or two before it is updated on GotDotNet. For those who missed it last week RSSBandit is available for download here.

As an old hand at K5 I am unsurprised that there is a K5 story moderation meta-article that got out of voting. What surprises me is that we there was a time K5 got them once every 3 months and this one took longer than usual to show up. Either K5 has hit its growth peak or the last tweaks to the story moderation system were very good. On an unrelated note I am quite unhappy that K5 has no records of my stories or my comments that go back past a year. This bothers me a lot because I used to like being able to Google for old diaries and posts or point people at my old diaries. There were one or two that I'd like to keep for posterity, I better grab them from the Google Cache before they expire.

Comments below on comments by Clemens Vasters on the XML Infoset and a response by James Strachan.

 


 

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February 1, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

MSDN is going to give people the impression that I do no work except write articles. I currently have 3 articles ( one, two, three) described as being written by me and published in January. Of course, closer investigation shows the latter two are reprints of my XML.com articles and not new work. I really want to write about something besides XML in the next few months or I'll go bonkers.

Thoughts on the Über-browser, referrer log abuse, Keith Ballinger's quote "XSD is the type system handed down from God", a link to yet another Apple Switch Ad parody and a brief update on RSS Bandit.

Poll: What were you doing when the Columbia crashed?

 


 

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January 29, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Sam Ruby's blogger meetup in the Belly of the Beast happened yesterday. There were about 22 people there (for a full list of attendees go here) and it was a major geek out session. A lot of people fired up laptops half way through with lots of IBM Thinkpads being represented (Sam, Don, and Miguel had one) while I had my Tablet PC but forgot my pen at home so I couldn't show off the cool handwriting recognition.

Links to pics and my memories of random snatches of conversation below.

Poll: Best parts of last night's State of the Union address?

 


 

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