The GIST Hub

NUI is OUI, Dear Reader. About eight years ago I blogged about "text mode" and said (if I may be silly and quote myself): "I’m just saying that my Tab,Tab,Tab,Enter will beat your Click,Tab,Alt-F,O,Click,Double-Click, more often than not." – Me I like to look at the computer systems of the businesses that I visit on a regular but spaced apart basis over the course of years. You know these businesses – your dentist, your eye doctor, the car shop that changes your oil, perhaps your bank or finance person. You see them every 3 to 6 months, or perhaps over a many years. At my [...]

I love PowerShell and spent years and years working with it since it first came out. I’ve actually got 15 or so pages of PowerShell posts on this blog going way back. PowerShell is insanely powerful. I would even go so far as to say it was (is) ahead of its time. PowerShell is totally dynamic and is almost like having JavaScript at the command line, but even more thoughtfully designed. I appreciate folks that love their bash shells and what not, but PowerShell can do some wonderful things. A long time ago (2009) Mark Embling blogged about a nice prompt with TabExpansion that he’d made [...]

For the most part, I’m an ASP.NET developer. I don’t need to specify MVC or Web Forms, because it’s all One ASP.NET its core. My apps are often hybrids and include not just Web Forms or MVC but also SignalR and Web API. Web Forms often gets picked on because of large View State, weird markup or maybe folks don’t like the controls model. However, Web Forms has its place and it’s getting even better with .NET 4.5. Here’s a little sneak peek of some cool ideas Damian Edwards and the team have been working on for the next version of ASP.NET . As a place to start, remember [...]

Warning, this is long. I’ll be frank with you, as I always am. I have an iPhone, a number of iPads and I like them fine. I have a Windows Phone that I use occasionally. I know C# but I do not know Objective-C. TL;DR Version I made my first Phone Application. I’ve spent about 6 hours on it. It’s called Lost Phone Screen and it makes nice wallpaper. It’s over at http://lostphonescreen.com. It was way easier and more fun to make than I expected. If I make a million bucks with this thing I’m GONE. You’ll never see me again. Introduction I wanted to [...]

I’ve been experimenting with my diet a little and considering a Paleo diet. What an amazing and selfish thing, though, for me to even consider or be able to change my diet in a fundamental way. Only someone who isn’t worried about their next meal could explore that aspect of their lives without fear or concern. One doesn’t get to have certain luxuries until other more basic needs are met. Here’s an interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:   I was talking to a customer a while back and one gentleman was deeply concerned about coding style, curly brace location, best practices in interface [...]

It’s been over 5  years since my post how to contribute a patch to an Open Source Project . That post is focused primarily on Subversion as the source control system. If you are using CodePlex and Subversion for example, those instructions work great . Here’s the same idea for GitHub projects. Folks email me all the time asking questions like "how can I be a better programmer?" "how do I get more experience?" or even the very specific "how can I make my resume more attractive?" My answer is almost always get involved in open source. Work with an open source project. Fix a bug, do their [...]

I remember spring of 1996 when FutureSplash Animator came out. That was 16 years ago, youngsters. Our minds were blown. No one had seen a cell-based animation editor before that was so easy. This was the beginning of Flash. Macromedia bought them, and then Adobe bought them. Now, almost fifteen years of amazing animations, full screen fun, loading screens, auto-play music and skip intro links, Flash (and browser plugins for general use) seem to be on the way out. Proprietary binary formats are being replaced by angle brackets and curly braces. Just when we think we’ve seen the limits of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, [...]

In August I purchased and reviewed the Microsoft Touch Mouse . I still use my Microsoft Arc Mouse more than the touch, initially due to what I felt was dodgy scrolling performance on the Touch Mouse, as I mentioned in my review. Still, I’ve kept it in my backpack and I use the Touch Mouse perhaps a few times a month and have kept the software up to date in case there’s some software changes made to improve performance. I can happily say that they’ve changed something and the scrolling performance is WAY better. I can finally get 1 to 2 pixel precision with it [...]

Many popular sites are blacked out today in protest of two acts before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. Long story short, the legislators barely know how to email, much less understand what a DNS takedown is. As I’ve been surfing around today bumping into SOAP sites, I noticed that every site is doing the blackout technique differently. This is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, things on the web aren’t setup for an event like this. To shutdown your website for a day is one thing but to [...]

Ok, I like my icons. You arrange your desk perhaps, shuffle papers, I update things with totally unneeded icons. A while back I made, ahem, these awesome Visual Studio Command Prompt and PowerShell icons with Overlays because, frankly, pretty icons make life better. I did these back in the day. I even did a little one for the system menu, ’cause that’s how I roll. I just bought a nice 3 Terabyte Seagate USB3 External Drive that I’m very happy with, but I noticed that it had an awesome icon. This epic icon was was making my other drives jealous. This, of course, cannot stand, Dear Reader. Easily fixed, [...]

I recently did a video with Rob Conery on how to be a better technical speaker and blogged about it . I wanted to put up a site for this video to give people more details and to make it easier for me to get the word about about the video separate from Tekpub. I went and bought http://speakinghacks.com and fired up WebMatrix to do a quick one-pager. The idea was to spend only an hour on this from the moment I got the domain to a "complete" site. My requirements were: An easy to remember domain name. Check. SpeakingHacks.com A site that looks kind of like my existing site, [...]

In a time where there is much gnashing of teeth around the meaning of community, what being on the "inside" vs. the "outside" means, I want to take a moment to remind my fellow blog writers, blog readers, blog commenters what makes it all work. You. Not a secret society or old boy’s network, not a select few or someone knighted by The Queen. It’s the nameless, faceless web search result that makes community work. I search all the time for help on the internet. I find blogs, tweets, Stack Overflow, MSDN and more. More often than not when I find the answer I [...]

You’re so old! What a dinosaur! You’re using old software and old languages to do old things! Or are you? Scott and Rob talk to David Sokol, Sean Bamforth and Pete Brown about Fortran, DataFlex and the Commodore 64. All these dinosaurs are doing useful work. Or, are they? David Sokol Fortran Programmer and dude with an AWESOME hover state on his home page Sean Bamforth Former Dataflex programmer and now beginning .NET guru Pete Brown Senior Project Manager, Microsoft and budding Thomas Edison I’d also like to encourage you to check out the last two episodes of This Developer’s Life . We realize this isn’t your [...]

I have a some friends and friendly acquaintances who are of some bit of note. Not Internet-famous, or even blog-famous like me, I mean actual famous. Like us, celebrities still have phones, Twitter accounts, Facebooks, laptops, hard drives, family photos and lots more that need to be managed. Maybe you’re fancy also? Maybe you think you’re fancy or just want to be? Sometimes I spend time on Skype with my friends going through a list of things they need to do to cover their butts when it comes to their personal media and gadgetry. I thought I’d make up a list that I could [...]

I did a " Greatest Hits " blog post in 2008, and since this year is winding down I though it was time for another. Here’s what I think were my best blog posts this year . Personal Updated for 2011 – McDonald’s WiFi Guide with updates for Mac OS X Lion and Windows 7 – This sill cracks me up, and I wrote it! Link-bait Hacker Slash News Dot Considered Cancerous Request For Call To Action – This took me 10 minutes to write and is the most popular thing I’ve written this year. It’s also got comments that are WAY better than the post. I hope [...]

Sure, I work for The Man in my day job, but I have an iPhone, a few iPod Touches, and two iPads in my personal mobile life. I have great respect for the Windows Phone 7 UX and I have a Samsung Focus that runs Mango that I swap my SIM into every few months to check out, but I’m invested in the iOS app store enough now that switching doesn’t make sense for me. I’m teased by some co-workers and community folks who think I should blindly use only Microsoft products. That’s fine. I use what works for me and I [...]

My buddy Jeff Handley tweeted this nugget of brilliance recently. Every year I give the grandparents DVDs with all of our digital pictures from the year. To them it’s a gift. To me it’s off-site backup. — Jeff Handley (@JeffHandley) December 18, 2011 Exactly. I’ve talked about backup strategies before. You just can’t have too many backups. I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage…a fancy name for a black box in the closet we back up to) but I also have two external drives that are labeled A and B that I rotate between the safe at the bank. My rules of thumb are: Use an imaging tool like [...]

I’m still using the Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 that I built last year. THE most important aspect of that build was not the super-fast processor or the fancy video cards. It was, and continues to be, the SSD. There is no other single thing that you can do to your computer that will make it feel faster than getting an SSD. If you need terabytes of storage, get an external drive, or a SAN like I did . But if you want to waste less time compiling, get an SSD. I know you want a terabyte, but get 160gigs or 256gigs if you can afford it. [...]

Considered Harmful Declarative statement opening blog statement. Back away from declarative statement slightly, pivot then double down with even more controversial declarative statement. Insult beloved programming language and assert newer language’s idiomatic aesthetic as superior. Including backing statistics with missing Y-axis labels to prop up weak link-bait including declarative statement. Reference Linus, invoke Dijkstra. Oh, everything looks bad if you remember it. Biased Benchmarks Supporting albeit equivocating statement. Weak marginally equivocating statement because I want to be on TechCrunch. Farmville. if 1 then A else if 2 then B else if 3 then C else/otherwise D Supporting K&R C quote inducing page references with non sequitur [...]