Another Meta-Blog, No Repect!

While reading some blog aggregation this morning (during a compilation session), I ran across this blog posting this morning.

I had an experience very similar to this one just a few short years ago (no names of course). This sort of thing seems to happen more often in small companies whenever you have developers working for non-developers that believe they are tech-savy.
The approach I took was to educate the non-developers in what I do and how I go about doing it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't work at all because, like anything you have to give and take.
The experience I most remember was discussing a new database design for some inventory tables. I believed in a normalized transactional design and they believed in a highly non-normalized design to support Access reports. At first I got angry because they were spoiling my 'pure' design, and the DBA was angry because he was trying desperately to create a normalized design for the database. Everybody walked away from the table angry, the developers, the dba, and the project owners because nobody budged.
After the meeting, I was reflecting on every bodies positions on the matter; and there seemed to be no way to move forward. I decided to suck up my pride and accept a badly designed database model in order to move the project forward; it's called "Compromise". The project was canceled in the end anyways, the stakeholders decided the cost was too much for their simple project.

Grieve for what you have?

I can't remember where, but I once read that people should experience grief for what they have. My thought at the time was 'That is just plain nonsensical' and moved on with my life & studies.

However, events have occurred in my life that have forced me to evaluate what is important to me and where I want to be in 3,6,9,12 months from now. So I ask this question gentle readers: Have you ever grieved for what you have?

Drill Baby Drill???

So, a recent campaign speech from McCain called off-shore drilling as our solution for oil independence from the middle east. You have to be kidding me; this can't be our solution. While I am now a supporter of Obama for president (I was a Clinton booster); I do think McCain has done a great job for Arizona. He was and is a good senator; but his energy solution for the country is horrible. In a speech recently he spoke a line that scares me to the core: "Drill baby Drill".

All it takes to see the failure of this solution is to use common-sense. How much does humanity currently depend on the ocean? Now why in the world would want to dump oil into the ocean?

The discovery for oil requires a 'lot' of test-drilling; and during this test-drilling thousands to millions of gallons of oil could be released before the proper facilities are put in place to harness this oil.

Consider the public outrage that occurred during the Exxon oil-spill not to long ago, this is *nothing* compared to the damage we will be doing should be start doing off-shore drilling. Its all about common sense people.

Off-Shore Drilling?

Off-Shore Drilling? You have to be kidding me; this can't be our solution. While I am now a supporter of Obama for president (I was a Clinton booster); I think McCain has done a great job for Arizona. He was and is a good senator; but his energy solution for the country is horrible. In a speech recently he spoke a line that scares me to the core: "Drill baby Drill".

Now, people use common-sense. How much does humanity currently depend on the ocean? Now why in the world would want to dump oil into the ocean?

The discovery for oil requires a 'lot' of test-drilling; and during this test-drilling thousands to millions of gallons of oil could be released before the proper facilities are put in place to harness this oil.

Consider the public outrage that occurred during the Exxon oil-spill not to long ago, this is *nothing* compared to the damage we will be doing should be start doing off-shore drilling. Its all about common sense people.

To Region or Not To Region, that is the question

In the .net blogging world, it seems that many folks are debating over Jeff Atwoods post on his disdain of regions (see here). My initial reaction was that I agree with Jeff Atwood on many of his points, but I don't agree with his conclusion. I personally use regions for one simple point: To allow me to focus on my current problem at hand.

Jeff has outlined 4 of his problems with regions:
1. Folding directives are glorified comments.
2. Folding is used to sweep code under the rug.
3. Folding is used to mask excessive length.
4. Folding can hide deficiencies in your editor.

I have seen these abuses in both close and open code. This sort of abuse needs to be corrected on a team level, but either the senior or lead developers of said team. If you have renegade programmers using regions as comment fields, you either need to instruct them in the proper fashion of comments, or "get them off the bus".

Personally, I tend to enjoy the region feature of Visual Studio as it allows me to almost work in Visual Studio as productive as I was with Visual Age for Java. One of the nice features of the old version of visual studio is that it forced you to work on a class on a 'method by method' approach. Granted, this can be destroyed if you have a renegate team-member(s) that use them for comments; but this can be corrected behavior. BTW, a wonderful free add-on to Visual Studio to allow you to standardize on the deployment approach to regions is Regionate.