Just A Programmer

You haven’t really started using git until you’ve gotten your first patch rejected. Due to the nature of git, merging is easier, but rejection is harder. Well if I was using branches it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but thats besides the point. You see I developed a love/hate relationship with a wonderful [...]

I recently helped to develop a small website to share images. I decided to use the new FILESTREAM feature of SQL Server 2008 to store the images. Along the way I encountered some gotchas, so I wrote this article to document them here. Usually, I am the last person to want to store files in [...]

Preface: Regardless of the size of your organization and segregation of job roles, every programmer must sometimes assume sys-admin related duties. Sometimes the programmer is also the sys-admin in a one man shop, and even in a large shop with many programmers and many system administrators, a programmer must develop the administrative procedures for the software he develops, [...]

Strange things excite me, things even other programmers would consider strange to be excited about. Every once in a while, something comes along that excites me in multiple ways. One of those things is the orthodox file manager, Far. The far manager was developed by Eugene Roshal, who created WinRar. It was originally shareware, but [...]

As I mentioned before, I am a big fan of msi installers on windows. So I was really excited to see Garrett Serack announce an OSS package management system called CoApp that he has been authorized to work full time on. In my point of view, Garrett really gets it. I’m hoping as a side [...]

I’ve always indented ternary operator (?:) statements like so in languages that support them: int fooCount = (isSeven) ? 7 : int.MaxValue; I’ve never seen anyone else do it this way , but no one has complained about my style to my knowledge. If anyone has a strong opinion on the matter, for or against [...]

This weekend I created a github repository for Cassini, the small, single executable, Ms-PL web server which Microsoft released for developers. This was motivated by my SVG experiments, because Cassini does not serve svg files with the proper content type. I coded a simple workaround to set the mime type and wanted to give it [...]

Go into the open dessert. Draw a circle around you. All that is inside the circle represents your knowledge. All that is outside the circle represents that which you do not know. The line represents that which you know you do not know. What happens as you make the circle bigger? – Unknown I don’t [...]

I’m pleased to announce my first open source jquery plugin, collapsiblePanel. Basically, this plugin surrounds a given html element with a box and places a title bar on top. Clicking on the title bar will toggle between expanding and collapsing the element. My main motivation for creating this plugin is to for the tangential lessons [...]

Note: To skip the long journey of what lead me to figuring this out, click here to go to the howto. Recently I was asked to look at a fiddler plugin Stan, the founder of this blog, was developing. He gave me a SVN path and asked me to build it and test it. So [...]

Paul Randal wrote a What three events brought you here article on his blog and asked some others in the SQL server community to do the same. I of course was not on that list. However, no one ever invited me to blog about anything before so why should I be shy now. I have [...]

Update: It seems that the facts presented to me in the initial bug report are not correct. I will be revising this article after the facts are settled. For now read the comments. It all started with a simple bug encountered while trying to get PHP and WCF to play nice. Before you know it [...]

Some people have a love-hate releationship with certain pieces of software. Others, a love to hate relationship. My releationship with Eclipse is more of a respect-hate relationship. Perhaps I make that categorization, because I cannot admit a more purer dichotomy of love-hate, I’ve often described eclipse as being put together by a hippie commune of developers. [...]