Greg's Adventures

You must watch this right away.

Greg — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:22:34 +0000

Really. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Awesome. Watch now. Thanks.

Reverse a dictionary

Greg — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:07:08 +0000

Have you ever wished your dictionary of was in fact of ? I might be the last person to figure this out, but with LINQ (and a couple lambdas) you can do this with one magical line of code:

var newDict = oldDict.ToDictionary(l => l.Value, l => l.Key);

Neat, eh?

I hate Subversion

Greg — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:33:41 +0000

I really really hate it. Every time I try to do anything USEFUL with it, like try out an idea in a new branch and then merge the bits of that branch that worked out back to my main line, it barfs all over me with totally crap-ass error messages that nobody could ever, EVER understand.

Also, despite their claims to the contrary in the documentation, svn will happily shit all over your working copy when a switch fails. So much for atomic operations.

I’ve had it. I’m switching to Mercurial.

Become a Jedi with Resharper

Greg — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:14:33 +0000

If you work in C# or VB.net on a regular basis, you really owe it to yourself to try out Resharper. This tool saves me countless hours.

James Kovacs put together some fantastic screencasts on “Becoming a Jedi” that show it in action, if you are curious.

He hasn’t covered the features that make it a boon for test driven development yet, but there’s another great screencast that shows that off, and this post provides some additional details on “coding in reverse” with Resharper.

Order of operations

Greg — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:22:43 +0000

Sometimes I can be such a buffoon. When programming with threads, one must be sure to lock and unlock in the correct order. Also, one must be sure not to do things explicitly marked as no-nos while in a “critical section.”
I just lost two hours to this, so I felt the need to whine.

Fictional Writings

Greg — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:03:37 +0000

And I mean writing that doesn’t exist, not writing about things that don’t exist.

So I’m working on what feels like a novel, perhaps of slightly shorter than what would be considered a big book, but not so short as to not fall into the novel category. It also seems to want to be a young adult book, through it wasn’t one when it was still rattling around in the cobwebs of my lack-of-brain.

That it exists in its unfinished form means that it isn’t fictional. However it hasn’t gelled sufficiently that I have more than a vague sense where the hell it is going. This frustrates me, and makes me wonder if it exists anywhere other than the vague shimmering of characters and ideas. Not that I have much experience to go on here; maybe this is how The Process always feels.

I do manage to write between a few hundred and a thousand words a day, but it just isn’t going anywhere. My silly characters are muttering to themselves and aren’t getting together like I’d planned. The BIG HONKING event that starts things off doesn’t want to happen.

Anyway, that’s where I am and I’ll keep you informed about where I go from here. This ramble brought to you by Debbie, blog secretary extraordinaire.

Posting…

Greg — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:57:32 +0000

Rab is making me start posting regularly. Rather, he had one of his blog secretaries inform me I would be posting regularly. He has secretaries to do his typing, and he doesn’t even post regularly!

On programming for fun.

Greg — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 15:48:55 +0000

I wonder if it is the nature of the beast that when someone does something for a living day in and day out, it stops being fun. I’m starting to worry that may be the case with me.

Why am I bringing this up? One reason is due to watching my friend Rab having fun with Python. He’s having fun. He’s doing it for fun, and thus he’s having fun. Doesn’t that sound like fun? It does to me. Yet he’s doing the same thing I do as a job, and I don’t have fun. Maybe it is because he’s writing a game?

Reading his adventures, and talking with him about python programming is fun. It makes me want to start programming for fun too. As it doesn’t make sense to me for the idea of programming to be fun but the programming itself not to be, I suppose I’m just looking at the the wrong way. Maybe all I need to do is adjust my point of view, and I’ll start having fun again. I say again because I did enjoy programming once. I know it is possible for me to do so.

Thus starts the experiment. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to approach this. Perhaps the best method is to just adjust my thinking — find the “game” in whatever I’m doing, cling to it, and use that shape my overall view.

New site!

Greg — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:58:33 +0000

Isn’t is nifty? After a dozen years, I’ve finally updated my personal site to something more modern. Maybe I’ll even keep this blog up! That would amaze and astonish.

Patch, patch, patch!

Greg — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:00:00 +0000

Microsoft has released a record number of patches many of which are of the most critical variety. Please, please, please! Update your system(s) now! Don’t get bitten.