If you’re using (N)Hibernate, or thinking about it, this is great little hands-on walk through of the various mapping possibilities and their impact.

I don’t often give CEO types much credit but anytime they’re using this much common sense they’re ok in my books.

CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character

“A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person”

Tom Peters has a similar post regarding treating your vendors like customers. His point is simple, give your vendors a little love to get good service.

I remember recently showing up late to a pub with some business associates and chatting with the waitress for a bit as I ordered a pint and some food. When I returned to our table I was asked by someone if my wife minded me talking to waitresses like that. My first thought was like what? Like another human?

While I’m sure, in the end, I annoy way more wait staff type people than the opposite, I do at least take a crack at treating them like people….I think…..oh crap, maybe not…..

I really don’t care much anymore when it comes to what language I work in. I’d be happy to work on non-MS stuff as most know. You’d be hard pressed to convince me that one language has something the other doesn’t. It’s like video game consoles, there’s always going to be a flavour of the day but they all watch and learn from each other.

If you want to know about a language then you need to look long term at the overall architectural direction of the language. Don’t get caught up in the day to day hype. Look at who’s leading the technology and whether their track record shows strong decisions that make sense over the long term, some of which may be to NOT implement certain hyped features? Sometimes the strongest decision you’ll have to make is one of non-action.

You’ll spend a lot of money buying new video games, and learning new controllers if you change video game consoles every year.

From slashdot, an incredibly details (10 page) review of one person’s experience of spending 30 days with Ubuntu.

I recently registered the domain ElasticOffices. The idea being office space that grows with your business. The simple first step is to get a coworking space running here in Guelph. Please add your name to the wiki if you’re interested in that.

It looks like the easyBoys are getting into the mix as well.

LifeHacker posted a link to a nice little ‘Learning the Command Line‘ article. I get asked a lot to explain my obsession with the command line and why I’d want to seemingly live in the past.

While the sheer power you have is the biggest reason, the next biggest reason is it’s ubiquitousness. I could be using that word completely wrong so I’ll explain. A real example, say I need to search through a large codebase on a project. I’m looking for any mention the word “CreateConnection” in any c# file. As well, I don’t care about any file that has the word “Test” in it’s title as those are unit tests. As well, I only want a list of files. I don’t want specific references in the file, just a list of filenames as I’ll then open up those files and edit by hand. I type one line, and yes I can do type this without referencing 18 books:

find . -name *.cs | xargs grep -l CreateConnection | grep -v “Test”

Let’s not even get started on what else I can easily add to this to write the list to a file, ftp it to a network location, run this as an hourly job to update a network location, and on and on.

So does Visual Studio, or some other gui, allow me to do that? I would guess it would but I don’t care about that. Here’s why. Tomorrow when I’m working on html files while building a website, or xml documents, or txt files, or any non-binary file, I can do the same thing. I’m not bound to finding a new editor or gui that’s implemented this. As well, I can login to almost any server on the net through ssh and do the same thing. That’s powerful.

The same applies to my obsession with vi. Everything I take the time to learn in vi, I know have available to me for any non-binary file on any *nix based machine. Again, in my humble opinion, powerful.

Now I don’t plan on getting my wife or dad in a terminal session but if you use a computer for anything beyond checking email and browsing the interweb then do yourself a favour and try the command line. You will be useless at first but didn’t your parent’s tell you, if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

Meetings make you dumber. I hate to say I told you so, but I kinda sorta maybe did.

An old post of Steve’s about related to OS X users jumping to Ubuntu. Steve pretty much sums up why I have no current plans to become a mac user…

“The reason that Mark and Cory are moving to Ubuntu is that they are uncomfortable with Apple’s use of closed-source, proprietary formats. Cory in particular seems to have a real problem with corporate invasiveness, closed formats, and DRM.

The Mac has never pretended to be anything other than closed and proprietary. Lots of people like to say that the Mac would be the dominant platform today if they had only licensed the Mac OS. Lots and lots of people really wish they could knock together a box of parts and run OS X. This isn’t even touching on the fact that Apple software isn’t open source. The Apple box is, more or less, a closed loop. You’re in or you’re out.”

Ok I really didn’t mean to just swipe Steve’s entire post but he does such a great job summing it up…

“Finally, people switching away from OS X is a good thing, more or less. Sure, Mac users Apple to gain as much market share as possible but ultimately, people switching away is an indication that the OS competition isn’t just between Apple and Microsoft. If Vista kicks ass and Mac users start bleeding over to Ubuntu or another flavour of Linux, you better believe that OS X will become better than it is. It may even become a more open system if the Apple marketing wonks figure that that’s the best way to keep users.

Please relax folks. The canaries aren’t dead on the bottom of the cage, they’ve just flown the coop.”

I’ve added a new category titled ‘Linux‘. I moved a few previous posts, not all though.

Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

This is another example of something I’ve personally ‘hacked’ almost everyday and of course it never occurred to me you could design a product out of it.

“Stainless steel can colander great for draining small cans such as tuna”

Link from cool tools.