LondonTube.CompareTo(DublinBuses&Luas)

I'm just back from London where I had really great time with my friends that live in a squat and are busy with their small independent theater. But the thing I want to talk about is the public transport in Dublin. We all know that it sucks but only when you go a city like London you realize how bad it is. To make a long story short it's enough to say that if Dublin was as big as London I would probably have to spent 6 hours on a bus from Cherrywood to the Dublin Airport.

Windows XP - no memory and no CPU required :)

This has happened to me a few times recently. My PC is equipped with 4GB of RAM and every time I use more then 2.5 GB XP starts being unpredictable. Needless to say that actually I was running 5 of 6 VS.NET 2005 instances at that time which more then likely consumed some resources :)

Security B&B way :)

I'm going with my friends over the weekend to climb up the highest mountain in Ireland - Carrauntoohil. I volunteered to book B&B. I sent an email to a few B&B owners and waited for a reply. Majority of them were booked out but one woman offered a family room for us. The interesting part of this story is how she wanted me to send my CC details. Below I show the best snippets from the email conversation.
The women:

"(...)Please give your cc number and expiry date if you wish to secure the booking.  Cash is paid on morning of departure."

Me:

"Is there any website that I can use to book the room? Sending CC number in an email is not secure. Emails are not properly secured and encrypted"

The women:

"People usually send 2 emails with half the number on each"

Just brilliant :)

From forestry to IT - channel 9 show

Peter Spiro is one of these guys who took unusual steps to get into IT. It's enough to have a look at him to figure out that he is more then interesting :) .  The whole conversation is about people and how to manage them in a way that both the Company and they benefit from it. It's first time I heard that we need to build properly layered systems just because there are some smart guys out there that want to unplug an old component and replace it with their own - better :).  
The next thing that absorbed my attention was his list of features that a good team should be characterized by:

• trust
• diversity
• no single man show
• shared responsibility
• passion

It looks like a list of obvious things but you would be surprised how many teams lack 2 or more of them. And the last but not least, he knows what the work-life balance is. It was a well spent hour :).

80 characters long line is gone

I remember that not so long ago everyone was saying that a line of code should not be longer then 80 characters. The problem with this approach is that it leads you to cryptic method/class/variable names because of the 80 characters hard limit. I could justify that rule back in the epoch of 15 inch CRT monitors because there are not too many things more annoying then constant scrolling from right to left and left to right to be able to read a piece of code. But even nowadays there are people who would stick with that rule which doesn't make sense for me because it's just a waste of space of your 17/19/20 or 24 inch LCD monitor. 24 inch is a really great one and 2 of them are just brilliant :).

Tags: Development

Joel Spolsky will come to Dublin

Great news. Joel Spolsky will (more then likely) come to Dublin to promote FogBugz. I don't use FogBugz personally but I've been following Joel's blog for more then one year and I can always learn something from him. It's not about the technology itself. It's rather about how the technology is related to our real life and how we can take advantage of it :).

How to rearrange the Windows task bar

I wish it was a built-in feature. Check it out.