Category: Techie

That’s 70-229 down, only 70-316 to go on the road to MCSD.NET: Friday’s the day.

70-229 was a toughie–the hardest one I’ve had so far. I scored well, but there were very few “gimme” questions. Most of the questions were quite long, too–just reading through the lead-ins, the exhibit code and diagrams, and the possible answers took a lot of time. I finished the last question with only eight minutes to spare, which left me precious little time for dithering and worrying about the answers I was unsure of. Anyway, I passed. Yay me.

I knew there was a lot of stuff in the MSDN subscription, but I hadn’t expected the box of disks to be the size of a small fridge. Sheesh.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 is now available for download to MSDN subscribers; the public download will probably arrive in the next few days. The Service Pack itself weighs in at a chunky 275MB download, but that climbs to 475 if you grab the ISO image of the installation CD. They’re not kidding when they suggest you order might want to order the CD instead.

I’ve been looking forward to SP2 mostly because there are now so many patches and updates to SP1 that doing a fresh install of XP takes bloody hours. Time to slipstream this puppy and ease that pain.

Dave Shea on setting up Virtual Hosts:

Virtual hosts enable you to intelligently run multiple sites on a single server. The useful side effect is that with proper setup, you can point your browser to www.whatever.whatever and load a local copy. My development site is now www.mezzoblue.dev, which works exactly the same as the .com, just faster. I don’t even need a connection to work on it, because it’s all local; all my PHP scripts and Movable Type templates work, and the local filesystem access is so much nicer than using FTP.

I’ve long been aware of their use, but never committed to learning how to set up virtual hosts in Apache. A conversation with Narayan of Etherfarm on his recent trip through Vancouver enlightened, and it’s really ridiculously easy, to the point where I wish I’d done this last year.

It’s just like kludging about with the Microsoft Loopback Adapter and hacking around with your HOSTS file…only a couple of orders of magnitude easier.

Nnnngggg. The time I’ve wasted….

There are so many superstar programmers in the blogging world, speaking in geek tongues, blowing off about the latest RSS aggregator they’ve written in their lunch breaks, and making 48-hour marathon coding sessions sound like a good thing, that it’s refreshing to find two articles in the same day that emphasize some of the other qualities that a professional developer needs:

Eric Sink: Great Hacker != Great Hire

[…] When great hackers are as fussy as Graham says they are, they’re not worth the trouble. We want the super-productivity, and we want the innate love of software development, but we don’t want all the extra baggage. Instead:

• Hire people who care about users.
• Hire people who understand the difference between a job and a hobby.
• Hire people who want to contribute in lots of different ways to the success of the product.

It’s okay to be in awe of these great hackers. But as a practical matter, small ISVs would be much better off hiring professionals.

Paul Tyma: Kick-ass Software Developer looking for work

So – the question wraps around to “Is a kick-ass programmer the best kind of programmer to hire to make the company the most money”. The answer seems obviously yes, but it may not be. In a specific instance we learned (as do all consulting firms) that sending 3 rockstar programmers to a client ends up with the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome.

If you’re running your computer with multiple monitors, where does your secondary one sit: to the left or to the right of your main monitor? Does this have anything to do with handedness?