Monthly Archives: February 2009

In Search Of A Better Garden

Back in Novem­ber, I wrote about my efforts to improve the pro­duc­tiv­ity of my veg­gie gar­dens by rais­ing the beds and dras­ti­cally improv­ing the soil. How­ever, in North Texas, all the good soil in the world does you no good if you can’t get con­sis­tent mois­ture on the gar­den. With that in mind, I engi­neered …

February 17, 2009 – 7:30 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Gardening | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Bankrupting A Nation

Today, if accounts are cor­rect, Pres­i­dent Obama will sign a bill that in name is called “Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act of 2009” but in truth is prob­a­bly the begin­ning of the bank­ruptcy of the United States. It is a bill that no Con­gress­man or woman read in full, that con­tains over fif­teen hun­dred pages …

February 17, 2009 – 9:35 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in National Issues | Comments (0)

Leadership

This is what passes for lead­er­ship these days. We send a bunch of peo­ple to DC to be our rep­re­sen­ta­tives and what they end up doing is pass­ing laws with­out even read­ing them. We’re pass­ing a $787 bil­lion stim­u­lus pack­age and the peo­ple who are sup­posed to rep­re­sent us don’t even have the time to …

February 13, 2009 – 4:11 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Economics | Comments (0)

What ASP.Net Gets Wrong But ASP.Net MVC Gets Right

Ready to Quit ASP.Net I have to admit, I love writ­ing web apps on the MVC framework.

February 13, 2009 – 10:41 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Mugshot Fail

Rod­ney Stanger, seen here in an undated mugshot photo, is con­sid­ered armed and dan­ger­ous. If you have seen Rod­ney Stanger or know of his where­abouts, please do not attempt to feed him ger­bil kib­ble or get him to run in a small wheel for hours on end. Call 911 imme­di­ately and back away from the cage. …

February 12, 2009 – 10:34 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Humor | Comments (0)

TDD Efficiency

Microsoft Research has put out a paper with data that shows imple­ment­ing TDD increases your devel­op­ment time by 15–35% but decreases your pre-release defects by 40–90%. This is in line with my expe­ri­ence and women’s intu­ition. I haven’t quite made it through the entire paper but you can read it here.

February 12, 2009 – 8:57 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged | Comments (0)

Silverlight Security Exceptions With WCF Services

From the pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment depart­ment, this is an issue I recently strug­gled with and since I didn’t find much help on the web, I thought I’d con­tribute. If you’re try­ing to hit WCF ser­vices (ours are REST­ful but I’m pretty sure this hap­pens on reg­u­lar ser­vices as well), you may get weird secu­rity excep­tions …

February 12, 2009 – 8:54 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Continuous Deployment

When Con­tin­u­ous Inte­gra­tion just isn’t hard­core enough. What an amaz­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing place that must be to work, an envi­ron­ment where dis­ci­pline to their process enables them to deploy code to pro­duc­tion up to 50 times a day. The scripts that mon­i­tor sta­tis­tics and per­form analy­sis on the result of the par­tial roll­out are inge­nious. But …

February 10, 2009 – 11:35 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Why Can Just Anyone Have 14 Babies

Look, I know we need to err on the side of cau­tion in most fer­til­ity cases but I think it’s clear to any ratio­nal human being that this woman is men­tally deranged and shouldn’t be allowed to have kids. On top of that, her idiot fer­til­ity doc­tor should be dis­barred, tarred and feath­ered and then …

February 10, 2009 – 9:58 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in National Issues | Tagged , | Comments (2)

WCF, Ninject and REST

On my cur­rent project, we’re using WCF and REST­ful ser­vices to pro­vide data to a Sil­verlight appli­ca­tion. We have our own IOC/DI frame­work but we’re also toy­ing with Nin­ject in that capac­ity and it was my job this week to hook it up to the ser­vice layer. I came across Heinrich’s descrip­tion of the process …

February 7, 2009 – 6:03 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)