Resharper's Code Style Sharing

One of the problems working with a team of programmers is personal taste in variable naming and general code style. Now Resharper comes to our rescue with the "Code Style Sharing" feature. Now all the developers on a project can share the same style if you export your preferred settings to a file called "<SolutionName>.resharper.xml", check it into version control under the same directory as your solution, and everyone selects to use the "Shared across the team, per solution". Enjoy.

Small Remote-Controlled Helicopter Can Pickup Objects

Surprisingly the first bank robbery in the United States did not occur until 13 February 1866 at Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri.
With remote vehicles like this how long until someone commandeers one from a hospital, puts a bomb on it, flies it to a bank and demands money?

David Smith at Austin SPIN and IEEE Meeting

The always entertaining and thought provoking David Smith talked to a crowd last night of the Austin SPIN and IEEE.



Some random thoughts I jotted down:
The world in increasing real time
Continuous integration is moving to continuous delivery of software
No system is 100% secure, you just make your tradeoffs
David recommended the book, "Does IT matter?"
His mantra through the night was "Digital content + ubiquitous communication + ubiqutious computing" is changing the world - are you ready?
Network communication used to be "People to people", then "People to things", now most traffic on networks is "Things to things".
The future is in biological computing.
"My geek is more powerful than a nuclear bomb" Cyber-warfare is incredibly powerful.
"Go" is the fastest growing language in Tiobe's history of tracking.
David said we passed "Sarnoff's law" on the way to "Metcalfe's law" and are now in the territory of "Reed's law" which says the power of the network of N nodes is equal to 2 raised to the N power.

TiVo Blue Screen of Death

My TiVo crashed the other night and left me this instead of a Blue Screen of Death (BSD). I was watching a talking head show when TiVo froze and then randomly started changing colors on the screen.

Works great in Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome - looks awful in IE

Realizing that an HTML tag was really just a placeholder for some css code was a 'Eureka' moment for me years ago. So while doing some maintenance on my web site today I wanted to style all the elements semantically with css code backing them, not with "<p class='quote'> ... </p>", but with "<quote> ... </quote>". This would be like a Domain Specific Language written in css,

quote {
  display: block;
  margin: 2em 0.5em 0 0.5em; 
  padding: 0.5em;
  text-align: left;
  background: #bbbbff; 
  border:1px solid black;
}
author {
  display: block;
  margin: 0 0.5em; 
  padding: 0.1em 1em 0.1em 0;
  text-align: right;
  border:1px solid black;
}

so, in the HTML it looks like this,

<quote>
Everyone thinks of changing the world, 
but no one thinks of changing himself.
</quote>
<author>
 Leo Tolstoy
</author>

Sadly, this works in all my major browsers, and the iPhone, but alas, not in IE.

Good "one sentence stories" from http://www.onesentence.org/

One of the great things about the web is aggregating and voting on user-generated content like these.
Good "one sentence stories" from http://www.onesentence.org/ :
Bree
After seventeen years of feeling like a disappointment to my mum, and writing a story about how she screwed my life, nothing feels as good as deleting the story after over hearing her exclaim to strangers about how proud she is of me.

Daughter
She cried as her daughter and her best friends shaved their heads too, so she wouldn't have to be bald alone.

Dear Sis
I watched her vomit blood for an hour and assured her she was fine because I was too high to drive her to the hospital.

Hollie
At 22 my father carried me to my old bed, and cried as he tucked me in minding not to touch the bruises that were a road map of pain and abuse I had hidden from him for almost two years.

Randy
Waking in the street after the motorcycle accident, I knew it was bad when I saw one of the paramedics throwing up.