Wednesday, April 03, 2002

A trivial thing, but it makes me happy: I use three sounds in Visual Studio and today I synchronized them on every machine I use to write code and in both versions of Visual Studio that I use. "IR_INTER.WAV" is Breakpoint Hit. "GLASS.WAV" is Build Error/Build Failed. "ChatWhsp.wav" is Build Succeeded/Build Complete. 8:58:35 AM

Joel makes a good point, as usual. Can't Understand It? Don't Worry. Whenever somebody gives you a spec for some new technology, if you can't understand the spec, don't worry too much. Nobody else is going to understand it, either, and it's probably not going to be important. This is the lesson of SGML, which hardly anyone used, until Tim Berners-Lee dumbed it down dramatically and suddenly people understood it. For the same reason he simplified the file transfer protocol, creating HTTP to replace FTP. You can see this phenomenon all over the place; even within a given technology some things are easy enough to figure out and people use them (like COM's IUnknown), while others are so morbidly complicated (IMonikers) when they should be simple (what's wrong with URLs?) that they languish. Trust your own judgement. Just because some authority says a technology is vitally important, does not make it so. 6:46:49 AM

A fascinating description of a most unusual style of writing. He makes some good points about expressing ideas simply. I doubt if I could go that far in my own writing, though. But it's tempting to make the attempt. Maybe I will. How come it's boring when I do it? Rats. [From Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 6:46:34 AM

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