Stackoverflow

Don't get me wrong, I love Stackoverflow, I'll even admit I am fully addicted to checking it on a regular basis. And I am dying to get to 1000 Rep, and grab a few more badges. However, since the Beta ended, I am starting to seriously question its worth (initially when I started using it, I threw up a couple of test questions and some of them were answered very well). It seems to work best as a Mechanical Turk for those to lazy to spend 20 minutes on Google. If you can't find the answer in 1 google, then post it on Stackoverflow and the hoards, hungry for reputation will fight over who can answer it first. Now if it is a difficult question, someone usually posts one incredibly brief and very vague response and it never gets looked at again. This would be the main problem with Stackoverflow, useful enough for very easy questions, not so useful for the arcane. I may be wrong, and over time someone will answer some of the more difficult questions I have posted, but it hasn't happened yet. It seems if you actually tag something pretty specific, or be somewhat detailed in the title you are only going to get a few viewings and probably one or two bad answers.

BTW, the way to gain reputation is to look for broad categories that lots of people look at (you can flip through the popular questions and quickly see what they are), and follow those for a while and do the fastest gun in the west answer style. (Put up a very quick vague answer and then edit it before the five minute, you can change your answer time is up)

Going Overboard...

Well, I just wasted about 4 hours yesterday going down an architecture rabbit hole. In our latest project we are updating some ancient code to DotNet (as well as creating a whole new architecture), and have decided to use an IOC/DI container to handle creation of a lot of our objects. This solved a lot of problems with our dual views (a WPF view and a WinForms view) where things like timers were required (can't use a WinForms timer on an WPF window). I was so happy with the results that I decided to change a ton of ported code that was basically a bunch of global configuration operations to using the IOC container. Since the code was ported it had a ton of dependencies, which ended up being a ton of circular dependencies (this object used that object, etc) which I only discovered as I was moving them into the container. Either all of the configuration code was going to have to be re-written or I am going to have to wall off that section of the code and accept that it is going to have a bad code smell for now and refactor it later. I decided to revert the four hours of changes, and keep the project moving forward so that we don't have to spend a week refactoring the configuration for no real gain other than getting over the Ugh factor of the ported code. Now the project can move forward, make small progress, check-ins can occur regularly, the unit tests can be run. Maybe sometime in the future this will bite us in the ass, but for now I think it is the right decision.

Was the four hours wasted going overboard? Probably, but for every mistake you make, you learn something. And I probably won't waste four precious hours like that again.

A Year With Vista

It's been a year now that I have had Vista at home. I still use XP at work, and to be honest if it wasn't a serious pain to downgrade my work machine, I definitely would have a long time ago. And although this has been hashed out for more than a year now here are my thoughts on Vista.



For power users (i.e. everyone who instantly turned UAC off) I see no advantage to Vista, and there are a bunch of disadvantages. I never use the search feature (I turned off indexing a while ago because it never found anything I looked for except for shortcuts in the program menu and Launchy does that so much better. Aero looks nicer than the standard XP look and feel, but not that much nicer. Windows-tab was really cool for about 5 minutes, and then I never used it again. And the first thing I did was turn gadgets off, I highly object to giving up so much screen space (and I am running at 1900x1200). Apparently the start menu has improved, but I actually find it worse (it is far more work to keep clean and organized, which is something that I am adamant about).


Now, I've never had any real problems with Vista (except for some home networking quibbles in the early days), and there aren't any programs that I can't live without that don't run on Vista. It just seems to me like an unnecessary upgrade to me. Part of the problem is my lack of familiarity with it. I hate the new explorer. Maybe it is better for newbies, but it completely sucks for people who have spent their whole lives with the old explorer. It constantly thinks you are in a music folder when there is one sound file (or even not) in the entire directory. It sucks to the point where I have switched to xplorer2 (just the free light version as of yet). And my other big complaint, is the ridiculous amount of unnecessary services that Vista deems you want to be running. I am so comfortable in the task manager on Xp, I know what everything is there. After a year I still have no idea about quite a few Processes that are running on my machine, and list of Services (which I do admit is an improvement in the task manager) is daunting. I have no idea what I need to run, and what I don't. What Microsoft really needs is a tweak tool that is in between giving you no control and the services tab. Kind of simple questions like "Do you want to run remote desktop", "Is this a tablet PC", "Are you in a work domain", and such. Why things like Remote Registry, Tablet Input Services, DFS Replication are turned on by default on Home editions of windows is just plain stupid.


Anyhow, I think Microsoft completely dropped the ball on Vista. They added nothing of real value, spent 5 years creating that, and dropped or back ported to XP all of the big changes that were planned for Vista. Plus, the promise of gaming in Vista is a total disaster. After a year and a half there are still no games that use DirectX 10 to make the game look substantially better (maybe Crysis if you have some kind of supercomputer, but that is hack that got around with some registry tweaks). Gaming is still faster in XP, and there games for windows program is a joke. The Games browser is completely useless and I Games for Windows Live is a complete loss. $49.95 a year, for two games that support it? One of which is Halo 2 for PC, which sold, maybe 4 copies.


Rant out...