Jason: I'm never a huge fan of string based designs, primarily because of their lack of compile time validation, etc... however, lets think about modifying your "Personality" pattern to work in .NET...

If you made the data type of "Personality" be a System.Type object, then you could do a reasonable assignment:

machine.Personality = typeof(ScanSideways);

This presents a could of interesting problems. First, you have a compile time dependancy on the ScanSideways class. Easily fixable by a slight change:

machine.Personality = Type.GetType("ScanSideways");

Which you can now parameterize, load from a file, whatever. So far, this is cake. My problem is that we have lots all the type checking. At some point the program will take the type object (even the strongly typed version) and do an Activator.CreateInstance call followed by a cast to the correct data type. Boom.

Personally, I wish there was a way of specifying the constraints of a particular type, some form of validation rules that could be applied (hey, wait! you mentioned that earlier in your post <G>). For example I could say:

public class Machine {
    [BaseType(typeof(Personality))]
    Type Personality { get; set; }
}

Which could then give me compile time validation for the first example, and a more deterministic error for the second one. Oh well... can't extend the compiler...

Just to restate (to make sure I understand the pattern); the goals of the Personality pattern is to provide a set of property adjustments and validations that are applied on function execution. Kinda like a pre/post condition on methods bundled with a CSS sheet.

Cool.

11:36:15 PM    comment []

Dan's comments about the evil-SUV are right on... apparently now owning or driving an SUV not only makes you a terrorist supporter, but apparently the target for vandalism. Unfortunately I can't find a web-able source for the news, but there are reports of SUV and Minivans getting tagged as al-Qada supporters. Try this google search to see more insanity.

I do disagree with Dan - Arianna doesn't have a good point. There is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" car. There are only cars that sell and those that don't. The industry create cars that people ask for. The new XC-90 wasn't created because they thought it would kill the environment, but rather that people wanted the car.

My wife just bought a new MDX and we love it. Currently we are getting about 14.8 mpg, which is lower than my M3, which goes at around 18 mpg. You can of course say that I am an bad person because I don't try a Honda Insight which gets something like 65 mpg. It's all a matter of degrees and what we do holistically, and not just about the car we drive. My wife wanted the SUV to sit taller in traffic, have larger cargo capacity, and more seating for when we have kids. The MDX handles like a dream, is shorter than our old TL (but a bit wider).

This may be shallow, but I believe that money is the way to change the world. If you want to really affect change in the auto industry, then attack the buyers. Introduce a massive tax on gasoline consumption. It turns out, that if I get 15 or 60 mpg doesn't matter - it matters that I consume 5 or 100 gallons of gas a day. Tax the gas usage, and people will change their habits. Hmm... then again, that didn't work for smoking...

10:55:47 PM    comment []

Wired: At least i'm not the only one that sees arena of video game fans as an interesting thing to write about.

As a side note - is it arrogant to link to your own blog?

10:16:57 PM    comment []

Dare: With respect to my last post, this wasn't an attack on you - i agree you have to be careful when talking about anyone in a public (or private) forum... I hope you take my posts with the goodwill with which they were intended.

9:52:14 PM    comment []

Dare: With regard to my "rants" about email and meetings

"I can't help feeling that if one of Chris's coworkers stumbled on his blog they might be abashed even though it is unlikely he is actually singling anyone out. I have tended to avoid talking about work for this reason..."

The one person that I mentioned in the entry (Amar) I followed up with today to make sure he wasn't offended. However, before I filled the entry I had made comments to Amar in person about how the scheduling issue was a tough one given our flexible schedules.

I agree that there is always the possibility of offending, and the last thing you want to do is make work harder with your hobbies. My general rule (that I really do try and follow) is to never say things behind someone's back you wouldn't say to their face. That goes double for the blog entry.

Both of these subjects I have broached many times with people at work. The email one has become a bit of a joke because Jeff and I keep at each other about it. The meeting one is a bit touchier, and newer to my radar - so i'm sure there are some people that I haven't mentioned this to that may take offense. Happily, so far everyone that I have mentioned this to (or read the blog) has whole heartedly agreed.

The two posts that you link to ([one] [two]) seem to be caused by people not communicating in person with the offenders and instead bringing it out first in public. Something I would never find acceptable either.

9:49:27 PM    comment []

Eric Hanock questioned me in an offline mail "Have you considered turning on
the comments feature, so people can respond to your ideas?"...

I have the checkbox on in my "Prefs" but it doesn't appear to work... I think that Radio's comments only work if I have something called Manilla on the server? Anyway, I'm thinking of switching over to a custom solution for my blog, so I'll be sure to make comments be a Pri 1 feature :)

9:40:59 PM    comment []

Joel's take on WiFi and VoIP... in response to Clay Shirky's piece.

9:37:56 PM    comment []

Dan: "Hollywood and the other members of the entertainment cartel do not believe in a two-way or multi-directional Web. They believe they are sending their content to consumers, not customers who want to build their own content or, crucially, communities."

Unfortunately that applies to way to many large corporate web presences also...

12:20:09 AM    comment []

Why, oh why, did Radio decide that an HTML page was the way to implement a client application?? I have lost 2 large entries so far with Radio... once I commited the "sin" of clicking an icon on my desktop... IE navigated to that page, my entry was gone... just now, I accidentally clicked the back button on my mouse, boom! another entry gone.

Given that Radio is a "smart client" application (being that it runs a complete WEB SERVER) on my machine, why couldn't they actually write a real client application to do editing?

Oh well... i really need to write my own blog authoring tool...

12:14:13 AM    comment []