Was just thinking about a funny story... used to work with Marc who liked to have fun with his code... He was known to have creative variable names so when we came across code that looked like:

void SomeClass::SomeMethod(...)
{
    BOOL fBobDoleIsGod;
    ...
    if (fBobDoleIsGod)
    {
...

I always laugh when I think of the code review!

6:43:22 PM    comment []

From Dare:

Good advice, but not always practical when you are tackling big problems. I can really understand how you could release minor versions of applications early, often, and give up control. But when you want to tackle huge issues (like producing a new runtime (CLR)) it is hard to do - especially when you have to support every release for 7 years.

Granted, you could argue that by following the OSS model and giving each customer the source you could relieve the support burden from Microsoft. However, you now have to ask every customer to sign up to support all the software they purchase... not something very friendly either.

I don't know the right balance - I think that Microsoft should release more often, etc - however there is a hefty cost for each release... hmm...

6:00:06 PM    comment []

From Megnut:

"Clay Shirky's got a new essay examining Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. I've only briefly skimed it but it looks very interesting."

Clay's observations about power laws is really interesting. I especially like the implications of power laws on stardom - "Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable". What I inferred from this was that given that there are so many people that want to entertain (and be entertained) then you naturally get super stars, primarily because people's choices affect each other. Clay uses this to justify the disparity in the blog community, but it can easily be applied to all sorts of arenas.

5:47:50 PM    comment []

Of course doug sides against me... But I mostly agree with Steve Tibbett's comment on Luke's post "MVC is something you build on top of the framework, not something you build into it.."

The building blocks of the platform shouldn't require something as high policy as MVC - but a having an application framework like MFC provide a default implementation of MVC is a good thing.

5:22:43 PM    comment []