I finally got around to creating an About Me page for my blog, which I’ve been meaning to do every since I read Jeff Atwood’s commentary on it in his Thirteen Blog Cliches post. My name is Russell Ball and I am 35 years old. I currently live in Kansas City, Kansas with my wife [...]
Browsing Posts published in September, 2007
Raymond Chen, the mastermind behind the popular OldNewThing blog, linked to my New Employee Hall of Fame post a few days ago and my web traffic stats took a brief, meteoric spike (at least by my humble standards). I even got a few comments from readers who got errors when trying to listen to the [...]
If you work with PowerShell and don’t already have PowerTab installed, take a few minutes to download and install it now. It’s a painless setup, especially if you just keep hitting enter at the prompts to accept the defaults, and the ansi-art intellisense magic just starts working everywhere without you having to learn anything. If [...]
I just took this online typing test and found out that I type 73 words a minute with a 97.5 % accuracy rate, which I assume is average at best. It would be nice to be able to type faster, but I’m not going to waste any cycles trying to improve at this point because [...]
It looks like I’ll have a chance to test out the10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint by Guy Kawasaki next Tuesday at the next KC .NET User Group meeting where I will be giving a presentation on PowerShell. I was only recently introduced to this rule, which states that PowerPoint presentations should contain only ten slides, last no more than 20 minutes, [...]
A new employee on the networks side started earlier this week and has already been nominated to the new employee hall of fame based on this voice message that he left on his boss’s phone on the morning of his second day. Apparently he had a little incident with the alarm system and calmly explains [...]
It’s been two months since I set out on my 6 month self-improvement plan to being a better developer. During my last one month update, I set out some specific goals for month two that involved learning about Resharper, NDepend, F#, the Windsor Container, and the ROTOR codebase and then writing some blog posts about [...]
In my recent post on code quality, I mentioned some of the high level features of a static analysis tool called NDepend. I’ve been exploring some of the pre-built CQL (Code Query Language) queries in the tool by running them against the WatiN codebase. Here are the results from selecting “Types with Too Many Methods” query. NDepend [...]
Dear Google Recruiters, Here is my answer to one of your interview questions that was posted by Tihomir Nakov. Question: Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her [...]
I knew that SQL Server 2005 had structured exception handling, but for some reason I assumed that you could only use it within CLR sprocs. Since I still haven’t actually heard of anyone using CLR sprocs for anything other than demos or sample projects (at least not without being pummeled by hoards of angry DBA’s), I mostly ignored this new [...]
