A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors ‘re-cut’ trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies . . . . this is the one that won:

Shining (Quicktime file)

[via Defective Yeti]

Windows Vista Build 5219 (32 and 64bit) is now available on MSDN subscriber downloads.

Get it while its hot…

Im not going to stand here and bitch about the quality of a beta product, but when you have beta 2 of an IDE out, you’d hope that the damn keyboard would work throughout.

On the contrary, while using Whidbey Beta 2, I’ve noticed that periodically (in the HTML viewer), certain keys on my keyboard (ENTER, BACKSPACE, etc) would stop working.

The fix: SHIFT-ALT-ENTER twice. Basically, this puts you in full screen and then back out. Stupid fix, but it works. Ive not installed the RC, but I really hope this one is resolved by then.

Michael Feathers has a post that talks about the exact reasons why I *hate* enums.

By designing your enums as classes, you gain a lot more flexibility down the road. In addition, the polymorphic capabilities gained from this technique covers you from some of the inherent dangers of using enums (such as adding or removing an enum, and not having a default handler in your switch statement).

This technique also reminds me of the Replace Type Code with State/Strategy and the Replace Conditional with Polymorphism refactorings from Fowler’s book.

Five design skills every programmer should have… How many do you have? Is it unreasonable to expect someone to have them all?

Like many others, I ordered my iPod Nano early last week, and have been eagerly anticipating it getting here.

Reading through my feeds today, it seems the “scratchability” of this iPod has caused quite an uproar on the net. I was actually really close to cancelling my order and waiting for the next generation.

That is, until I was pointed to the InvisibleShield. For $20, I now have a virtually indestructible cover for my iPod. Best of all, there is free shipping for a limited time, as well as a lifetime warranty.

The comments feed for this site is back online. The feed will display the last 5 comments for the last 10 entries commented on, along with an entry summary.

Enjoy!

David Starr put together an excellent tutorial on running an effective and efficient scrum meeting. If you’ve been doing agile for a while, you probably know all this stuff… If you’re new, theres a lot of valuable info there.

Thanks, David!

A very simple .NET 2.0 (beta 2) application…

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
    XmlTextWriter xmlWriter = new XmlTextWriter(writer);
 
    xmlWriter.WriteStartElement("foo");
    xmlWriter.WriteCData("");
    xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
    xmlWriter.Close();
 
    Console.WriteLine(writer.ToString());
 
    XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument(new StringReader(writer.ToString()));
    Console.WriteLine(doc.CreateNavigator().OuterXml);
}

As you can see, this is utilizing an XmlTextWriter to write out a very simple fragment of xml. This then gets written out to the Console, and shows what I expect is the correct result:

<foo><![CDATA[<bar>]]></foo>

However, after I load up the XPathDocument and write OuterXml to the Console, I get this:

<foo><bar></foo>

Can anyone explain why this is happening, or is this a bug within the XPathNavigator?

After noticing a significant degradation in the hosting service provided by blogomania.com, I have finally abandoned ship.

This change *should* have been transparent to everyone, however if you noticed a couple of glitches yesterday or today, this would explain it.

The new host is ICDsoft, and if you’re looking for a good, solid and responsive Linux host, these guys are the way to go.

I had to open two support tickets yesterday (nothing that they were doing wrong, but rather permissions issues on some scripts). ICD guarantees a response time of one hour. However, my tickets were responded to and resolved in less than 10 minutes. This is unheard of from my other hosts.

Again, definately worth checking out if you’re in the market…