The Tomes Of Experience

Make sure you test your changes. end to end.
Make sure you write unit tests to cover your code. Every possible line
And for the love of God, don’t ask me to review your work when you haven’t taken the time to test it yourself. Not only do you waste my time, but you waste YOUR time [...]

I’m just about close enough to join Outland….after my 4 months hiatus from WoW, ive basically power levelled my way from 45 to 57 (soon to be 58) in order to catch up with the others.
and then once i’m 70, with PVP gear, i’ll blow the priest away and try a class which can actually [...]

There are a number of good pages which explain how to enable permalinks and rewrite rules for Wordpress, such as:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
and
http://faq.wordpress.net/view.php?p=20
None of them mentioned my problem - the main apache conf for the website had the setting AllowOverride None.
Hence my .htaccess wasn’t being honoured, hence my redirects weren’t working (and resulted in 404’s). Hence i ripped [...]

In case i forget or lose the details on how i can post code in my blogs, here it is:
Wordpress doesn’t allow you to post HTML code directly into your blogs. Sucks.
A bit of googling turned up embed-it. This WP plugin allows you to post HTML code into your blog. it does using the concept [...]

wow - I’ve just finished cleaning up a project conversion gone massively awry.
The proejct was originally in classic ASP, but over the years, people have extended it with ASP.NET parts (in this case, webservices).
The hosting provider was asked to configure the main root-folder of the website in IIS6 as a standard website, but a special [...]

I love this one. I don’t know the name of the pattern, but i love using it.
Imagine your system uses strings to represent the value of a status field. potential values of this field are:

New
Requested
Open
Closed
Deferred
In Progress
More Information Required

…and you want to write a method (or webservice) called UpdateStatus, which takes in one of these values.
Standard [...]

…and while i’m on the topic of Facebook - LOSE THE SHITTY APPLICATIONS, FACEBOOK!. Your website is becoming overrun by hundreds of thousands of lousy applications, most of which are focused on trying to make a quick buck out of the system.
if you leave something popular open, it will be exploited by those who see [...]

Does it concern most people that Facebook (as one particular example) basically allows you to show and share virtually everything about you?
I don’t particularly care if any of the 390 odd people on my friends list check out my photo gallery, or tagged photos of me, but surely there comes a point when people you [...]

At my last job, this quote was printed on an old, half dog-eared, half-torn piece of paper, and stuck to a random pillar in the office.
As fate would have it, I sat next to this pillar for my first few months there, and this message seemed to resonate with me since then. It’s (quietly) one [...]

This morning i managed to install run Photoshop under Ubuntu Gutsy. Wine
never stops to amaze me.
At the bare minimum, i was impressed at how the installation was flawless.
well….almost ;)….it looked like it had crashed towards the end, so i
killed the process, but by that stage, everything had already been installed
and registered, it seems.
Once installed, I [...]

Remember that when you’re converting from an ASP.NET 1.1 web site
project to an ASP.NET 2.0 web application, you need to configure IIS to
run as an application, and run in a .NET 2.0 app pool.
Without doing this, you’ll end up with a broken error like this:
Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Parser Error=20
Description: An error occurred during the [...]

Today is the day I go back to work
Mixed reactions about it - I’ve enjoyed the last 6 weeks without having
to take the 501 down Victoria road.
Ps. If anyone has had success getting the Intel 965 wireless card working in bridged mode for VirtualBox, I’d like to hear from you. I’ve got a [...]