{ Monthly Archives }
November 2007
links for 2007-11-29
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Nifty guide to writing a ssms add in. Bonus: he gives you an addin that does fuzzy searching on db objects
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OAuth is the great new standard allowing your users to use your application to talk to their accounts on other applications.
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Cobian Backup is a multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule and backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories/drives in the same computer or other computer in your network.
Best sentence I read this morning
“A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorhpic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows.”
From Greg Egan’s Quarantine, which I am currently reading.
links for 2007-11-28
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Generates ASP.NET websites for CRUD based on DB schema. Point Blinq at a SQL DB and it creates a website with sorted and paged data CRUD pages with table relationships.
No writing SQL, LINQ generates optimized queries that request just relevant data.
Books: Supercapitalism
Robert Reich wrote a very surprising book on the interplay of capitalism and democracy. His argument is that we’re seeing a lot of problems in our democracy because we have demanded too much of corporations. If, instead, we strip away some of our fiction that corporations are people, we won’t expect them to be noble, or fair, or honorable.
Instead, we should see corporations for what they are. They are legal contractual agreements between groups of people in order to generate profits. They have no purpose or concern other than the flow of capital and profit. Just as we don’t ask a gun to distinguish between good directions to shoot in or bad directions to shoot in, we shouldn’t ask corporations to do anything but obey our laws and generate as much money as they legally can.
At the same time, we shouldn’t allow corporations any entrance into democratic policy, since they aren’t people. Corporations shouldn’t have the ability to sue to overturn laws or any rights to free speech. Since they are legal agreements without morals, without any concept of right or wrong, corporations have no business participating in democratic politics. They aren’t, after all, people.
People can say things like: “I quite like cheap sneakers, but I don’t want to allow anyone to employ children to make them.” Corporations can’t do that. So people can get together and decide what rules corporations play by.
Now, this is good. It’s a good thing to have a book that connects the dots between corporate influence on politics, the changing marketplace, the economics of globalization and the legal concepts underlying corporations. I just wish it didn’t take so long. The last chapter, “A Citizen’s Guide to Supercapitalism” contains the only real proposals and it is 16 pages. The previous 208 pages are all lead-in. Frankly, I got it early on. The book didn’t need quite that much paper.
To be fair, I did have some good insights while reading.
- A good portion of the decrease in economic security resulted from container ships and other technological advances which led to a decrease in the security of large corporate profits that supported the deals between labor and management.
- People want to live on charming Main streets, but the people who work there can’t afford to live there. My neighborhood, Cobble Hill, is fantastically charming, but I couldn’t work there and afford to live there. On the flip side, I can afford to pay rent there, but I couldn’t afford to buy there. I earn around 5 times my first salary, but I can’t afford to purchase in the neighborhood I rent in. Oh, how I’ve worked the numbers but it ain’t happening.
- Fascinating nugget: Sam is a City employee, and her pension is administered by William Thompson, the city comptroller. He has heavily invested in the Fremont Mining Corporation which owns open pit gold mines in Papua New Guinea. They seem to dump toxic waste in fragile river ecosystems, which is legal since they seem to bribe the local officials to make it legal. This sucks, and Sam would never support it but Bill Thompson (he’s now a potential mayoral candidate) just is in charge of maximizing Sam’s pension.
links for 2007-11-27
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Shiny. LINQPad supports everything in C# 3.0 and Framework 3.5:
* LINQ to SQL
* LINQ to Objects
* LINQ to XML
Comes preloaded with 200 examples from C# 3.0 in a Nutshell.
It is free and needs no installation -
A quickstart for knocking up facebook applications
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how to write your apps so you don’t have to put up a goddamn down for maintennance sign.
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At the moment there is very little documentation of Migrator.NET, but the idea is the same as Rails Migrations.
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A db migration library for .NET based on Ruby on Rails migrations. Get simple upgrading and downgrading of schema using .NET code from command line or built into your application. It is a stand-alone library and does not rely on a surrounding framework.
Flickr is pro hell.
I read about flickr’s new places feature and started playing around with it. They must be satanists. Flickr makes hell look good. Then I thought I’d have a look around some other mythical locations.
Flickr knows that heaven isn’t in this world, but thinks paradise is closer to home!
links for 2007-11-17
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Sam wants this dinner - I’ll cook it for her next time I work from home.
Money: What happened to the markets in August
I’ve been looking for a simple way to explain what happened to my friends, and I think Statler and Waldorf here nail it.
links for 2007-11-09
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HUGE muckrake on Reagan. It’s got it all: Promiscuity( Nancy and Ron), racketeering, and even rape. Interviews with the girl he raped, the girls he got pregnant and ditched.
best bits near the end.
Whew! -
Autotest is a little command line utility that sits next to your editor and then runs all of your tests every time you save a change to your files. It makes test driven development feel natural. It’s kind of like personal continuous integration.
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holy awesome crap.
enter a comma seperated list of artists. they create an rss feed of new album releases for all of those artists.
awesome. Computers should totally be doing that work. -
Add more of these to gcal, self.