South East Queensland endured another round of pretty severe storms last night. As I stepped off the train on the Gold Coast I had to give some serious thought to the possibility my car may have been blown somewhere across to the other side of the carpark.

Anyways, during the blackout that kicked in shortly after I made it home, I listened to a podcast interview with Brad Feld. In the interview he discusses how he and a friend started a small consulting firm at 19 which I thought was pretty cool. After the business was acquired seven years later he began angel investing and is now a partner at Mobius Venture Capital. I found the discussion really interesting, and it was especially good to hear about his personal experiences as both an entreprenuer and a VC.

I’m a massive rookie when it comes to this sort of thing but now I feel like I have a little bit more of an idea of how start-ups get off the ground. I definitely need to check out some of the other Venture Voice podcasts and see what else I can learn.

Said of software that is functional but easily
broken by changes in operating environment or configuration,
or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any
system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to
abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g. a file system
that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said
to be brittle.
…

(Dictionary.com)

I just experienced my first case of comment spam. A couple of muppets posted complete crap to my previous entry which I promptly deleted.

Initially I was thrilled to see the email notifications in my inbox but this quickly turned to disgust when I realised the comments were bogus. I actually had a chuckle at how pathetic their sales pitch sounded.

So far my blog has been shielded from the evil acts of spammers by a veil of insignificance. It seems this is no longer a defense, and in any case I’m serious about increasing the significance and credibility of this blog.

As a result, I’ll be moving it just as soon as I can put aside a little time and cash to research/purchase some decenting hosting.

Stay tuned.

Here’s a funny comic that takes a shot at ESB technology.

Rich Turner, Indigo/WCF guru, blogged it a couple weeks ago but it only just showed up in my aggregator. His blog is definitely worth checking out.

A mate emailed me asking for an explanation of the del.icio.us firefox plug-in. I got a couple sentences into the reply and decided I should take a few screenshots and put them here, along with a few pointers. I could have done a screencast but I’m a little lazy. So here we go:

The plug-in adds new submenu to the right-click context menu on the webpage:

The first thing you need to do is choose the ‘Options’ submenu item and setup your account details, like this:

The submenu also exposes the most useful feature of the plug-in which allows you to add to your del.icio.us bookmarks without having to navigate to the del.icio.us site and interupt your browsing.

That’s the ‘Post current page’ menu item which displays a a dialog box that is like an evolution of the standard del.icio.us bookmarklet. You can start adding your own tags while it gets busy downloading the list of tags you’ve already used. It also highlights recommended tags based on how other people have classified the page.

Another useful piece of functionality is the ‘My tags’ submenu option that displays a list of your tags and allows you to jump directly to that page in del.icio.us

I don’t use this one all that often but it’s still kinda handy to have.

The last thing I want to show you is the plug-in’s sidebar. It acts just like a bookmark list, interacting directly with the del.icio.us service interface to provide real-time lists of the bookmarks under each of your tags. Ctrl-Shift + d is the shortcut key.

When I first started using the plug-in I used this a lot but I find the interface is a little cluttered and there’s a slight delay while the plug-in fetches the list of bookmarks when you select a tag.

I’ve since started using firefox Live Bookmarks because my preference is for a responsive interface rather than a completely up to date list. The major flaw with the Live Bookmark approach is that you must manually add a new one for every new tag you create in del.icio.us if you want to keep the two in sync.

I hope that’s a decent little introduction that gets a few people started using the plug-in. Have fun.

Check out this cool 3d alphabet which Dave Weinberger just linked to.

As I mentioned previously I’ve got Ubuntu running on a virtual machine, today I went googling to figure out how to get the networking going and found the Virtual PC Guy’s Weblog.

Aside from being an interesting read, it proves the point I made to a colleague over lunch about how blogs are about conversations and interactions. They allow customers and potential customers to permeate large organisations and get reliable information directly from the source. This is far more satisfying than being fed info through the catch-all helpdesk and unidirectional PR/marketing channels. I suggested he join the cluetrain.

This whole blogging caper is about interaction and starting conversations.

With that in mind I’ve added a few ways that anybody can get in touch with me over in the sidebar.

So what are you waiting for?

I’m a fan of Raymond Chen’s blog, The Old New Thing because he often points out these subtle little things that I would have never thought about. One of his recent pieces, raises a question about whether developers should be more accountable for how power hungry their code is.

Nobody ever said, “Oh, yeah, I switched my word processor from X to Y because X was chewing too much battery power.” When a battery doesn’t last very long, users tend to blame the battery, not the software that is draining it.

Being a bit of a greenie, I’m all for thinking in that direction… instead of producing larger capacity batteries that will run the most power-hungry applications for longer, why not just write apps that consume less.

Anyway, the final thought goes to SETI@Home. And especially to all the punters out there with their garage farms of old 486ers, left to run 24/7 at 99% cpu utilisation, on a quest to find ET.

I’ve been asked to modify a VB.net function. It’s approximately 30 lines, the majority of which are on the inside a try-catch block, catching the base Exception. I’m pretty sure better-practice here is to try and keep only code that could throw an exception inside the try-catch block. I’m even more certain that I should be catching more specific exceptions than the base Exception class.

If I was more experienced with VB I’d probably skim over the code, recognise which are capable of throwing an exception and place them inside a try-catch block. Since the core VB libraries aren’t second nature to me, I’m wondering if there’s any support from Visual Studio in discovering which of these function calls are capable of throwing an exception, and then what specific exceptions might be thrown.