The Ashdar Partners Blog

So, at about 1 am this morning, I found out that Google is shutting down it's widely-used Reader application. I read four different takes on it (I think I saw it on BGR first) and only then headed off to Reddit. (It's all over the Internet now. Apparently, other writers recovered from the shock more quickly than I did.)   Ironically, I found out that Google was smothering Reader while using Reader.    This is particularly frustrating to me. I use Reader more than any other single thing. Reader channels probably 95% of my Internet interaction. I use it for a few hours every day. I use it at my desk. I use it during commercial breaks on TV. I use it when my wife falls asleep on the TV couch and when I can't sleep. I use it while waiting on line at McDonald's. I use it on commuter trains and on long car trips. It's a constant companion, I've spent more time with it than any pet and nearly any human. If my phone is charged and I'm not doing someth...

As I do some posting on another site, I've been running the   BGR live stream of the Sony Playstation 4 launch   on my second monitor and I've got something to say. I'm not a "gamer". I stopped playing games back in 1999 when I found that I had lost yet another weekend to Quake and Tomb Raider. I spent innumerable hours playing Quake, TR, Doom (and many others -- the late 1990s were kind of slow for me, socially speaking) on my Micron Pentium II. Before that, Falcon 3.0 (and Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D) on my Northgate 386/33. In medieval times, Ultima on my Mac Plus and Adventure on my Atari 2600 occupied my time. I was never all that good, but the games absorbed my brain in a way that TV never did. I had to stop playing games because I didn't do much else in 1999, besides go to work.   Since then, I have watched developments in game hardware and software from the sidelines. I do have some observations about the situation with the forthcoming PS...

I did a fair amount of work with Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day, writing spreadsheets for other people. (I was paid and everything. Amazing.)   Tracking down errors in those spreadsheets was always a pain in the neck. Time has marched on, mercilessly. 1-2-3, Symphony, Jazz, Improv and even Quattro are just historical footnotes now. I haven't built a serious spreadsheet for anyone since 1991. I do use Excel, more as a "user" and not as a developer. I've never really dug into any of it's debugging features. For my own purposes, I use the relatively anemic Google Spreadsheet because it's good enough 90% of the time and I always have a browser window open.   I've often wondered (a nice word for "daydreamed") how people debug complex spreadsheets. Spreadsheet power users, while they can spell SDLC and know their way around a VLOOKUP(), do not strike me as the types who have backgrounds in TDD.   Apparently, I am not the only person who won...

While at University in the eighties, I didn't learn much in the way of useful software development tactics or strategies. It was just a question of fulfilling the homework requirements and getting past the exams. I was an EE student and not a ComSci major, after all. When I started my first job out of college, which was as much about programming as it was engineering, I was introduced to version control in the form of the PolyTron Version Control System, or PVCS. At that time, I worked in a two-person coding group. PVCS kept us from stepping on each other's work and allowed us to track our changes, using nothing more than the legendary MS-DOS command line.   When I moved on to my second job, the coding environment was more complex and chaotic. I was surprised that the version control strategy consisted of occasionally pkzipping the source files. The product itself was somewhat confused. I've worked on many projects since then, and it always seems that the better-run p...

This blog entry consists of my notes and thoughts from the PSSUG meeting at Microsoft's offices in Malvern on 2012/12/12. Any misunderstandings are mine. The evening was broken up into three parts. First , Kevin Howell presented " Visual Studio 2012: A Complete IDE (Debugging and Source Control" . He covered some of the enhancements since Visual Studio 2010. He did a quick demo of server-side debugging of a stored procedure, and pointed out a few configuration changes that you must make to your solution before you can use this feature. Kevin particularly likes the schema comparison feature, now part of SQL Server Data Tools, which I think debuted back in Visual Studio 2008 or 2005 as an add-on/down-loadable thing. He points out that you need to be using the Premium or Ultimate editions of Visual Studio 2012 to use schema comparison feature. The comparison feature does seem greatly improved, even over Visual Studio 2010 and is light years beyond what was available...

With all of the flamage surrounding Windows 8, tablets and phones, I've been resisting making any comments. (I have so many negative comments to make about the Windows 8 UI that I sound like a crazed Unabomber, and there is little to be gained from venting at this point.)  For posterity's sake, I'm going to put down some random musings that might be fun to check back on in 2014. I believe that the end game for tablets will be Microsoft selling tablets directly and without apology. Microsoft's formerly joined-at-the-hip hardware partners will be left trying to sell 'traditional' PCs (laptops and desktops) with an increasingly tablet-ified Windows. Some vendors may take stabs at shipping Linux distros (again), but that has it's own set of problems. There just isn't enough pricing room when the market wants to buy a tablet for $300 and Microsoft wants $150 or more for their software. People seem to feel that the Surface tablets are too expensive to com...

Hey. Did you know that I am #78 on the All Time "Top Users" list at Stack Exchange's Database Administrator's site? I was surprised myself. Here is a link to my information page . Stack Exchange provides sites to ask questions about a number of topics ranging from technical things like databases or programming to less technical things like bicycles or philosophy. As a quick introduction, here is a link to their About page . Pick a topic at Stack Exchange and and learn from many top people in their fields. It is always informative to see the problems that people run into over and over. Better yet, create a login and help someone out.