I just completed the Classic Mistakes survey from Construx. Thanks to Jeff Atwood for pointing this one out.

The survey itself didn't seem particularly helpful, but the questions it poses do help in enumerating many of the problems I've experienced by actually putting them into words.

It also is beneficial to me because some of these mistakes stem from the developers instead of the management. I've been guilty of developer gold-plating and the silver-bullet syndrome many times, which is likely a result of being a beta junkie. We're in the process of moving to .NET 2.0 (no, not even .NET 3.0 or 3.5 yet) and I'm already jumping to move to Visual Studio 2008 (formerly Orcas). I mean, surely WPF, Linq, and WCF would solve all of our problems wouldn't they? Or, if we suddenly went 100% with Test Driven Development, all of our problems would disappear! Wouldn't they?

Sam Gentile's comments on writing maintainable code are very relevant to silver-bullet syndrome. He points out that the XP methodology revolves around 12 practices and not TDD by itself. TDD isn't a silver bullet but instead is a tool to help document and protect your codebase. You also have to work at refactoring your code and keep it clean and simple.

I haven't ever worked in an XP/Agile environment before, but I do like the goals that it strives for. I'm really pushing my team to learn more about architecture, design, and unit testing because I really do see the value. We really have to just start using these tools. Otherwise, we'll keep talking about them and never actually do anything.

Thank goodness for all these tech blogs. I've learned more from reading these in the past couple of years than I have from just about anything else. It's almost like I'm being mentored by all of the more experienced developers.

Last night, I installed the Orcas Beta 1 release. Aside from just a couple of issues, the whole process went quite smoothly. One of the issues I had already seen before involving finding the rmt9x.mst file and mounting ISOs. My other issue was with the install speed, but that is when I realized I had mounted the ISO from one drive just to install to another. As a result, I was completely missing out on some of the performance that my 10,000 RPM Raptor drive could provide. To rectify the issue, I mounted the ISO on the drive I was installing to and everything else was great after that.

I haven't really coded in it yet, but the application itself sure seems snappier. I'm talking about toolbar menus and the general responsiveness, which is very nice. Has anyone else noticed an increase in speed for Orcas from 2005?

In case you haven't heard, Apple has released a public beta of Safari, which is their web browser.

The surprising news is that it supports Windows.

I have to admit that this is a really good move for Apple. Their software has been intriguing me quite a bit lately, and watching John Lam demo Silverlight on a Mac certainly doesn't make me not want to try it out for myself. My only experience with Mac OS X is via tech support while I was in college. We had an iMac desktop in the office for the rare occasion when a Mac user would call in asking for help getting their LAN connection set up (note, the rarity had more to do with the lack of Macs on the network than the lack of problems). The system ran quite slowly because it didn't have enough RAM and it didn't have any software on it. The dock was pretty cool, but it didn't seem to add much value at the time.

Things seem to have changed, though. I would really, really, REALLY like to try out Quicksilver. The Parallels software looks really cool, too. I like Windows too much to switch, but the capability to run both Windows and OS X side by side is very attractive. Everybody seems to like TextMate a lot, too. I do wonder sometimes if I just want Windows ports of these programs or if it really is OS X that seems so nice.

For the time being, I'll probably still stick with Windows Vista. I just like using custom hardware too much to lock myself into Apple hardware right now (that, and I hate not being able to resize windows from the top). If they ever come out with a virtualization option to run OS X on Windows, I would probably give that a try. I would encourage you to check out HardOCP's 30 Days with Mac OS X article if you've been curious what running OS X might be like.

For the past month or so, my internet connection at home has been dropping constantly. There hasn't really seemed to be any rhyme or reason to it either. What's interesting is that one of my neighbors with a similar network setup was experiencing similar behavior.

I decided to take this as an opportunity try out some new firmware for my router (a Linksys WRT54G). I first decided to check for updated official firmware. Luckily enough, there was some updated firmware, though it wasn't what I would call current (i.e. 2005).

Taking a failure to update as a bad sign, I instead took Scott Hanselman's advice and decided to try some alternate firmware. So far, it is working with flying colors and my router suddenly has all sorts of new functionality. It is a little frustrating that the hardware could support this out of the box, but the firmware wouldn't allow it.

Here's what the web administration tool looks like with the DD-WRT firmware installed:

Much snazzier than the "official" firmware.

If you're interested in trying out DD-WRT, look no further than http://www.dd-wrt.com/. I was able to find plenty of resources online for getting DD-WRT working, too. Hopefully, this will fix some of the connection issues I've been having.

UPDATE - Interestingly enough, Lifehacker named DD-WRT their number two network utility of their top 10 network utilities.

Here's the link: http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Film-At-1100.aspx

Wow. We're famous.

My cubicle neighbor pointed it out to me.

Don't worry, I did this over my lunch break. Because I'm a nerd.

A few weeks ago, I posted on the Stack Style Tabs extension for Firefox. I used it for a little while and I realized that it wasn't exactly what I was looking for... I think it was because I couldn't use my keyboard arrow keys in addition to ALT-TABing around. What I really wanted was a keyboard-centric way to quickly navigate through my tabs.

Today, I was going through my feeds and noticed a post from Lifehacker on a new experimental feature that Google was working on to allow you to navigate through search results using j/k and a few other keyboard shortcuts. My first thought was that this would be great, because I use the provided keyboard shortcuts to navigate through my feeds in Google Reader all the time. Unfortunately, it was a little rough around the edges still.

Then I saw a comment to the Lifehacker post on vimperator. I had seen posts on vimperator before and had even tried it, but it was a little too weird for me at the time. I mean, I still use my mouse occassionally; however, the comment mentioned that you could type :set guioptions=mTs and get your menu and toolbars back.

So I thought, eh, why not. I'll give it a shot again.

So far, I'm liking it.

First off, I'll recommend turning your menu and toolbars back on using the guioptions setting. It makes the transition to vimperator a little easier. Once you've done that, just start browsing.

Here are a couple of my favorite features so far:

1. If you press f, you'll get Hit-a-Hint like labels pop up on all of the anchor tags which will be numbered. If you press the number in the label, it will navigate to that link. No mouse!
2. If you press b (comes from the vim idea of buffers instead of tabs), you'll get a list of your tabs! Just press the number and it will open that tab up! Awesome! THIS is what I wanted for a Firefox extension.

Here's a screenshot of it in action:

There are a lot of other options that are probably great, but I still need to spend more time learning them. I encourage you to give it a try, too. Don't worry if it seems a little overwhelming. You can always turn to vimperator's help, which is excellent.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Just some ramblings from my brain this morning.

I got to work a few minutes ago and the first thing I do every morning is go pour myself a cup of coffee. The coffee doesn't bother me too much - at least after I pour some sugar and cream in it and it looks more like milk than coffee. However, others at work despise the stuff. It's the typical coffee you might find at any other corporate office... except maybe Starbucks.

That's when the ironic thought hit me.

What if the coffee that Starbucks has for their employees is the same coffee sludge that every other corporate office has? Wouldn't that be hilarious? Wouldn't it be... ironic?

It must be too early in the morning to form coherent thoughts.