Cool Programming

The Interview

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:10:21 GMT

Being an 7-time author of technical books and a very successful developer and popular blogger in Toronto, I'm getting much different interviews than I did in the 90s when I was just starting out. Now, people tell me they read my book(s) or read my blog. But today, I had a really horrible interview because of it. The technical lead in the interview decided to take this opportunity to show off his intelligence to his non-technical co-workers. So, he started asking these really obscure questions that nobody in the right mind should know the answers too. Unfortunately for both of us, I did know the answers to some of the questions. I'm a quack that way. He began getting frustrated and the questions started getting more and more oscure. Eventually, he gave up and simply told me that I was wrong and didn't know what I was talking about. He claimed that you couldn't do an INNER JOIN on two tables and OUTER JOIN the result to a third table all in one SQL statement. I had done this a thousand times in my career, so I was quite certain it was possible. I didn't pursue the issue and simply said "OK". Maybe there is some weird issue in SQL that I didn't know about? When I got home, I searched the Internet for something related to this failing of SQL. I couldn't find anything. Does anybody have any idea what this guy was talking about or was he just trying to garner brownie points with his non-technical co-workers by showing me up?

OPML 2 HTML

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:53:23 GMT

In creating a blogroll for The RSS Blog, I wrote a bit of C# that converts OPML to HTML. Thought I'd share.

Vista Countdown Widget

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 18:22:48 GMT

I saw that Miel had a Vista Countdown Widget on his MicroMiel blog. A couple clicks later and there was the code to add one here.

XML vs. JSON, The Mistake

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:39:37 GMT

Two weeks ago, Tim Bray made an argument pro-XML anti-JSON. I read this and realized immediately that his argument was incorrect. He pandered to the JSON's in making his pro-XML argument. It was completely wrong. Now, everybody and their cousin is using the argument against XML. The latest is Don Box, who does the same dumb thing as Tim. You can see he's pro-XML, but his argument includes a lot of BOGUism about JSON simplicity crap. The anti-JSON argument has to change. Just say NO to another parser. I'm tired of the same arguments having to be rehashed every year. I don't care which is better, but starting all over at step #1 every year is crap. XML works. But I guess this is why we have Atom.

http://pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/archive/2007/01/03/45560.aspx