Slashdot recently posted this article about a study that’s determined the internet is to blame for people’s dwindling social networks.

“This change indicates something that’s not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action”

It reminds me of Mesh and how excited people were about the whole social networking movement often associated with web 2.0. I often look at movements such as technology based social networking as symptoms. Held in that light I think it starts to get sad. It points to masses of people using technology who are desperate for social interaction. The sad part is watching them try to achieve that over the internet.

One of the presenters at Mesh was the guy who created Favourville. It’s a great example of what technologists hold up as examples of a web 2.0 social application. It allows people to connect with each other and exchange favours. You need to borrow a tall ladder, have a pile of rocks to get rid of, etc.

Great, someone using internet technology to connect people and build social networks? No, my first instinct was that this is yet another way for people not to know their neighbours. The only reason applications like favourville exist is due to a failed experiment called the suburbs combined with a technology called the internet. It isn’t opening up new possibilities, it’s attempting to fix what we’ve broken.

5 Loop

10 Go next door

20 Introduce yourself

30 Ask your neighbour if they have a ladder you can borrow.

40 Repeat until ladder borrowed

If you’ve heard of the concept of refactoring then you may have heard of code smells or database smells.

While these smell concepts have developed to the point where they have names and formal definitions, I’m guessing that wasn’t the original intention. That clarity only came through the work of documenting and conveying them as a formal topic through books and articles.

My guess is that orginally the concept of ’smells’ was all about tacit knowledge. It’s about embracing a hunch which isn’t always done in technology, quite the opposite. Heavyweight processes often force tacit knowledge out by way of reviews, design documents, etc. If you can’t explain it, convey it, or write it out then it doesn’t exist.

The problem is that our greatest knowledge is tacit. You know something long before you can explain. How could that ever be the opposite? When was the last time you said I can explain it clearly but I don’t understand it. How many times have you said to your partner “crap, I’m sorry, I’m not explaining myself right”?

The greatest athletes can’t explain how they do it. Some brain doctor types argue that in order to do something at your complete potential requires you to put it into your sub-conscious, stop thinking about it. Athletes think about, and can explain, what they’re learning, ie the basics, the fundamentals. They can’t explain how to score 50 goals or throw 5 touchdown passes in a game.

Spoken and written word is flawed, it’s a hack, and we’ll never be able to completely convey what we experience through language. You break what’s beautiful about an idea the minute you attempt to convey it in words. In technology we sometimes allow ourselves to believe it’s all 1’s and 0’s and therefore has no place for tacit knowledge. In doing so we may lose out on the best part we have to offer.

If you, like me, are tired of the burdensome application known as the Adobe pdf reader, give Foxit a try.

“Foxit Reader is small (the download is less than 1MB), so it downloads quickly. It doesn’t need any installation, so you can start to run it as soon as you’ve downloaded it.

And It starts up immediately, so you don’t need to wait for an annoying “Welcome” screen to disappear.”

One aspect of ClearSpace we don’t talk about enough is that we aren’t full-time employees. We work full-time hours, or more, but we aren’t full-time employees. We certainly don’t hide this fact but I’m not sure we focus on it enough as a uniqueness and strength. In some ways our offering directly competes with teams of full-time employees. We offer a viable alternative to staffed developers, you can hire your own staff of developers, architects, etc or you can bring us in. As well, we augment existing teams.

Anytime you identify your competition it’s difficult not to think about what they’re doing. In doing so you can drift into emulating them. It’s like a high school dance. You suck, have no clue how to dance, so you watch that other guy who’s got some moves. Before you know it you’re doing a sad imitation of rolling up the garden hose.

The obvious problem is that in trying to compete with the other choice we make ourselves indistinguishable from them. In those fine, gray line situations we should be doing the opposite, that is focus and highlight what makes us unique not what makes us alike.

We allow our clients to start projects today, not months from now when they’ve hired a team. We allow our clients the flexibility to grow and shrink their teams as their business needs change. They’re able to slow development for a few months while they raise funds, perform research, negiotiate a deal, without having to pay a team of developers.

I guess I’m just agreeing with what my mom always told me, be yourself, be unique. Ok, my mother never said that but I think I’ve seen a mother in a movie say it.

I finally received some encouraging feedback about this site. It’s great to know that not only is someone reading it but they enjoy it. The comment was:

“I love this site. Good work…”

For some reason Wordpress marked the comment for moderation, surprising given the high caliber of this particular comment. That of course drew my attention to the commenter’s URI which was serachzoloftblahblah…

I don’t mind you bots and spiders stopping by and fluffing my stats up a bit but come on, now you’re just playing with me. I’m a person, I’m not sure I can handle this emotional roller coaster.

Any relationship should really begin slowly. You catch her eye across the bar, maybe ask a friend about her, meet a few weeks later, eventually have a coffee together, some longer chats, etc. A nice gradual progression.

When’s the last time you meet a girl for the first time as she pushes past you at your front-door with a construction crew trailing behind her, begins some “minor” renovations to your place followed by moving in all her stuff while at the same time “getting to know you”?

Visual Studio is an obnoxious lady. I had to reinstall Windows last week because….well that’s another topic altogether. In doing so I installed Visual Studio again. It takes less time to install the entire OS then it does to install Visual Studio. The beast takes well over an hour to install. Does that make any sense? Of course there’s some technical explanation out there but I don’t want to know it. It’s just a bad way to start a relationship.

If you’ve been sleeping for the past few months, or just using your internet time productively, then you may not know that I’m a self-proclaimed vi bigot. It’s okay, not knowing puts you in the club with most other humans. There’s a really neato plug-in for Visual Studio that emulates vi for the low low price of $69.95.

So you can buy Visual Studio AND a plug-in to “fix” it instead of just using the tool that works in the first place for free, or a small donation.

Finally technology is making some sense.

There was a post on slashdot today titled “Making an Argument Against Using Visual-Basic?” I’m sure it’s clear where I stand on this one.

C# and VB.NET are almost indistinct from a functional standpoint. In the end it is all compiled down to MSIL but we don’t program in MSIL and this isn’t primarily about language functionality. This should be about writing quality maintainable code.

In attempting to compel some clients to migrate off VB and over to C#, the best article I’ve come across that more or less states it all clearly is Not Another C# Versus VB Article.

Some other points not touched on in this article:

• “C# is a future language with international standardization muscle; the others are just legacy language reruns. Don’t write new code, especially class library code, in them!”
• Microsoft’s developer roadmap specifies that C# is intended for class library development while VB for RAD development.
• C# has much greater potential for widespread adoption, not only by developers but also by platforms, already having been released on other platforms (Mono 1.0).
• C# has the lead in language extension while VB continually plays catchup.