I’ve been doing some very rough testing of Lucene .NET and it’s an impressive framework. I’m able to index all text documents(153) on my drive in a little over 5 seconds. That’s indexing the entire contents of those text files!

Subsequent searches of the resulting index take about a tenth of a second. Technically, these aren’t valuable benchmarks as I’m just running in debug mode on a VMWare windows image with only 500 MB ram designated.

I’m still impressed.

I’ve heard of, but had yet to get around to taking beagle for a walk.

“Beagle is a search system for Linux and other modern Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, or Google Desktop under Microsoft Windows.”

Wow, you can colour me impressed. That little puppy indexes everything, including my IM conversations and my web browsing history. The mac crowd has spotlight but I certainly haven’t seen anything this slick on windows. Unless of course you’re brave enough to hand over the keys to the boys at google.

The searching and indexing in beagle is built on Lucene. We’re assessing using the .net port on a current project.

A great quote of Donald Knuth’s is “Early optimization is the root of much evil.” I’m with Donnie. Don’t solve problems you don’t yet have because in doing so you may create worse problems than the ones you didn’t have to start with. Wow, does that make any sense?

In an interview today I was shocked to hear Heather Mallick say “when Kurt Vonnegut died…”. I had no clue and if you’re in the same boat, it’s true. Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week on April 11th, 2007.

Ever since I read my first Vonnegut I’ve had an affliction. Whenever I look for a book to read, I have to force myself to take a break and read something other than Vonnegut. I have yet to read all his books, if you’re interested, two of my personal favourites are Sirens of Titan  and Bluebeard.
So it goes.

I’ve always been in agreement on Joel’s stance on developer productivity in relation to private offices. It’s yet another reason I love our model, we all work in private offices. When Joel designed their new office he went to town and private offices were only part of the story.

As with most things in corporate culture, I do my best to at least spend some time contemplating why something I disagree with exists. For example, cubicles. If you believe that, for the most part, the world’s filled with people who are trying their best and have decent intentions, then there must be a reason offices are filled with cubicles. Or maybe Joel and his ilk are the only one’s who’ve taken the time to make something unique happen?

Well in this case I think Joel’s learned the hard way why cubicles exist and it’s pretty interesting. Ok, technically it’s boring tax stuff but it’s interesting to see an idea that makes sense, to me at least, in theory be put into practice and then run headlong into financial reality. If you’re a CFO at a tech company then you may want to bookmark Joel’s post. One thing to note is that if not for their own success and growth this problem wouldn’t exist and they’d still be sitting cozy in their bionic offices.

Joel’s now looking for middle ground in the form of moveable walls. Be careful man, I’ve had movable walls before and there was little, to no, noticeable difference between them and a cube.

“A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.” Fred Allen

Mathew Ingram posted about a friend of his Kareem and the fact that he’s a nightmare for big companies. I agree and would say that Kareem is also the opportunity that CreationStep and BandOfCoders is intended to leverage. Leverage is a bad word and sounds a bit evil. I guess we’re a bunch of Kareem’s who got together and are trying to float our own boats. We’re smart, motivated people (hopefully…) who’s boats aren’t floating in traditional companies. You should contact us for a chat if Kareem’s quote rings true with you.

“After too many days of being miserable, I realized it was because I wasn’t happy with my job. I was earning a lot of money, had just gotten a promotion, lived in a beautiful apartment near the beach with my rad girlfriend, but none of it was floating my boat.”

One of the handy features C# has is properties as a first level concept. In most cases it’s relatively straightforward to determine when to use a property and when to use a method. There are, however, some grey lines that will crop up and I’ve bumped into a bunch recently. Some related links:

• MSDN Properties vs Methods.
• C#: Properties versus getter methods which mentions that property abuse call lead to Heisenbugs.
• Finally, I like the summary at the bottom of this.

This has already done the rounds but if not, Paul Graham recently suggested that Microsoft is Dead. He didn’t mean dead like gone-dead and had to go so far as to explain himself.

A few highlights:

• “No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous.“
• “All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft’s anyway.“

Well this is getting out of hand, I just took and peek and have 469 comments awaiting moderation. I think it’s a safe guess that it’s 99% to 100% spam. Lovely. I know this is an old issue for sites with comments but I’m a rookie with this type of volume. I may have to get around to looking up some better tools for this.