CodeFest 2008

The inaugural CodeFest 2008 is over. Attendees Clarence Bakirtzidis and myself made our first 3 silverlight apps. Though I have made a small one before for work.

Hello World
Showing some images
Showing a video

We spent a day from 10 am and it was a lot of fun.
We used Microsoft live to host the silverlight apps as its free, the only hitch is it has no database. The video was encoded using Expression Encoder and the code was Developed using Expression Blend2 sp1 and Visual Studio 2008.

Our next attempt will have to be a game, or so we said as clarence left.

Speed up Firefox startup

I found this great post to speedup the firefox startup.

It amounts to settings 4 settings in the about:config
network.http.pipelining=true
network.http.proxy.pipelining=true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=30
and add integer
nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0.

"Normally Firefox will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading."

And the initial paint delay of 0 makes firefox render immediately.

Be warned this may break some of your page views. But for me if it gets rid of the annoyingly slow startup while sacrificing a few pages, I can live with it.

If I find any others Ill add them.

I found this reason to use a DSL today, and it is the best reason to use a DSL I have heard of so far.

"DSL allows business people to read through code and understand what is going on, so they can spot misinterpreted requirements."

I wonder if it is true in practice?

StyleCop for ReSharper

I ran into this little plug in on CodePlex StyleCop For Resharper the other day. It's still in development but it seems a great idea.

To all the people working on it, keep it up, it looks really good so far.

Plastic Logic E Readers

I found this Plastic Logic e reader a while back. I hope its development is not affected by the global economic slump we are in, this seems such a cool product and much better than the kindle or its ilk. The original release date was Spring 2009 which i assume means March-May. Hopefully its not delayed or even put off.

I was originally tempted by the Illad by iRex as it wold allow me to develop stuff for it too. Well here's hoping the Plastic Logic will be a developers platform too.

Dream PC's

Asus and Intel have a new site up for you to suggets your dream PC. I found this one a laptop with 3 screens and I have been wanting one of these for ages. When not plugged in you use one screen to save power, but other times as a developer I really appreciate 3 screens, so it would be a true mobile workstation for me.



Whats your dream PC? Why not suggest it, it can't hurt.

My stack overflows

Haven't posted for a while, I've been using the new stack overflow website of late.

I'm not sure its working yet. The aim of the site is to become the one source of useful answers for code and computer related questions and it is getting a huge number of questions and answers. I've steadily been answering and voting on questions to up my reputation points.

The biggest issue I have with the site is almost no questions end up as wiki style entries. There ends up a long list of answers, some better than others but a combined and detailed answer may be the most useful. I suspect the initial steam to gather reputation and badges will slow down after a while and the site might struggle to maintain the desired wikipedia like feel.

Maybe wiki answers are irrelevant for the long term survival of the site. It remains to be seen.

Check it out anyway its a new resource.