The Left Field
by Sean McGrath

Sean has a reputation for a take on technology that can seem to be "out of left field," but is guaranteed to get you thinking. Sometimes contrarian, always insightful, he offers a unique perspective on the practice of programming and on technology in general.

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Ruby, DSLs and the free lunch that was not so free

The world of IT is embarking, I suspect, on a another period of language creation hype. This time, the hype epicenter is Ruby and the facilities it provides to create custom languages.
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Future techtorials

I'm soliciting feedback/suggestions on the techtorials I have been doing with ITworld.
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Career damaging self description

"I am a X programmer" (for arbitrary values of X), is not a good way to describe yourself in my opinion. This techtorial talks about why.
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I like it!

Is it secure?

An awkward question deserves a somewhat awkward answer. "Is it secure?". Its really all about residual risk calculation.
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Loose coupling?

My take on loose coupling.
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Techtorials - An experiment with an electronic sheet of foolscap

I spend a lot of time drawing pictures to explain technical concepts. How can that medium - the quick paper-based sketch - be best turned into a web format? Here is what we have come up with. We call them techtorials.
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Bootstrapping tomorrow, today

As a species, we generate some unconscionable amount of new digital data every day. The number is so big that no member of our species, that I know of, really has a good feel for the number. To try to wrap our heads around it we resort to desperate analogies e.g.
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Debuggers Delight Syndrome

From time to time, my long suffering wife asks me what the heck I do all day and where all the techie problems that furrow my brow to a depth of 0.5 inches come from? It is a really good question and recently I have been expending some energies trying to figure it out.
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Multi-tasking the project plan

I had one of those weird moments recently where I made an analogy between two things that I have never before analogized. Namely, multi-tasking operating systems and project planning. I will get back to that in a moment but first, I have a possible reason why weird analogies are popping in my head that I would like to spend a minute on.
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What version are you running?

There are many aspects of the IT business that have been turned upside down the internet. One concept which is effectively being meaningless is the concept of a "version" in the sense of an application software package version number/name or an operating system version number/name.
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Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

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