January 2010
1 post
December 2009
2 posts
Year End Statistics Roundup
This year was pretty awesome. It was my first full year as a real employee, I started contributing to my 401k, and for a brief period, I had my credit cards entirely paid off. I had a girlfriend, I started taking better care of myself, and I now have a semi-decorated apartment. Downsides: my car drastically declined in value, pushing my net worth down 15% of year end of 2008. Lets take a look...
I Crack Me Up
Try
frm.Tag = lt
frm.RefreshCharts(lt)
Catch
' do nothing; this operation was just a gesture of kindness anyways.
End Try
November 2009
2 posts
Concerning the Lexus LTA
me: i want that car
me: real bad
James: amazing shit
me: only $350k
James: thats all!
me: ain't no thang
me: i'll ring up the homies and get them to put in extra shifts on my corners
me: gotta expand that trap son
James: oh i hear ya
James: i expect my dudes to get that for me for christmas... they saw my tweet, they know what that means.. time to hustle harder
me: time to hustle harder or you're gonna hafta regulate on `em
me: just one of those things you ain't gotta say, ya feel me?
James: oh i know
James: game recognize game, and you looking mighty mirror image right now
"I Drive a Dodge Stratus!"
I love my car. The engine warning labels are written in Japanese. It is incredibly well engineered. It gets good miles per gallon. It has a keyless RFID system. It can determine its own location globally to within ten feet. It has power windows and can get radio signals from fucking space.
Daylight savings time, however, escapes its grasp.
October 2009
7 posts
Twitter Lists: Ready for Abuse
me: oh man, twitter lists.
me: http://twitter.com/dsokol/lames
James: doesnt work for me
me: awww
me: man
me: get on that
James: IM trying
me: (ps it's a list of just you, named 'lames')
me: lolololol
James: figured that
me: man
me: that's gonna be great
me: cause you can arbitarily name lists and add people
me: i could have a list named 'Dick Lickers' and BAM
me: everybody goes in
Cooking
Upsides of Cooking Sausage & Maceroni and Cheese with Same Lid:
Awesomness
Maceroni Tastes like Sausage
Feeling good because you’re saving water and resources like those goddamn hippies told you to.
Downsides:
None
This Showcases My Conversation Skills
me: if you're that bored, i've got an article on software estimation that needs writing
James: oh word!
James: yeah lemme get to that
me: yeah
me: formula is
me: Estimate = Min x -Max + Min + ScaleFactor x Max
me: ScaleFactor being between 0 and infinity (but probably around 0.7)
me: basically centers around this distribution:
me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_(continuous)
me: which has unique properties that allow the inverse CDF input to be greater then 1!
James: i was gonna blog about good rap thats out
me: that'd probably be better then my boring shit
me: at least someone would read that.
me: "oh man numbers THBBT"
me: (but my technique allows you to easily use stratified latin hypercube sampling for determining the best estimation time!)
me: (or straight monte carlo if you want to run more trials!)
me: yeah
me: you can see why i've been just ITCHING to write about it so hardcore
James: for sure
James: totally passionate about it
me: it's gonna be extra boring
me: yeah
me: because i'm going to trash joel's theory of software estimation and debunk betaPERT as ineffectual as it doesn't handle small increments well
me: not to mention i'ts completely biased against the 'most likely' which is probably wrong.
me: i have the most boring life ever.
James: i stopped reading what you typed a while ago
James: lemme know when you're back on that rap talk
An Excellent Rebuttal of Paul Graham
I saw this a few years ago, but I’m re-reading it because it’s good. Also Paul Graham is kinda meh. It was written in response to Hackers and Painters, which was decent at best. A sample, from dabblers and blowhards:
The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports (“Management secrets of Gengis Khan”, the “Lexus and the...
Fixing Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard on Vista/Win7...
When I originally upgraded to Vista and Windows 7, I could not get my Rocketfish Bluetooth keyboard to connect. This was incredibly annoying as the keyboard decently expensive (~$100) and pretty nice. I ended up reverting back to the crummiest cheapest $3 keyboard I could buy at Microcenter, and it sucked.
Eventually, I grew sick of it and spent today figuring out how to make my Rocketfish...
My Own Personal λ
I updated my main website, dsokol.com with an approximate update frequency. This λ value is the exacted number of updates per day, sampled from the last one year period. Given that my blog has had eight or so updates, over the past 365 days, my future frequency is calculated to be 0.02192. (λ = 8 / 365)
This is not an accurate prediction of frequency, as data for the past 11 of 12 months is...
Show Me Your Desktop
Last week, @shanselman started a tag stream on twitter called #showmeyourdesktop. He seemed to be somewhat miffed that everyone he knew had nice, clean desktops with a pretty background image and very few icons. About 10 submissions in, I decided to post my own work desktop, which you can see in a prior post.
This is apparently not how must programmer desktops look. At all, period, ever. From...
September 2009
7 posts
“When trying to make a point involving business never interject your own...”
– Me
Things Every Programmer Must Do
Go Hard
A programmer without passion is pretty much useless. As this poster quotes, Productivity Stems From Passion. (Scroll down, the website sucks for product linking.) If you don’t have passion for your creations, you’re pretty much doomed. Notice that I didn’t say code or design; products are the lifeblood of any developer. Thousands of lines of source or amazing designs...
So the Zune Uses IE6 for Mobile
PM: Alright team, we've been handed down an edict to use IE6 for mobile as the Zune's browser.
Developers: Fuck IE6, that shits garbage.
PM: Well, we have a very specific release date and we want to make sure we don't delay this.
Developers: We originally had a stiff release date and wrote our own WPF variant and it worked wonderfully!
PM: We did let you do that, and it looked pretty slick.
Developers: So let us write our own browser, we can get it done on time!
PM: We also let you write your own date calculation code.
Developers: IE6 it is :(
1 tag
New Computer Part I
I recently built a new computer. My previous machine was garbage (destroyed by Vista and my choice of super-cheap computer parts) and doing even the most minor disk or cpu intensive activities sucked. To deal with the situation, I just shifted to doing most of my work at Work, and just did simple web browsing and chatting at home. I finally got frustrated with the six-minute bootup time and...
Please Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself
My name is David Sokol. I am a Software Developer in the finance industry. I focus mainly on risk management and developing excellent software solutions. This site and it’s related content does not reflect the views of my employer.
The format of this site is a daily update containing hopefully decent content. Content will either be technical (.NET, Finance, Software Development theory,...