mertner.com/morten

If you’ve ever been to a Microsoft job interview you’ve probably been through a personality test that aims to find out whether you’re an all-round good guy or some weirdo best left alone. I seriously believe that any intelligent person will be able to pass these tests, either by answering truthfully or by knowing what the test is all about and picking the right answers. I suppose even if some people can cheat it does help to screen candidates prior to spending actual face time with them.
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I’ve long been vehemently opposed to the concept of patents, particularly software and business process patents. I’ll not re-iterate the arguments against “imaginary property” or speak about the ever-increasing (but already insane) copyright duration and their combined restrictive power on the freedom to invent and build upon the already invented. Instead, this post is about an idea I’ve had on how the current patent system could be reformed in a way that is “backwards compatible” with current practices and investments.
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I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that you can’t easily share user controls between projects, so I decided to see if there was a way to achieve/simplify/automate this. The following is more of cookbook-style description of the steps required, and I’m not sure if it’s something I’ll recommend anyone uses. It’s posted here mostly for my own sake, so I can return and improve on this process at a later stage without having to remember all this nonsense

Still with me? Then let’s dive into the details…
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I recently discovered that you can register your user controls in web.config instead of individually on every control or page where they’re used. This technique doesn’t let you get rid of the fluff (some configuration is still needed) but at least it’s a way to reduce it. Being a fan of the DRY principle I thought I’d apply the technique to a project…
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When the first preview release of the MVC framework was published I immediately had to try it out, and while it was obviously a first cut it has been a joy to work with.

The updated release is much further along and integrates most of what was previously a separate download (the MvcToolkit). There are “plenty” of tutorials so I’m not going to publish anything like that, but wanted to comment on a few things that I think could be improved in the current release.
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Microsoft just released an updated preview of the MVC framework as well as Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008. Be sure to install the Blend 2.5 preview before the Silverlight tools.

I’ve also created an updated keyboard layout for danish developers, as described in a previous post (download link). The download includes source code (aka the .klc data file) so that you can open up the layout and use it as a base for further customization.

I’m now so frustrated with Visual Studio 2008 that I’m starting to consider whether there might be something else that is less broken that could be used for .NET development. What makes me sad is that I really want to like the product, and while there is much to like about it there is even more to dislike. I also want to point out that I don’t think I’m biased against Microsoft or something like that. In fact, I once took an implicit association test that showed I had a mild bias towards Microsoft over open source, so if I don’t like it it must be because I really don’t like it.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 things that I think are horribly broken with Visual Studio 2008, and unlike Letterman I’ll do my list from top to bottom.
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Last week I was in Barcelona to attend the annual Microsoft TechEd conference for developers. I’ve never been to a Microsoft event of this size before, and must say that I am impressed by the overall organization of the event. With over 4000 attending developers and hundreds of sessions crammed into less than 20 time slots over 5 days, I’d not want to be the one deciding what goes where. The food in general was not very good, and one could wonder why there wasn’t a single classic Spanish meal like tapas or paellia [sic?] on the menu. The coffee was endurable in the morning but horrible in the afternoon, presumably from a combination of me being less coffee-hungry and it having been brewed several hours earlier.
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As an instructor teaching Microsoft courses on a regular basis, I often get asked to compose a custom schedule covering just what this particular customer finds interesting or worthwhile. As a result, I spend an amazing amount of time juggling with schedules and modules to make it fit without breaking the semi-natural order in which the topics are best delivered.
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As you know, I managed to get through day 2 with a reasonable stack in spite of the huge chip loss I managed to inflict upon myself. Day 3 would be the day when the money bubble bursts, and I would have expected people to play very carefully. I went into the day playing fairly aggressively, assuming that people would prefer to stay alive than to take chances.

However, no more than an hour had passed before I played my final hand in the tournament. I had pocket kings…
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Note: this post was originally authored by Allan (restored here after a disk crash).

It has been an interesting night trying to follow the action in Day 2A – there is not much live information to be found, so I have been drip-feeding on pages with chip counts and “interesting hands” much of the night.
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The second day of the WSOP started out really well, as I had a very nice stack to intimidate my fellow players. Although rather uneventful in terms of huge pots my stack had grown to 150k after the first 2 hours, 170k after another level and all the way up to 217k after about 5 hours of play. At this point I was starting to think, hey, I’m going to end this day at 300k rather than 200k.. but unfortunately, things would go differently.
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After a few days of relaxation in the desert furnace of Las Vegas (nicely tempered by the always available aircons), the big day has finally arrived – my first day of the WSOP.

About 1300 players started yesterday and after 12 hours of play only 450 remained, with the average chip stack going from the initial 20.000 to 58.000. Chip lead ended with a commanding 270.000 chips, and these numbers certainly indicated that much can happen in 12 hours of play.

I didn’t do very well initially and at the end of the first 2 hours my stack was down to 15.000. The second round didn’t go much better and left me with only 8.000 chips. At this point I was starting to feel the pressure of being surrounded by people with much larger stacks, and the fact that blinds were increasing did not help either.
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Some time ago I received an email from Titan Poker informing me of upcoming tournament events for their VIP players. Having spent sombunall of my spare time playing poker in the spring, I happened to accumulate an astounding number of bonus points and had apparently been upgraded to a more respectable status One of the advertised tournaments was a VIP freeroll tournament where you could win a seat to the WSOP main event in Las Vegas, and who could pass that up given the modest entry fee of 0$
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It has always been a bit of a pain to be a programmer in Denmark, because you need to access a lot of special characters – and these are mostly placed behind obscure and hard to reach key combinations.

To rectify this situation I have created a keyboard layout that offers quick access to the most commonly needed special characters, and fixes a few of what I consider to be top annoyances with the regular danish keyboard layout. Specifically, my layout contains the following improvements:

• @ replaces the never used � character
• [ and ] are also available via AltGr+; and AltGr+.
• { and } are also available via AltGr+K and AltGr+L
• < and > are also available via AltGr+I and AltGr+O
• ~ is available directly (rather than as a dead key not showing until an additional char is entered)
• \ is also available using either Ctrl+< or Shift+� (replacing the � symbol)
• / is also available using Ctrl+Shift+<

The duplicate availability of the backslash also enables the use of Das Keyboard, which only has 101 keys and lacks the key normally holding the backslash character (as well as < and >).

All in all I am very satisfied with the results, especially the handy bracket accessors I wish I had been able to disable the Caps Lock key too, but this wasn’t permitted by the Microsoft software used for this.

Click here to download the installation files for this.

I just came across this article in the Washington Post by Flemming Rose (cultural editor at Jyllands-Posten and responsible for the publishing of the Muhammad cartoons). It explains and justifies why the cartoons were published, and reflects a bit on the aftermath. A very interesting read.

Note that there is a translation error in the article, in that the danish comedian Frank Hvam is afraid of making fun of the Koran rather than pissing on it. He originally used the phrase “tage pis på” (which means “to make fun of”), whereas the word “pis” by itself can translate as “piss”. [source]

Another interesting submission has appeared as a joint statement from 12 intellectuals, among them Salman Rushdie. It is short and to the point – and I couldn’t agree more with it.

Who has not at some point used an old newspaper to kindle a fire? I certainly have, and I think no one will contest my right to light a fire and some burn paper and ink. But then, why is it that burning the Koran is forbidden?

I’m fairly convinced that the Muslim community would be united in condemning such an act, probably to the point where they would issue a fatwa or go to war over it, if the reactions to the Muhammad caricatures are any indication.

But when is paper and ink transformed from something ordinary into a sacred thing that it is forbidden to set aflame?

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It is both fascinating and frightening to observe the current uproar in Muslim countries over the publishing of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a..w.) in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. If you’ve missed out on the story you can catch up on Wikipedia before coming back here.

In short, Muslims worldwide are taking offence at the publication of these cartoons, condemning the publication of them and calling for retributions of all sorts, ranging from flogging of the responsible cartoonists to the collective dismemberment and beheading of all Danes. Governments have recalled their ambassadors in protest and stood by as angry mobs have torched Danish embassies and burned flags in the streets.

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Creating a decent web precense for an open source project is often much more work than one initially anticipates. You need to find an appropriate license and come up with a long list of non-product specific information to help interested end-users and (potentially contributing) developers along.

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While spending a few hours over on Brad Abrams blog I came across an interesting definition of developer types:

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