On December 3, 2008, Logitech (my employer) announced that it had shipped its billionth mouse. While I didn’t contribute much to that as an employee (I work in a non-mouse division), I have helped as a consumer: I think I personally own four Logitech mice.

As part of the company internal celebration, there was a video contest with fairly liberal rules: One minute in length or less, something to do with mice.

Here is my prize-winning entry:

Watch the Video

Friday was the third and final day of the QCon conference.

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It’s another day of industry stand-outs at QCon.

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QCon is a software development conference sponsored by the InfoQ site and software consultancy Trifork. I am in San Francisco attending it, and here is a summary and some thoughts on the first day’s sessions I was able to attend.

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The current stock market makes the title generally appropriate, but I’m specifically talking about Microsoft Money here. I used to use Quicken pretty heavily, but I got tired of forced upgrades so I’ve been using Microsoft Money for a little while. Now I’m happy to be done with both of them.
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The “story” in agile development’s “user story” is not a narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Many are short on verbs, which is a big hint that something non-narrative is going on. “User story” is shorthand for a set of concepts and principles. The danger with taking a simple word like “story” and assigning it a new meaning is that novices, and occasionally even experts, confuse the jargon with the traditional definition.

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Last year I wrote about my dislike for cell phones. Despite that, I actually have one now. Maybe I’ll write more about that at some point, but I was just recently reminded (irony to be revealed later) of a particularly sloppy user experience associated with adding birthdays to contacts and I couldn’t help rant a little.

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A few months ago I wrote about an approach to improving .NET cold startup performance. Here’s a little more information that I’ve learned since then.

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As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading Jeffrey Richter’s book CLR via C# right now. I was kind of surprised to read this statement by the author: “If I had been involved in the design of the .NET Framework and compilers, I would not have offered properties at all…” (p. 218) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading Jeffrey Richter’s CLR via C# lately, and just read a section titled “Declaring a Method’s Parameter Types”. That title doesn’t exactly promise a riveting read, but it did a nice job of articulating some guidelines for method parameter and return types, independent of any particular programming language.

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