May 13, 2002
@ 12:58 AM
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Sexual Propositions, Interdepartmental infighting, elitist programmers and amusing petitions
So I am dancing by myself in a corner of the club after having consumed my 1st Long Island Iced Tea of the night. [A little background info; I am a very flamboyant dancer. Note that flamboyant doesn't necessary mean good but it does fool a lot of people into thinking it is.] Anyway, where was I? Yes, dancing last night in the nightclub. So I start dancing with this girl who claims to be bored by the "lame" club. She then proceeds to tell me that the only reason she is there is because here friends are there "trying to get laid" and she came along for the ride. After this revelation we start to dance and she begins to get rather grabby (as do I). After a while, she tells me that although she's getting worked up we cannot "do anything" because she has a boyfriend to which I responded that I wasn't interested in "doing anything" since I had a girlfriend. After this exchange, I walked away.

About 30 minutes later, I bump into her again at the bar and she asks if I came with friends. I respond in the negative and ask why she is interested in who I came with. She responds that she wants me to go home with one of her friends but needs someone for her other friend. Curiousity overcomes me and I ask to see this friend who'd have someone else scout out a potential one night stand for her. She leads me to a corner of the club where I see a plain looking girl in a black long-sleeved sweater which I considered unusual given that most women come to the club revealing as much skin as is decent and then some. After introductions, the sweater clad girl if I've been briefed on what's going to happen. Feigning innocence, I ask "What's going to happen?", she responds "You're going to come back home with us and have some fun.". At this point, I'm stunned and ask if the original cute girl I met will also be a participant to which she replies, "No, she has a boyfriend." then begins to caress me. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, I thank them for their kind offer and retreat back to the bar for a stiff shot of vodka to bring me back to my senses. My mind racing, I couldn't help wondering why the girls had decided to go to such lengths to find sexual partners and imagined that the plain girl's sweater hid some disfigurement or skin disease which kept her from being able to find willing sexual partners by conventional means. I guess I'll never know...

I sent out my 1st MSDN article which was inspired by recent happenings to a bunch of folks on the XML team and MSDN for technical review. The general vibe from the XML team was that the article was good, mayhap a bit technical thus requiring a bit more explanation and examples. Imagine my surprise when Tim Ewald (who now works for MSDN) creamed the article by not only disputing many of the points in it but requesting that the column be split in two since he felt it was inappropriate for a column. Over email his request sounded like a directive which made myself and some of the other folks on my team in the thread wonder if he was trying to dictate content. I began to wonder if it was going to become a contest of wills to determine who had the most say basically an annoying political battle that has no place among technical people.

So I gave Dr. GUI. a call to ask him what he thought and he seemed to think that I and the other folks on the thread may have misinterpreted Tim. I decided to swing by the MSDN building to have a face-to-face with Tim and we spoke for a while along with someone else who I assume was there to act as a mediator. It was cool talking to Tim since he is smart as hell and once I realized his comments were made as suggestions not directives I eased up somewhat. Once I did ease up I realized I agreed with a number of his technical critiques of the article most of which surrounded the usage of overloaded terminology. His suggestion to split the article actually turned out to be a decent compliment given that he thought some of the article had potential of becoming a definitive guide and he thought I should focus on releasing that part of the column seperately and the other half as the regular column. I was flattered but declined given that I expect each one of my columns to explore topics in such depth which will take some getting used to for people who are familiar with other the kind of content MSDN columns usually carry.

A while ago I stumbled on It's the Runtime Stupid by Sam Gentile via Sam Ruby and was disgusted by how elitist the article came off. For those who don't have time to read the whole article, it is a rant by Sam Gentile where he berates stupid programmers who ask some permutation of "If I write this .NET application, do I need to install the .NET Framework Runtime on each machine?". He claims that the question is asked frequently on message boards which to me seems to indicate that there is some design problem in user interface [if one can call it that] which causes people to continually have this misconception. Whenever I encunter situations like this, I seek out the root cause and either write an article about it or file a doc bug if it's root is MSFT documentation. So I decided to seek out the root cause of the reason people assume applications developed using the .NET Framework do not require the Common Language Runtime (CLR) to run.

Determining the root cause of this turned out to be quite simple. The .NET Framework spits out programs as executables (.exe files) or assembles (.dll files) which up until the release of the .NET framework one typically did not need much more than a typical install of a recent Windows™ operating system to run or otherwise utilize. Further confusing this is the fact that .NET Framework assemblies and executables although requiring the .NET runtime do not use it explicilty in a way that an end user can determine. On other hand, most programs written using special runtimes need to be executed through the runtime including applications written in Java, Lisp, Smalltalk, etc. For instance, while one types "java myProgram" to run a Java™ runtime app, one types "myProgram.exe" to utilize a .NET runtime app.

Now some people may claim that people who can't realize that a "managed application" needs a runtime to do the managing have no business programming. To this I'll respond that arguments like that ignore the reality that most programmers are ignorant to some degree of the inner workings of the processes behind compilation and actual execution of a program especially the more complex the technology (e.g. CORBA, COM, C++, etc).

By the way I just wanted to say Joel Spolsky rocks. I originally thought he was full of shit when I read his interview which was covered on Slashdot at least twice. However, I've changed my mind. He is rather insightful and quite intelligent which makes the stuff he writes a great read unlike some other pundits who's writing is more miss than hit.

Speaking of things I like, I've started considering buying an N'Sync album or two. I have MP3s of 4 of their songs (Gone, Just Got Paid, Girlfriend, It's Gonna Be Me) which is my typical Time to Buy A CD threshold. I never thought I'd be a boyband fan, Damn.

While taking a leak at work sometime last week, the guy handling his business in the next urinal starts talking to me. He tells me how he was searching the web for good reference material for Java and C# when he stumbled on a page that was full of quality content. The page turned out to belong to me and he just wanted to thank me for putting up such good content. I was flattered but didn't know whether to be offended as well because he broke rest room etiquette by having a conversation with me while we were both grabbing our dicks.

INSIGHTFUL KURO5HIN COMMENT OF THE MONTH

Amusing Link Of The Day: To properly appreciate it you have to read some of the signatures
 

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