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Here at Whiny Blog Central, we frequently receive email from Alert Readers who tell us: "THANKYOUSOMUCH for you're latest blogg entry! Youve saved my BABY from becomeing an evil manager or a VIM user or whatever! Heres a personal check for $500!" And we can appreciate that sentiment, although we wish it would come from people who realize holding the check up to their screen so the email program can "see" it doesn't actually send anything to me. To us, I mean. We mean. It is nice to hear that some people like what you write, though, since anyone who does anything noteworthy in the world will have critics, and criticism can really sting, even if you have a thick skin, or even a cephalothorax like some bloggers out there. But then, the critics are often critical because your writing stung them in some way, so I guess it's an eye for an eye in this writing gig. Almost Famous Earlier this week, my coworkers and I were astonished and more than a little ...

It's hard to believe it's only been eleven years since they opened the first Wizard School. I hear they just opened new campuses in Singapore and Istanbul. That's, what, sixteen or seventeen locations now? And enrollment is already backlogged five to ten years at the new campuses. The money involved just defies the imagination. Mine, anyway. In retrospect it seems pretty obvious. Who'd have guessed they'd make so much money , though? We were all there, all programming in the same industry, but somehow the two founders saw an opportunity there that the rest of us missed. I think it's worse than that, actually. I mean, I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it. Didn't you? But I'm such a late adopter. I didn't know about Napster, not really, not until they were being shut down. I didn't buy a DVD player or a CD player or an iPod until they'd been out at least six or seven years each. Stuff like this always feels like it h...

I finally upgraded to Emacs 22 a few weeks ago, and now I'm wishing I'd braved it sooner. Technically it's not released yet; I'm working from a build of a cvs snapshot from a month or so ago. But the Emacs dev team works pretty hard to make sure it has problem-free builds on a whole slew of platforms, so just following their instructions has a pretty good chance of working for you. It's worth the effort. Truly. Reading through its NEWS file, there's just tons and tons of new functionality. It's going to take me some time, maybe a few weekends, just to absorb it all. Personally, though, I think there are two features that by themselves justify the entire effort of upgrading: the Unicode and UTF-8 support, and the enhanced replace-regexp command. International At Last It's been a very long wait for Unicode and UTF-8 support, and now that I have it, I could never go back. There isn't much to say about it, except that it works. Seamlessly. It ...

Manager Secret Sauce I've managed software developers at various companies, on and off, for about fifteen years. Doing so I've made or watched just about every mistake in the very big book o' management mistakes. So, like many others before me, I thought I'd offer a few observations and tips. I'm not trying to be comprehensive here. It's just some thoughts, just enough of them to fit in a blog. And wouldn't you know it, they fit exactly . Lucky us! Also, I don't mean to be controversial here. However, given that nearly everything I write seems to generate at least some controversy, I eagerly await seeing how far I miss my mark. If today's rant seems boringly obvious to you, then you may very well be a rare breed: a good software engineering manager. I say you may be, because knowing these things isn't the same as practicing them effectively. You may do all my Dos and don't all my Don'ts, yet still find some clever way to be an...

So I haven't been blogging lately, because Oblivion doesn't have that feature. On the plus side, though, I've been leveling completely out of control because I was stupid enough to have Athletics as one of my primary skills. If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky. As in, your luck attribute is maxed at 100. Because the game is so damned addictive that when you're not playing, you wind up looking outside and thinking "man, that lighting model is really realistic!" before you remember you're not actually playing at that particular moment. And then you get all bummed, because you're not playing Oblivion. Oblivion is the latest in a series of very long games called "The Elder Scrolls" , from Bethesda . It's a single-player first-person RPG, or "Role-Playing Game" for those of you who've lived under a rock for the past 30 years. RPGs are a genre defined by its immersively intense realism....