I think Last.fm wants to be for music what LibraryThing is for books. Because it’s track and playcount focused, it’s a different experience. But I think if it could give me a similarity list for the contents of my library, it would probably turn up my Seattle friend Tom Harpel, on the basis of his recent Favorite Records list. Thanks for the listening suggestions—I’ll have to check the thirteen albums on the list that aren’t already in my library.

I am getting some acquaintance with the trade of professional testing; it is just amazing how far were my previous testing notions from the state of the art in such a profession.

Again, pillars from that trade like Glenford J. Myers and Cem Kaner help me to open my eyes.

For instance, in Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord, they said testing is applied epistemology; that is a very intense, deep in meaning and very compelling statement.

I have made available an old annotated list of interesting messages in the MUD-Dev mailing list archives.

A non-spam comment recently arrived on the old Boycott Sony site, which is something of a rarity these days. Reader PJ asks whether there is a known list of sites that are owned by Sony BMG, or Sony generally, so that he can block those sites for showing up in AdSense ads.

I don’t have such a list. Does anyone out there? I suspect that part of the issue may be that Sony Music/Sony BMG registers unique domains for its artists, meaning that blocking ads for them may turn into a game of whack-a-mole. But I’ll throw the question out to LazyWeb anyway.

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Very good article in IEEE Software January/Februry 2006 magazine:

Looking for Powerful Abstractions by Rebecca J. Wirfs-Brock

'Finding the right level of abstraction
takes practice and experimentation.
There are times when both concrete
classes and their common abstraction
add value to a design, and there are
times when they don’t. To find good
classes, experienced designers make
distinctions based on significant behavior
differences.'

There are words and phrases from experienced people in our industry of software design and programming that just feel right, it is like they are describing a higher level of truth I need to aspire.

Another example from How do we tell truths that might hurt?:

'Besides a mathematical inclination,
an exceptionally good mastery
of one's native tongue
is the most vital asset of
a competent programmer' -Edsger W. Dijkstra

That is a reason why these people are pillars of our trade.

Wow, this was a quick release, glad to see MS on the ball here for getting a SP out for 2k5 so quickly.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sanchan/archive/2006/04/19/579074.aspx

-         Learn about the new features and improvements included in SP1

A ton of new features have been added and a lot of improvements have been made in SP1 for SQL Server 2005.

You can learn more about it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916940/

-         Bugs fixed in SP1

Refer to KB 913090 (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=913090) for the list of bugs that were fixed in SP1.

Note that not ALL bugs that were fixed in SP1 have an associated KB article yet. As pointed out in this KB, you can expect to see more KBs on bugs that were fixed in SP1 in the future.

-         Download SP1

You can download SP1 for SQL Server 2005 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913089/

          Note that there is a separate version for SQL Server Express.

Planet Python and Planet Zope have been announced this week.

My 'Slices of Py' made the Planet Zope list, yet not Planet Python one. *shrug*, email sent.

I concur with Roberto Alsino that these groups need to define whether they're about a community or a topic. Many bloggers (/feeds) contain many 'off topic' entries. Some of these bloggers have sub-category methods to narrow the feed, others don't. Those that don't and rarely post a topic based entry should be pruned from the list or re-trench with a blogging engine or scraper that does. Those that do, please email the admin with your focused feed. Examples upon request.

Here’s a common design problem: You have a long list of data, far too long to fit on one screen.

Sound familiar? You might be tempted to paginate the results, using something like this or this to help users navigate through the list.

Why not use the scrollbar?

The scrollbar was invented as a way of helping users navigate a long list of data through a limited viewport. It’s still relevant and useful — though often overlooked — today.

I’m a big fan of the scrollbar. Implementing it requires no extra development work (it’s built in to the browser), and the popularity of scroll-wheel mice means scrolling is no longer a pain in the neck. Scrollbars also offer some usability benefits — browsing, comparing and place-finding is easier than with a paged list.

One challenge is extremely large lists. Some datasets are so large that loading them all on one page is just too slow. (We have this problem with some long email subscriber lists.)

But the rest of the time, scrollbars work — better than you’d think.

I’m officially pro-scollbar. Mark me down.