Ducas has posted up about this cool video by some t-dashes at Microsoft who must be finishing up their internship. At Microsoft, if you aren’t a FTE (Full Time Employee) you get an account that has a dash in it. There are different kinds of accounts, t- (trainee/intern), v- (vendor) and i- (int’l vendor I think).

Anyway - the account naming is a bit like a branding that says your are margarine, not butter Having said that I’ve been an i- and later a v- and it was fun! Go dash trash!

Sahil Malik has come up with a good post on using ParameterizedThreadStart. One of the things that I wanted to point out whilst reading his post was that other nice thing about delegates that was introduced in C# 2.0 where you can convert method names to delegates automatically where a delgate is expected. The following picture is a simple piece of threading code that declares the parameterized thread start explicitly.

The following code instansiates the thread specifying the target without explicitly instansiating the delegate. This is referred to as method group conversion syntax. A nice little language feature.

Darren has already blogged about Ducas hitting the blogosphere, good to see him blogging. I’ve been working with Ducas and Omar for a few weeks in Sydney and its been fun. But we shouldn’t forget to mention that another Readifian is blogging too – welcome to the blogosphere Bibhakar!

Looks like Frank Arrigo got a page created about him on Wikipedia and it has subsequently been deleted. Frank seems to be taking it well but I suspect that quite a few of the Australian Bloggers are a bit peeved about it right now. Frank is the hub of a lot of blog related goodness in this country and he is really a bit of a figure head for the blogging community here.

Some folks have suggested that the editing done on the Wikipedia is heavily skewed towards the US, I’m not so sure, but I’d like to know what percentage of deletes came from which country.

Surely the people in a country should have some extra weight about what is recorded about their community!

Frank has blogged about the Sydney Business and Technology User Group. We also got an e-mail about it internally which is how I found out about it. The group is being run by Craig Bailey who has also blogged about it. It looks like an awesome idea. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the first meeting but I am hopeful for the second. The user group homepage can be found here.

P.S. The user group meeting is held the last Wednesday of each month out at North Ryde but always check the homepage for details.

OK, so when I got into distributed computing (you know, modems, networks and stuff) it was pretty easy to recover from one of those insane moments where you didn’t mean to send an e-mail (FIDOnet mail actually ), all you had to do was wrip the modem cable out of the wall before the packet of data made it all the way down the wire in the ZMODEM transfer.

Twice in the past week I’e hit CTRL-ENTER to send an e-mail and by the time I got to my Outbox the message had been starting to transfer, however as I looked around to pull out the network cable to stop it (faster than telling the mailbox to go offline) it realised that its really hard to “yank” a wireless cable.

Whenever you get a new technology you win some and you lose some

Geoff A (as opposed to Jeffa) has linked to a cartoon by one of his buddies that features TestMan and DefectGirl. What a cool cartoon, but I think that TestMan and DefectGirl need some competition.

Who would be your software development super villan?