I often found that my creativity was completely drained in one activity, or the other.  Therefore, these days I focus on coding because I truly love it, and secondarily because it pays the bills; after all, we need money in this world to live, but if I could do it for free and still provide for my family, I wouldn’t think twice.  That is, at retirement, I will still be coding

Many musicians are inspired to make music by other musicians; in fact, it’s an ever flowing stream of inspiration that drives generations of musicians.  They also say “everything old is new again”, and it shows in just how much the music industry repeats itself.  70′s disco is alive again these days, with a twist (usually rock, heavy synth).  But for me, I am deeply inspired by musicians to write code.  It sounds strange, but given how much of a creative outlet it is for me, it comes as no surprise to, well, me.

Most kids who aspire to be musicians often view 1 or 2 musicians as their “idol”; their archetype by which they judge their own performance, skill level at their instrument, and even the quality of their phrasing and expression through their own music.  For me, growing up with the dream of making music for a living, it started with Richie Valenz, and ended with James Hetfield.

These days, being inspired daily to write code from music, one of my biggest influences is definitely Thom Yorke.  I can’t think of someone else who exposes so much beauty and expression through a bit of ugly; someone who puts something into his music for a very specific reason, who you can envision crafting every last detail of his music the way an experienced software craftsman would create a class, a method, even apply a pattern.  Imogen Heap is a close second

Programming is definitely expressive, and the desire to express myself has had the perfect outlet for years now, and it shows no signs of stopping; I love it, and am grateful to have music as my inspiration to code, in addition to great coders like Steve McConnell, Martin Fowler, and Stephen Prata.  I didn’t grow up idolizing them, but I spend my time these days trying to emulate them.

The interesting thing is being on a development team reminds me of being in a band.  There are lots of parallels, from dealing with other creative people, to dealing with the emotional side effects of it, to a sense of accomplishment when your “baby” is released into the wild (new album).  There’s just as much pressure to stay current in software as there is in music, except of course you aren’t always focused on appealing to “tweens” or have the latest pop hit on the radio.  But 1-2 years in this industry without keeping up and you could become stale and have a hard time finding a new “band” to play with.

I can’t think of something else I would rather be doing.  I love creative expression, and I love programming because it needs me to be expressive; it’s symbiotic to the core

For one – it would lead to a versioning NIGHTMARE if, for example, I’m trying to figure out why an application I built on .NET 4.0 is now broken on my client’s machine who was updated to .NET 4.5; I can’t imagine M$ would actually do this.

Anyway, article here: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33198_7-20112398-286/amazons-press-event-7-a.m-pt-live-blog/?tag=topStories

1. They’re delivering a fully integrated experience.  Amazon has had Prime videos for quite some time now, an MP3 store for quite some time complete with music locker (I use it, it rocks) and their own Android Market for probably the past year.  These all come with their new tablet; the best part is they beat Apple to the punch with the music locker feature.  Given that they now offer unlimited storage as well, can you say “iCloud Killer”?
2. The hardware, while subpar, doesn’t truly matter in the grand scheme of things.  Earlier this year, I bought a Motorola Xoom tablet, and while I can say the hardware probably destroy’s the iPad’s, the experience isn’t there.  The apps the market (ahem, I) wants are not there; back then, not even Netflix worked!  For Amazon’s tablet, the hardware will be subpar in comparison to current Android tablet offerings, but who cares?  What people want will be there.  What people want is an end to the fragmentation that permeates (and degrades) the Android experience.  Amazon will deliver here.
3. Who else offers such an integrated experience?  iPad comes oh so close, but then there’s the integrated Amazon shopping experience.  That might be enough to dethrone the tablet king.  Doubt it?  We’ll see.

Thanks Pandora team!!

Oh, read more here: http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2008/12/pandora_on_wind.html

And view supported handsets here: http://www.pandora.com/on-windowsmobile

However Livedrive has proven to be a bit (a lot?) buggy, which sent me off on a search to see who else might’ve had this idea and perhaps is further along than Livedrive is.  Well, I found Jungle Disk, which utilizes Amazon S3 as a storage back end.  The idea of storing my files at one of Amazon’s data centers was a very intriguing one.  However my interest in Jungle Disk quickly waned as there’s no offline file access.  Yes it provides a locally mounted drive, yes it provides a local cache making file access easier, however the lack of offline access was mystifying at best, since Livedrive offered it and it seemed like a natural feature.  Alas, no offline access drove me away from Jungle Disk.  There were other problems with Jungle Disk from my perspective, like the fact that it automatically downloaded files, even just to list them, which at times would freeze Windows Explorer until all files were downloaded in the current folder, which is just ridiculous.

So Livedrive, while having the best idea, is far too immature to be of any good use, and Jungle Disk just wasn’t going to cut it either; I kept searching …

Enter Humyo: it has all the features of Livedrive (yes, even offline access), and is an order of magnitude faster when copying files to it.  It is by far the best online drive I’ve used, and it’s extremely stable and very intuitive.  And it doesn’t suffer from the same immaturity that plagues Livedrive and the same automatic file downloading that plagued Jungle Disk.  It is everything I could ask for in an online storage solution.

The one drawback that I have found with Humyo (if there is one) is the 100GB limit on paid accounts, which upgrades @ $99 for another 100GB.  I find this to be expensive considering how cheap storage is these days.  I’m not quite sure of the justification for these prices, but those are them and you live with them or move on.  Me?  I choose to stay, pay and enjoy the peace of mind of having my files stored in reliable storage clusters, which replicated application servers ensuring I always have access to my files.  And for $6 a month, who can beat it?  Thanks Humyo!!!

Because Todoist (not misspelled) is by far the best out there.  For two simple reasons: unlimited sub-tasks and unlimited reordering of tasks.

You would not *believe* how many web-based to-do lists do not have these features (none of the above mentioned ones do)!!  It’s not even that hard of a feature to code; I mean if you’re using an XML file as your backend you instantly have hierarchy built-in to your architecture.  The reality may be though that most developers are unfamiliar/afraid of hierarchical tables and so eschew things like this.  At least one of the to-do lists mentioned above have limited subtasks (2 level I think), which likely mean their data model establishes the hiearchy using multiple tables.

Anyway, check out Todoist *now*!!  If you want a good web-based to-do list.  If not, stick with something trendy and chique like Remember the Milk.

QUICK UPDATE: Someone posted in the comments regarding CheckVist.  Check it out NOW!!  I think I might actually like it better than Todoist; nicer UI, and complete (and intuitive) keyboard integration.

Why haven’t more people picked up on the necessity of unlimited hierarchical to-do lists????

YAU (Yet Another Update): Checkvist is my new web-based to-do list.  Those who have seen this post previously may have noticed the title change.  This was deliberate and reflects my new found love for Checkvist.  Thanks Checkvist team!!

Then I found Livedrive.  Livedrive is one of those things that sort of slap you in the face with awesomeness.  Firstly it mounts a drive for you (defaults to ‘L’) that you can use like a normal hard drive.  When you copy/make modifications to files, the Livedrive desktop client will automatically upload files in the background to your Livedrive account.  It has a local cache that it stores files in for fast access and fast copying.  All around awesomeness.  However it’s in beta (some would say alpha), its pricing is dubious, and there’s no indication on one’s ability to trust Livedrive as an organization.

Even though I still really like Livedrive, I moved on to Jungle Disk.  Jungle Disk has all of the same features Livedrive offers, but it uses Amazon S3 as its back-end storage solution.  All files you post to Jungle Disk are uploaded in the background to Amazon.  The biggest benefit from my perspective was that Amazon’s storage servers are replicated and offer high availability.  Price was also absolutely amazing at $.10-uploads and $.17-downloads.

I ended up going with Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition.  For $2 a month, you get backup on unlimited machines, a number of users can be added to share files with, and you get Amazon’s high availability with unlimited storage (i.e. as much storage as you want to pay for).  So far it runs great; I’ve uploaded a number of files to it, and I can access them on a local drive.  I would recommend Jungle Disk to anyone who was looking for the ability to store files in an uber-safe place, have high availability/replicated servers store your data, and access your files from anywhere.

I do want to add however that I will be keeping a close eye on Livedrive.  I actually do like its service better, especially its file sharing ability.  There are some integration short-comings like no ID3 reading for media files, but overall I do like it better than Jungle Disk, minus the beta part.  For now Jungle Disk is my choice, but Livedrive will likely take over at some point in the future.

If you’re hosting a WCF service in IIS that exposes a workflow (e.g. ReceiveActivity), and you get an error saying there’s no endpoint defined, changes are your workflow’s WorkflowServiceAttribute configuration doesn’t match your web.config WCF settings!  Here’s a great post about it, I just wanted to link to it: http://www.keithelder.net/blog/archive/2008/03/13/WCF-and-WF-No-Application-Endpoints-Error.aspx