bugfox blog

brevity.org — Links to essays in Best Software Writing I

Steve Yegge has a long post on Agile development methods. (via Joel Spolsky):

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile

Actually this is mostly about how Google develops software. Never having worked for Google myself, I have two questions:

1. Is it true? (Probably, at least from his viewpoint.)
2. Can Google keep it up? (I suspect the system will fall apart as Google continues to expand.)

On the other hand, maybe twenty years from now Google will own the universe and the rest of us will be begging on the streets. In that case we can all go the the public library and do a web search for this article to find out how they did it.

If you want to call old-style COM components from an ASP.NET page, or worse, from an ASP.NET web service, be sure to read this article carefully first:

Wicked Code: Running ASMX Web Services on STA Threads — MSDN Magazine, October 2006

A lot of weblogs and similar sites use feedburner.com to generate custom RSS feeds. This gives a lot of flexibility, but it has a hidden disadvantage: your feeds will not be accessible from many business, government or library networks that use filtering software.

The filtering companies will generally blacklist an entire domain based on the contents of a single page. So if they get one complaint that a single feedburner customer has posted pr0n or other not-suitable-for-work content, then everything from feedburner.com will be blocked. Users may be able to evade this by using bloglines.com or other web-based feed readers, but the links back to the original articles will still be blocked since feedburner.com inserts itself into all the links that it generates.

Before using feedburner, consider whether the feed-generating tools included with your blogging software will suit your needs.

(Similar problems exist with free hosting sites that put everyone under the same domain name.)

Under Options|Privacy|Cookies select “Allow sites to set cookies” and “until I close Firefox”. Then press the Exceptions button and add the sites that you want to allow to set permanent cookies, with the “Allow” option. Obvious once it’s pointed out, but I guess like a lot of people I assumed that “Exceptions” could only be used to block cookies.

From Mungo.