Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, one of my favorite blogs, recently posted his list of Programmer's Bill of Rights.  While I completely agree with his enumeration, I think he overstates things a bit.  The list, editing out the links, is below:

1. Every programmer shall have two monitors
2. Every programmer shall have a fast PC
3. Every programmer shall have their choice of mouse and keyboard
4. Every programmer shall have a comfortable chair
5. Every programmer shall have a fast internet connection
6. Every programmer shall have quiet working conditions

I would add to that the ability to alter or modify my workstation in order to make it more productive to my style of programming.  Not trash the system or make if vulnerable to exploits, of course; but to allow me to load any little utility that I need to make coding easier, faster, or cooler.  I will get into some of these utilities in a later post.

I don't think it's our right to have these things, but the employers obligation to provide them.  Follow me here for moment:  It is my duty to do the best coding I can do given the tools I have.  That includes clear requirements, necessary hardware/software, and decent working conditions.  However, if my employer wants to get the greatest amount of productivity out of me, the above conditions should be met.  If they wish to pay me for substandard conditions, they should expect substandard output.

As GC says, If you go out and hire the greatest distance hauler you can find in order to guarantee the delivery of goods between LA and NY, you don't give him a pickup truck to do it with.

I am fortunate; after six years, I finally have a decent system:

• A 21" Viewsonic Gfx monitor with a 17" Viewsonic sidekick
• Dual CPU 3.4GHz Xeons with 2GB RAM
• Crap keyboard, but I bought me a MS Wireless Laser 5000 mouse
• Grabbed this comfy chair my first week and never let it go
• Stupid fast Internet (OC style)
• Could be quieter, but has been much worse.

So I am pumping out some great code.  At least I am not wasting any significant amount of time trying to coax my system into doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Now that everything is working OK, I am going to start retrofitting old posts.  So you may see some older posts showing up previous to the first one here now.  Don't be alarmed, it's OK. 

There are still a few things left to do:

• Create a "bridge" for individual posts.  Each post needs its own page for compatibility reasons.
• Create a categories list.
• Publish the blogrole.
• Continue to adjust the CSS.
• Create a real front page to utilize all of these features.

That's all work.  I'll do it later...

I have been laboring through setting up Custom Attributes and automatic validators in C#.NET.  It's very cool stuff, and as explained to me by my far more experienced lead, going to make our downstream efforts vastly simplified.

I was bashing at the keyboard aimlessly over this when I happened upon this article:  
   Attributed Programming in .NET Using C#
which has really helped me a great deal.  If you are interested in building custom attributes for business object entity classes, and you should be, check it out.

Well I finally have a full solution I can live with for the blog.  Using DasBlog to create the entries and do all the managment necessary on them and a few custom scripts to post from it, I am now able to do nearly everything I need.

I figured out that the easiest way to filter private items is to do exactly that:  the script to post the public blog searches for the Atom tags for private category and removes that entry.  I will probably leverage this concept to create a even more filtered professional blog too.  So now I have 2 blogs from the same source:  a public, censored blog that I am not afraid to let out, and a private one to capture my thoughts and feelings about everything.

I am pleased!  As always, the scripts are available upon request.

Please don't look at my public websites.  They all suck.  My personal one because I just don't have the time to build a decent one and the one for the corporation I work for because, well, I just work here.

Let me explain.  I am the Senior Web Developer for the corp.  That means I control the servers and design of all the company websites, right?  Well, not quite.  The Network group controls the servers.  Ok, I don't need to worry about patches, viruses, etc., so good.  Oh, and I don't write the content of the websites either.  Well, that's good too, I don't fully understand the needs of the business as communication to their customers is concerned.  So rightly so, I am relegated to the technical aspects, which I certainly prefer.  Wait, I don't do the design either, that is up to the marketing department and business owners.  Too bad our marketing group is entirely print oriented and don't really understand the unique nuances of the web; and of course the business owners shouldn't, that's not their shtick.

So what do I do here again?  I forget...

I love SharpReader.  I have tried dozens of other readers and aggregators and always come back to it.  I just hate the way it treats ATOM feeds.  Or more specifically, MINE.

See, when I posted a entry, it gets a date.  If I ever go back and update it, it gets another date.  This is built into the spec.  One tag is labeled "published" and the other "updated".  Pretty obvious what each is for, yes?  When I tagged my own entries, I just ignored the <updated> tag.  But I have moved to DasBlog to ease my administration and now it (properly) updates said tag.  But SharpReader uses <updated>, not <published>, for its display and sorting algorithms.  So all of my entries show up out of order if I, say, go back and apply categories to stories.

Frustrating...

I want to be able to post rants and anti-establishment entries without having to worry about who sees it.  So I have a "Private" category that I want to filter out. 

You should not see this post!

I have tried to get ATOM to format nice with XSL with nearly no success.  So I switched to CSS.  It works!  Almost.  IE6 doesn't render it properly, which is annoying, as I have been a defender of IE for years.  IE7 should do fine.

If you'd like my CSS file, note the xml-stylesheet tag in the XML and grab it.  If you don't know how, then you don't really need it, do you.