I’m a big fan of cross-pollinating disciplines, taking two silos which rarely interact and swapping best practices. In the field of medicine before prescribing any treatment there has to be a quantitative benefit demonstrated which outweighs the risks associated to that treatment. In many cases this is black and white: You broke your arm? Let me fix it with a cast. In cases of long-term illness such as cancer the lines get blurred: You have 15 tumors in multiple locations? Yes I can arrest their growth with chemotherapy but I …

On April 9th “Team Mandelbaum” will be running the Pennsylvania Tough Mudder Challenge [LINK] to raise money for the Colon Cancer Association. So far we have raised $1,885 which is a tremendous amount but I would go a step further: If we raise over $3,000 I will shave my head before the race.
Send in your donations through Razoo: http://www.razoo.com/story/Tough-Mudders-For-Colon-Cancer. All money goes directly to the CCA (does not pass through my hands at all) and Razoo accepts all forms of payments.
What is Tough Mudder?
Tough Mudder is not …

If you are using AsciiDoc (and A2X) to convert documentation to ePub you’ll probably have run into a problem where a2x runs xsltproc and fails trying to locate the ePub docbook xsl style sheet.

This post shows you how to fix it.

A good architect stays current with technology to better enable their team’s productivity. One often overlooked area is that of CSS, there have been many improvements. In this post I record the steps taken to successfully setup SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) with Sencha Touch on Windows.
If you’re building a website with a non-trivial CSS file (aren’t we all),  SASS  makes managing the CSS a lot simpler.
“Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than …

In my post on Software Agents I described some of the scenarios in which a Software Agent might be useful. Josef Betancourt [LINK] pointed me to his excellent article with some interesting ideas of his own and I particularly like his mind map [LINK]. Getting pragmatic I’ve been thinking about how to go about building these and will put down my thoughts in an attempt to move the conversation forward.
Let’s start with few design principles:

Agents should be flexible; We should be able to mix and match their functionality to …

The otherwise excellent Kindle 3 doesn’t natively let you subscribe to RSS feeds. To me this is a major failing but we can write a simple service to aggregate feeds into an HTML file. If you email this file to @free.amazon.com Amazon will convert (for free) into an AZW file and deliver to your Kindle. Presto, free feed aggregation. This is essentially what http://kindlefeeder.com does and I recommend this service if you don’t feel like writing your own.
Since switching to WordPress I hadn’t looked at RSS in a …

To date, I have met only two people who actually “get” cloud computing and why it will be so transformational (Jeff Barr and Marc Mercuri). The term “cloud” is so overloaded as to become useless. What does Cloud Computing mean to you? Storing data in the “cloud”? Yawn, boring. Storing infrastructure in a data center? Sorry, we already do it. To me, one of the most compelling areas, which I have not seen in the media is…Software Agents. (warning, some blue-sky-what-if-out-of-the-box-dreaming ahead).
Software agents exist today but most are …

Good documentation is a critical component in any project. A common myth is that developers hate writing documentation but I don’t think this is true. Developers are happy writing the content but it’s the formatting that’s a major headache. Do you use Word, or HTML? Do you use a Content Database? or some other knowledge management system? Mix in multiple developers and you end up with inconsistent formatting. This kills the effort.
If you are looking to produce standards-based content which is consistent across authors, which can be converted …

Irreducible Complexity – the world is too complex to have evolved!  Let’s see…
HTML5 introduces the ability to perform multi-threading in the browser using Javascript through the notion of “Web Workers”. So far I have only seen examples of using workers to calculate very high prime numbers. I took a fresh look at these from the standpoint of genetic algorithms and applied it to the Traveling Salesman Problem (a classic). The results are a multi-threaded implementation of the TSP in Javascript capable of converging on a solution for up to 200 …

I did some toying with Unity and ASP.NET MVC Extensions and found the documentation and number examples somewhat sparse, particularly with MVCExtension. Here’s what I did to change my project over to use MVCExtensions with Unity.
Starting with a basic ASP.NET MVC2 application:

Download and build MVCExtensions from the latest Trunk (http://mvcextensions.codeplex.com/). This is important as the MVCExtension project is under active development. If you download the last stable release you won’t get support for ModelMetadata.
Add references to Microsoft.Practices.Unity, MvcExtensions and MvcExtensions.Unity.
Changed the global.asax to inherit from UnityMvcApplication
Cleaned out the global.asax and moved …