Adam Caudill

Monkey Powered Search Engine

We all know that Google is PigeonPowered™ – now, we have a search engine ran by trained monkeys. Well, not exactly monkeys, but semi-trained people. Yes, you heard that right. When you do a search, it doesn’t hit some massive database containing every web page known to man, it goes to a human for them to figure out.

If I didn’t know better, I’d call it an April-fools’ joke. But, alas, it’s not.

Like Power Toys?

The Sandcastle team just announced a new toy for users of Visual Studio, the Power Toys for Visual Studio Pack Installer. This is a unified installer for the various Power Toys released; no more downloading a dozen installers to get what you want, this one does it all. If you like pushing VS to be all it can be, this is worth looking at.

.NET Framework 3.0 Released!

Yup, it’s here! The next version of the .NET Framework has been released, while this isn’t a major release (as not much has changed), it is a milestone. This release adds support for the WPF, or Windows Presentation Foundation, the new presentation framework that will enable a new generation of remarkable interface designs.

If you’re a developer, get going and get started – this is going to be fun. 🙂

What Motivates Developers?

Developers have jobs for the money, right? If you want a developer to work hard, give them more money, right? Wrong. For many developers, money has little effect on motivation.

Being an odd creature anyhow, developers are a bit different in that the things most people seek in a job means little to most developers. A developer is motivated by a completely different set of factors, and I believe I’ve ran across a great definition of the things that really matter.

Is Vista Gold?

The legendary Robert Scoble has just posted word the Vista may now be gold. It’ll be interesting to see when we get official word. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t wait till Vista hits the MSDN Subscriber downloads so I can start playing with the final.

Starting a Business?

I just ran across an announcement for a new Microsoft product, Office Accounting 2007 Express. This is a free, and surprisingly full featured accounting package aimed at small businesses. If you run a business, or plan on starting one, this looks like a great addition to your tech-toolkit. I’ll post more on this again once I have time to review it more thoroughly.

Vertical Column Indicator for Visual Studio

The coding guidelines at my job have a rather interesting requirement: code must be wrapped at 100 characters. If you fail to meet this on any line of code, you fail the code review. In the year I’ve worked at this company I’ve learned to guess how long a line is quite well. As of today, no more guessing.

Here’s a quick registry hack to add a vertical line in the editor at any column you wish, just double click the REG file and you’re set. The contents of the file look something like this:

Site Updates

This weekend I’ve made a few upgrades to the site, a software upgrade, a few new plugins as well as some tweaks to clean things up. Hopefully these changes will make the site a bit more useful, and remove some clutter from the main page, so that you are presented with content, and all the ’extras’ will be tucked away.

WordPress 2.0.5

I’ve upgraded to the newly released WordPress 2.0.5, the software that power this site. As a rule, WordPress is an extremely easy install. This upgrade would have been simple, had I not forgotten about a few core files that I modified. After reverting to the previous version, I had the files patched and uploaded within a few minutes.

Optimus: First Sign of Life

Those of you that are into computer gadgets have surely heard of the now quite famous Optimus keyboard – the (once) OLED powered keyboard that has caused quite a stir. Recent, word came from the team that Optimus will not be using OLEDs, the belief since then is that it will use LCD instead. Well, after many, many months of waiting to see proof that Optimus will live, finally, we see a key.