Previously on Writing or Just Practicing...
Archived posts from 2011. Note that due to the increased security for RSS feeds in IE9 and later you must either add this site to your trusted sites list to make the link work, or copy the URL...
View ArticleLeaping To Conclusions - Predictions for Leap Year 2012
After my resounding success predicting that 2011 would finally see the lingering and painful death of JavaScript, and that the interface of Windows 8 will consist solely of one large Flash animation,...
View ArticleHands Up If You're Doing Hybrid...
After several months of diligent dappling with documentation, comprehensive confrontations with code, and seriously systematic study of system architectures, we've managed to toss together most of the...
View ArticleThat What Was Demonstrated
It's been a long time since I studied particle physics in my spare time at university. However, as it looks like the clever people at CERN will soon be publishing photos of their new baby - the...
View ArticleThe (Non-political) Third Way
One of the major advances in politics in recent years has been the evolution of "The Third Way". You know the kind of thing: Given a choice between two approaches to a problem, neither of which are...
View ArticleAn Enduring Documentational Experience
Unless you write books or guidance for long-lived technologies, such as assembly code programming or software design patterns, the products of your IT documentational effort tend to have a somewhat...
View ArticleWhat's The Point?
My wife will tell you that I'm really not very good at getting the point of things. I mean, when it comes to making typically vital choices such as whether I want brown sauce or ketchup on my sausage...
View ArticleTry, Try, and Try Again
There are some seemingly simple phrases that trip so easily off the tongue, but end up leaving you tongue-tied. Or, if not physically entangled, then tied in knots both architecturally and...
View ArticleMy Guide's Got Duff GUIDs
It started with Windows XP Media Center Edition, continued through Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, and now extends into Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. Are we sadomasochists, or is the pain of keeping...
View ArticleWriting? It's Easy...
I've decided that, next time I write a book, I'm going to put everything on page one and make some obvious errors as well. I'm not convinced that it will actually do much to make the book any better,...
View ArticlePrequally Empirical Numeric Confusion
Our son went to the cinema this week to see Star Wars Part 1 in 3D, and I was tempted to go with him. I can remember seeing the original Star Wars movie when it was released in 1977, and I thought it...
View ArticleSo Where Does Stuff Come From?
You regularly hear about the disconnect between real life and people's perceptions of it. For example, it seems that two thirds of inner-city school kids don't realize that the contents of their beef...
View ArticleHybrigation Complete, Feedback Required...
So at last we've finished the Windows Azure hybrid applications guide, and it's out there ready for anyone interested in integrating cloud-hosted applications with on-premises services and partner...
View ArticleDoes Online Shopping Deliver The Goods?
It's fairly obvious that the Internet is changing everything. For those of us involved in the computing industry, that's no surprise - we're the people driving most of the changes. But it's recently...
View ArticleThe Rule of "It Depends"
It seems odd that, in order for a rule to be valid, there has to be an exception. According to the well-known phrase "the exception that proves the rule", this must be the case. Yet watching a TV quiz...
View ArticleWho Ate All The Pi?
Here in the UK, you have to wonder where our next generation of developers and programmers will come from. What has changed over the past twenty years that seems to be destroying the curiosity and...
View ArticleIt Feels Like I've Been Snookered
Probably the most memorable comment from a snooker commentator was Ted Lowe during a Pot Black match in the late 1960s. Acknowledging the fact that in those days many viewers didn't have a color...
View ArticleMeandering Meanings
I bet you didn't know that the word "Wikipedia" actually means "fast child". And that the towns of Pendle Hill in Lancashire and Bredon Hill in Worcestershire both have names that mean "hill hill...
View ArticleDrowning in Drought
Perhaps all countries, states, and regions are naturally capital-city-centric, but it's not often I am brutally reminded of that fact here in Ye Olde England where nowhere is very far away from...
View ArticleHands-Off Labs
It seems to be a general rule now here at p&p that every guide we produce must have an associated set of practical examples so that users can get their hands (and keyboards) dirty playing with the...
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