I have a great amount of respect for someone who has an idea that's so good that they can sit back and watch the money roll itself in. The Million Dollar Homepage is a great example. Good idea, great use of eBay and it's associated media machine and a simple self-explanatory, self-promoting domain name. I bet Alex nervously enjoyed this auction like no other! Behind all the hype though, it did actually take 6 months to sell all the pixels. Have a look at first posting here.

Anyway, in my everlasting quest to find permanent employment I found ...

Web services rock! Long live the API! As seen here from this great series of postings

Interesting stats.

I recently had a phone interview for a developer job with an interesting sounding company working on a desktop application with some venture money in Clerkenwell. It was my first interview for 4 years and I fluffed it up. The difficulty was describing code verbally rather than through a computer screen, or more specifically an Integrated Development Environment. The challenge that I messed up was to describe the mechanics and problems associated with the simplest of the "Gang of Four" Design Patterns, the Singleton.

To rectify this inability to articulate a simple programming paradigm, I'm going to practice here ...

Wow, search for C# and allotment on Google and I'm number one and two! Now, if someone, apart from me, shared those interests, what a wonderful world this could be.

Just working through An Introduction to Programming with C# Threads by Andrew D. Birrell. I'm finding the best way to understand all of this is to write code that breaks and then fix it. Not quite sure how to use unit tests with threading problems yet, so I'll just show the before and after code.

If you have more than one thread running and they have access to the same class, then it is quite possible that eventually both threads will change a field or call a method at the same time. Depending on the field or method ...

In March 2005 I was lucky enough to speak to the right person at Haringey Parks Department and got an allotment without having to endure any waiting lists. This is pretty rare in London, most people have to wait a few years to get their plot. In some areas you might never get one. Islington has only 15 plots and yet is one of the most populous boroughs in the country. The quoted waiting time for me was 30 years!

The reason I got mine so quick was that it was disused and in a very overgrown state, covered in ...

Since October 15th 2005 I've been in a state of deliberate unemployment. After working for four years as an IT Manager at an animation company in the West End of London I decided I didn't find helping people to use software and computers that fulfilling, but rather preferred writing the software that they use.

I had been writing various tools and applications to help people with their animation work and make them more productive and able to collaborate better. I decided this would be my fulltime future, but realised that my skills were not as good as they ...

Here it is! I shall hopefully make good use of this blog to record the occurrences in my life with regards to becoming an accomplished C# programmer and a successful vegetable grower!