After a loooong pause this summer due to work I started taking lessons with Sydney again. What I really appreciate about the training is that the instructor does not train Sydney, but me. The instructor never gives a command to Sydney. All commands, and the way Sydney behaves, are explained to me and I do my best to teach Sydney. Instead of coming back with a programmed robot I get trained to understand what Sydney wants, needs and why he behaves the way he does. I try to take a similar approach with the developers I work with but it is not simple; it is a lot faster to just fix the problem than take the time to explain and teach the developer what is wrong and then ...

I have been too busy lately to play as much with my Lego Mindstorms NXT as I had hoped. I constructed the TriBot and got it to do the basic tricks; wait for the ball to be dropped, drive forward, pick it up, turn around an drive back until it crossed the line etc. But the Lego NXT kit has a lot more to offer and the latest September CTP of Microsoft Robotics Studio shows some of the things you can do with it and other robot kits. The "Tutorial for Using MSN Live Messenger to Control a Robot" looks particularly neat: You can download the September CTP here.Visual Lego, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Instead of providing a "virtualization layer" for a ...

Memories... I spend most of my time working at the site of clients so I am almost never in the office. Yesterday I was in the office for an internal project and I found the "Hero Award" and some other items from last millennium when I worked for Microsoft;(Signed by David Cole and Brad Silverberg) You can say what you want about Windows 95, but I have really fond memories of my time in Microsoft. I worked my ass off the last few months before shipping Windows 95 but I learned a lot and met a lot of wonderful, and interesting, people.

It is official, all good programmers are lazy Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code - thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. The article goes on to claim that all good programmers must be stupid: Why? Because if he's smart, and he knows he is smart, he will:a) stop learningb) stop being critical towards his own work ..But there's a more crucial point why ...

The Borland Turbo products are back, but with a twist; this time they are free. I used the Turbo products a lot for my first consulting jobs and when I studied. They were far superior to anything else on the market. But then I hit a nasty bug in the Turbo C++ compiler (wrong offset in a class v-table) and I had to "port" everything to Microsoft C++ 6.0. The Microsoft compiler was a lot slower and used an old & ugly DOS user interface but at least generated the correct code. I have never tried Borland Delphi but I will give it a try now. Many developers claim it's the best thing there is for developing Win32 apps and I am curious to see how much it has evolved from ...