tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33634393799097976342012-01-01T15:11:08.200+11:00Welcome to the road less travelled...for good reason. There isn't much here of interest; no pretty scenery or valuable natural resources of wit or insight. This is the remote log cabin of the blogger that time and progress forgot. What are you staring at anyway? Move along.Quick Joe Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15112311758463940176noreply@blogger.comBlogger111100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-66253442006910995852011-07-29T00:14:00.015+10:002011-11-15T01:33:22.820+11:00

A friend contacted me recently with a rather vexing problem he was experiencing with XML serialisation in .NET. A very simple class containing only integers and strings was causing an exception with the message:“System.InvalidOperationException: A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type Common.Models.Member”.After a few minutes, the intertubes suggested to me that the

Quick Joe Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15112311758463940176noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-57361361817014684332010-05-16T16:42:00.007+10:002010-05-16T22:25:18.231+10:00

Atheism is an increasingly hot topic across the world, with bus campaigns, this year’s global convention and an influential presence on YouTube.The last bit may sound a bit trite, especially to people who think YouTube is all about dramatic hamsters, lolcats and skateboarders doing face-plants for our amusement, but YouTube has provided a legitimate frontline in the conflict between skepticism

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-86029803469826197622010-01-01T16:52:00.004+11:002010-03-20T10:18:49.550+11:00

The SitePoint forums are a microcosm of a long-running and disheartening real-life trend towards instant gratification. In the interests of saving the reader a tedious mouse-click, SitePoint sells books about web design, boasts about how popular it is, and also offers a message forum.The scenario I refer to involves people asking incredibly basic questions without having shown any suggestion of

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-16858341234712117552009-12-29T00:33:00.002+11:002009-12-29T20:29:12.959+11:00

Working the 9 to 5 grind at a desk for any length of time is almost guaranteed to, sooner or later, result in the question: “Is this really my life?” And unless this distraction prevents you from palming off work to somebody else, it may lead to other equally disturbing questions — disturbing in the sense that there are no immediately obvious answers.Some such questions may take the following

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-21138212913927242732009-09-04T21:16:00.001+10:002009-09-04T21:20:24.032+10:00

Human progress seems to be a fairly inefficient process. People acquire knowledge and experience throughout their lives (~75 years in the developed world) and then, quite suddenly, they die and take it all with them. Some of it is passed on and occasionally some of it is written down and preserved; but most of it is irretrievably gone. Even that which isn’t lost is often ignored so that the next

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-28988928916102084442009-07-28T18:24:00.010+10:002009-07-29T22:52:44.479+10:00

Recently a public discussion took place between Ray Comfort and YouTube user and scientist, Thunderf00t. The discussion was broadcast by Thunderf00t as a 9‑part series and is presented unedited, stuttering and all. Thunderf00t is a relatively unknown entity outside of YouTube; Ray, on the other hand, is most likely to be remembered for the following things:Presenting the humble banana as

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-27591035185146945742009-06-07T11:48:00.025+10:002011-07-29T02:06:42.440+10:00

JavaScript is not a strongly-typed language, but it does have types and there is a difference between 42 and "42", though the language sometimes does its best to obscure this by resolving the differences between types according to its own rules. This is why the following expression evaluates as true:if("42" == 42) alert('Spoon!');Implicit string to numeric conversions like this are rather

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-26530867632029661172009-05-27T20:50:00.004+10:002009-06-07T11:54:55.469+10:00

Recently my place of work started using Redmine, a fantastic project management web application. Redmine is written in the Ruby programming language, which generates a fair amount of hype in web development circles.The reason for this hype, the language and the Rails framework are all things I am largely ignorant of. I’ve been dimly aware of the Ruby on Rails phenomenon for some time now but

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-80323389720086380922009-04-10T00:33:00.004+10:002009-04-13T21:54:59.751+10:00

Life is not linear. Individual existences certainly have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life, however, spans individuals and generations. The most observable pattern to life seems to be the cycle, be it that of day and night, the seasons, death and rebirth, or the endless cycle of mistakes that defines human history.This thought hit me while skimming over a forum thread (viewable to members

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-681755395881475572009-04-05T12:58:00.007+10:002009-04-05T15:21:06.838+10:00

As of over a year ago, the estimated number of blogs in the world was perhaps as many as 200 million. For something so novel, growth rates tend to go exponential rather quickly and then plateau once either the fad wears off or there are no people left without blogs. How many there are today is probably far greater. How many of those are active is anybody’s guess.And as with any “new” thing (I

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3363439379909797634.post-2192931102857121832009-03-31T16:06:00.010+11:002009-04-20T17:33:31.568+10:00

For the inaugural post in any new blog there is either a desire to lead off strong with some epic work of insight, or to hit the other extreme with “So, err, I have a blog...”-esque nonchalance. I chose neither. My highest hopes for this adventure is a sort of long-winded pedestrian mediocrity but at the same time I abhor laziness and white noise, so I may as well stay true to form from the very

Quick Joe Smithnoreply@blogger.com0