Nanosolar’s Breakthrough - Solar Now Cheaper than Coal
Their mission: to deliver cost-efficient solar electricity. The Nanosolar company was founded in 2002 and is working to build the world's largest solar cell factory in California and the world's largest panel-assembly factory in Germany. They have successfully created a solar coating that is the most cost-efficient solar energy source ever. Their PowerSheet cells contrast the current solar technology systems by reducing the cost of production from $3 a watt to a mere 30 cents per watt. This makes, for the first time in history, solar power cheaper than burning coal.
Jon Skeet: Coding Blog
The Open-Closed Principle, in review Background Unfortunately I still wasn't satisfied, so I thought I'd try to hit up the relevant literature.
K. Scott Allen
In software development we face many constraints, and we usually think of constraints as bad things that make our jobs miserable. If we had no constraints, we’d build beautiful software with impeccable error handling because there would be no errors. In one of my first jobs I wrote firmware for lab devices. Each device had a 32kb ROM for program storage, and those 32kb of memory constrained the type of software I could create, and the tools I could use. As an aside, the limited memory did not constrain me from destroying small thermal printers attached to each device because 32kb is still big enough to hide the machine code that writes to memory-mapped IO in an accidentally infinite loop. Constraints don’t always have to be a negative, however, and I was reminded of this when reading Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.
Kenneth Truyers
I came across a tweet today about refactoring badly written code. I’m always interested in that, so I saw a few fellow devs had taken some badly written code and then applied refactoring to it, following good software design principles. It all started with this article on CodeProject from April last year: The author […] Git’s man-pages state that it’s a stupid content tracker. It’s probably the most used version control system in the world.
Paul LaViolette on Galactic Superwaves and Sub-Quantum Kinetics
Paul LaViolette has some really interesting and plausible theories regarding: regular “super-wave” pulsations emanating from the center of the galaxy, red-shift due to “tired light” instead of expansion, sub-quantum kinetics. He is a rare individual in the scientific community; many in the church of science would consider him a heretic, for his willingness to posit truly unique and independent theories. While most scientists are genuinely afraid to think outside the box, due to the manner by which the “scientific” community tends to isolate you and cut you off from your sources of funding; Paul did not allow them to coerce his views.
Posts by Bill Wagner
By: Bill Wagner I’ve always found that developers are very interested in contributing their skills and their time to help others. I’m excited to be part of a Read more >> Write Some Code, Change the World
Powerful New CSS- and JavaScript-Techniques (2012 Edition)
Advertisement Since our last round-up of useful CSS techniques1, we’ve seen a lot of truly remarkable CSS geekery out there. With CSS3, some of the older techniques now have become obsolete, others have established themselves as standards, and many techniques are still in the “crazy experimentation” stage. Since the release of the previous post, we’ve been collecting, sorting, filtering and preparing a compact overview of powerful new CSS techniques. Today we finally present some of these techniques.
Bill Blogs in C# - Bill Wagner
Important note: I’m still an independent consultant, Regional Director, and C# MVP. I haven’t officially started at Microsoft. All opinions expressed below are my own, and do not represent any Microsoft statement. I spent the better part of last week at //build/ in San Francisco. //Build/ is Microsoft’s premier developer event.
You Should Have a Robust Backup System For Your Computer
I’ve had several friends with drives going out recently and it occurred to me that I should really look into getting a decent backup system. At first I thought of just burning DVD’s periodically or getting one of those 1-2 TB drives which attach to your USB port; but it all seemed to be a bit labor intensive. I just know that I would forget to backup at just the wrong time and lose critical files.
J.D. Meier's Blog
Your Outcome: Learn how to use Monday Vision to identify 3 outcomes or 3 Wins for the week. By identifying your best 3 Wins for the week, you’ll be able to focus and prioritize throughout the week to achieve better results. Welcome to Day 2 of 7 Days of Agile Results. Agile Results is the productivity system introduced in my best-selling time management book, Getting Results the Agile Way.
Custom MVC ModelBinder with Complex Models/Objects/Interfaces using built in MVC Validation
I’ve been creating some cool stuff using ASP.Net MVC 3 lately and came across a situation where I’d like to have quite a complex model/object bound to an Action on my Controller based on a set of posted values from a form. In order to do this, a custom ModelBinder is necessary to collect the data from the posted values, turn it into my custom object, and bind that object to my Action’s parameter. The easy part is to write code to turn the posted values into my custom object and return it, the tricky part is trying to get the in-built back-end MVC validation working for my model… which is currently using DataAnnotations.
Jon Galloway - Jon Galloway
Between releases of my other book (Professional ASP.NET MVC, next release due out soon!) Jesse Liberty somehow talked me into collaborating with him on writing a book on Windows 8.1 development. Actually, it wasn't a hard sell, because I've done a good amount of XAML dev, love C#, and Windows 8 / 8.1 development is a lot of fun. We co-wrote the table of contents, I wrote code samples and very rough drafts (sometimes just bullet points), and Jesse turned it into prose. That worked pretty well, but was a little too slow - especially once my work on Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 ramped up. Fortunately, Phil Japiske agreed to join us and finish the book off.
