top three technical skills

Recruiters keep asking me my top three technical skills. Let's see if I can figure it out -- here's an unordered list.

• Object-oriented design and programming
• Specification-oriented interface design and implementation
• Disciplined software engineering: checking for and reporting error conditions with useful error messages, meticulous use of version control, commitment to clean design
• Taking advantage of language and library features
• Tracking bugs and odd behavior to their source by reading code
• Finding, evaluating, learning, and using new tools: libraries, applications, utilities, books, tutorials, etc.
• 
  I don't think these will make much of an impression on recruiters, but I think a programmer would appreciate this list. Any suggestions?

national holidays: a proposal

There are some routines which I think should be added to our national yearly calendar of things to do. April 15 is tax day; there's Mother's Day and Secretary's Day and people in LTR's tend to celebrate anniversaries... but what about Clean All Those Unused Icons Off Your Desktop day? I think the current calendar leaves out some rather important and often neglected activities of the digital lifestyle.

My proposals:

• Change Your Passwords Day Sure, it'll be harder on the infrastructure, not to mention a security risk, if everyone changes their passwords on the same day -- but isn't that better than everyone using their kid's birthday for all their passwords ever?


• Shareware Appreciation Day On this day, we should all demonstrate appreciation for the authors of open-source software/shareware/freeware/peepsware/etc. We'll demonstrate this appreciation either by sending props, peeps, or payment to the authors. Come on; how long have you been using that copy of Stuffit/SecureCRT/Transmit without registering it? Don't the authors deserve at least a shout out?


• Backup Day I backup all the time, okay? If I'm working on an important document, I've almost always got it under version control, with the CVS server running on a professionally-maintained, daily-backup'd file server. (Thank you, Brown Department of Computer Science.) But most people just... don't. Eventually their computer crashes (if it's windows, which it usually is) or they switch jobs, and their old data just disappears. Regular backups are the answer but mortals don't do them until they've been through the pain of a hard crash. Backup Day will encourage and support all computer users in backing up their data. It'd be good for everybody. Maybe Symantec and Retrospect could get together and promote Backup Day.


• Clean Your Hard Drive Day Search out those unused applications, that junk mail file, coredump files, used podcasts, bittorrent downloads that never finished... and delete them! Then defrag your hard drive.

avalon eyecandy

There's some eye candy to avalon. In fact, I've seen a few things that look pretty fantastic. Smooth gradient shadows, two-and-a-half-d layering effects, liberal use of rounded edges, large san-serif type... It almost looks like... Mac OS X!
The applications that I saw at conviat.com are a particular theme for Avalon, fine, but it makes me happy that Avalon is capable of that sort of visual feel. I use Stardock Object Desktop to skin my tablet pc, which makes the look acceptable, but there's a hell of a performance cost. Now, if Longhorn actually builds in skinnability at the very lowest level, and I can actually skin my environment with no noticeable performance overhead, well, that might be a system I could work with.
As it is, yes, I'll say it right here and out loud: I choose to use my 15" Mac PowerBook G4 867 MHz over my 1.5 GHz/1 gb ram tablet PC and my 2.2 GHz giant dell laptop with a 1600x1200 screen because... it's more pleasant. It's just more pleasant to use the mac. It doesn't have to always be that way. If I joined the Avalon team, I could help make Avalon more pleasant, and I could help improve the user experience of the largest segment of personal computer users in the world. I think that could get me out of bed in the morning and staying late at night.

SIGGRAPH sketch accepted!

My SIGGRAPH sketch was accepted. This is my first SIGGRAPH publication.

I'll post the sketch itself as soon as I can -- need to be sure I'm not breaking any pre-publication rules. And our team already decided that I'll be the one to present it at the conference. Yeah! I'm going to have TWO ribbons on my nametag this year.

the blog is moving! (but not far)

i'm moving my blog from this url to a slightly simpler one:
http://sbsine.net/blog/.