Helping Out a Fellow Programmer or How I Learned to Love the Code Again

This week I found out that a guy I work with is a brand new programmer. He has some experience working with ASP.NET in the VB language. I have had a couple of conversations with the guy to evaluate his technical skills. It is confirmed, he is a new programmer. He is also eager to learn and seems to be fairly bright.

I have started him off with a programming challenge and a reading assignment. For the programming challenge, I went over to the Sphere Online Judge website to grab the problem 'Life, the Universe, and Everything' the classical problems page. The reading assignment is from the MSDN website: System Namespace, Object class, Console class and Introduction to the IDE webpages.

My personal opinion is I should also do the programming and reading assignments I am giving out. I am doing this for two main reasons. The first being, I don't want to over whelm the guy with information. The other reason is to make sure I also understand the material. I have discovered an interesting benefit of working with this new programmer. I am being forced to think about code in different ways. I need to be able to explain the code to someone else and I am also thinking multiple ways that the code could be written.

This is going to be an adventure.

Firefox Tips and Tricks

On Monday, I learned a few tricks, tips and optimizations for Firefox.

The first item is Widefox (Firefox for the widescreen generation). This optimization works well on my laptop. I am still getting use to the new layout. So far I like it and seems to help me be a little more productive. Setting up Widefox is composed of two major steps, installing the TabMixPlus add-on and configuring userChrome.

Next I applied several tricks and tweaks for Firefox the was posted on Lifehacker. I followed several of the tips listed in the blog post and the comments for the posts. My two favorite posts so far are: Force links to open in the background and Geek to Live: Top Firefox 2 config tweaks.

The last tip I have is to learn some keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. You can get a big list of keyboard shortcuts from the online Firefox help page. My style is to learn a few keyboard shortcuts and use them for a week or two before adding more. The two shortcuts I use the most are ctrl+W to close a tab and ctrl+L to select the location bar.

PowerShell Resources or How I Learned to Love the Command Line Again

The other day a friend was showing off some tricks he learned about PowerShell. PowerShell is a new command ling shell and scripting language from Microsoft.

When I start learning a new tool I like to create a small reference library of resources. The following list is a mixture of websites, blogs and blog postings that I have found useful or interesting.

• Windows PowerShell
• Windows PowerShell Blog
• The PowerShell Information Centre
• Scripting with Windows PowerShell
• PowerShell Quick Reference & Graphical Help File(chm)
• The PowerShell Guy
• PowerShell Secure Remoting
• TechEd Webcast Available – PowerShell: The Future of Server Administration
• Free Powershell book and other Powershell info
• PowerShell CMDLET Visual Studio 2005 Item Template
• Microsoft Command Line Standard
• PowerShell: how to unit test your cmdlet
• Asynchronously execute PowerShell scripts from C#

Some thougths on paying off the mortgage early

Over at the website Get Rich Slowly the is a posting entitled 'Ask the Readers: Is It Better to Invest or to Prepay a Mortgage?'. The article has tickled my brain. The posting has multiple quotes from different finical gurus layout support for their view on paying off the mortgage early. Right now in my finical life Dave Ramey's advice makes a lot of sense to me.

There are several finical and tax benefits to a mortgage, most along the lines of the value of the house increases over time. The issue at hand suggests we need to look closely at few basic areas: How soon to retirement? What are your post retirement plans? How fast the value of the house is increase in comparision to the mortgage rate? What opportunities are we lossing out on when paying off the mortgage at an accelrated pace? The answer to these questions should lead a person to an acceptable answer.

I personally feel that it is better to get your finical house in order before you tackle the issue of paying off the house. I also think that paying off the mortgage should be near the end of your personal finical plan.