I will now move to litemedia.info. See you there!

Time to go live!

Release as soon as you have functionality that will generate business value.

When it comes to my new blog, it is now complete enough to be useful to me. That is why I choose to get it out through the door even though it does not have basic things like search and archive. This is not a big loss since my audience consist of two groups

• Those who read the blog through Google Reader
• Those who Google a specific topic and enter the blog directly to an article

of which neither will use the search or archive functionality of the site anyway.

Why moving the blog?

My main reasons for moving the blog are

• Learning Orchard CMS and Azure, the techniques used to build the blog
• An English blog should be on an English domain
• Mint was a project that is no longer active. Time to go back to the roots: litemedia
• Upgrade to html5

New URLs

• Website: http://litemedia.info
• RSS Feed: http://litemedia.info/rss?containerid=8

Michael Lopp, famous for the blog Rands in Repose has written a book with the title Being Geek – The Software Developer Career Handbook. I’ve read it through and found it easy to read, humorous and full of first hand knowledge about the software industry.

Being Geek

Michael Lopp has written two excellent blog posts the nerd handbook and managing nerds that made me buy this book. Sadly, these two contributions to the book are the only one that is strictly about being a geek. The rest of the book is mostly about managing people, which is not very surprising as it seems Michael Lopp spent most of his career as a manager.

It’s ok. It’s just not what I expected from this book.

The Software Developer Career Handbook

I will give it to the author, that he fulfills the subtitle of this book. First hand experience of how to become a great asset in a software company. How you should read other people around you, and how you should handle management. Yes, I knew all of this before I read the book, because I’ve read similar books in the same subject but it was great to get a more personal twitch on it, than most other books will give you.

The good, the bad and the ugly

This is a fun and easy to read book. It is something for the hammock a warm summer day. It is not a book that you should base your daily decisions on, but some stories that you could bring along with you.

The ugly part of this book, is that you feel deceived by the title. I where expecting more anecdotes about geeks and being geek.

Last year was a pretty good year for me. Here’s my plan for 2011.

1. Write twice as many blog posts

I compose blog posts because I learn things in the progress, and it gives me a searchable directory of all problems / solutions that I’ve encountered recently. I find that I often solve the same problems over and over. That’s why I save a lot of time writing blog posts.

In 2010 I wrote 39 blog posts. Next year I expect to write twice that amount. 78 blog posts means that I have to write one every fourth day. That should be manageble.

2. Have three public appearances

Talking in front of an audience is a great experience. The trouble for me is to find a broad subject that is of interest to many. Most of my talks so far have been quite narrow.

In 2010 I’ve talked at two public events that my employer held. Next year I want to talk at three events, with one of them outside my comfort zone.

3. Learn one new language outside of .NET

Learning one new language each year is a way to get perspective of your current mother programming tounge, mine is C#.

Last year I really started working with F# for real and that has changed much of my thinking while coding C#. My OO code is much more functional this days and I take much better care of immutability and state in my coding.

In 2011 I want to dive into something outside Windows and .NET. Let it be Python or Ruby. I need to get out of my comfort zone and get new perspectives.

4. Deliver one private project

I have a lot of private projects outside of work. It is my workbench where I can experiment freely without costing my customers anything.

This year or 2011 I would like to deliver one of my private projects. If this is something that I’ve already begun or a new project, doesn’t really matter. Just being able to deliver a private project would be a huge step forward for me.

5. Project Euler #50

Last year of 2010 I completed 25 project euler project problems. This year I would like to complete 25 problems and getting to level 2.

6. No more than 40 hours work weeks

This year I will get my first child. That is a major reason why I will cut down my work hours to 40 hours every week and no more.

I told you about my problems with the StarCraft II Loader recently. After solving that problem I didn’t get very far, until I reached next one.

The game will crash pressing the connect button.

After trying all kind of things I found out that my NOD32 Antivirus software was the cause. Or rather, the problem is that the StarCraft client does not play well with antivirus. Here’s another report with Comodo Internet Security.

Temporarily disable NOD32 to play StarCraft II

1. Right click on the NOD32 icon in your task bar, and select Open Window.
   
2. Press Setup and select “Temporarily disable Antivirus and antispyware protection”
   

Now you should be able to connect to battle.net and play the campaign. You might think that these issues should have been taken care of during the beta testing. Anyway, I’ll get back to you if I run into any more problems.

So, I finally got around buying, and installing this StarCraft 2. I couldn’t resist being part of the talk-the-talk at work.

Anyhow, it took me 1 week before I had enough time to push the “Start Game” button, and then I met a loop with the error message “StarCraft II requires a patch. Would you like to download and install the patch now?”. Very frustrating.

The reason is that there is a patch available, but the downloader does not recognize your internet/proxy settings. This is easily fixed.

1. Open up Internet Explorer. Go to Tools – > Internet Options.
   
2. Go to connections tab and press the button [LAN Settings]
   
3. Make sure that “Automatically detect settings” is unchecked. The problem could also be located around your Proxy server settings, if you’re using a proxy server.
   

Enjoy the game!