Just been going through re-organizing my blog. Reading articles by Jakob Neilsen (Useability Guru) has pretty much changed my thoughts about blogging, how to percieve it and how to go on about doing it. He is right in his articles (here, especially) that the web really needs proper, well formed, well thought and specialised content rather than 2 second rants about something you found annoying or loved like Scoble’s over obsession with everything iPhone and everything about blogging. So i was here, seeing my categories list and I see just too many categories with single entries. I have narrowed down the categories to the following major ones:
Blog Log: My category for stuff I write about others’s blogs. Like this one.
General: For general talks. Like this one, again.
Code and Programming: Code talk and snippets.
Design: Problem (and software) design articles/comments.
Late Night Blog: Quick rants about something i found really useful.
Troubleshooter: For articles related to troubleshooting problems others found and approached me for, and my own fixes.
Apart from these major ones, there are short categories for Linux, MS Windows, MS Visual Studio, OpenGL, C++, and .Net.
So comming back to the topic “refactoring myself”. If you havn’t been studying refactoring then i highly recommend that you do. It will add up to your skillset of software engineering. I really can’t go deep into the topic right now (and how useful a skill it is) here in this post, nor do I have many cool links to hookup here for refactoring but I know you know your way to google. (Just for information, one of my favourite shortkut keys in Visual Studio 2005 C# workspace is the F2. It renames all the instances of the variable/function/etc currently my cursor is at). There are a lot of features in VS2k5 to explore for refactoring for beginners. One of the great articles i read today is the article at One more pointless blog called Refactor yourself. Eddie approaches the refactoring phenomenon from a totally different angle but does it very beautifully. A must read for anyone, not just software specialists.
As for the weekend, its really not very intresting. I’m really intrested in taking care of my new house so been searching some proper toolkits to have here, here and here. After an hour long searching in google I found some nice links.
Reading my news feeds is getting to be like life to me. I’v just been reading Ali Eteraz recent articles. One i found fairly intresting and thought provoking is the Geneology of prostrating (Muslim silence since 9/11). Apart from all the MI and ISI covert battle shit being related to the Lal Masjid issue by my uncles and their wives, Ali Eteraz has his own views on its end here. I find a lot of consonance with his school of thought. Keep it up Ali.
Recent entries on my reader include A list apart, some Adobe blogs, and The News feed(which i dont read at all, i just added it because of the lal masjid issue. Did I say on my blog that I literally hate reading newspaper news, especially here. They never fail to disappoint me… its all just about deaths and shit).
A GREAT news I recently heard is that Rico Mariani (Someone i really lookup to meeting in this life) has finally taken charge as the Chief Architect of Visual Studio. I hope he’s not too late to take charge for Orcas and hope to see some great innovation comming up next Feb’ when microsoft releases Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 etc. Way to go Rico, i wish you the best! I’m so happy, i wonder why. hehe!
So much for the latenight blog, im hoping to write a few articles this summer on my blog. Lets when I get the click.
Filed under: Blog Log, general, Late Night Blog, blogging, late night bloggin', refactoring, software
Zaki Mirza's Blog 
Talk Back!