Despite knowing the recipe won’t you prefer somebody else cook it for you?

If you are like me you will answer positively to that question. By bringing the similarity between cooking and programming I wish to establish my point how distorted results one can get from the cooks (hacks) all over on the Internet.

The convention I am establishing is that the ready to employ code is compared to the prepared meal and the concepts and mechanisms to the recipes.

The contradiction comes when everybody agrees that people will prefer the meal versus the recipe and still a very few are describing the recipe. By describing the recipe one can imply fundamental directions in the spirit of self-help culture and not holding someone hand by supplying step-by-step instructions. I will provide an example below in order to clarify what fundamental directions one can expect to discover.

So like everything in life you will be a lucky if you filter the white noise of the hacks and find real authors, who altruistically provide contents outside their books. This means that in the same manner as in their books, their writings come with bibliography and other references and sometimes with personal experience.

To get the taste of writing I am describing try Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary. Also the early days of Joel Spolsky blogging are a good example as well.

Here is the example I mentioned earlier. Let’s assume you research a way to implement drag-and-drop functionality over the desktop shortcut of your program. The results should be structured around the fundamental understanding, from where going to the particular understanding will be very easy. In other words one should look how chosen OS reacts when a file is dropped – first it opens linked executable and second it signals to the application to open the dropped file. The signal from OS usually comes via command-line methods and the research is narrowed dramatically. One only has to look how the IDE deals with such methods and research which one to choose to implement in the particular application. Finally the hint has to lay on the application creation event. The research is done and the rest is matter of typing the code.

Of course if such writing concludes with complete reference list about the books or articles supporting author’s idea, then you have a complete recipe, which definitely will satisfy your appetite.

I understand - I live here too!

The headline for this posting was inspired by the slogan in the Mercedes commercial “We understand – we live here too!” This slogan very concisely summarizes the point I would like to make about how Obama can trick people to believe in whatever they think he believes. In other words it is only necessary he to proclaim his good intentions and then nobody to look for results.

Recently Dries Buytaert, who is the creator of CMS Drupal, very enthusiastically wrote on his blog that he admires Obama for promoting Open Data by the fact that Obama’s administration built their recovery.gov site using Drupal. The most naïve conclusion by Dries is illustrated when he states that “We, the Drupal community, have a unique opportunity to help reshape how politics is done.”

Maybe I am exaggerating a little but this sound so similar to “We the people” – the first three words in the US Constitution. In other words Dries projects very unrealistic expectations towards the realm of politics and shows that he has to continue to educate himself about US politics. (I am not sure if he also decided to be post-national, citizen of the World like Obama, or if he sees himself like European of Belgian pedigree only.)

In the matter-of-fact USA Today reported that "Although President Obama has vowed that citizens will be able to track "'every dime' of the $787 billion stimulus bill, a government website dedicated to the spending won't have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next Spring.