A few pearls from the office:

• Pasha: Damn, I like TDD so much. Writing a 5 minutes piece of code takes about a day (sarcastic tone, of course).
  
• Aviel: in my case, code does not come from my head but rather from my heart.
  Pasha: I saw your code. It comes from your ass.
  
• Me: Integration environment is the Tamagochi of an Agile Team
  
• (Phone ringing, Pasha answers)
  Robert: I'm Robert.
  Pasha: I'm Robert.
  Robert: I'm Robert.
  Pasha: I'm not Robert, I'm Pasha.
  Robert: Oh, My bad.
  Pasha: Bye then.
  (end of conversation).

Pasha Bitz, friend, teammate, hacker and gifted(?) photographer took some photos on our last Daily Standup Meeting and a few more at our offices:

Daily Standup Meeting (I'm on the left, Sagie(aka Flash)  is on the right):

Our office door (notice: it's beta 0.1):

And finally, the new setup, although it's far from being ready & not updated (I've got 2 22' inch LCD at the moment):

More pictures we'll be posted soon...

You must admit, I'm a pretty cool (yellow) geek:

You can create your own avatar here.

We've just received an email describing the agenda for Purim day here at Mercury. It goes something like: " Register for Purim disguise competition(M1 building) (You can be painted for free ; -) ... [ some more text goes here ] ... " The first thing that came up to my mind was "Oh shit, it won't compile, she forgot to close the second )".   Happy holiday everybody!

If you write a blog and love to talk about code\architecture\funny customers\funny programmers\funny [you name it], you've got a chance to talk the talk and chop the chops.

Date: 21/02/2007
Time: 21:00
More details here.

I'll be there.

http://urikalish.blogspot.com/2007/02/beam-me-up-scotty-copy-and-paste-human.html

Talking about building solid, trustable enterprise applications...
gosh, this makes you think about real-time applications in a different perspective right?.

After you're done wiping, read ^*this dude's blog.
He is a good friend of mine and a teammate at Mercury, and by god, he knows how to write and he's never boring!

* I call him T-Bag(no physical similarity, just a private[for now] joke), but he's also known as Uri Kalish ("the man and the legend").

My company, Mercury, is looking for sharp minds with endless passion for code and great creativity. If you consider yourself that sort of a guy and you're looking to work with the very best in the industry(my promise), please contact me(oellenbogen at mercury dot com) and send me your CV.

btw, I have no desire just to pass CVs between my site readers to my company. I would talk with each one of you(and ask you some interesting questions to see if you have the spark) that will pass me his CV before forwarding it to our HR. In addition, if you want to talk with me about "how is it to work there?" or any sort of question you might have about working at Mercury, feel free to drop me a note. I'm eager to join the best of you guys to our company.

Remember "Lnbogen test for Google's rating, the target: Oren Cohen"?
Well, I thought it will take about 2 weeks, but google managed to surprise me. Looking for "Oren Cohen" in google.com will give you my post as the 18th result. Oren is now thinking about publish his pictures\sites in my blog. I guess I should start thinking about a pricing model , I need to provide some food to my kids, support 15 wifes, etc. It can get quite expensive you know...

The proof (you are welcome to search for "Oren Cohen" at google.com yourself, of course):

COM object think that they understand .Net assemblies (via Proxy(tlb file)) but in matter of fact, this proxy is a mediator(girlfriend\gay-friend) to the real assembly that actually make the connection work while .Net assemblies think that they understand COM object, again, via proxy(Interop file) but in matter of fact, this proxy is only a mediator(friend, lesbian-friend) that make the connection work.

The hard migrating process my team encounters this days(and will keep dealing with for the next few iterations) makes you(well, me, but a sorrow shared is a fool's comfort) appreciate one-platform systems. Integration between different platforms can be a female dog (translation: bitch!) if you are not familiar with the tips&tricks on the subject. Working with the registry is a complete disaster. I don't think that the initial idea of MS was to abuse the registry so much and literally write every reference as a long GUID that points to some class\interface\dll. Hack, register a simple dll (via RegSvr32.exe) and unregister it can leave you garbage on the registry, not mentioning migrating VB6 code into VB.NET\C# code which requires RegAsm.exe for "old" clients. So much garbage to cleanup. And you think that throwing the garbage at your home, once every your-wife-is-nagging-again is hard. Think again.

Yes, they(COM, .Net) know how to communicate and live together, but just like Men and Women - you can't really understand how it actually works.

I wonder if I should start writing a book on the topic...

p.s - don't get me wrong, women are hard to understand but it's only making the game more fun. So does the migration challange.

I was just laughing with my teammate Oren Cohen (Yes, we have 2 "Oren" in the team. We solve it via alias(=namespace) so my name is "Boogi" but this is a story for another day). I made a point that I managed to "publish" a few friends of mine here by mentioning their name (Amir Markowitz, Dror Engel, Ken Egozi, Moran Benisty) and during that conversation I searched for "Oren Cohen" at Google.com which returned about ~627,000 results, non of them are related to the "subject"(Oren Cohen, my teammate). I wondered how much time it will take from the second I'll publish this post until he will be rated from my site.

But let's make it interesting OK?
Let's make a "virtual bet" (one beer for the winner on my expense): my bet is that in 2 weeks - he will be on the first 50 results for "Oren Cohen" in google.com.

All bets are on!

After being poetic on my TDD preface post my good friend Moran, a geek with no shame, gave me a few poetic titles for future(?) posts:

"web.config - friend or foe?" (this one kills me, honestly )

"yellow screen - a blessing in disguise."

Can you beat him down ? Have some issues you want me to talk about ?
Have some geeky titles to share with the rest of the geeks that follow my posts ?


Bring it!

I'm reading one of our client's characterization in order to determine the amount of time it will be required from us to develop the project. While reading the paper I've encountered this hilarious sentence:

"Architecture: Smart-Client application in DNA methodology(3 tiers) with .Net"

(global) Tip: If you don't understand the meaning of a (buzz)word, don't use it. It is that simple.

btw - I think that this phrase will win the "How-Many-Buzzwords-Can-You-Put-In-A-Sentence-Without-Knocking-Yourself-Out" contest. I'll vote for it anyway.

You remember my last post about templating via .Net 2.0 Generics and delegates. Well, after getting some good feedback from all of you, I thought to publish it at codeproject so I'll get some more feedbacks, grades and most important - additional comments.

Feel free to grade the article

 

I'm trying to give some good PR to the Israeli MCPD study group, arranged by Justin Angel (Hebrew).
So if Hebrew is native for you and you'd like to hear some good(hopefully) presentations about .Net 2.0 - leave a comment in this post. It's important to get some early feedback as Justin tries to get a classroom (& some food) from Microsoft so they'll  sponsor the event.

See you there...

I'm using the Captcha anti-comment-spamming-engine in my blog:

Some of you complained that after posting a comment you can't see it afterwards. This is caused due to a time mechanism plugged in the Captcha engine - after X seconds, the code becomes invalid and you have to insert a new one. In case that the Captcha will have code timeout - it will make you enter a new generated code simply by leaving you on the same page. So please make sure that after hitting the "Save Comment" you're on the main page and you don't have your comment at the bottom of the page, if so - enter the new code and click the "Save Comment".

Thanks.

Reading Dror's post, I had to give it a shot so -

If you want to see your extension - look here.

Like every good Jew, I like to listen\read what other's has to say about me; So, a few days ago I've got a referrer and I went to see who's mentioning me and why ? After reading the all post there I've seen this paragraph:

"After my PC got fixed, I found this:

http://www.lnbogen.com/ChangingMicrosoftsTabStripDisabledPropertyViaJavascript.aspx

One step closer to salvation. However, it didn't work either:

Oren Ellenbogen (?!!?!? is this a real name!? To my native Dutch ears this sounds like "Ears Elbows".) " ... [the rest is irrelevant]

Man, I laughed about it (with myself) for about an hour ! I know, "Ellenbogen" in Dutch is "Elbow" but "Oren" is "Ear" ?!

Well, I guess there is no such thing as bad publicity...

I've worked on a new post for about an hour and by simply clicking the Ctrl+R instead of Windows+R my entire post has been thrown to garbage ! I can't express how frustrated I am right now about the "Add Entry" in dasBlog, It's not the first time I lost a post (sometimes my Avant stuck and this also makes me rewrite the entire post).

Anyone have good (FREE) suggestions ?

p.s - I'll write the original post (again) tomorrow.

Hey folks,

You can now receive my new posts directly to your email via FeedBlitz service!

All you have to do is click here and insert your email.

Searching Oren Ellenbogen in Google placed me on the third(3rd!) place !
It's a huge progress if you keep in mind that just last week I was at the 15th place (second page, at the middle)...

update [14.09.2005]:

I'm at the first place now ! Respect !