The entertaining and amusing winky99 recently tweeted at me.

@realistschuckle Should we quit saying MVC when most implementations are MVP? Or agile when actually it is scrum? Communication > purity

— Scott Stevenson (@winky99) February 28, 2012

This came from a comment that he made regarding a post by Rob Conery. I have to disagree with his assertion that “communication > purity” primarily because precise communication is pure communication. We develop specialized languages with unambiguous terms just so we can communicate with one another clearly.

Since Rob sparked our short-lived debate, I went to look at Rob’s site.

Ok, things have started to slow down in my personal and professional life. It seems that I have time, again, to work on BORAX.

And there was much rejoicing. “yay.”

I don’t like dimes.

They’re small. They’re pathetic. They’ve got that ridged edge. They make my fingers smell like inexpensive metal. They don’t represent the greatness of the man on them, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I’d rather have two nickels than a dime.

I’d rather have just one nickel.

I don’t like frameworks.

They’re huge. They’re overwhelming. They’ve got that undocumented API. They make my fingers sweat from too much implementation. They don’t represent the intelligence of the software programmers that implement them.

I’d rather have two toolkits that solve my problems.

I’d rather have just the compiler.

I don’t like eggsalad sandwiches.

They’re messy. They’re globby. They’ve got that too-much-mayonnaise problem. They make my fingers smell like eggs and celery. They don’t represent the deliciousness that a sandwich could achieve.

I’d rather have two ear infections than an eggsalad sandwich.

I’d rather have tuna.

I don’t like homegrown IDEs.

They’re slow. They’re feature-poor. They’ve got that collection of bad-usability problems. They make my fingers ache from switching from keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse. They don’t represent the polished state-of-the-art you find in <your fav IDE/text editor>.

I’d rather have two instances of Notepad++ than a homegrown IDE.

I’d rather have a dime.

Today, more training, more test-driven training. The group of attendees really seems to enjoy it. Yay! Because of this, I didn’t really work on anything else non-work related, except…

…I ran into a couple of problems when using flatiron/plates. You may recall my series of articles on flatiron that I posted about a month ago and the follow-up update that I posted because of the plates reëngineering. I found what I considered a bug.

Remember back on Monday when I said that I had to fill my week with typing other stuff? Well, I did. I mostly finished my leave-behind training manual (67 pages, so far) and started on the presentations for the three-day course to help the employees joining the new development stream. And, then, yesterday afternoon, a Muse inspired me to throw away the presentations and try something completely new: test-driven training!

I have the opportunity to lead some pretty big training, this Friday. In the spirit in which I do most everything, I have thrown myself into the position with abandon. I’ve made it 17 pages into the supplemental text that I will distribute. I still have presentations and narrations to create. Busy, busy, busy.

You have my apologies if you find it discouraging that I will not post regularly, this week.

I want to make the training interesting and engaging, something difficult to do for programming. At least the attendees will have computers on which they can type.

Yeah, it’s bad. Really bad.

bray and I just spent a couple of hours looking at the authentication model in ASP.NET MVC.

<blegggh/>

I threw up a little in my mouth. Sorry. I’m okay.

This class from which you must inherit for authentication to work just makes my heart sink. If nothing else, Microsoft, please just provide hooks on which to hang my authentication. Then, build your stuff atop that.

I’m a big boy and understand how to write my own authentication and authorization services. Really, I do. And, thanks for providing means by which to authenticate against Active Domain and relational databases. I’ll make sure to use them in “enterprise” systems.

But, for my home-grown system, for this software that I want to write here, for the awesome product that bray gets to help create for his energetic start-up, just give us tracks on which we can run our own locomotives.

Choo choo choo choo!

I remember using PowerPoint for the first time in my Public Speaking course at University in 1992. The medium of the electronic presentation, like all things PC, appeared new and shiny. The textbook had only a slim chapter on this new-fangled presentation aide so the professor invented as he went along.

Instructor: Put no more than five bullet points on a slide and make the text about about size 40.

Student: What if my sentence goes to the next line?

Instructor: Strip the unnecesary words to make it short again!

And, so it went until we started learning every bad habit that PowerPoint has encouraged its users to practice for over 20 years.

No longer shall I do these things!

Warning: This post has salty language, i.e., profanity. Do not read it if you have cultural objections to four- and seven-letter words commonly referred to as “bad language.”

Over the past two days I’ve posted articles on managing down and managing up, how I think you should lead your team and work with your manager, respectively. Now comes the hardest topic of the three: managing sideways.