Music, software, and sculpting software

I should put out a disclaimer that although I was in a band for a couple of years, I'm hardly a musician. I played guitar and sang in a three piece punk rock outfit, but I was never one of those talented musicians. I can't tune by ear, I can barely improvise, and I sing from my throat (the wrong way to do it).

I first heard about the brain composition of musicians on a Radiolab story. Digging a little deeper, I've found several articles that detail the relationships between creating software and creating music. There's even a book on the subject. I heard it again on .Net rocks in an episode with Bob Martin.

I won't repeat what others have written, but in general the idea is that as a musician you are putting difference pieces of music together and make them fit, and that there are different shapes and patterns that need to be combined into a singular piece of music. Much is the same in software.

UI tips from my wife

Without even knowing she did it, Charlotte made a valuable observation. I got a flat tire on my bicycle two nights ago at the office, so I decided to walk home. It's good for the waistline, the environment, and my self esteem. But I knew she'd worry about me so I sent her an sms and said "you can track me on eraza.org".

When I got home she casually said "it's a pain to always have to zoom into you on the street level when I want to watch you move around."

So, I added some buttons to the hover window. The little globe zooms right to the person at street level. I don't want to clutter that window too much, but it's a great place to put quick information and some navigation options.

System.Xml.XmlException: The element with name '' and namespace '' is not an allowed feed format.

I was about ready to rip my brains out. There I was getting ready to write an article about how simple it is to use the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace to consume ATOM from this very blog, when all of a sudden nothing was working correctly. All the other blog entries seemed to make it seem so easy, and I was getting null exceptions everywhere. Then I got this gem:

System.Xml.XmlException: The element with name '' and namespace '' is not an
allowed feed format.

So apparently Google is living in the dark ages with their version of ATOM. Read on.