Thursday, 30 April 2009

An apology to Raymond Chen

There really wasn't any other choice for my blog name - how could I miss out on the opportunity for such a bad pun :-) Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing was the first blog I ever started reading and is still the second blog I read each day (after "The Daily WTF" http://thedailywtf.com - I need to get a daily sanity check first).

Even though I have been writing Windows software for nearly 15 years, his blog still manages to teach me new things most days. I also bought his book (of the same name) and read it cover-to-cover. I have nothing but admiration for him and his fellows because of the lengths they go to to ensure that my code continues to run on each iteration of Windows virtually unmodified. Some may say that is a bad thing, but in the world of corporate software the ability to transition to each new platform without significant changes is hugely important.

I also wish to come clean and point out that I didn't really know which blogging site to use, or what template to pick, so I have unashamedly copied Matthew Wilson
http://blog.stlsoft-musings.net/. He is a fellow ACCU member and author of a couple of cracking books that take pride of place on my bookshelf.

The say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", I only hope they see it that way :-)