I was honoured enough to do another lightning talk at SkillsMatter.  I’m afraid I had easily the least interesting talk of the evening, as you can see from the hastily prepared slides on Google Docs. Neale Swinnerton gave a great talk on Paredit.  I’m still trying to nail paredit, and this was a great help.  The slides are a thing of beauty, watch them in full screen mode.  Nick Rothwell gave a lightning talk that I wish had been longer, on teaching Clojure to artists.  He’s done some amazing and thankless work on embedding Clojure in MaxMSP. ...

I was having a drink with a supplier the other day and he was explaining that during the outage "all of our settings had been replicated to DR, so we couldn't switch to DR either."  The implication was that automatically replicating settings to DR was a bad idea, precisely to avoid a scenario such as this.  Personally, I think it's more about understanding purpose.  What do you want to do with your DR solution? Deal with a complete physical loss of your primary site? Handle hardware failure on one of your machines? ...

I wanted to write something about the concept of a "configuration class", which Emanuele touched on in a discussion about the singleton pattern.  Let me start by explaining what I mean by a configuration class.  It's a relatively common "pattern", although you'll never find it in any books.  I'm going to argue that this is because, like Singleton, it's the wrong solution to the problem. The Problem .NET has an incredibly flexible XML-based configuration API.  However, for the purposes of this discussion, we can concentrate on the bit that most developers use: AppSettings.  This is basically just a string hashtable with delusions...