Twitter

I thought I'll jump on the twitter band wagon and give it a shot to see what twittering is all about. I found a couple of friends in twitter and added myself as a follower. I was hoping I could see what they are doing on a regular basis but it seems they have forgotten about twitter and have left it.

I recently become a twitter follower of fiji holiday since I was thinking about going to fiji soon, I thought I'll see what happening over there. They seem to be an active bunch, adding new functionality to the site and listening to peoples comments that twitter back to them. I always appreciate website owners that take interest in other peoples ideas.


Fiji holiday also shows their recent twitters on their home page. I didn't really think this twitter thing was such a big deal till one starts to participate in it. People not only use it see what friend/family are doing but to also to use it like a mini blog. I guess that probably what it really is.

Fiji Holiday

I'm thinking about going to fiji next year. I found this great website for fiji accommodation that had lots of great info and tops rates on fiji. But I'll think I'll wait a bit it seems like the aussie dollar is getting stronger so I might get a better deal in the coming months.

One of the islands I was thinking of going to was Mamanuca Island. It seems to cater for all sorts of stuff like weddings , romance, scuba diving. I haven't done any scuba diving before that that should be a buzz.

Side Effects and Functional Programming

Side Effects and Functional Programming - Matthew Podwysocki

One of my first posts at CodeBetter was in regards to side effects and how, when unmanaged, can be truly evil. Today, I want to revisit that topic briefly in regards to functional programming and managing side effects. When I was out in Redmond a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Erik Meijer to discuss functional programming among other topics. In there, we discussed a number of issues around managing side effects and state in your code, and how both C# and F# don't intrinsically support such a concept. Languages like Haskell, of course do with IO monads and other such monadic structures. Whether languages such as F# and Erlang are not pure functional programming languages is another matter, due to the fact that you don't have to declare when you are side effecting (reading a database, writing to console, spawning a process, etc).

Side Effecting Functions are Code Smells

Side Effecting Functions are Code Smells - Matthew Podwysocki

I know the title might catch a few people off guard, but let me explain. Side effecting functions, for the most part, are code smells. This is a very important concept in Domain Driven Design (DDD) that's often overlooked. For those who are deep in DDD, this should sound rather familiar. And in the end, I think Spec# and some Design by Contract (DbC) constructs can mitigate this, or you can go the functional route as well.

Chess Problem of the Week No 3

Black to move and win material. Thanks to Tony for this puzzle.

Chess Puzzle of the Week No 2

Another stumper! well for me anyway, it took me twice as long as chess puzzle 1 to figure out. I hope you guys enjoy it :).

White to move mate in 2.

Chess Puzzle of the week No 1

I have decided to put a chess puzzle on my blog at least once a week. Mainly to force myself to do at least one chess puzzle a week along with my chess playing. Hopefully these puzzles will help me improve my game.

The puzzle below was created by Max Euwe who was world champion from 1935 - 1937. White to move, mate in 2. Post up you answer if you think you have it, even better post up your answer in algebraic chess notation - I need to get used to understanding it.