Tristan Cartony Presents...

Canceled versus Cancelled

tristanc — Fri, 06 Feb 2004 21:36:00 GMT

There are these annoying gray areas when coding that eat up way too much time but if you don't get it right, you look like a jerk later on. Here's the situation: one of my teammates has two events, both signifying that something was cancelled. He had named the first FooCancelled and he named the second one BarCanceled. When he noticed the different spellings, he decided to use Word as the arbitrator: “Whoever gets the red squiggly loses! Fight now!” Anyway, in an upset decision Word said they were both winners. Looking up the word on dictionary.com verifies this: they are indeed both correct. However, being a developer and thus lacking the ability to see anything other than in Boolean terms, I can't accept them both as being equally correct.

So, the question is: which one should we use? The Framework only has a couple occasions of it, that I could find, and they opt for “canceled.” I prefer the double “l” because I find it easier to read.

We're gonna flip a coin for now, but if the coin lands on its edge, I'm freaking out...

[Update: I should have checked our Manual of Style first, but for some reason I didn't. The mos says: one “l“. Google may have sided with the two “l”s, but I gotta run with the mos... Canceled is victor! ]

Funny geek

tristanc — Thu, 15 Jan 2004 23:48:00 GMT

Rory may be the funniest geek to ever walk the Internet (read some of his archive stuff; it had me crying). This actually doesn't make me happy, because I always thought I was the funniest one around, I just needed to get my website up and running so people could recognize this fact, but first I wanted to learn about HTML so I bought a book on that, which led me to reading up on ASP, and let me get that book on IIS as well, and huh, Windows 2000 is kinda neat, let me look into that first, and before you know it, I was all set to watch football. Critical note: I have a short attention span. Say, I got it--I think I'll start a blog!

The link I just had to share was actually a comment Rory made in one of Chris Sells' recent blogs. See, this cat is so good he goes around making other blogs funny. Make sure you view the picture that Chris links to first, then read Rory's comment.

iRider

tristanc — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 23:30:00 GMT

Many years ago I vowed never to purchase an Internet browser. It's just one of those things that I couldn't justify spending money on--similar to how I would never buy a pdf viewer, flash player, or music player. However, Scoble has been discussing Internet Explorer and someone in the comments mentioned an application called iRider (an app that takes tabbed browsing and punches it in the face). I checked it out, found it interesting enough to download and install, and I have to say this thing floored me. I mean, in the short couple of hours since installing it, it has made me view regular IE as plain, like comparing Wordpad to Word 2K3. Check it out. It'll shift the way you browse the Internet and make you feel good while doing it--it's just a sweet little app. After the 21 day trial, I'll be purchasing it...

First Post!

tristanc — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 17:55:00 GMT

Well, I tried to swim against the current and set up a blog on a completely different blog hosting site than my gotdotnet brethren. But after hitting a few hiccups, I decided to give in and just create one here, along with everyone else. It's been since PDC since I've blogged, mainly due to vacations and deadlines. I plan on getting back in the swing shortly. My blog started out as a repository for C# Idioms, which I hope to still work on. But one thing I learned about technical writing is that it's hard. I mean, really really hard. Never again will I look at Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and think, “Eh, I could do better.”

So, I'll be posting random stuff. Some technical, some not. After PDC I got very fired up about Avalon so I may discuss that from time to time (note that I have zero connection to any cool people working on Avalon).