Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

I thought this was a good mantra for all coders, which comes from Python REPL by typing "import this". The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those! These ar...

I created a utility which translates.NET applications into any language. Robotranslator Features Generate .resources localization files for your application and then launch it to see your application in that target language Use Google Translation service to automatically translate text Publish your translations online to share with other users Translating an application can often be expensive because it requires both developers and application users. App Translator allows end users to produce their own translations and share them with other users. Translation is automated via integration with Google Translation API. We are interested in your feedback, please contact me, or leave a comment with questions or suggestions. An example translatable application is included in the install which demonstrates how easy it is to use App Translator. To change the target application, simply edit the Features.xml file. App Translator has been successfully used on large enterprise appl...

I created a utility for translating .NET applications . App Translator allows you to translate .NET applications into any language. Generate .resources localization files for your application and then launch it to see your application in that target language. Use Google or Bing Translation service to automatically translate text. Publish your translations online to share with other users. I am interested in your feedback and suggestions. Please download it and try it out, or watch the tutorial videos.

I conducted a three month analysis comparing three top spreadsheet controls for .NET application developers: SpreadsheetGear , SyncFusion Spreadsheet , and ComponentOne Spread.NET . The definite winner was SpreadsheetGear, with ComponentOne Spread.net in second. SpreadsheetGear provides the most Excel-like experience, is the most performant, and provides the most responsive and capable product support. I build a reporting engine for my company and SpreadsheetGear made it awesome. Our customers have been very pleased. I wanted to share my extensive analysis with any other developers out there trying to find the right spreadsheet control for their .NET application.   Comparison Spreadsheet gear grid goes to 1 million! Wow. (SyncFusion goes to 500 by default, ComponentOne goes to 60k) SpreadsheetGear is an older control which has been around for a while. It is built by the same guys who built Formula1, so they have been doing spreadsheets for many years. Sp...

I hope this ranking of my favorite classes is helpful to other students trying to schedule their classes. I am currently attending the University of Texas Masters Degree program in Software Engineering. When you pay for the program out of your own pocket like I did, it becomes very important to get the most out of each class. I have little enthusiasm for spending 3,500 dollars for a course and not getting much value. Note that this is my opinion.   Course my ranking time commitment comments Professor Communication Networks 1 heavy Bard is great. In an Internet world, this is very relevant information, it answered many long time questions that I have had about how the Internet works. Workload is high. Bard is entertaining. He is an ex marine and prides himself in the difficulty of tests. Sometimes his tangents are more interesting than the lectures. He is full of interesting infor...

I gave a presentation today in my Embedded Systems class titled: “Seeing Machines”. The presentation describes my project in which I created a security camera which leverages the skeletal recognition capabilities of the Kinect to detect when someone walks in view of the Kinect camera, upon which it takes pictures and uploads them to a private Picasa library. If 10 seconds passes without receiving authentication from the person who set the alarm off, an audible alarm will sound, and an SMS text message will be sent to notify the owner that an intrusion has been detected. The Kinect represents some amazing technology. I predict some really interesting technology coming out in the next 5 years which leverages the depth data and skeletal tracking capabilities of Kinect. My paper can be downloaded at this link: Seeing Machines, a paper by Joseph Fluckiger Note: view the speaker notes to see links to some of the amazing Kinect projects I found during my research.

  I am a Software Architect for a Fortune 500 company. My job is to take large amounts of information, filter through it and find the important facts, trends, techniques, subtleties, and truths. Let me take a moment to talk about a truth of the US Medical system. 1) The US Healthcare system over prescribes narcotic pain killers. I broke my collar bone on Friday while playing soccer and had surgery this morning to have a plate implanted over the two pieces of my collar bone. After the surgery the nurses insisted that I take narcotic pain killers to for the unbearable pain they described I would have once the local block wore off. They even convinced my wife who is a fan of natural foods and medicines that I absolutely had to have narcotic pain killers. All the way to the car the nurse pleaded to my wife to make sure that I took them. I didn’t because I value my brain cells. Guess what, I was fine. I was uncomfortable for 4 hours between 8pm and 12am, but I used ice which eased...