Definitely Cat6. Most of the cost is in the electrician. Gigabit switches are commodity items now. We added minimal CAT6 wiring to our home in self-defense. You should hear my wife blister the air when the WiFi farts out.

Definitely VirtualBox. I've used it for years to write Linux code on a Windows machine. It's easy to install the guests OSs on it. The Guest additions (which I highly recommend) are pretty easy to get goign in the last year. The one gotcha is that you need to do a separate install of the VirtualBox Extension Pack. Documentation is OK, too. I've mostly used Ubuntu and Fedora on it.

I Was going to say I really don't care, but thwn remembered my stint in Rocky Mountain BASIC (in HP technical computers for engineering and test) where one could use any set of indices you wanted. I ended up settling on 0 for all arrays because it made bound checking a lot easier. Remember the 3-week rule: Agter 3 weeks you'll look at you're code and mutter "Why the hell did I do that and what does it do?". It's a lot easier if there is consistency in your code. After years of C/C++/C# and recent Ruby I have no problem with 0 based indices.

Absolutely. My last two cell phones (non-"smart", they have physical keyboards) have been the worst phones I've ever used, and there seems to be little hope of improvement. Thinking seriously about opting out of cell phone use. I have little or no use for smartphones, but you should hear my UNIX maven wife cuss about them. The UIs just get in the way of everything. The iPhone UI is complete rubbish, and the iPhone4 has the distinction of being the worst cellphone ever manufactured. I won an iPOD Touch in a contest I didn't even know I'd entered and I find the current iOS interface so painful I don't even use it. Still using my old Sansa. Bah. Humbug.

Used VirtualBox

I've only used regions for assignment code in blocks and for properties in classes. Now I create a separate file for properties (calling properties for ClassName something obscure like ClassNameProperties). Generally if a file gets too large to navigate through I split it up. Guess I'm still used to Hercules or smaller display drivers and small text editors on 128kB machines. Or else I just can't fit much more into my little brain. I do make good use of the XML comments. Saves a lot of time remembering what sort of perversion I wrote last week.

Ruby. I still resort to DOS batch files, but that's because I've used it since it first appeared.

I've used Virtual Box for over 5 years almost without any hitches. It's the best FOSS applications I've run across.

I like the ribbon in Office2010, especially since it not only supports keyboard shortcuts but it also supports the old shortcuts that are part of my fine-motor memory. Gotta say that it takes a lot more work to create a good ribbon than a menu. I found the combination of menu and toobars a little messy. The ribbon integrates the two functions quite well.

I call it Objectionable C

I confess that I tend to do this, but I do have a reason. I program in multiple languages. Not explicitly calling out an equality in a dynamic and loosely typed language like Ruby can give you unexpected results. A variable will evaluate to true if it is true or has an assigned value (even if it's an empty string). It will evaluate to false if it is false or nil. In the interest of clarity I tend to make logical tests explicit and let the compiler take care of things. Turbo C 1.5 optimized this way back when, so I'm sure VS2010 can handle it. There's no harm in being explicit in one's source code. It's like using "extra" parentheses. It doesn't matter to the tools, but it sure does make reading the code easier for us humans. Not to say i don't appreciate obfuscated C, it's just I do't want to have to modify it and make it work.

I don't know that's it's being forsaken, but one has to wnder about the future. PowerShell is being used in place of VBScript. It has the entire Windows GUI at its disposal. As of VS2003 UI development with C# is as easy as VB6 and VB.NET are. Is there a business reason for continuin with VB at all? The only real justifications I see are VBA for Office (which benefits from VB.NEt development) and support for a very large VB user base. Unlike Apple, MS doesn't hand its users out to dry. At least, not any more. That said, I never even considered VB.NET going forward. C# makes more sense to me as a syntax, probably because of all the C/C++ code I've written. I always liked it better than all the BASIC languages I've used (TinyBASIC, Rocky Mountein BASIC from HP in various incarnations. QBASIC, IBM BASIC, VB2, VB4, VB6, and some others for which I don't know the name).

Try Qt (IDE and framework). You can write code for all three and their application framework can target each platform. Looks like the hottest thing is mobile, unfortunately for me.

You really need to get to New Mexico (try those Hatch chiles) or California some day and tour the local taquerias.

When I think of some technical managers I've had the first questions I think of are "Do you know your a*****e from a hole in the ground?" "Do you know s**t from shinola?" "How did you ever manage to graduate from high school?" "How often do you change your TPS report formats?" When I think of the good ones I've had, different questions come to mind. Ask open-ended questions, especially inviting the interviewee to talk about him-or-herself and what they've actually done. This is how I've devised questions for everyone from an assembler up to a manager, actually. You can get a lot of good information out of people, their pesonality and abilities, when they tell stories. Concentrate the questions on things required by the job description and expected by you. How have you tracked project progress? What do you like to cover in staff meetings? How do you estimate the number of personnel and amount of work a project will take. Give an example of an accurate estimate and how you came up with it. What tools have you used for project management? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your favorite one? Give an example of how you lead a recovery from a major project delay or disruption. Give an example of an effective code review. What was the approach? How about an ineffective code review? What could have been done differently and what did you learn from it?

A light disagreement here: VB6 and earlier certainly encouraged bad coding practice. I found it hard to keep my C/C++ chops in place against the spaghetti model of code made easy in VB 4 and 6. My VB6 was much improved when I thought in C++ and translated to VB6. On the other hand, VB.NET is much better. If people are writing VB6 style code they have to swim upstream to do it. That being said, when I migrated to .NET I decided to use C# and not learn a yet another new BASIC.

Gotta be careful about what "slow" means. A group at a large tech company that was led by a SW manager friend of mine ws always indicted by her management for working too slowly amd not spending more than 40-45 hours a week on the job. They designed code and experimented with new techniques before writing anything. They all had families go home to. On the other hand they always finiahed their assignments early with fully released and tested code. As a result they usually spent 20-40% of their project time working on parts of the project they weren't responsible for. Their bug rate was a few orders of magnitude lower than any other grouop in the division. On the other hand, it is easier to peg low productivity on someone who's slow and ineffective. The fast and ineffective ones take a lot more effort, but they can do a lot more harm.

Funyny you should say that. OS/X is a Linux port from UNIX (an operating system from the 70's) plastered into a Wintel platform. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux for a lot of things and develop embedded software for a Linux OS product. But I wouldn't ever consider OS/X for manufacturing. Too much effort to recreate things I alreaddy have in Windows from equipment vendor's sample code. Not enough hardware choice. Native development in Objectionable C, which the MAC fanboys here all agree is a vomitous nightmare. To much training of test operators with minimal PC knowledge, generically speaking. If trainng were not an issue I'd be far more likely to use Ubuntu or Red Hat for manufacturing systems. I also find the Apple greed culture too much to stomach. So do many of my friends who work at Apple, most of whom have been there for over 15 years. As far as UI, iOS is horrible. I've won two iPODs. I stick to using the classic because the UI on the Touch is such a mess. As far as Apple's vaunted industrial design, I fail to see what's so good about mobile devices that squirt out of your grip like wet bars of soap of Teflon(tm) tweezers. They do look good, but what's the point when everyone puts them inside a nsaty little piece of plastic or (in my case) leather to keep them from dropping to the floor.

I almost always call functions from events, but if I need to act on the control I put all that logic in the event (e.g. RunButton_Click() will change the text to "Stop") Ionce had an engineer working for me who liked to raise control events to use the functionality he put in the event handlers. Lots of very interesting bugs crawled out of that practice. He never quite caught on to the problem.

VS2010 for writing C# and Windows C++ code, Notepad++ for Ruby, Geany for scripts on Linux.