July 2004 Entries
I have been using MythTV for my Media Library for over the past year. I really like it because it's open source. I am however, not very comfortable programming in C++. Its not that I don't appreciate the value of C++ as a language, nor is it complete incompetance on my part in understanding the language, I just prefer something else for productivity reasons because I don't have much time to spend on pet projects.
The other thing is that MythTV runs on Linux, yet another venture into the wide open spaces of wierdness that I still can't commit to at the workstation level. MythTV has everything I really want in a Media Library, but its not very comfortable for me to tweak in my spare time. If I had unlimited time to spend on messing around in development then I would most likely stick with it.
I had to come to terms and face the fact that I am a DotNet developer and to spend as much time as required to become more proficient in the MythTV model, the time would not be optimally spent.
Enter Meedio.
Meedio is not Open Source, but it's the next best thing... It has an Open API and an Open Add-in System. Several Add-ins are already available and there are sure to be more soon since Meedio was just released a few days ago. The API works with DotNet and there are samples available for C# And VB, there is no requirement to write the COM Interop code, they have already done it for you. One of the real advantages to an Open API vs. Open Source is that the API tends to be less fluid, when you write a module, it is much less likely to break from version upgrades of the base system.
I have the bulk of my new Library frontend under Windows installed now. The installation of Meedio is a lot less painful than it's Linux counterpart, especially if you know very little about Linux, in the Linux world you have the pleasure of building kernels and going through command line gymnastics just to get your drivers loaded properly.
hardware tweakers love Linux, and I admit it was interesting and fun for a while, but most regular users can't touch it.
The Linux world is full of jokers who don't want to pay for any software and think Open Source is Nirvana. I am certainly willing to pay a few bucks for a core program that has the a framework I can build upon. Making the Meedio system modular and accessible is fantastic, it's absolutely worth the paltry $60. My time is valueable, $60 is less than my hourly consulting rate, I can't imagine being able to program all this in an hour. Yes there are things I might do differently, but this framework seems highly configurable to me. There are stubs and demos on the MDN (Meedio Developer Network) for most tasks you need. The part I like the most, is that I can create plugins from a really simple framework and extend this base system anyway I need to. If I hate the Music Library, I can make my own. If I want to attach to an external player, its available.
I really look forward to getting this all configured and when I do, my Media Site will switch over its main focus from Linux and MythTV to DotNet module development, Meedio and Windows Media Center Edition. I don't personally use WMCE because it has no framework to build on and it extremely restrictive in what it's TV module can do and its not replaceable. However, its worth keeping an eye on because I have friends and relative using it because they seem to like how it works out of the box and there is a pretty good looking new version coming soon.
The Meedio License could be a little less restrictive as far as how many machines the license support, but hey, like I said, it's costs less than an hour of my time. Think about that trade off next time you decide Open Source might be a better alternative... I have spent hundreds of hours monkeying around with MythTV. I'm sure I will spend just as many working on Meedio, but it will be vastly different, it will be time spent writing productive modules I have full control over and I could actually sell them if I wanted to.
OK, now I get it...
I was wondering what would happen when Scott Watermasysk joined Telligent System...
It seems they are combining all the DotNet Community tools into a single homogenous system.
I don't know if this is good or bad, but it will surely make these three programs work together in a better way.
So far all I have been seeing from the currently available community tools are DotNet duplication of functionality that's been available on Linux for years, not a heck of a lot of innovation other than some really amazing code written in C#. I don't want to diminish the quality of this code at all, the 3 programs listed here (the old names are: ASP.NET Forums, DotText and nGallery) are all really great pieces of software albeit missing some spit and polish to make them really useable by a wider audience. This is hopefully what Telligent will accomplish by assimilating them into the same company.
Now if they could just make an installer that actually works, add maintenance pages that make sense, and update a few features (like mass uploads to nGallery and some better multi-user blogging to .Text, I mean adding user rights to a single blog ala drupal, not the mutli-user site/blogs/name type that works fine) then they will make a modular system that really shines as an example of superior code for DotNet. It will be nice to see something that finally rises above what is available on Linux for free without just duplicating its functionality.
Dare makes some really interesting speculation.
In the past couple of months Google has hired four people who used to work on Internet
Explorer in various capacities [especially its XML support] who then moved to BEA...
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running
their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster
each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general
purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google
is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
A friend of mine, Justin, had an interesting idea at dinner yesterday. What if Google
ends up building the network computer? They can give users the storage space
and reliability to run place all their data online. They can mimic the major desktop
applications users interact with daily by using Web technologies. This sounds far
fetched but then again, I'd have never imagined I'd see a free email service that
gave 1GB of free email.
[Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life]
If there is any merit to this, I wonder if they would be prepared to go even further with this concept and actually sell (or give away) the OS. This obviously linux based system could do some of the things that Quantian and ClusterKnoppix fall short on.
In light of the post I made yesterday, I plan to post some specifics about what I am doing and how to run a real Media Server. While most of this will remain on my Media Programming Site, (especially anything related strictly to Linux) until I get the time to revamp the site, I will post the DotNet related stuff here.
One of the things that I have wanted for a really long time that no one (read Microsoft) seems to care much about is a real networking OS that is simple for a normal person to setup and configure, an OS that will treat multiple PCs like a single multi-processor machine. By this, I mean, add resources to one PC and all the others can use it like its local, no special parallel processing code, etc. I doubt we will see it any time soon, but with Gigabit ethernet costing about the same as 100BaseT cost a few years ago, its time for clustered machines to become more mainstream outside of webfarms and datamining operations.
How this would specifically effect a Media Server System is networked storage, distributed transcoding, distributed captures, etc.
I now have a 20Gig 4th generation iPod. This is probably the most perfectly designed piece of hardware I've ever seen. Too bad no one can figure out a decent way to mount these in a car, the market is certainly big enough that something better than a cupholder mount, but not as costly as an Icelink would sell.
My reaction to the software however, is not so kind. What I like and dislike about the software are basically the same thing from different perspectives. It's really more than that, what I want doesn't exist yet.
I like the portability, but I dislike the need to dedicate a duplicate library that I manage on a PC. I can't store everything in iTunes, Winamp integration is basically a kludge (with an equally poor library). I already have an enormous library of media, I only want a small portion of that on the iPod at any one time. I tend to do the same thing with my TabletPC, I put some TV shows or Movies I want to watch on a plane or while traveling temporarily, then discard them later. Music on the other hand, I would like to rotate in and out of the library, retaining metadata like last played time, number of times played and ratings.
Portability is for things like listening to an audiobook, then removing it from the iPod, but retaining it in my "Digital Library". When editing content on the portable and sending the metadata changes back to the library, there is no need whatsover to transfer the whole file back to the library.
I have digital items like Voice Notes, TV Shows and Movies from a Tivo like device or DVDs, CDs (all converted to MP3/AAC), Audiobooks, Digital Photos, and several other "formats". Its really just a confusing jumble of stuff for most people. For me its much more, I tend to think of my collection of digital media in much the same way Victorian gentlemen thought of their Personal Libraries. I collect this stuff from all over the place, add Word Processing documents, Important emails, OneNote files, Diagrams and Drawings and you start to see that the way I deal with media is an almost full-time job.
In fact for me, it IS a full time job. As the CTO of a Document Imaging company, I have to think about how to deal with this stuff constantly. Couple that with my enthusiasm for a digital lifestyle at home and it’s a never ending battle of shuffling digital content around. I don't think WinFS is the complete answer to this dilemna, though it may help. It only solves one small part of the problem. For what it's worth, my personal media fileserver is a Linux box running Raid 5 and Samba. It has worked out far better for me than a Microsoft solution would have. If they allowed us to buy Storage Server 2003 for about $300 I'd certainly consider it as a viable solution, but as of today you can even buy it if you aren't an OEM without a bunch of useless (to me) hardware.
To my joy and dismay, there hasn't been an effective solution proposed to sort all this stuff out. To my joy because I can obssess about it and figure out the best way to do it, then propose it to the world. To my dismay because I really need a completed solution right now. It drives everyone around me crazy because I live in an Alpha grade software state that changes all the time when I have to adapt to something new. They can never figure out how to do things as simple as turning on a TV in my office because it changes almost daily and they never know what state it will be in.
As we march on in the digital era its only going to get worse because we will keep getting larger and larger amounts of storage to deal with. 10 Years ago a large hard drive was 4 Gigs, today its 400Gigs (and most of us have more than one), within the next 10 years it will be in the Petabytes (1024 Terabytes). I already have over a Terabyte of storage in my house, granted I am not the average PC User, but I am always being consulted by friends and relatives in their confusion over how all this stuff works.
We are shoved further and further in this nightmare of digital overload every day. Removeable media isn't an answer because its not searchable or refineable. Average consumers won't maintain a full time staff of DBAs and application developers to keep track of their digital lives.
I see a desperate need for us to have a centralized media library at home that all our devices can talk to. I want to be able to mark a bunch of files for use on my iPod and at the same time mark a completely different set of items for my wife. There is no client (or server for that matter) made to do this right now. Developing one has been one of the most challenging and fun things I have done in years.
Devices need to have some sort of interface built into them that acts like WSDL, declaring all the stuff it can consume and how it expects that data to be formatted, then a central library could simply interact with it.
Something you would think is easy becomes incredibly complex really fast when you start thinking about how to make all these devices interact with each other. If you are not a caveman, then you probably have stacks of CDs, DVDs, Camcorder Data and Photos in one form or another. Piling all these things into some ordered system is no easy task, for the average consumer it is virtually impossible. DRM adds an even more ridiculous layer on top of all this.
I own a DVD, I bought it, its mine. I want to watch it on my TabletPC, but I don't want to carry around the disc with me in case it may get damaged, or even just to save the hassle of space. With a digital library, I can just select a group of items I want to take on vacation with me (so I can show my grandmother pictures of her great grandkids). I can catch up on the last season of the Sopranos that I still haven't watched, in the free time I may have on vacation and we can watch a decent movie on the plane that isn't hacked to bits or unappealing in storyline.
Try that with the tools we have available today and you will just about go crazy just making it possible to run everything, let alone, make comments about the Photos (like grandma's voice comments recorded for posterity) and get them back into the library.
Metadata needs to be able to stay with the portable file, at least until it can be synchronized back to personal library, but it would really be nice when I select a few files, I could take all the associated data with it and put it on the portable device when I go visit my great uncle so he can hear what grandma had to say.
We definitely live in a new world, we need new ways to handle the data that goes along with it. We no longer live in the era that can store something in Filing Cabinets and make a copy of the document we need temporarily, we want to take a piece of media and all the metadata and related material that goes along with it.
As developers, we need to start thinking of ways to lets systems interact with each other in intelligent ways, letting the systems start to make decisions on their own how to transfer media from one device to another. Until we have Positronic Brains that can go into these devices we are just going to have to think of ways that they can interact in less time consuming ways. Average people don't have a clue how to use XSLT to translate one XML fragment into another or the difference between embedded metadata and attached metadata, nor should they have to. Devices should be able to talk to each other just by plugging them into each other, discovering each others capabilities then offering ways to move data between them.
I should be able to transfer my “personal media” (forget DRM for now) from one central library to another (directly or through a portable device as a transport medium) in a simple straightforward fashion. Merging the items that are different from one to the other and searching the metadata then become something more intriguing. I want a personal Google style interface that does it, not some convoluted form requiring training.
Stick around and see what develops, I am sure we are in for some interesting times.
I joined Mike Schinkel this week as a CoreGroup Member to get dotNetInfluencers up and running.
This site has a lot of promise in delivering a central repository for who is doing what with DotNet and finding many things DotNet related in a centralized database system. You should see not only links to people who write significant articles, but also get insight into 3rd party products, conferences, training and a place to get experts you can consult with in specialized areas.
There have been a few places that have tried this before, but none of them have offered the searchable XML database that will have once the data gathering has progressed a little more.
This is not the typical news site, it purpose and goals are different:
- Short Term: To provide a central repository of information about influencial .NET developers and their activities for the benefit of those influencers, and anyone who might want to hire them for consulting, training, and/or another other purpose for which the specific influencers might be interested.
- Long Term: To gather the requirements and then define an XmlSchema that would allow influencial .NET developers maintain and publish their InfluencerResume, and for aggregators all over the Internet to consume and publish them in a variety of ways.
I look forward to contributing to the success of this venture.
Yesterday ICANN announced the addition of IPv6 to their Root Servers.
It's only taken about 6 years of screaming in desperation for this to happen... Remember the theory 6 years ago was that the internet would collapse because we would run out of IP addresses? I still can get plenty of IPv4 Addresses, maybe that's because of the DotCom bust, but it's also about efficiently using a single IP with things like Host Headers and thought out port allocation.
Some of the more important aspects of IPv6 are less known to the general public. Besides expanding the number of IP addresses to 128bit from 32bit, IPv6's most important aspects are:
- Multicast and Anycast Routing
- Quality-of-Service in the packets for Realtime services
- Authentication and Privacy
Besides the security feature which will hopefully prevent spoofing, I think the most important aspect here is Multicast Routing.
Multicast routing has been something we have needed since streaming became popular. If we are ever going to get broadcast systems like Internet Radio/TV and Webcasts to stop using up gigantic amounts of bandwidth, we are going to need IPv6.
IPv6 will allow a single stream to be broadcast from a server and delivered to millions of desktops. This is analogous to broadcast television, if TV was broadcast to every household (actually every TV) individually it would be rediculous wouldn't it? Well, this is currently how things work on the internet for broadcasting media.
With IPv6 you can actually broadcast a single Video/Audio stream from your Cable connection and let millions of people view/hear it.
This is what we normally think of as a Killer App... can you imagine the implications if anyone with a computer and a moderate broadband connection was able to broadcast high quality signals to millions/billions of people? The backbone of the internet is choking under the current media delivery scenarios and now that IPv6 is available on the Root Servers everyone can use it, not just people who know how to setup an IPv6 DNS server. If you use Windows Server 2003, it's already built in.
In the next year or so we are going to see some great things happen with the advent of this wonderful improvement to the internet. Remeber how Desktop Publishing and Webpages chaged EVERYTHING shortly after they became mainstream? look for something similar to happen with Personal Media Broadcasting now that the capabilities are here.
If you run this on a LAN internally at home you can do your own multicasting pretty easily with VideoLAN. I am currently working on doing this at my house to enjoy my media library and DVB signals everywhere. Imagine being able to have a family group conference (for free...) and show the Videos of your vacation to all your relatives around the country with a single stream coming out of your cable/dsl modem.
Now think about if DURING your vacation you have some insanely great thing happen and want to share it with everyone -- the local Starbucks can assist you, or what if INDEPENDENT video journalists could go to a LIVE event and broadcast in realtime from that event, this is truly amazing stuff that IPv6 will now enable.
For about the past month I have been obsessing on which iPod to get.
Fortunately the wait is almost over. Apple has announced the G4 iPod that has the clickwheel seen on the mini.
I bought my wife a mini just over a month ago and she really likes it, bear in mind -- my wife is a total technophobe and this is the only electronic device she will use besides her cell phone. I think the iPod has the best UI of any player by a HUGE margin.
I was debating a mini for myself, but I had a CD Player so I really didn't need an new player yet... well, bad luck struck and my player was stolen (along with my truck...) So I have been shopping.
I wanted a little more room than the 4gigs that the mini offers and now the new product looks awesome. I didn't like the 4 button interface and the mini just seemed so much better to me. This 4th Generation iPod looks like they have really nailed it.
With multiple (synched) playlist support, the airPort express and a car adapter that works with the docking port, it's finally time to buy an iPod for myself.
Now I can start obsessing on how to use the new API that comes with iTunes 4.6 to synch Home/iPod/Work with my giant music/spoken word library. The stange thing about iTunes has always been what to synch with your iPod for me. I have 250g+ in various audio files and it grows all the time. I don't want all that on an iPod, but I need a way to access everything without losing all the metadata when I transfer in and out of the portables.
I'd really like to be able to synch the metadata changes (like ratings) so when I decide I don't want to hear a song anymore I can reduce the rating and it will disappear from my auto-playlists.
Expect to see some interesting things on what I do with my iPod and my music library as I get it closer to something I think other people can actually use.
Have I made my point yet? I don't think I really have... Here is a great list that Rockford Lhotka just put together showing several things that are a boost to my development productivity, I think I have used every one of these.
A customer asked me for a list of things VB can do that C# can't. "Can't" isn't meaningful
of course, since C# can technically do anything, just like VB can technically do anything.
Neither language can really do anything that the other can't, because both are bound
to .NET itself.
I love this one :)
Sound a Beep in less than a page of code.
3 More Dual Monitor Wallpapers added...
 |
 |
 |
Rendering of
Titan Landing |
Rendering of
Cassini Approach |
False Color Image
of Saturn |
For some reason unknown to me, Server.URLEncode() doesn't work as I expected it to in VB.NET.
I have a piece of code that writes out some script using what is in a textbox...
It's not something I do often, but in this case it is from some legacy code, but it needed to be updated because it was causing some odd behavior that I didn't like.
I have this old paging system that I was using prior to my XSLTPager.
It was something I did for custom paging in a Datagrid and it wrote out the javascript links for the pages that posted something like this back to the same url:
http://mysite/getpage.aspx?Search=O'Brien%25&Page=2
The problem here is that apostrophe wasn't getting converted with URLEncode like the % sign was.
so I had to settle for this to create the desired URL:
Dim LinkTemplate As String = "<span onclick=" & Chr(34) & _
"window.parent.window.CustomerPopup('" & _
Page.Request.Url.AbsolutePath & "?Search=" & _
Server.UrlEncode(_searchText).Replace("'", "%27") & _
"&Page=%%%')" & Chr(34) & "><a href='#'>%%%</a></span>"
Doing an extra replace just for single apostrophe seems strange, but when you have to write that string out to javascript it causes a bunch of problems when there is an unescaped apostrophe in the mix.
This is ultimately replaced by my XSLTPager, but is there some good reason why the Apostrophe is not getting converted to %27 by URLEncode like it should be? URLDecode decodes it as expected.
Why does this just crack me up? Every language has some things that are unique and they ALL borrow from each other. Language bias is just rediculous and I'll just keep pointing it out until it sinks in... If you are productive in VB, forget C# unless you have a really good reason to make the switch, spend your time wisely becoming more prolific in the language you already know! VB isn't going away for a long, long time.
Eric Gunnerson has just blogged about using the /o+ compiler switch to generate faster code in Whidbey. What's the magic /o switch do? /o- puts nop instructions in your IL (to let you do thinks like set a breakpoint on a closing brace).
http://builder.com.com/5100-6373-1027686.html
[Via Early Adopter]
Update: somehow I missed these threads when I posted...
A well-deserved smack back to some C# zealotry
Why VB.Net Is Better Than C#
Language wars (sigh)
I really share Eric's sentiments here, but I however, will comment...
Sorry if whoever's doing this reads my blog, but personally I think a lot of the stuff on your list is really silly.
C-Sharpener For VB - Why Switch?
[Via HumanCompiler - Erik Porter (MS MVP) Blog]
On a point by point basis, why this list annoys the heck out of me, and makes the list itself outrageous to seasoned VB developers.
The "For the Developer list"
- maybe, the average is perhaps biased, It's not like you will make more money just for developing in C#. Quality code is Quality code no matter what the language.
- C# is no more elegant looking than VB, PERIOD.
- C# is closer to java, so what? I don't program in java unless I am forced to and that is extremely rare. In fact I use DotNet to specifically avoid Java altogether.
- VB is perceived as a "toy" language. ONLY BECAUSE OF MISREPRESENTATIONS LIKE THIS STUPID LIST!
- Bah, show me ONE Microsoft person besides Anders that will publicly admit to this.
- First point is addressed in Whidbey, 2nd addressed with nDoc, 3rd who cares, if you want unsafe code you probably wouldn't write it in C# anyway, you can't (at least shouldn't) write a hardware driver in C#.
- um, all those are the next release of VB too, not just C#.
The "For the Manager Section"
- your code won't magically improve by switching to C#. If this statement actually had any merit, we would all be programming in ADA.
- VB is 3x more productive for me than C# and the main reason I don't switch primary development to it, besides that, I just don't like C style syntax, in C#, C++ OR Java, I don't care how many people love it, I don't.
- this is PURE crap, if it's mixed, its mixed, you can switch all the C# to VB just as easily, if not MORE easily without codegen.
- so what, we aren't using DotNet for portability, and Mono can compile VB anyway.
- ECMA doesn't make syntax any more standards stable than anything else from Microsoft.
- LIE, flat out LIE... anything they sell is written in C++.
- both points are totally moot to MOST development efforts and point #1 is solved completely with nDoc.
Lists like this remind me of idiots promoting rumor and inuendo as facts that must be refuted by sites like this.
I have made some changes to XMLHelper and rolled it to version 1.1
The most significant is to allow getXmlDocument and getXPathDocument to accept multiple resultsets from SQL Server as a single XML Document.
The reason this is useful is so that you can create a Stored Procedure with your entire XML Structure using multiple Select statements.
for example, consider this Stored Procedure:
CREATE PROCEDURE report_MailingLabels_XML
(
@LocationID varchar(9),
@DateOfReport datetime,
@SalespersonID varchar(25) = NULL
)
AS
SELECT '<Labels>'
SELECT '<Parameters
LocationID="' + @LocationID +
'" DateOfReport="' + @DateOfReport +
'" SalespersonID="' + IsNull(@SalespersonID, '') + '" />'
SELECT
Customer.CustomerrName,
Customer.Address1,
Customer.Address2,
Customer.City + ', ' +
Customer.State + ' ' +
Customer.PostalCode As City
FROM
Invoice
INNER JOIN Customer
ON Invoice.CustomerID = Customer.CustomerID
WHERE
(Invoice.Date_Completed = @DateOfReport) AND
(Invoice.LocationID = @LocationID) AND
(
(@SalespersonID Is NULL) OR
(Invoice.SalespersonID = @SalespersonID)
) AND
(Customer.Address1 <> '') AND
(Customer.City <> '') AND
(Customer.State <> '') AND
(Customer.PostalCode <> '')
ORDER BY
Invoice.InvoiceID
FOR XML AUTO
SELECT '</LABELS>'
GO
This is now returned by getXMLDocument properly as a single XML or XPath Document.
I accomplished this with a fairly simple nested Loop and StringBuilder (sb) that uses .ExecuteReader as follows:
'// Execute scalar won't work, it has a size limit on returned strings.
'// we can't use ExecuteXMLReader
'// because it won't handle multiple resultsets
'// So we create a SQL data reader.
dr = cmd.ExecuteReader()
'// The outer loop is for handling the muliple rowsets
'// returned by using multiple selects
'// The inner loop handles the large strings of each
'// resultset in multiple rows there is always only one column
Do
While dr.Read()
sb.Append(dr.Item(0))
End While
Loop While dr.NextResult()
dr.Close()
As
John Sands points out so eloquently, some people just shouldn't write code, no matter what language they use. I wonder what the Whiz means in Whizlabs...
In this JOKE posting, Hannes lets C# developers demonstrate their complete snobbery through their inane comments.
This reminds me of the bitterness shown by the Delphi crowd towards VB Developers 10 years ago and the monotonous whining of the Java camps.
Bill Gates himself changed the Whidbey roadmap and brings back the focus on VB. The development language which is part of the Microsoft success. They stopped all their activity and rewrite everything in VB.NET. I give you the opportunity to share this very secret information. Read the whole story!
The actual point here is: Why the heck should anyone care WHAT language its written in as long as it is well written and provides the desired functionality. Language snobbery belongs to the French, it plays a very unimportant role in technology. Microsoft says you shouldn't write core OS processes in C# either so there... all important code should be written only in C/C++.
I know this is a really old (a year ago) post, but I started reading Phil's blog again since he came back, btw: welcome back Phil.
Phil makes a good point here and during the past year it's only gotten worse. There is a really easy way to resolve this. Expert VB.NET developers need to release WELL WRITTEN Code and Programs to the public the same way they did with VB3, 4, 5 and 6. The incredible shortage of quality code for people to follow is amazing, most of the good stuff that is being downloaded for FREE (which like it or not is what really fueled the popularity of VB) are written in C#.
Cases in point, .Text, dasBlog and RSS Bandit.
Julia Lerman laments the VB.NET stigma and C# elitism being perpetuated by the trade press. In particular, she refers to this editorial in asp.netPRO magazine. I found that editorial troubling as well. In it, Elden Nelson writes:...
Whether it's just or not, white developers make more money, get work more easily, and enjoy more prestige than minority developers
(Or, as one of the commenters on Julia's blog suggests, "...male developers make more money, etc. than female developers")? If the situation is 'not just,' as Nelson implies, why isn't he working to change it?
[Via philweber.net]
I for one plan on doing something about it, I have been working feverishly in every spare moment to get a couple pieces of work out the door to be posted here, more news on them hopefully soon. If any of you knew how little free time I actually have, you would be amazed...
I know for a fact that there are enough Advanced VB coders out there that can write quality software to demonstrate that Professional VB Coders don't deserve the beating they take from C#ies.
In Fact, I know there are many VB Coders that can run circles around even the upper eschelon of C# Bigots. Unfortunately, for the community, alot of them have retired (wealthy) or gone on to something other than writing code of any kind.
As disgusting as it sounds, viruses and spyware are a virtual plague that have reached epidemic proportions!
A co-worker (not a coder, just a run of the mill user...) asked me for some help today...
He did a fresh install of Windows 2000, SP4 a couple DAYS ago. He had the usual complaint, it was slow so I installed Webroot's Spy Sweeper to see what was going on... 522 hits! He has installed nothing, just surfed Yahoo. This guy uses his machine like 2 hours a day. We have a PIX firewall and Symantec AntiVirus Enterprise, they do NOTHING for spyware. In fact, after an hour we rescanned him... 5 hits.
This is absolutely rediculous, If we don't get a REAL upgrade to IE in the next month we are going to just stop using it corporately. This means I have to Retool about 5 apps just to make them more display reliable in Firefox. In his case, I installed Firefox because he doesn't use any of our IE Only apps. Even retooling apps will cost less than trying to work around a browser that hasn't been upgraded in 3 years.
I'm reaching the "I must UNINSTALL IE point" to survive, listen up Microsoft! The COST of leaving IE running as the main browser is getting too high. I don't look forward to what the installation and updating of every machine regularly is going to cost us, explaining the critical NEED for this seemingly unnesessary software to management is going to be a lot of fun.
I have to agree with Scott on this one
I'm amazed that anyone's computer still runs anymore!
This holiday weekend, when you (computer person) visit your cousin/dad/aunt/grandma,
give them a gift:
* install anti-spyware software and configure it to run automatically on startup...
[Via ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog]
As a follow up to what I posted about the media UI yesterday, here is a link to a lot more information about some ideas coming out of Redmond. We can only hope that this isn't totally crippled by DRM and items mystically disappear just because some metadata is similar to some license key that some guy in Timbuktu claims to own...
Needless to say, I am very excited about developing exactly this type of technology, I really would like to see the hooks built into the Dot Net Framework that are going to allow this, it surely can't all just be Avalon, this is apparently running on XP, or is this just a slideshow that isn't actually doing anything.
When we get right down to it. Everything is connected by metadata and there needs to be better ways of tagging, organizing, browsing and referencing that metadata. These are the areas I am working on right now. When I have some more clarity on how I want to go about it, I'll be posting it, but it has alot to do with VS2005 and SQL Express 2005...
If the rest of the UI looks as good as this video demonstrates with pictures, then we are in for some really incredible challenges in the way we do basic UI design as general coders. If anyone thinks that a Web App can even come close to something like this, they are... I'd rather not say.
Do I want an application like this... uh, yeah, like yesterday... Do I want to write the code that it takes to achieve this? No Way! I am counting on alot of this stuff to be built into Visual Studio 2007 that will hopefully launch simultaneously with Longhorn so we can take advantage of all the new UI features.
Will this really happen? who knows, but as far as media applications, I chose to limp along with what I have available today and wait for Longhorn rather than try to write an all encompassing media library today. One day I will write it, I swear (been saying that for about 3 years now...). For today, I am just happy working on the backend and making the library and data cross referencing more robust.
BTW: Notice the startbars at the bottom of the screen are (the same as) XP... I think this is total vaporware ATM. We can only hope that this isn't all smoke and mirrors when it is released.
I'm going to be keeping a Visual Basic Bloggers OPML file that will be updated as much as possible to include all the “active” bloggers posting mainly (or at least heavily) about VB. I am not making a distinction right now whether these people are inside or outside of Microsoft, I may implement a folder hierarchy if there is a need to in the future.
I will probably mirror it as a blogroll at Scripting News later.
This OPML will directly import into most RSS Readers as well as OneNote.
Does Microsoft have any shame? They've only been sued more than anyone else for copying the look and feel of something else. How about doing something truly innovative and giving me a Webservice to use freely.
In it's new “light” search page, it seems to look strangely familiar.
So does the MSN Toolbar when compared to the Google Toolbar.
I really don't mind the consistency of a tool that pretty much looks the same as every other tool like it, but for cryin' out loud... A Search engine isn't a hammer.
At least it's obviously powered by DotNet (except the gathering done by Yahoo). Is it just me or does the current state of Web UI leave alot to be desired as far as asthetics and real usability. OH!, and where is the Webservice interface for MSN Search? That might get me to use it if I could call a Webservice from my own interface without the limitations imposed by Google's Terms of Use.
Even though these sites are fueled by ads, they could easily adjust things in the xml results that showed advertiser support.
Someday we will get a search tool that doesn't require a browser to be useful, I think the browser is a second-class citizen as a useful tool when utilizing the internet as an information center. If I want to integrate search capability in a Windows App, I surely don't want to shell out to a browser just to perform searches and I would rather not do screen-scraping (html parsing) of results so I am not forced into presenting those results in the way that the search tool thinks I should see them.
Come On Google and Microsoft give developers what we really need, results in a structured XML File that I can present/filter/adjust to conform to the way I need to use the results.
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Copyright © 2003-2004 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.