November 2005 Entries
I'm not the only one who loves ClickOnce technology, over here Julie Lerman tells of a client willing to port an entire application to VS2005 just to get the functionality in ClickOnce. Who wants to go back to the Application Update Block now? :)
I like to read Scoble but sometimes you have to wonder at his ego. For those of you who don't know him, he's a Microsoft evangelist. Now that means his job is to point at stuff and say, "ooo look at that". Sometimes we look and say, "that's cool", and other times we look at say, "nah that's not for me". At the end of the day though, he's not actually done anything useful, in short he's a celeb. Famous only for being famous.
So when he writes here, of a feature he doesn't like in Bloglines, "I’ve complained about this before and they haven’t fixed it." you can only boogle at the man's ego. Surely he can't imagine the Bloglines developers are going to drop everthing and fix it just because he says, can he?
I want to talk a little about bird flu today, or more specifically one of the daftest things surrounding it, namely the wearing of surgical masks to protect yourself.
Now I know it's an easy trap to fall into, but let's think about it for a moment and ask yourself this question, does the surgeon wear a mask to protect him from infections that you may have, or does he wear it to protect your inards from infections he is likely to breath onto them? Yeah? Got it now? Gooood. So let's have no more nonesense about surgical masks - they just wont help you - you need to stop bugs coming into your system, in other words you need a respirator mask.
Right now, back to work the lot of you, there's nothing to see here - move along!
I've taken a bit of a shine to Python just recently. I like it for life's little scripting problems, you know, the sort of thing it's not worth opening up Visual Studio for. Anyhoo, I've been looking at doing web development using Python as well. The trouble here is that you can't embed Python in html like you can with PHP or ASP say. You have to have the Python CGI script generate the html, which is no big deal really but it does mean that it's a pain if anyone wants to skin your web application. They have to go into the Python code and make changes to the html, now what's the chance of them doing that without breaking anything? Slim I'd say.
So, how to overcome this problem? I thought about it for a while and the solution's obvious really. Instead of generating html, I get the Python CGI to generate XML and apply a XSLT transform to it and then send it to the browser. Now, if anyone wants to skin my appliacation all the have to do is look at the schema to see what's in my XML and then ammend the XSLT file to provide the design they want. This pattern also works for other languages that you can write CGIs with but can't embed in html, like C++ for example.
We keep all our code under Subversion on a server that is backedup daily. However, from the book of "you can't be too careful", I like to back my code up to an off-site area too. The off-site area happends to be my memory stick that I take home at night.
I have a Python script that iterates over my dev tree and adds all the files to a Zip file then moves the Zip file to my memory stick. A point to note regarding the script is that there's no recursion, I simply use the Python "walk" function. Very nice! You can download the script here.
We took the kids to see GOF over the week-end. What a great film, much darker than the other films. It's the best book to date (IMHO) and by far the best film. Although there's a lot cut out from the book, to make the film a sensible length, the director has done it in a clever way so that none of the story is lost. If you haven't yet, I recommend you go see it.
I wanted to add weather information to my blog, in case any of you out there wanted to know what the weather was like in my part of the world. Now I know there are WordPress addons out there that I could have used, by hey, I'm a software engineer I can do this myself. So what I did was to access the METAR data (current weather information from airports) from the public server at ftp://weather.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/. I then cleaned it up a bit and ftp'd it onto my server here and included it in the html for the sidebar at the left of this page. The Python code to do this can be downloaded here.
At work I use scrum as our software engineering methodology, I've just come across this scrum addin for Project 2003.
Check out the new Xbox 360 ads here and here.
I been messing about with the new ClickOnce techology available in Visual Studio 2005 and it is very nice :) As an experiment I ported the tranining zones calculator from Python to C# and put a ClickOnce application up on my site for you to download, you can get it here.
Back in July I posted that Grokster had lost it's case in court and that it had been held that Grokster was responsible for what people did with their software, which is like blaming Microsoft if someone writes some bad flight control code that results in the crash of an aircraft. Anyhow, Grokster, as part of the settlement have had to close down their servers and place a humiliating message on the web site.
It sort of makes you wonder if Hollywood has forgotten its roots doesn't it? Here's a reminder just in case they have ...William N. Selig, an early American film pioneer, who built his own camera and projector; by 1909, Selig had three studios in operation: in New Orleans (Louisiana), Edendale/Los Angeles (California), and his base in Chicago (Illinois); as a result of litigation, when he was brought to court by Thomas Edison for patent infringement in 1905... That's right, the film industry is based on the west coast so they could escape the long arm of east coast law. Jeez, now why don't I have a lot of sympathy for the MPAA
...or it's beta predecesors to be precise. There's a tool, available here, to uninstall any beta versions of Visual Studio you have on your machine, ready for a clean install of the RTM version.
I use Wordpress on my server to power my blog. Lately I've noticed that when I try and update my blog from home I get the error below. It turns out that my personal firewall is blocking some information critical for Wordpress to work, so I have to turn off my firewall to post to my blog. How rubbish is that?
It's out, and i've got my copy :)
What are they thinking about? Isn't this sort of thing illegal in mosts countries?
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