Archives
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What's so terrible about using software owned by a company?
I'm not sure I get the point of Mozilla wanting to push an open source video standard (see Ars story). They're pusing for an open platform for video. So why exactly does everything have to be "vendor-neutral, standards-based?" I don't care that Flash is from Adobe. If it works, and everyone has it, what difference does it make? And hey, with Silverlight making some inroads, it keeps Adobe even more honest and working to innovate. Everybody wins.
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State of the platform: Are we losing? Does it matter?
Ars Technica launched a redesign today. I seem to recall that they were on ASP.NET before in some custom made CMS. Now they're on Movable Type.
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Lessons in building an uploader in Silverlight
I mentioned previously that I was working on a multi-file upload control for Silverlight. Yes, it has been done, but it's a good practical thing to get your head around. I feel like I've managed to get to a good place with it in terms of the "hard" parts (that is, getting to know Silverlight). I haven't fleshed out the back end part as much yet.
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FJCore updates... perhaps coming soon
I had an exchange with one of the guys from Occipital, who maintain the FJCore library. For those of you not playing along, this is a pure C# implementation for basic JPEG manipulation. It doesn't depend on the .NET Framework in any way, which means it's ideal for use in Silverlight.
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My first real experience with Silverlight
Back in 2004, when I was writing my book, I was all over everything new in the .NET world. It was partly out of never ending curiosity, but partly because I had to know what was in the pipe to avoid making the book obsolete before it was released. These days, I'm a bit more measured. I still watch carefully (really guys, seeing ASP.NET MVC final would be awesome!), but I'm a little more content to just let things evolve and be released as final before jumping in.
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Facebook flaw ignored: Chat system not secure
Well, despite getting some leads on who to contact after my previous post, Facebook has otherwise ignored me. I even sent a message Mark Z. just for fun, and he (or someone who monitors his account) wrote back and indicated he would pass along the info to the right people.
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Is most software development really as bad as I think?
Following my lay-off over the summer from Insurance.com, I've been around quite a bit doing contract work and other sub-optimal things. Now I'm finally in what I hope is a solid job with an online marketing agency that also does app dev. As the company's technical architect, I'm not writing as much code myself as I have previously, but I do get to see a lot of stuff inherited from other places.
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How do you reach humans who work at Facebook?
I just happened to stumble on a pretty serious flaw in their chat app, to the extent that I wouldn't be comfortable using it on a public network. I feel like I should do the right thing and tell them about it, but they lack contact information in a fairly enormous way. I assume the suggestion box just goes into a black hole somewhere.