December 2003 - Posts

Mad Cow RANT
28 December 03 05:14 PM | Joel Semeniuk | 4 comment(s)

You know… I’m getting a little ticked about this Mad Cow stuff.  When Canada got its case this past year, the word, including the US, went nuts.  How can this happen?  Canada must be a backward country to allow such things to happen.  Countries like the US and Japan took no chances proposing that it raised a SIGNFICANT health risk to consumers.  From then on, the Canadian economy was crippled for months (combined with the SARS outbreak – which I found funny that the US didn’t have one single case…hmmmm), and is in fact still on a slow recovery.  I would also like to point out that it is known that the cow that was found to be infected in Canada originated in the US, but that story was quickly hushed for some reason (more “hmmmmm”). 

Now the tables are turned.  Mad Cow is now in the US.  Oh, but all of a sudden there is no significant risk to consumers.  No one should be worried at all.  No problems what so ever.  And oh, it probably came from Canada anyway right?  In fact, instead of blocking imports from the US, we should just continue to block imports from Canada until the entire country is crippled.  Meanwhile, during Mad Cow in Canada, US beef producers saw the best year in history – zero competition from Canada – which helps to explain 8.X growth rate in the US and only 1.X in Canada.  Eagerly watching how the media/government spin will work its magic on the consumer.

What I would like to see in 2004
28 December 03 04:48 PM | Joel Semeniuk | 2 comment(s)

Don Box started it… I think it would be fun to continue… 

Some things I would like to see in 2004:

1:  WAY Cheaper plasma flat screen computer monitors and TV’s.  I want them – I need them – just won’t spend the money.

2:  WAY Cheaper music downloading.  99cents a song still isn’t a big bargain. 

3:  A really good (and affordable) Virtual Reality set pluggable for first person gaming and the virtual office.  I have been wanting that since Wolfenstein and since Duncan and I created a Doom map of our rented house.

4:  Eye Glasses that project a huge computer display but is also positionally sensitive.  I’ve seen glasses that project onto your eye, however, I haven’t seen any that are positionally sensitive – I don’t want the screen to move when I move my head and I want to control the opacity of the image like I can with video card.

5:  More kids games for the Xbox.  I’m not talking E or T games – how about something educational?

6:  Less violence on TV.  The world screams when there is any form of sexual context on TV shows but we seem to be complacent with violence – not just in movies, but in kid shows and the news.

7:   WAY better functionality in tablets.  I have a tablet, but can’t stand to use it.  It’s NOT instant on, it doesn’t have biometrics (so that I don’t have to continually type in my complex passwords), the screens are too small, and the processors are no where near powerful enough.  I have to force myself to use it.

8:  Better Office 2003 functionality on tablet PC’s.  Kinda sucks that I can’t really use hand-writing capabilities in all Office applications.  I would like to see all Office applications as aware of the tablet as OneNote and MindManager for the Tablet.

9:  More services from Google.  Google has the keys that will allow us to unlock the ability to extract discrete facts from chaos – and this is the ultimate key to moving forward the way we develop software. 

10.  A search engine from Microsoft.  As I love using Google to search Microsoft, I can’t see why Microsoft can’t create a good search engine.  Even in products such as Sharepoint the signal to noise ratio of the result sets is terrible and at best irrelevant.

Speech SDK ...
27 December 03 07:17 PM | Joel Semeniuk | 1 comment(s)

I like speech technology.  I think it’s really neat but has a ways to go.  Recently, Microsoft announced its new SpeechSDK used to bring speech recognition to web apps.  My first thought was “web apps – who cares?”  Thinking more on this I realized the importance of server side speech recognition, especially when it comes to customer service and phone support.  I realized this even further after I blew my Sony receiver this past weekend.   I decided to call customer support to find out where I could bring my cooked receiver and was pleasantly surprised when I was told that instead of hitting numbers on my phone to navigate options of customer support  I could just “say” what I wanted.  Yup – Sony has implemented some form of server side voice recognition technology – and it did a good job.  Turns out that I ended up pressing buttons anyway, since for voice recognition to work you need to wait for all of the prompts to complete before speaking your entry.  I’m impatient and ended up pressing the correct option as soon as I heard it.

At the end of the day, Sony automated support hung up on me again and again after I voiced my postal code in so that the system could help locate a local service center.  Ended up going to the web site anyway. 

MMC's with .NET?
21 December 03 09:12 PM | Joel Semeniuk | 3 comment(s)

Is it possible to create a Microsoft Management Console Snap-In with .NET?  I know about the MMC Snap-in Designer for Visual Basic – but don’t know if there is anything newer or pre-canned for the .NET world. 

Visio Solution
21 December 03 08:35 PM | Joel Semeniuk | with no comments

I kinda like using Visio to play around with ideas.  I find it expressive enough for me to refine concepts into something that looks more like a software design.  What I can’t seem to figure out, however, is how to create a Visio Solution where I can have many sub-projects responsible for specific parts of my design.  I would be able to work with the Visio Solution as a whole, but toggle between different macro sets (sub files I guess) as I need them.    For example, I typically work with the UML software development templates.  These are OK for initial idea refinement.  What I also like working with is the Brain Storming templates (I like MindManager better for this however).  Both templates are “active” where Visio provides additional features to help manage, build, and validate your UML model or your mind mapping ideas.  However, you can’t use both active templates at the same time in the same file – I need to keep two copies of Visio open and toggle between the two as I refine my ideas.  It would be “cool” to be able to work in the same model “solution” instead of completely separate instances of Visual Studio. 

DevPartner or Business Investement
14 December 03 11:41 PM | Joel Semeniuk | 3 comment(s)

I’m writing a new product review on DevPartner from Compuware, and have been working with it for about a week now (14 day trial installation).  It’s a pretty nifty product (obviously a convergence of a number of tools that Compuware has acquired over the years).  I’m a big believer in this kind of software.  Essentially, the tool provides:

·         Code coverage analysis

·         Static code analysis

·         Distributed application analysis

·         Error detection

·         Memory analysis

·         Performance analysis

No matter how good of a developer you or your team is, there is still a lot of ways of coding “smarter”.  Besides, not every team developing business solutions can have a development “GOD” on their team – who also has the time to read over and review every single line of code your entire team writes.  Using a toolset such as DevPartner can help you catch mistakes, or other less threatening issues, early in your development process. And, as we all know, catching bad things up front is a whole lot cheaper than trying to fix them after you hit production. 

The product looks solid, but when I looked at the price – I almost fell over.  I’ve worked on a number of large projects and I can truly appreciate the business case for the tool – but for much less money can I get the majority of the features from FXCop + CodeSmart + ?? I haven’t had the time to do a complete feature comparison between other product lines, so I truly don’t know – but $4500 per concurrent license ($1500 named user)  reminds me of Rational (er… IBM)  licensing.  What I  would want is to have every developer outfitted with this software so that they can maintain their own code as they go forward.  With very expensive licensing models, organizations might elect a single person as the code analyst who runs the tool regularly to identify problems.  Again, I’m not sure which the better model is.  At the end of the day it is re-assuring that code is being scrutinized by more than just human eyes.  In retrospect, however, I have been on projects where we spent hours and hours (ie… many 10’s of thousands of dollars) hunting down bugs, memory leaks, etc.  If we expect this to happen on every large project (the larger the project, the more likelihood of this I guess) than there is no problem justifying these costs up front.  For the small dev shop however, this does hurt a lot!

Of course, this product also fits nicely into Compuware’s TrackRecord product that helps out with your project’s tracking, defect management, task management, and workflow automation tasks.  Compuware TrackRecord functionality is available when you have DevPartner Studio Enterprise Edition installed.  Again, HUGE points here as I believe that this type of software is what is really missing from ALL integrated development environments.  IDE’s should come with these features baked right in – not as separate products for extra money (Microsoft, are you listening?).  Until then, the MKS’s, Borland’s, and the Computeware’s need to cover this market – but make it affordable for heavens sake.  These add-on’s are as expensive, and in some cases, more expensive than Visual Studio.NET – and they are no where near as massive.

Smart Client Deployment
12 December 03 06:16 PM | Joel Semeniuk | with no comments

Part of my presentation at Bigger Better Basic (MSDN) yesterday was a discussion on Smart Clients.  I’m a Smart Client guy – as opposed to a web client guy – always have been and always will.  Prior to my session on Smart Clients, one of my co-presenters, Lenny Lous, presented a demo of the Smart Client framework created by Kinitos.  Wow, is it slick!!!.  I’ve been working with Smart Client deployments (http, loadfrom, click once) and their demo really went WAY beyond.  Great stuff… make sure you go and check out their Client SDK and their Client Management Server.