Archives
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Move to weblogs.asp.net
As one might have expected, the move to the new weblogs.asp.net domain wreaked havoc with NewsGator. I had to play yet another round of "clean up the duplicates" - a game which is growing quite tiresome. The whole problem of duplicate posts is really my only big issue with the blog experience. NewsGator does it's best to deal with the problem, but it can only do so much (in this case even the GUIDs changed). Hopefully incremental feeds will help alleviate this problem.
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Setec Astronomy
And as long as I'm ranting, let me mention how tedious it is to see "I know something I can't tell" posts from Microsofties. If you can't tell, than be quiet.
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ZIP in the .NET framework
The fact that this article needs to exist is just wrong. ZIP compression support should be a part of the core framework. Hell, it's been in Java since 1.0.
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Caught up
Whew. Just finished catching up with my unread blog entries. Though not by reading all 966 posts, of course.
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The stagnation of IE
E&A post about the comatose state of IE's evolution at Microsoft. I've been thinking about posting on the very same topic - I see I'm not the only one feeling this way. This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the problem with monopolies. Microsoft now dominates the browser market, and have little reason to innovate. I'm looking for an excuse to switch off of IE, but I haven't found it yet. I continue to evaluate Mozilla from time to time, but I still find it too piggy. And I still like IE's ability to run multiple instances of the browser process (maybe there's a way to do this in Moz but I haven't found it). Firebird has potential, as it seems design address the bloat factor of Mozilla. I'll be keeping an eye on it.
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RSS - the bad
Hi, my name is Kevin, and I'm a blogaholic.
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Trick for command-line junkies
I'm still very much a command-line kind of guy. I get around the Windows UI just fine, but frequently I find it quicker to just drop to a command prompt to accomplish certain tasks (especially since Explorer generally sucks at launching apps with command line params). I like the "My Documents" feature of Windows, as it keeps documents easily accessible in from the Windows Explorer. However, when I want to perform a command line operation in My Documents, it's a pain to navigate there, even with path completion. Plus, C:\Documents and Settings\Kevind\My Documents is a long string, so my cursor starts 2/3 of the way over in the window before I've typed a single character.
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Virtual PC at Microsoft
Several of the Microsofties have been singing the praises of Virtual PC for development work recently. As a long time VMWare user, I share their enthusiasm for this type of technology. For me, it falls into the "how did we ever live without it" category. My biggest hope is that Microsoft comes up with a sensible licensing policy around the thing. The "each VM requires an OS license" model imposed for VMWare users is exceedingly onerous.Unfortunately, there's a chance Microsoft will now be able to license-and-support-policy VMWare right out of existence. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Those VMWare guys do incredible things with software, and I have massive respect for them. -
What's going on here?
First InfoWorld and eWeek, then Microsoft's MSDN site, and now PC Magazine. It seems like everybody is going through a major site redesign these days. Is it the first hint of spring in the air (at least in the Bay Area, where winter is just ending finally)? A case of "the other guy is doing it"? Or is everybody just feeling stale at the same time? Wackiness.One disturbing trend is that the sites seem to be moving toward smaller fonts and packing more text on the screen. Personally, I find the new multi-column eWeek layout to be difficult to read. They also don't seem to adjust their text size based on the browser font preference (although maybe they never did). Also, PCMag's site is a fixed width, it doesn't grow with the width of the browser window. Tre lame. -
WINIPCFG for XP
Nice. I've often wondered why Microsoft never ported WINIPCFG from Win9x to the NT-based operating systems. Finally someone else got around to it. -
Testing NewsGator posting abilities
If you can see this...NewsGator rocks!
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MSDN .Net Show
These shows kind of amaze me. I mean, I appreciate Microsoft's general strategy of carpet-bombing developer's with technical information on a new platform like .NET. And the human face that these videos present are a good thing. But does anyone actually have time to watch an hour and a half video on IIS 6? That violates the most important principle of technical communication - scanability. There's way too much information out there to process for this kind of thing.
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Recently used applications....grrrr
The recently used applications list in WinXP is a great idea (although not a new one...wasn't that feature in the early betas of Win95 but removed because it wasn't "data centric"?). The problem is that the list is in exactly the wrong place. Putting it at the top level of the Start Menu completely breaks keyboard navigation of the Start Menu. It makes the keyboard accelerators non-deterministic - I can't hit Ctrl-Esc, C to launch the Control Panel because I might have recently run CardScan.
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Registration Free COM Activation
I've only recently become aware of the registration-free COM activation feature of Windows XP (aka side-by-side deployment). Very interesting. The idea is that you have an application manifest which describes all of the COM types that an application uses. Sort of an application-scoped XML file version of HKCR. Of course, Microsoft has all kinds of caveats about how the COM objects should work to support this mode of deployment, so I'm not sure if it our existing COM API would just work in a production environment. But it could be super-cool for testing different versions of our API on a single machine.
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VS.Net 2002/2003 Open With...the real answer
OK, I did a little regmon-ing, and I'm finally starting to understand the workings of Open With a little better (this stuff has gotten a lot more complicated since I last looked at it). Keep in mind that I'm working in XP here - don't know if the same applies for W2K, I haven't installed VS2003 there yet.