January 2007 - Posts
I really do not understand the point of view of Wikipedia, nor the very biased author of this silly little article: "Microsoft in hot water over Wikipedia edits"
Let me summarize what I conclude after reading it:
1.
Microsoft, alone, is not allowed to have anyone review or manage
content on WikiPedia. Even if this person is an independant expert on
the subject. Paid, or unpaid.
2. IBM is allowed to have content
updated as they please, and pay people to do it, seemingly because they
support Open Source software in a larger fashion than MSFT. So I guess
that just makes them better?
3. Microsoft's only course of
action in order to have any sort of content on Wikipedia updated is to
create a slew of whitepapers which address each issue and to link into
the Wikipedia and hope that the people at Wikipedia or even IBM review
the whitepapers, and update the content for them. They are not allowed
to tell Wikipedia about it, because they will just be ignored.
As
long as Rick Jelliffe didnt post an ad up for Vista (Buy it now!) then
isnt the whole purpose of Wikipedia to be a collaborative project? Why
is MSFT being singled out here?
The headline should read:
"Wikepedia sells out to IBM and refuses to let Microsoft contribute" or
"Until Microsoft releases all of its source code they have to go sit in
the WikiCorner"
A few months ago I purchased some of
the super cool products listed on the Phidets.com site, specifically I picked up
the RFID kit and the blue LCD display. These things are extremely
simple to work with, here is some sample code.
All it does is creates a timer which
automatically will update the two lines on the LCD screen with the
current time, weather conditions and if Winamp is available it will
attempt to grab the current song title.
Full download is available, for a
limited time.
As you can tell I really love this VisualWebGui stuff from Guy Peled. Take a look at the latest ability, its called "Dual Mode". Essentially you build your web site using their technology and you deploy to the Web normally, or deploy as a complete Windows Forms application! Of course you will have to make special consideration for your business objects and more importantly your data source but its just damn cool.
I know I have been waiting for something like this for many, many years now.
I managed to take a deeper look at the
Ceedo product which I previously posted on. They have a pretty
decent story about wrapping up the application -the whole
“Application” or “OS” virtualization thing. From what I can
tell it simply monitors all calls to the registry and the the local
file system (My Documents, etc.) and re-routes them to the
virtualized versions of each. This is one of the bigger pain points
of running any application from a portable device; its nice to see
them try to solve that. Note that you can still find hundreds of
applications which do not rely on either the registry or well known
windows paths.
Other than their virtualization
technology I dont really see much value to their offering. They have
a fancy menu which hides in the system tray if you tell it too, but
you can get that for free.
It would be nice to see them produce
their virtualization product as a standalone wrapper around other
applications. Reg Rapper somewhat solves the whole wrapper around the registry, which does a ½
decent job at it; and its free but I dont see it handling file system
calls – not that this is all that important either way.
Mirror
I just stumbled across Ceedo. At first look it seems like a hybrid between U3 (without all the U3 mess), and a typical System Tray App Launcher (like PStart), but much more pretty (like U3).
They boast a huge set of portable applications, all of which seem to be the standard set floating around today.
IMHO,
we dont really need another launcher, especially a pretty one which
costs $30. It has no Mac support, not even the Tablet XP edition
(seems strange to me). We simply need more apps to become more
portable friendly.
No SDK nor API, which seems superior over U3
which requires you to package up your applications in a very specific
way. With Creedo it seems that you can just add any application in via
their interface to have it added to the drive/menuing system - thats
nice. PStart works slightly in that fashion as well.
No
synchronization/backup component. This (as I have found out) is quite
necessary for trusted computers. I actually purchased GoodSync just for this purpose and keep a full backup of my pen drive on my machine at home all the time.
They
boast some sort of "application virtualization", interesting since most
applications do rely on the local filesystem (My Documents, etc..),
System Environment Variables, and the Registry I can see this being a
tough task to handle. Unfortunately most applications they list are
"experimental only". There are some wrapper stub/launchers which have
the ability to trap these calls and redirect them but IMHO that is
still a work in progress. The security aspect of all this is quite
significant as well. A non-admin will have significantly less
privileges as the administrator on the system, which causes headaches
for many Portable applications and environments.
Their technology page states:
Ceedo
Operating Environment -
Micro-OS installed on portable media
which provides services to applications
installed on it. The Ceedo Operating
Environment contains the Ceedo Core
mechanism, a vitalization method
handling all the necessary operational
aspects for a single application.
Now
that seems contradictory to what they indicated previously. Is it a
virtualized Operating System or Application Environment? Or is the
Virtual OS wrapping the Application Environment?
Another
major issue with this type of launcher/app manager is its ability to
handle constant updates of a whole variety of software which people
will stuff on their drives. For example if you look in their Programs Directory you will notice that Mozilla Firefox
is listed at version 1.5.0.7 which is quite outdated at this time (I
have 2.0.0.1 running right now). I dont think I would call it a flaw
in the software, more of like an issue it must deal with gracefully.
They have been getting a whole lot of press lately,
so maybe there is something too it; I will have to give it an install
and see how it goes. The thing with the press is that they usually
jump onto some good ideas, but they focus on bad implementations. Lets
hope this is a decent implementation.
I should also take a deeper look at the Portable Apps Launcher.
Lastly,
it is possible to run both Windows XP (via BartsPE) and Linux (via DSL
& Qemu or any other smaller distro) on your USB Pen Drive.
Currently on my daily use drive I have both. I need to work on the
XP-Embedded version much more in order to get some sort of environment
setup which I can work with. I also want to test running Qemu with
either OS in a non-admin setting. If Qemu will run as non-admin then
you can truly carry your OS around with you, including all your
normally installed applications and it will work on a non-USB Boot
compatible machine.
Mirror
In
Firefox you can manage a whole slew of configuration options just by
loading the url "about:config" (not quotes nor http://). The MozillaZine KB Wiki has a complete description of all the entries.
Mirror
Pegtop has recently released version 2.09 of their PStart application.
I personally love this tool, it essentially replaces my Start menu in
windows with a tray icon used to select and run applications from the
pen drive in my portable configuration.
Download it here.
My
only wish is that they would give us the option to simply download a
.ZIP of the .EXE itself instead of using their installer. Easy to get
around, just a few extra steps to do so. RoboForm
does this as well. I've asked them directly for future releases to be
available as .ZIP files, instead of assuming a fresh install on a clean
pen each time. I'm a control freak. :)
Mirrored
Some seemingly useful XUL links...
I will be moving my blog out of asp.net and over to blogs.mscorlib.com permanently.
In the mean time I will be echo'ing the titles here until most of you move your habits to that site instead of this one. Here is the main RSS feed for the new site you can subscribe too.
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I wanted to start investigating XUL, Mozillia's version of XAML (actually XAML is a XUL rip off, but thats another story). If you have used Firefox or Thunderbird then you have already used XUL.
I noticed that the intial setup of the directory structure and required files was a bit tricky so I created a vb script file to automate the process. I actually nabbed most of the content in order to create this script file from this blog post.
Download and run the script. It prompts you for the XUL application name (friendly and unfriendly) and your Company Name (for the application.ini file). Once its done you can navigate down to the "\foo\chrome\content" folder and start editing the *.xul files in order to start updating your application.
Next you will need to download XULRunner and shove it into your path environment variable. My script will create a batch file which will launch your application, and it assumes that XULRunner.exe (and other binaries) are in the %path% environment variable.
Two absolute necessary URL's for reference are:
XUL Ref : http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/
Turtorials : http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/
More references:
XUL Introduction : http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Introduction_to_XUL
XUL with Eclipse : http://eclipsexul.sourceforge.net/
http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/tags/xul/
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Getting_started_with_XULRunner
I will be moving my blog out of asp.net and over to blogs.mscorlib.com permanently.
In the mean time I will be echo'ing the titles here until most of you move your habits to that site instead of this one. Here is the main RSS feed for the new site you can subscribe too.
The new URL: http://blogs.mscorlib.com/rchartier
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