Just came across notes on Jeremy Allaire's site about an interview last year with Sergey Brin of some company called Google.
Will Google provide a desktop utility -- e.g. index/search my drive?
He says no, it's not a core competency and no one has ever made it work that well.
Ya got to wonder where the boundry between "seeing into the future" and plain old luck crosses - "Google Desktop Search is currently indexing". Ya!
Also been reading a book about Jim Clark (new new thing) - led me to look at the old Mosaic web page at http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/mosaic-w/
Didn't know at the time he was a BIG boat fan which at least explains the Ship Steering Wheel on the original Netscape Navigator browser.
Read about the numerous companies he tried to create, some sucessful, others not. What's he doing now?
steven
I recently read some text indicating the reasons that C# doesn't support overloaded properties. I also tried this in Whidbey Beta 1 and it remains the case. However, i am a little more interested in why this is and what people think about it. To be specific, the following will not compile :
public string Author
{
set {_author = value;}
get {return _author;}
}
public AuthorEntity Author
{
set {_authorEntity = value;}
get {return _authorEntity;}
}
Why would you ever want to do this? Well, in my case, there are occassions in the "Book" class where the user may wish to define the author as a primitive string such as "Steven Livingstone". However, there are other cases where people want to declare that the author is the *Author* (derived from Person) who has the name "Steven Livingstone" - allowing them to further populate the Author class.
So i would like to say:
MyBook.Author = "Steven Livingstone"
or
MyBook.Author = MyPerson;
... and let the compiler figure out which it is using, in much the same way as overloaded methods work.
The ability to overload properties is pretty fundamental to the way of thinking i have for a project i am working on just now and so further suggestions would be appreciated. I could just always use the Author class, but that is an overkill for times when only the name of the author is to be set. I guess i could use SetAuthor() and GetAuthor() and overload these methods to accept the string and Author parameters - just not as nice as using properties directly.
steven
More : http://www.amazondc.com
"Amazon.com is delighted to announce the launch of a new software development centre in Edinburgh. The new centre offers a unique opportunity to be a part of a rather unusual start-up -- one which will serve 41 million active customer accounts around the world."
"Candidates should have experience designing and building complex yet maintainable systems, and should be able to do so in about one third the time most competent people think possible"
Are they basically saying "people who develop on time", baring in mind most projects end up taking 3 time longer?!
Welcome to Scotland Amazon - may the rest of you now follow...
steven
http://stevenlivingstone.com
Over the last 2 months I have been conducting research almost exclusively on the web.
What has really became obvious to me is the amout of dead material out there.
From web pages, that contain out of date information, to whole sites that stopped running years ago with no indication, to projects that seem to have been in flux for years, businesses that stopped trading years back and left their site on and even stuff written by people whom i'm almost read to email, only to find the passed away a couple of years back.
So is a new web needed to get us out of this? Can we see Google work with Archive.org and create a diary of the web? A time-aware searcheable web which allows some kind of time scale on the information out there, without requiring everyone to annotate their documents! Could i say "Only search content added/updated in the last year" ?
I hope so, because frankly it's getting ridiculous. 10 years ago i did some research on solitons for a Physics paper i wrote. Today some of that material returns seelingly as relevant as ever despite things continuing to evolve over the last decade. My File Exists article on 15 seconds at http://www.15seconds.com/issue/990401.htm is now over 5 years old, but still comes 8th in Google when i type "FileExists".
I don't know how many replies i have had indicating some academic moved on 3 years ago, or some project research was finished, or even links to other sites that closed their doors, re-organized or just changed their content to make it completely useless.
Could a hyped up archive.org challenge something like Google? I think so. Coudl we "Diff The Web" to make the content more relevant - noting that getting dublin core on everything is highly unlikely.
Anyone got answers?
steven
http://stevenlivingstone.com
Paul Allen at it again with http://www.flipstartpc.com
Would be interested in the pricing - would be very cool for on the road travel where the laptop is just a pain or taking my work from desktop to desktop without a 16' Sony Vaio which really is my desktop machine now anyway. My PocketPC is not being quite feature rich to be useful for anything more than contacts and calandering.
Looks good.Now, does the price also look as good?
Steven.
Whatever happened to the days when we got weird and wonderful error messages? When i moved to the current application i am working on (port from ASP/VB6 to .Net) there was actually an error message saying "You cannot possibly be this old" when someone entered a data of birth making them over 100 years old. As it is a government training system for schoolleavers and adults getting into work, you may argue someone over 100 is probably too old (although i'm sure we all had that kid in the class who was repeating the year for the 6th time due to never attending). Anyone know of a blogger over 100??
Anyway, where did this all come from? Well, logging into my machine this morning i got this extremely specific warning:
Does it mean it was running for 809 minutes? "This program cannot possibly run for more than 808 minutes".
Is it a new kind of key activation? Aha, maybe my 808 minute trial period has run out?
So now rather than setting my date back in normal days when my activation runs out (of course i have never done that!), I need to use fractions of time, specifically "13.466666666666666666666666666667" hours.
Any ideas on what the 808 might stand for?? There was a techno group called "808 State" years ago - maybe they bought Sophos?
Steven
PS. the most likely reason is that one of the network drives it checks was offline and so it just kind of hung... but interesting way of telling me!
Whilst reading through some blogs and articles (been busy, so basically catching up), i have been surprised by the number of people seemingly condeming MS for the increasing timescale of the beta and RTM releases of Whidbey as well as the Yukon release dates.
My view on this has always been, let get it right (or as right as is possible) first time rather repeated releases and upgrades. There has been enough criticism in the past of rushed releases that require multiple patches. Whilst I remember being pleased with the XSL working draft version release with IE5 a few years ago, I also remember a lot of people saying it just caused confusion and so on.Some reading leads me to believe that others just want VS2005 out ASAP. I have even seen some posts where people are planning production systems on the beta releases!
Any general opinions on this?
Steven
So I'm working on an application that is going to be used be Internet users as well as External users, with the app itself written in .Net and running on Win 2003 and above (hopefully with Win 2K support also).
The interesting part is combining the security mechanisms that come with IIS and .Net. In the case where there is a pretty significant Active Directory in-house, with Groups and Roles and so on, you probably want to use that and so you'd likely go with Integrated Auth. When coming some outside the firewall you don't have this option and so you would go for forms auth (or even basic auth). In my situation, i want those users who are staff to be authenticated against the AD and for those who are not, to be authenticated against a custom SQL Server database we have.
Now, IIS/.Net doesn't allow you to use both at the same time, but doesn't offer much in between. I have read Paul Wilson's article over at MSDN and although this was a nice article with a solution, it against points towards only one security solution, which is forms.
The problem i have with this is that i cannot then easily use my AD to find the groups a user is in or protect my resources without the user being prompted for a username/password - because i am in forms auth world! To get round this i would have to programatically check whether the forms user has access to that resource (and so on).
I would prefer if you could use both. So if you are Windows authed, then when you request DisplayDoc.aspx file which reads a resource which has NTFS privilages set on it, you are denied (where appropriate). If you are forms authed, then this will have to be done programatically using some security rules which is fine. Without NTLM support in this way it makes it very difficult to use the cool impersonation features of IIS/.Net along with your AD implementation.
It's not often that I use SQL Server Windows Auth mode (mainly as it kills the connection pooling features), but in these cases where I would, then it would be tricky in this situation.
One "quick-fix" way around this which I believe would work would be to redirect to a NTLM protected web page (say by reading that this was a previously NTLM authed user from the forms cookie data section) when requesting a restricted resource and as you logged on once you should still have those privilages and so impersonation at that level would work fine. It's not something I like the sound of but it would work. I'd be interested in other people's experience of this, if you've tried.
A single identity por favor.
Steven.
As part of my day job as well as my own venture, i am doing a fair amount of work researching modelling techniques. I've used UML etc for a number of years, but the position i am in just now is the architecting of an existing system (moving from VB6 to .Net) as well as architecting my own software suite. This puts a new light on things as I need to know the whole end-to-end process a lot better.
The current part i am finding most tricky/interesting is modelling user interfaces. Now, when i say that i don't mean graphically (hell i shouldn't be allowed to dress myself never mind put colors on stuff) - no i mean the flow, controls, navigation, screens, dynamic content and so on. The things that you know can be defined for a UI without actually designing the thing.
Now, this is something i thought about when i worked at IBM Global Services a few year ago when working on a presentation layer architecture, using Xml, Xslt and so on - how to abstract the UI enough from the end users so that i could get down to what they wanted it to do, rather than just look like. It turned out there was nothing obvious to help and so i wrote my own ideas and developed a failrly simple solution (treating controls as objects, javascript methods as business rules, pages as screens and so on).
Doesn't look like much has moved on since. Having read "User experience storyboards: Building better UIs with RUP, UML, and use cases" by Jim Heumann at IBM Rational and then "UML Activity Diagrams:Detailing User Interface Navigation" by Ben Lieberman at Blueprint Technologies as well as some other pieces, i am still trying to figure out what is best.
You see, one sees Activity Diagrams as best, the other preferring Sequence and Communication diagrams. I can see benefits from both, but I don't want to create diagrams for the sake of diagrams, so i'd be interested in how other people see this. You could possibly argue that the activity diagrams would be useful for mapping out the general navigation around the site on a per use case basis, with the sequence diagrams looking specifically at each possible action in detail.
I still find it strange that they do not have a front end UML notation - if you know of some specs out there, please let me know as i'd be interested in looking at them.
This should be an interesting journey for me as i'm going from interviews with director level business folks (for my own venture) to business details for my day job's system (which has a significant number of transations per week) to the detailed technical stuff and everything along the way. And what's great is that .Net is going to be at the centre of both :) Look out for more each week.
steven
In follow up to yesterday's blog, someone contacted me from Adobe offering help and advice. You gotta wonder whether it would be worth them having "Adobe blogs" so they can follow their customers views and opinions!
What is seems is that the Windows 2000 box i had didn't have the latest version of the MSI installer and during the installation process, the installer i was using tried to contact the Adobe site for an update (i remember a a "win" directory in the adobe.com URL it was requesting). Seems this server was down ("Failed to connect to server" error in event log) and as this now seems to be up, there is no longer a problem and it installed first time :)
The key point from this however, is not the technology. It is that i was able to give and get feedback very easily to/from someone whose product i was installing - i would even have been happy to tell them the URL of the server giving me the problem - constant alerts for them. It gives the company good PR and they even get a (free) extra line of people watching for problems that may occur.
steven
More Posts
Next page »