Archives
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Big Bang #2
Ed Kaim's latest post is going to change will change the face of every industry forever.
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How Netscape Beat Microsoft
Scoble mentioned this article in his blog last night. I reads like Linux Universe hired former Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf to write this one.
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Phone Company...
.... I'll just leave it at that.
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Holy Acronym Batman!
As I mentioned last night, we are moving into a new office. Along with this move comes the purchasing of new development machines. Now it has been some time since I actually purchased a myself, so I was in for quite a shock. And after spending 3 hours working on a PO I came to a conclusion; we must end this acronym madness!
I mean it guys, we have gone way overboard in the naming department. I can't for the life of me tell whether I'm purchasing a PC here or ordering a medical procedure. It is no wonder that the rest of the world looks at us like we are lobotomized martians.
I know that we spend so much time surrounded by this technology that we simply get used to the massive collection of acronyms. And I'm sure it as true for the hardware guys as it is for us software geeks. But I've now seen what it looks like from the outside, and it ain't pretty.
Oh, and does anyone know what an AOPEN MX440/128/DX9 is? Is it anything like a vasectomy?
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Hello, Man-Eating Samurai Monkey Here
I got this off of Savant's web site today... I will kick your monkey butt!
Kaje is a Man-Eating Samurai Monkey with a Battle Rating of 8.9
Unleash your own Food-Eating Battle Monkey -
Ug...
Know what the problem with 3:00AM is?
I'm awake for it.
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Windows, that other kind
We decided a little while back to add a developer to the company. Until now it was just me and some contractors to pick up the slack. But as the customer base has grown and the decision to move to .NET was made, it became clear that I needed real full-time help.
Now, for the last 4 years I have worked out of my home. And for the first 2 it was fantastic. For the last 2 however... Lets just say that my cat is a poor conversationalist and the dogs don't seem to care about who was booted off of Survivor. Seriously, working at home full time is lonely; damn lonely.
So not only are we adding someone, but we also rented office space to house the two of us. It is a very nice space in a beautiful old building (built in 1834) with hammered tin ceilings and oak trimmed walls. Oh yeah, and HUGE windows with stained glass at the top. Windows that were quite dirty and that I decided I was more than willing to just clean myself.
Funny thing about stained glass, it is made up of some very small pieces. Insanely small pieces in fact. There I am, straddling the top of a ladder with a bottle of Windex in the right hand and a tooth-brush in the left, doing my best to scrub microscopic pieces of colored glass. But I did it! All the hard work was over, the windows were clean! And so I stepped down from my ladder, looked up and my window and thought to myself: “Hmmm, doesn't look any different at all”.
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If we build it.... it will fall down and crush us to death.
Joel linked over to this article today. It is a worthy read.
After you have read it you'll understand why when someone gives me that line about “software development should be like construction”; I tell them it already is.
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Compact Framework
I've been working with the Compact Framework the last few days and I'm really in love with it. Talk about simplifying PDA development. Wow.
In a matter of hours I had a simple UI that could connect to our existing Web Service API, search for a customer record, and then edit that record. And most of that time was spent working on the UI (I'm still getting used to such a small screen area to work with). Pretty sweet if you ask me.
The only thing I wish they could enhance is the events for the controls. More precisely, it would be nice if each control supported a Click event. Currently most do not, so you need to do some playing in order to get a click-able image for example. Not really a big deal, but it would have saved me some extra work last night.
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Toys
I'm sure this is old news to most, but I don't frequent ThinkGeek to often. On a whim I went there today and found my next watch. Very cool.
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Is That Light Over There?
There seems to be more and more optimism on the job front. I've started to notice more job postings recently and while I'm not expert, it seems to me to be a good sign for unemployment. Charles Lieberman seems to think that it isn't just recovering, but doing so quickly. He has an interesting article over at CNBC. If nothing else, it is nice to see something other than the doom-n-gloom articles of the last few years.
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Now For A Good Week
After the New England Patriots were summarily shellacked by the Buffalo Bills last Sunday, I felt rather gray the entire week. There is nothing worse than getting all hyped-up for football and having your team look like they are a pop-warner squad, post-sugar high. But thanks to the Eagles, I feel a better week coming on.
My condolences to the Eagle fans out there. Two weeks of lack-luster football can be hard to swallow. But as they say, better you than I my friend.
Now if those damn Red Sox would just please stop getting the flue...
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More On ImageLists
The other day I blogged about my frustrations with the ImageList control. My knee-jerk reaction was to call for un-sealing the ImageList and many people were quick to point out why it was sealed in the first place (some not so politely I might add). After some more thought on the topic, I think I may have found a way to leave the ImageList sealed, but still allow me to solve my problem.
The ImageList holds a collection of Images and these images are typically stored in an ImageStream object. One of the things you can do with an ImageStream from an ImageList is pass it to another ImageList control. So when I talk about creating a "Global ImageList", what I'm really asking for is a "Global ImageStream".
The problem now is that the ImageStream property isn't available at design time. If the .NET team were make it available, I could point it to my global ImageStream and have it available at both run and design time, solving my problem completely.
Comments?
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ImageLists
In keeping with my tradition of simplifying my point, I've trimmed down my 30 page manifesto on ImageLists to the following:
Sealed ImageLists suck and I'm getting ulcers from working with them.Ok, so maybe I should explain a bit more here. I have a rather large application with a rather large number of windows. Each of these windows has a toolbar and menu of some kind. And more importantly, they all use the same collection of images (of the 100 images in my collection, 60% are used in 90% of the windows). And thanks to someone on the .NET team, I'm forced to either maintain a separate ImageList for each of my windows or loose all design-time functionality of the ImageList.I'm not looking for the world, just a shared ImageList. If I could just build my own UserControl that inherits from ImageList, I could then add my images to the UserControl and in turn use that control on my forms. Then I need only maintain a single ImageList that every form could have immediate access too. It would be ImageList Nirvana. But no, I'm get to remain stuck in ImageList Hell because someone at Microsoft deemed me to dangerous and sealed the damn class. Thanks...