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<font size="2"><br />Musing on .Net</font>
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Pump up the volume ;-)
A car stereo that can kill you? Cool
Back when we were in high school, "bass-offs" -- contests where teenagers with pumped up car stereo sound systems would compete to see whose car could reach the loudest volume -- were a really big deal. And apparently they still are, but now they're called dB (as in decibel) drag racing, at least according to this article from Popular Science. The dB drag racer pictured at left has a Dodge Caravan with a 130,000 watt car stereo system with 72 amplifiers and nine subwoofers and needs 36 batteries for power. At maximum volume it can produce sounds loud enough to kill a person. Putting this in the "Portable Audio" category might be a stretch, as the car is so heavy that it can't actually be driven.
From Popular Science -- Troy Irving's 18-year-old Dodge Caravan has a heck of a sound system: 72 amplifiers -- you got it, 72 -- and 36 big 16-volt batteries to put out the 130,000 watts of power needed to rumble his nine 15-inch subwoofers. -
Bill Gates' take on subjects from spam to Mozambique
Gates on...
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BBC has the blog fever
Good news ! most of the BBC has RSS feeds. Check the list here -
Blogs have legal protection -- at least in the US
"The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily. "One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."
Source: Wired -
Giant blob baffles marine scientists
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Data Access Application Blocks are great
The Application Blocks are absolutly essentials tools to implement in your applications.
I found the Data Block very useful in my CMS project.
I am going to look now at the other Application Blocks to see how they can be useful for my projects. -
Official start for Dscribe ... now !
Ok folks, here we go I launch my project dScribe now.
At the bottom of the article, you will find the links to the different files required for this CMS project.
I wish good luck to this new initiative ;-)
To introduce dScribe, I will just repeat here the introduction of my first story (please don't flame me for some mispellings, I am not a technical writer ;-)). -
dScribe project
Sorry for the delay, but I still have to catch up with some important business issues !
Anyway the first article on the CMS project dScribe is on the way.
I hope to publish it tonight, if everything goes well.
Otherwise, you will have to be patient until tomorrow.
Of course, this is a kind of new experience, the idea is that the project going on, I will be happy to take in consideration the different opinions I will receive.
I know already I will probably frustate some C# gurus, but knowing I can do it in C#, I feel really more comfortable to do so in VB. Anyway at the end of this experience, I will seriously consider the tranlation in C#.
And what's about Cobol# ?. No I am just kidding :-)
Just a note on something totally different, my fight against spyware and other trojans.
Well I am not sure to win the war but surely a decisive battle after installing ZoneAlarm, and also the new google toolbar v2, with the popups blocker. -
dScribe - Architecture
dScribe has a standard 3 tier architecture. The Solution I built is articulated around 3 projects:
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Build a CMS -- Project dScribe
Today is a big event for me. I decide to launch a new initiative on my blog.
I hope it will work as planned ;-)
OK, here we go.
For my project Scoilnet, using my personal experience on CMS(Content Management System just in case you still don't know;-)), I was confronted with many options.
Because I still don't believe (don't flame me ;-)) in the big CMS tools for medium websites, I decided after a long brainstorming session (with myself, easier to make decisions) to jump in the DIY CMS on my own.
Don't misunderstand the project. I am not going to compete with Vignette or other big cheeses !
Well it's not really a premiere for me, but in .Net, surely yes.
I studied and read a lot of books, websites, of course and analyzed all the aspects of the project.
Because so many marvelous things around us were created by some talented folks, I decided to follow their footsteps, and to develop my solution based on the excellent book Building a Content Management System written by Stephen R.G. Fraser.
As I said already this is an excellent reading. Because I am also more comfortable with VB, I had to rewrite a lot of things from C#.
I say rewrite because I am not interested by just 'copy and paste', I really want to do my own stuff.
So this CMS is loosely based on the book content.
The other different thing is that I like the concept of N-tier architecture, and for that I included in my project the Data Access Application Block from Microsoft.
I will have the presentation layer and the business rules separated from the data layer
Using this, it's surely more job, but much more readable code at the end of the day.
So now, this is working smoothly, and I am now at the moment where everything start to be clear in my mind about what I can achieve with the tool.
Rather than just publishing a big zip file with all the codes, I want to innovate and I am going to publish dScribe (Ok OK not great name but I like to name things) brick by brick.
I'm going to start talking about the Workflow, followed by the Content creation, and so on.
I have no clue about the number of stories I will have at the end, but it's surely an exciting project (for me! And I hope for you too).
Of course, feel free to comment and if you have some ideas or resources to improve dScribe, let me know.
So the first part in a couple of hours, about building a nice expandable menu for the Workflow part.