Sorry, another test, but this time I ll give you something to see... … View Post »

If there s one thing I ve learned from my two years immersed in an all Mac sanctum is that there s a place in this world for both Microsoft and Apple... As I sit and listen to my team fawn over the latest creation of Steve Jobs I feel compelled to defend Microsoft to the death... It s the old school-yard my bike/computer/favorite TV show/Dad is better than yours argument... Strangely though when I hear people fawning over Microsoft I feel compelled to stick my foot firmly in the Apple camp... Recently, in a local Borders book store I stood in line waiting for a coffee (that still sounds strange to me, the combination of book store and cappuccino) when I spied a chap immersed in his Dell... I suddenly had an overpowering urge to run up and swipe the notebook from the table... The idea is that when you play a song the Genius feature will show you other similar songs in your library... You see, just as Apple was something of a subculture among nerds the world over prior to Mac OS X, Zune is now something of a growing subculture among music fans... … View Post »

Microsoft s technologies aren t something I get to use in my day to day work anymore and the amount of work I do for Izea at home leaves me precious little time to dive into anything in detail these days... was always an intimidating framework to get up to speed on... framework you have extensive tools for everything from industrial grade crypto, through Web development, data access, threading, system security, serialization the list goes on... I started digging through old code last night and found two ideal candidates... Vault is an application I wrote way back in 2002... s XML support and strong encryption... I ve decided to see what I can do to overhaul it and give it a shiny new WPF user interface... I m a big fan of David Allen s Getting Things Done methodology, so I wrote a small application some years back (2002 again I think) called Davenista to manage GTD contexts, projects, action items and so on... … View Post »

I ve been trying to help some friends and family find flights from the UK to Orlando for next week to come to a family event... I went to Virgin Atlantic s site and clicked on Last Minute Deals to see what they had on offer... To me, a last minute deal should be an attempt by an airline to make money on a seat that would otherwise be going vacant... The flight is still going to take place after all, they are not going to cancel the whole thing because 10 or so seats are empty, so why not throw up a stonking good bargain in the hopes that you ll recoup at least some of the cost... $1900 dollars for a seat that would otherwise just be vacant, for a seat that without someone in it would just be a foot rest for someone with undoubtedly smelly feet?... How on earth can Airlines expect to beat a recession with stuff like this going on... … View Post »

The C# advocates have done a great job at making .NET... development synonymous with that language... Indeed, most online code examples you ll find for .NET... I started looking through the VB docs last night after seeing an interview on Channel9 with Amanda Silva at TechEd... Code Snippet 1: Dim author = _ 2: Author 3: Name Pete Wright / Name 4: / Author /PRE... You can t do that in C# at all (although you could get close with a nasty multi-line string and then various casting and object instantiationtricks)... Type Inference, initializers, anonymous types and XML literal support are just a few of the new features I stumbled across last night, but there s a lot more... It s verbosity also makes it an ideal counter to the terseness of C# for many... … View Post »

Django has gained considerable ground over the past year to become one of the predominant Python web development frameworks... Despite all the noise, and even a couple of published books, Django hasn t actually hit a 1.0 release milestone yet... This isn t ready for production use just yet, but Bennett also claims the project is on track with it s release plan and 1.0 Beta will launch in just a few short weeks on August 5th... So, if you have want to learn more about what s coming up in the first official release (as opposed to preview) of Django, head on over and take a look... As is common with other Python web frameworks, Django is a combination of a number of best of breed libraries covering database access, administration interfaces, view templating, security, AJAX integration and a whole lot more... … View Post »

Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb posted a piece lamenting the recent spate of outages over at Amazon S3, the poster child of data in the cloud... There s an old adage with computers that the machine is really only as fast as the slowest component... Similarly, software is only as fast as the slowest component (either software or hardware) that it uses... When you start writing applications that are effectively an orchestration of services spread all over the globe your application will only ever be as reliable/fast/etc as the weakest link... … View Post »

This is sure to make the legions of software freedom advocates rejoice... Stowe Boyd reported today that the US Patent office is considering invalidating thousands of software patents, which is sure to be seen as a huge victory for the anti-patent movement... A patent generally allows the inventor of something to protect his work and profit from it... If you go home tonight and invent a pocket sized fusion reactor to power your car using nothing but the fumes from decaying vegetables, you can patent that... There have been patents filed in the software arena for everything from a link on screen that can be clicked, to lists of stuff in a database, to a button that enables a user to instantly purchase something without having to go through a shopping cart/checkout process... The problem is that many of the patents out there are, including most of the ones above, are quite frankly ridiculous... If you go home tonight and tackle a thorny programming problem and decide that you will, in code, store a list of things in a database then you just violated someone elses patent... it doesn t matter that you never read the patent, never got inspiration from it, nor that you invented your own solution that happens to be similar to someone elses, you owe someone a lot of money... … View Post »

When Twitter goes down they post relentlessly on the issue blaming everything from poor management to shoddy tech skills... When on demand systems like those offered by Google or Amazon experience a glitch, Arrington and cronies love to revel in the drama of the whole thing... We in the business call that having issues ... … View Post »