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What I learned on my summer vacation
There are (at least) two truisms when you work for yourself:
You either have too much work, or almost none. and You can take a vacation anytime you want, as long as you're willing to spend just as much time apologizing to customers and struggling to catch up, and you're willing to not be paid for that time.
With those two in mind, we[1] decided to take a week off and head over to Yoho National Park. I decided to document this trip using this 21st century equivalent of the old elementary school teacher's favourite, "What I did on my summer vacation."...
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Silverlight inspiration
While these pages are in Flash, they can/should also be inspirational for those working in Silverlight. Probably even for WinForms and ASP.NET developers.
As the good Jon Galloway pointed out the other day, Silverlight developers should really think of what they are doing from the user perspective, not from the developer "oh, shiny!" perspective. Don't just create something that could be done in HTML with a little JavaScript. Doing this just creates a site that is less functional, less searchable and overall less worthwhile. (yes, I'm looking at you Download center beta)
There was a backlash against Flash when people added it...
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It takes a village
Or at least an effort.
I went down to the regional district office last week for one of their planning meetings. The masses had gathered to determine a vital matter for the three communities of the valley: Should there be a new gas station?
While the matter certainly wasn't anything of global proportions, it did bring one characteristic of the citizens here to light: Just how long have you been living here? One speaker after the other started their proposal with, "I've been here n years..." I imagine the message is supposed to add weight to their opinion.
You see and hear this...
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'Some other issues'
Don't get me wrong: I really like my Macbook Pro. Almost to unhealthy levels. I truly believe that it is the fastest laptop I've owned, while still being one of the lightest and the easiest to carry around.
However, Apple support boggles. Here's the *full* text of an update that came out today:
MacBook, MacBook Pro Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0
This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues.
The update package will install an updater application into the Applications/Utilities...
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10 goto 20: 20 goto 10
I know I'm just a caveman, but at the moment this world confuses me.
M forgot her Hotmail password. So, I decide to go through the wizard to help her get it back. They will kindly mail out a new password. To her Hotmail account. Who came up with that one?
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Bearable lightness of bandwidth
I decided to work off-site on Friday -- partly (I admit) to get away from the usual distractions at work (Miss Simon, and the three cats), but also to get off a network for the day.
The network gives me a "convenient" distraction most days: waiting for a Web project to start up? Check a few blogs. Need to grab a few graphics? Well, I'll just go to this Web site.... Ooo, shiny, I should look at this article. Finish a task? Well, I'll just check the Auction House to see how things are selling. Etc, etc. Just disconnecting for a...
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Review: The Canon
I just finished The Canon last night, and ... whoa. Great book.
The premise of The Canon is simple: most people have very limited knowledge or interest in science. That frightens and saddens me (and the author, Natalie Angier). To solve it, she has written a book to provide the basics of science and scientific thought. It's not anything that you wouldn't get from a decent high school or college education in the sciences, but many people don't have even that. However, her explanations are phenomenal -- she helped me understand a few concepts that I never did get throughout university....
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The version goes up before the features go in?
I am agog. Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access doesn't support rules? Wasn't that in the first version of OWA years ago?
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Look at all those Xes!
Congratulations to Chris, Dave, Jeff and everyone else over at The Code Project for what must have been a fairly herculean effort - rebuilding CP for ASP.NET while a few million people continued to hammer on it.
CP is still one of the best resources for just about any stripe of developer, be they native C++ wonks, .NET scribblers or even Java folk. Now, it joins the ranks of the most battered and heavily used ASP.NET sites -- hopefully to be a showcase for many weeks to come.
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Late to the party (again): Version Control for all your files
Like all good developers, I keep my source in version control (you are a good developer, aren't you?). However, I started to expand its use lately, keeping my home directory in version control (in my case Subversion). Yes, I know, that's nothing new, lots of people do it. I now understand why.
I tend to work on one of three machines, and I've always had the problem of keeping my work in sync on the machines. I've dabbled with Google Docs, SyncToy, RoboCopy and other solutions, but none of them have seemed all that satisfying and/or cross platform enough. Then...
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Leopard - one weekend in
Well, I've had an entire weekend to play with Leopard, so it's initial review time.
So far, the migration has seemed both painless and pointless. OK, maybe pointless would be the wrong word - perhaps "without any compelling need" would be better. I have to admit, I've turned on cover flow for my documents, and I flipped through them. Dazzling, and I suppose it could be useful were I still generating a lot of PowerPoint. I like the new dock, although I'm a little sad that I can't use Fan view because I keep my dock on the left hand side....
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Quote of the day
G got me started reading Heather Mallick's essays on the CBC Web site. She's usually amusing, enlightening and whatnot, even if I'm nowhere near as literate as she. I had to pull this out of today's though so that I can come back to it in the future:
People should consider talking to the last person they would ever consider.
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All knowledge is precious
I've been reading about the declining interest and knowledge of basic science, and it's bothering me. So, I'd just like to pass on a few recommendations for a few great "book larnin'" sites you may want to add to your daily intake.
LiveScience: Apart from being the site Stephen Colbert reads on his drive home to get angry, it's a great popular science news site, covering just about every topic imaginable. The articles are short, and sometimes are a little ... intentionally light. However, it's a great site to monitor and find topics you want to read...
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Lessons learned while teaching
Well, I finished providing my first training session since 2000 (or so). As always, I learned a lot of things (hopefully not as much as the students). The course was a custom, "Upgrading to .NET with VB" that I wrote for the customer.
Right now, I'm a little conflicted about the session. Personally, I think it was awful, but they seemed to be more or less happy with it. Most of my conflict is around the act of training in general. Before I had joined that company, training was the way I made most of my living: I travelled, teaching the...
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The reports of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated
A few weeks back, there was a bit of discussion on the "Death of Microsoft". More recently, none other than the mighty Martin Fowler seemed to imply that perhaps if it isn't dead, then perhaps just sleeping. Well, if anyone felt that way, after the responses to that post have started echoing, along comes "the TestDriven.net event." The volume, not to mention the acrymony, of the response has shown me (at least), that people care about .NET and what happens in its space.
I keep myself in cat food -- like many of you -- by programming on Microsoft tools for...
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Wha? Sexy pages on MSDN?
I see that there are a few new interesting pages on MSDN this morning. I can tell they're sexy, because they have a black background. And there are reflections! (Reflections are the new black). While their overall "Web 2.0"-osity is hampered by the MSDN chrome, it is interesting to see MSDN at least taking a chance at creating interesting pages.
Wonder who built those pages?
Which leads me to think a recurring thought while I was at said fish shoppe: Do visually interesting pages work for information? One of the requests we got a lot was for "sexier" pages on MSDN, particularly...
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All corporations are eeeeeeeveeeel!
Jay has an interesting post on Mike Gunderloy. I've been incredibly interested in Mike's migration out of Microspace as well since he announced. Partly because I'm a big fan of his[1] and partly as I've considered the possibility of making the same migration. It seems Mike felt the need to migrate out because he didn't like a few of the decisions Microsoft has made on Office and Vista. Jay counters with a few 'iffy' things Google has done, as if that makes it better. I'll go the one step further and add that I don't think you'd find any corporation...
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Link bait, part II
I've calmed down a bit (measuring to put in a new stair handrail can do that I guess), but I promised myself to add a bit more about the whole notion of "Microsoft is Dead". Now the assorted commenters are saying, "What he really meant is that no one fears Microsoft anymore."
While the mere mention of a new feature coming by Microsoft doesn't cause the market to pause (see Visi On), it is the company everyone compares themselves to, or that frequently strives to be bought by. One simply needs to compare the size of the Microsoft partner list...
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Taking the LinkBait
Is Microsoft Dead? Paul Graham decided to post a "yes" over the weekend, and all the cool kids are commenting. Apart from the fact that it's a pretty standard troll, and that I'm far from cool, I've decided to kick in my 2 cents (Canadian).
The basic thesis to Paul's post is that Microsoft has become irrelevant to the vast majority of computer users, and that other companies (notably Google) are now the prime motivators. That broadband and Ajax have conspired to level the playing field, removing the need for Windows and Office.
There is no doubt that Google rules the roost...