Category: Uncategorized

About two months ago, on the day I returned from Australia, we got a phone call a really terrible person who happened to be a realtor representing our landlords. She informed us that the landlords intended to sell the apartment, and that they’d like to give us the first crack, before it went on the market. I had several discussions while I was down in Australia about property, buying a house and what not, so it was on my mind when I got the call. It seemed like destiny. We didn’t get it, mostly because of the evil, devil-lady realtor.

In retrospect, I’m glad the realtor was such a terrible, terrible person, because the property wasn’t so good, and it wasn’t going to get any better. (We don’t live in the best of neighbourhoods in Victoria.) Nevertheless, the real estate market being what it is here, the place sold in a day; so we had to move, again. This has been the fifth move in as many years. We were lucky to get a place that was literally down the street from our last place, and it’s nicer, so it’s not that bad a deal. I’m now absolutely sure that moving is the positively the worst thing ever. This time, we decided to spend a modest sum on cleaners: that was the best money I ever spent. I might “outsource” more of the work next time I move, like packing. One conclusion I came to while moving: I can’t pack irregularly shaped things. Books, putting little boxes into bigger boxes, placing my computers and their parts in their original packaging: all of this I’m fine with. But as soon as I’m confronted with knick-knacks or the can opener, I tilt my head, try the irregular shape in a few places in the box and remind myself to do it later, ’cause the box isn’t going to be filled properly and I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT…

Anyway, as soon as I found out we had to move, my blogging frequency and my interest in writing entries took a steep decline. We’ve been moved in for a month this Friday, and I’m only just thinking of things that I want to post. I’ve thought about why I don’t blog as much as I want. Here’s some of the reasons:

• I want this to be a largely technical blog; this means XML in the content or code samples. .Text is not setup very well for XML content, especially if it’s formatted. It’s mostly the shitty text box that it comes with, but upgrading to Community Server Blogs is not going to happen. It’s supposed to be easier and more powerful, but I couldn’t get the damn thing working at all. So I’m not happy with my blogging software. I haven’t had the time to investigate any others, but I might just take the opportunity to actually learn ASP.NET and write my own.
• There are things I want to say, but I’m either too lazy or too busy or I think no one would possibly care about what I want to post, so I don’t do it. Part of it is because I censor myself: there are things that I’ve kept off-limits. Having those limits makes it harder to post about things that I didn’t restrict. So I’m going to try to not impose those limits.
• This site is butt fucking ugly. I don’t like that. I’m not inclined to make posts ’cause I don’t want to look at the site. This has to a lot to do with the first point; it’s another limitation with .Text. The style I picked was one of the only ones that works in Firefox, my browser of choice.

 

 

Haven’t had one of these in a while:

Take the quiz: “Which American City Are You?”

Cleveland
You are blue collar and Rock n Roll. You Work hard and party harder.

I’ve started giving some serious attention to the Tech Previews Microsoft put out for .NET 2.0 and VS 2005. I’ve mostly been using VC# Express: overall, I think it’s worthy of having around, even given the state it’s in. It’s like Snippet Compiler on steroids…and wolverine thyroid gland. If they’re retailing it for $20, I’d consider getting it.

There’s a lot I like about the new framework, and I know I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s in there. Lately, I’ve been playing with the new Uri classes, or trying to. The whole point of this post is to point out the complete lack of documentation for the new BCL classes. That’s not correct: there are plenty of articles on using the sparkly new features of the framework: generics, anonymous delegates, etc; but there are absolutely no examples for the new classes added to the BCL. For instance, UriFactory is a new abstract class that, from what I can tell in Reflector, can parse new uri schemes that come along, thus making Uri a little more future proof.. And yet: I have no idea how to use it. Seeing what the code does in Reflector doesn’t help me with how I’m supposed to use the class in my code.

I’ve found the MSDN docs to be pretty good about providing examples, at least a good starting point. But with these Tech Previews, it’s quite similar to an open source project. There is almost no documentation, so you have to stumble around and discover what you can on your own. Sometimes, that’s fun, but other times, like now, I just want to get on with it and do some work. Part of me likes the new, transparent Microsoft with their tech previews and their blogs (actually, all of me likes the blogs), but I have my doubts if it really helps anybody except consultants and writers and makes MS look good. With VS and Longhorn, all we’ve seen is, I’d say, MS more transparently push the dates back further and further.

Hopefully, with Beta 2 coming out in late January late March, the docs will be up to the quality we’re used to from Microsoft.

I was going to wait until the full release, but I couldn’t help myself. This is an app that I use multiple times, daily, so I just had to find out what was coming. The little improvements in the UI really make this a compelling release. The newsfeeds are great and work with feeds or categories. I think that’s by far the best new feature; especially useful for link feeds or bloggers who post quick, funny posts. I usually only check them when there’s some down time, ’cause it involves so much clicking or typing. Well, not anymore! I think if I hadn’t been running the beta, I would have missed this hilarious site [via SideShow’s link blog].

Other improvements include ordering of comments by time in ascending order (they were in descending order before, so it took me a while to figure out that they had switched it). There are still a few bugs with the new column layout tools but it’s looking pretty kick ass. Hopefully they’ll pull the NNTP UI elements; I think that’ll just confuse users, given Dare’s announcement of the beta.

This thing rocks though. If you’re not an RSSBandit user yet, I encourage a look. Download it! I command you!