The UI of the Future

At yesterdays IPSA meeting (http://ipsaonline.org) our local MVP Todd Miranda (http://www.nxtdimension.com/blog/) gave a great presentation on XAML. My coworker Bin and I both felt it was an hour of our time well invested. I don’t know of many other ways we could have learned as much with the same investment of our time.

Coincidentally just yesterday I was in the book store and picked up a book on AJAX (Introduction AJAX for ASP.Net by Dino Esposito). Not too long ago we rolled out the AJAX for ASP.Net libraries on all of our ASP.Net servers, and I’ve wanted to dig into it.

It got me to thinking about user interfaces and the technology we used to create them. Not too long ago it was all text based. Just recently we showed a young collegue and old DOS based application still in use. Her reaction was “Did people actually used to use that?”

Windows made it better, with a standard set of controls that we could easily drop onto our forms. As Todd pointed out in his presentation today though, any attempt to change the basic appearance of these items could take thousands of lines of code.

With the introduction of XAML, I firmly believe we are on the verge of a new revolution in user interface design. It seems to have been a bit slow to start, but all it will take is that one “killer app” done in XAML to rock the boat. The recent introduction of Silverlight (formerly WPF/E) and it’s use of XAML will only serve to increase it’s popularity.

So where will we be in 10 years? I think under the covers compilers will be generating a lot of AJAX code, but I’m not so sure that we’ll be coding a lot of Javascript to deal with it. I feel a lot will be handled for you.

Of the two, right now I’d say XAML will be the more predominant player. I think the code generation tools will improve, but I feel a good, basic understanding of what’s going on with XAML will be crucial to every developer.

Microsoft Goes Open Source

For years critics have been blasting Microsoft over their proprietary standards and applications. Over the last few years, however, Microsoft has slowly been answering those critics by adopting internet standards instead of insisting on their own, and releasing more things to the community.

The ability to save Office 2007 documents as XPS comes to mind, as does the ability for CardSpace to use open standards like OpenID. Now, in their next step they are embracing the open source community through the addition of a new Open Source page within Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/default.mspx

On this site you can find all sorts of information and resources for those wanting to do open source projects using Microsoft software. Links to articles, websites, and the Visual Studio Express editions can be found. I won’t try to reiterate the entire site here, but if you have an interest in Open Source it’s well worth your time to have a look.

In addition is another site called Port 25. It is the outreach site for Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab. Some really cool stuff here on Linux interoperability, as well as the new Dynamic Language support such as IronRuby and IronPython.

http://port25.technet.com/

I can tell right now I’m going to be spending a lot of time on Port 25.

Finally, I should mention a site that’s been around for a bit by the name of CodePlex. It’s Microsoft’s site to host open source project done by both Microsoft folks and those of us in the community. (Well, I say us, one day I keep swearing I’ll find time to crank out some cool project and put it on CodePlex.)

http://www.codeplex.com/

Currently they show about 2000 projects right now, so there should be a lot for you to check out.

No, I don’t foresee Vista going open source anytime soon. But I really have to hand it to Microsoft. Somewhere over the last few years they realized they weren’t the only game in town. Since then they have really made an effort to “play nice” with other communities, and embrace many new open standards. The creation of their Microsoft Open Source site is just another step in that journey.

Arcane Fun Fridays: The Eighth Dimension

I realize the entries this week on facts and dimensions can be enough to give even the most stalwart geek a pain in the pocket protector. So allow me to wrap the week yet stay on the topic of dimensions with a movie suggestion:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

(http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Buckaroo-Banzai-Across-Dimension/dp/B00005JKEX )

This fun little romp from 1984 has a large collection of now well known stars such as John Lithgow, Peter Weller, Christopher Lloyd, and Jeff Goldblum. The hero, Buckaroo Banzai is a brain surgeon, particle physicist, and rock star. His experiments in the eighth dimension land earth right in the middle of an interplanetary war, and that’s just the first few minutes of the movie.

You have to watch this several times in order to catch all of the jokes and subtle humor. I think the funniest line is from Lithgow, playing an apparently insane but in reality alien possessed Dr. Lizardo, who keeps telling everyone “”Laugh-a while you can, monkey boy! You all are-a gonna die!”

After a week of sifting throught facts and dimensions, it’s great to be able to relax and spend a little time with Buckaroo in the eighth dimension. And even if you don’t get to see the movie, at least remember Buckaroo Banzai’s advice…

“No matter where you go… there you are.”

Standard disclaimer: I don’t make any money or have any financial affiliation with this flick or anyone who sells it. Just a cool movie. So there, monkey boy!

Being a Better Developer… In 6 Months

Scott Hanselman’s show this week was killer. (http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=90 ). In it, Scott and Carl discuss a thread going around the internet, namely how to become a better developer in six months. They had some excellent ideas, some of which they were passing along from other posters, some were theirs. The post that seems to have started the whole thread was done buy a guy named Justice Gray, back in April. http://graysmatter.codivation.com/HowIAmBecomingABetterDeveloperPart1OfInfinity.aspx or http://shrinkster.com/qvx . Just recently he posted a follow up at http://graysmatter.codivation.com/AnUpdateOnGoals.aspx or http://shrinkster.com/qvy .

I like the whole concept, and am going to implement my own version of it. And the first step is to declare what I’m going to do, so without further ado…

I’m going to start by reading a chapter a week from a book. Now, I know that doesn’t sound like much compared to the plans of others to read a book a week, but it leads to my next step…

I will work all the code samples in the book. Reading is one thing, but doing is even better. Personally, I find I get a better understanding when I actually type in the code samples and run them. And not just run what’s in the book, but tweak it, experiment with it. And then what will I do with my knowledge?

I will teach what I learn. The best way to learn is to teach. I’ll blog, talk with my co-workers over lunch, give presentations, but in some way I will give back what I learned. But I won’t stop this learning process with just books.

I’ll increase my listening of podcasts or videocasts. I recently got an inexpensive MP3/WMA player, which I load up with podcasts. This left the 1 gig card on my iPaq free, which I’ve loaded some videos on. Since the iPaq is portable, it increases my ability to watch these videos. Since I’ve blogged so much about podcasts in the past, I shan’t continue talking about them.

I’ll create at least one new presentation and give it to a user group. Again, the best way to learn is to teach, and there’s no better place than with your peers at your local user group.

I’ll look at the source code for an open source project. This is one I really loved from the show. Look at someone else’s code, see how it works, step through it. Right now I’ve got several in mind, first is the Paint.Net project ( http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html ) since I think the graphics would be interesting, and graphics aren’t something I normally get to play with at work.

Next is RSSBandit, http://www.rssbandit.org with the source at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96589&package_id=103276 .The networking concepts in there should be quite useful in many instances. Finally is SharpDevelop (http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ ). It’d be interesting to see how an IDE works. I’m not sure which of the three I’ll look at, but these are on my short list.

I will learn a brand new or little used technology. There’s a lot of new technology out there, or tech I don’t read much about. Working a lot with the SQL Server BI (Business Intelligence) tools, the upcoming SQL Server 2008 sounds interesting. Of course there’s Visual Studio 2008. And XAML promises to be a hot topic, between WPF and Silverlight I think this will eventually be a “must” for everyone. Those are just some examples, find something that fascinates you and go learn.

The final two items on my list are suggestions from my manager, who my kids have dubbed “Mighty Mike”. I thought these were really good.

I will learn more about the business. No, not the business of programming, although that’s certainly important. I’m talking about what my company does. Most developers aren’t in a job where their company produces software. Instead our programming efforts help support the production of some product, which our company sells. I will learn more about that product, how it’s produced, what processes apply, and what the difficulties are. And finally….

I will get to know my customers. By that, I mean the people who are using, or are affected by the software I write. For most of us, those will be other employees of our company. Meet these people. Get to know them. Buy them a cup of coffee. Take a non-IT coworker to lunch every so often. Setup a half hour meeting with them every so often to learn and understand more about their job. Find out what their pain points are, find ways to solve their problems, offer them solutions to make their jobs better.

Whew, that’s quite the list. It will take a lot of balancing of my time to carry this off, but at the end of it I’ll be a better programmer.

To wrap this up, I’m supposed to tag four other developers, to challenge them as well. So here goes…

First is Jeff Barnes, http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/default.aspx . Payback time! (He knows why, heh heh heh).

Next is Todd Miranda, Birmingham’s newest MVP. Congrats Todd! http://blog.nxtdimension.com/

I think my next victim will be my brother-in-law, Dougal. Even though he’s not fortunate enough to work with .Net, he at least got to do some cool stuff with WordPress. http://dougal.gunters.org/

My final pick is that perfect blend of lunatic and coding genius, Mark Miller. It’s his fault I got deeply involved in coding again. I was thinking of getting into project management, but after seeing his talk at VSLive 2005 I got so enthused about coding again I jumped in with both feet and here I am. So how about it Miller, put down that McGriddle and blog something! http://www.doitwith.net/

An now I challenge you, the reader of this post to go out and be a better developer. Post a link to your development plan. If you don’t have a blog of your own, feel free to post your plan below. Look at others, take the best of the ideas that will work for you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do!

Arcane Thoughts: Privacy in 2054

You might not have known it from the blog but I took last week off. Vacation! I actually took a little time away from the computer and caught up on some movie watching (made some good finds in the five dollar bin at my local big box discount store).

One movie I saw was Minority Report, based on the Phillip K. Dick story. In short, it’s the year 2054, and there are some precognitive people who can see murders before they happen, which allows the hero to stop the murder before it happens.

Whats interesting though is the optical scanners that blanket the city. As the hero walks down a street, optical scanners are constantly scanning his eyes. Wall mounted billboards greet him by name, asking him if he’d like to buy more of whatever it was they were selling. One even asks how he’s enjoying a previous purchase, mentioning they have a sale or something.

In addition the scanners track his movements as he moves through the city. They control admission to buildings, his purchases, etc.

Even though they movie takes place in the year 2054, I suspect we’re a lot closer than 47 years from this sort of targeted marketing. Everytime I go to Amazon, it has a list of recommendations based on my past purchases. Google gives you targeted advertising based on your current search.

Is this a good thing? I can’t say I’ve decided yet. On one hand I do appreciate having relavent ads. On the other hand, I don’t know that I’m comfortable with not only being tracked, but who might have access to that data. For example, perhaps I don’t want my insurance company to know I’m doing MSN Live searches for home remedies for back pain.

It’s not just the web that’s tracking you. How much info is being logged from just using your software? I have quite a bit of software that calls home looking for updates on a regular basis. At the back of my mind I often wonder what other info is getting passed back and forth.

Cranky Geeks latest episode (#71 as I write this, http://www.crankygeeks.com/2007/07/episode_71_how_vulnerable_are.php ) has a very interesting discussion on the entire topic as I write this.

So am I worried for nothing? Should I care if Amazon (or anyone else) knows I like books about .Net? Are we doomed as a society to “big brother”? Let me know your thoughts.

Arcane Tidbits

Today I thought I’d cover a few items that I found interesting, but were not in and of themselves enough info for an extensive blog post. I call these Arcane Tidbits.

First up is an interesting new Trojan horse that is attacking computers. When you reboot the computer, something pops up that looks alarmingly like the Microsoft Windows Activation screen. It tells you another user has activated your copy of Windows, and demands you enter credit card info as a way to validate your identity, of course reassuring you that you won’t be charged. If you fail to do so it shuts down your PC. PC Magazine has an interesting writeup as well as a link on how to remove this pest at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2147608,00.asp .

Another interesting story from PC Magazine, the first known spam sent out as a PDF file is now in circulation. Read more about it at http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2007/07/more_pdf_spam.php . To quote Patrick Norton (http://dl.tv/ ) “Remember kids, never ever ever open attachments from people you don’t know, and sometimes even from people you do.”

If you’ve been working in the .Net space for a bit, you’ve probably heard of the new Microsoft Cardspace that is part of .Net 3.0. However, you may be looking for a good basic intro to give to your boss or non-programming friends like system administrators to help them understand it. In episode 98 of Security Now, Steve Gibson gives a nice basic overview of what Cardspace is and how it works.

You can this episode at http://www.twit.tv/sn98 . Steve does get a bit technical, so I don’t know I’d suggest it for your dad (unless your dad is a former CIO like mine) but for your boss, DBAs, or System Admins it’s a good intro on what it is and how it works without getting into the programming. You might want to listen to show 95 (http://www.twit.tv/sn95 ) on OpenID first, as OpenID and Cardspace go hand in hand.

Next a bit of a personal note, I feel like a kid in a Web 2.0 candy store lately. You see, up until this week I’ve been using Hughes DirecWay to get my internet via Satellite. The speed was slow, about 700k down, but better than dial up. The downside is their FAP, or Fair Access Policy. Now I was spending nearly 90 bucks a month for their Professional Level service. Under that plan, I would get FAPped if I downloaded “too much”.

And how much is too much? Good question, I tried to find that out myself and was met with evasive technical answers. The best I could determine, based upon the elusive answers given to me by several tech support personnel, was somewhere around 50 megabytes an hour. Yes, you are reading that correct, 50 megabytes an hour, or about 1 podcast.

And what happened if I downloaded to much? Well I got FAPped as they call it, my bandwidth was choked back to a speed so slow it made dial up attractive. And forget doing VPN on it, it won’t work.

In order to get the speed out of the satellite, Hughes compresses the packets before they go up and down to the satellite via the dish. With VPN however all traffic is encrypted, so it can’t see the packet to compress it. Oh, the sales people don’t mention this, and one even told me it “should work” and I have to admit that once, just once, I actually made a VPN connection to the office. It was so slow though I had time to drive to the office to see the results of a single keypress.

Well happy days are here as AT&T ran DSL to my house last week. The installer could not have been nicer and more professional, and they even called a few days later to follow up and make sure everything was still working. I admit I was a bit dubious when AT&T bought BellSouth, but so far they look like they really have their act together.

My rather long winded point is I now have an 8 megabit connection to the net, with no limitations on bandwidth. No more FAPping! No more latency! No more 90 bucks a month for a service I’m not allowed to use! I’m now free to go explore all the cool Web 2.0 stuff like Skype, YouTube, and more. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about my experiences, but if you know of some cool high bandwidth technologies I can go play with drop a comment and let me know.

And finally, my local Discovery store is closing (sniffle). True there’s still the online store, but it was a lot of fun to go in and browse. I picked up two books I’ve had my eye on for a while at a deep discount. One is Mythbusters: Don’t Try This At Home Unless We Tell You To. It’s a book of experiments you can do with your kids, I intend to give it to my daughters and we can have some fun with it.

The second book is also about Mythbusters, and talks about the founding of the show and covers the stories behind 30 of their most popular myths. I’ve already looked through the first chapter, this looks to be a fun read, and with discounts I bought both books for a mere 20 bucks. You might want to check your local Discovery store as well.

And there you go a few little tidbits for your reading pleasure.

Standard Disclaimer: I receive no considerations financial or otherwise from any of the business or products mentioned in today’s post, and being a geek think the Mythbusters are really really cool.

Arcane Fun Fridays: Photographic Podcasts

Readers will know I’m a big fan of digital photography, it’s a hobby of mine I like to relax with. For example, here’s a pic I took in downtown Birmingham (the one in Alabama, not England).

I’m also a big beliver in podcasts, I listen to many to educate myself in the .Net world. It occurred to me there’s probably some good photographic podcasts as well, and sure enough I found some good ones. I thought I’d pass along some of the one’s I’ve been listening to, for your listening delight.

The Candid Frame – The host interviews photographers to find out how they got started, their techniques, etc.

http://www.thecandidframe.com/

Martin Bailey Photography – Martin shares his techniques with us.

http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/podcastmp3.php

Jeff Curto’s Camera Position – Jeff concentrates on the creative side of photography

http://www.cameraposition.com/

Tips from the Top Floor – Each week Chris has a new technique for us. You should also check out the forums, they are very active.

http://www.tipsfromthetopfloor.com/

Photocast Network – This is a central site for many shows including the ones I’ve listed above. They also have a few other shows I want to check out but haven’t had the opportunity to as of yet.

You should definitely check out the “Focus Ring” episodes. These are shows where the hosts from several of the network’s shows get together on a single podcast to discuss various topics. By far these have been my favorite episodes so far.

http://www.photocastnetwork.com/

There you go, some podcasts to listen to while you’re out playing with that new camera of yours this weekend!

VirtualBox – USB Support

So far I haven’t had a lot of success getting USB devices working under VirtualBox with XP as the guest. Perhaps it has something to do with Vista being my host?

I’ve been testing using some USB keys, and while VirtualBox seems to know they are present, the message never seems to make it into my guest OS of XP. I intend to keep working with it, USB support would be one of the most compelling things to make me start using VirtualBox as my primary virtualization platform. However, as of right now USB support doesn’t seem quite up to prime time.

Arcane Reasons for Data Warehousing

I may have mentioned that of recent I have been doing a lot of work in the Data Warehousing arena. Today I met with some IT folks from another branch of the company who are considering a reporting strategy for their area. One of the people I was meeting with asked me “With so much data available, how do you decide what data to put in the warehouse first, versus what data do you leave in the application, either permanently or until a later point?

Great question, and I thought that you too might be interested in the answer.

Interapplication Reports. Historically trying to combine data from multiple applications has been painful, to put it nicely. Clearly than this turns out to be one of the most compelling reasons for data warehousing, to house data from multiple applications and allow users to easily combine that data into singular reports.

Phasing Out Historical or Ad-Hoc Systems. Accounting systems seem to have an existence all their own. For various reasons they live well beyond their normal lifespan. We have a system at work, written in an old DOS based reporting tool that dates back to the late 1980’s. Over the years it’s been used to do reporting from other systems. As it turns out it has some issues with Vista, and will need replacing. Rather than getting yet another system, we plan to replace its reports with ones from our data warehouse.

Friendlier Reporting. Often when I see databases, the field names are quite cryptic. Names like fklnam (foreign name last name) and accsbcd (account sub code) litter databases. It’s difficult enough for IT Professionals to decipher the field name mayhem, but asking users to do so just to create a few ad-hoc reports can be asking far too much. Not to mention the sometimes bizarre seeming relationships between tables.

Moving to a data warehouse allows you to give much saner, user friendly names to your data. In addition you can flatten out some of the tables, simplifying the relationship structures significantly.

Production Server Load Reduction. Production systems are usually optimized for dealing with single records at a time. As a result, searching through and retrieving data for large quantities of data can be resource intensive on the production system. Shifting reporting to a warehouse means a reduced load for the production system. In addition you elimante the chance that malformed SQL from some ad-hoc query can cripple your production system.

Ease of Offline Maintenance for Production Systems. Finally, having a warehouse makes it easier to take production systems offline for maintenance. If users know they can still get to their data via the warehouse, they will be less concerned about their production system going offline for work, which in turn makes it easier to schedule such work. If you have a system that requires frequent maintenance, your users will be less likely to give you grief if their data is available elsewhere.

Those are my primary ways in which we decide which data is targeted for inclusion into the warehouse. If you need to combine data from multiple applications, have older systems that need replacement, have cryptic field names or complex table relationships, need to reduce the load on your production server, or have systems that need frequent maintenance then consider those systems first for inclusion into a data warehouse.

I’d be curious to hear your comments on your strategies for determining inclusion into your own data warehouse.

Arcane Surfaces

By now most folks have heard of the new Microsoft Surface ( http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ ). In case you’ve been busy organizing your Star Wars figures, Microsoft Surface is a technology that lets you interact with the top of a coffee table sized device, as if it were a touch screen. You can draw on it, write, move the windows around and resize them.

It also has the ability to interact with wireless devices. In one demo, a camera is placed on the Surface and the pictures appear to spill out onto the top of the table. Multiple people can “grab” these, spin them resize them, move them around to the delight.

What’s interesting though is the level at which people seem to want to take this. I’ve seen numerous blogs and websites exclaiming how they can finally have their “Tron Desk”.

In case you don’t recall, Tron (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ ) was a 1982 movie in which Jeff Bridges gets sucked into a computer and has to play games to escape, and TRON is the program that can stop the bad guy. In the “real world” the bad guy (Ed Dillinger, played by David Warner (above)) has a really cool desk.

The monitor is built in, as is the keyboard. Dillinger types on the flat surface of his desk as lighted keys appear under his fingers. Of course in 1982 it was a mock up, but today we do have the technology to do that kind of thing, I recall some early personal computers of that era having flat keyboards, each key was just the slightest bump. Today, my PDA has a touch screen, I can use my finger to key in the password and manipulate the start menu.

So if this is so cool, and do-able, why isn’t everyone using flat desks like the Tron one today? Well for the same reason that I think the Surface is going to see limited use: Tactile Feedback.

Humans, at least for the time being, still like multisensory input. We like the feeling of the keys bouncing against our fingers, or the satisfying click of the mouse as we press it. It’s these tiny subtilities that we don’t think about that make the device usable, and largely unchanged since the inception.

Sure, Surface will have it’s place. I can see it as a big conference room table, or on a conference room wall. Maybe in resturaunts, to place orders or ask for drink refills.

But using the Surface as my desk? No thanks. Not unless it has a USB port for my keyboard!

— END OF LINE —

Grok

After listening to last weeks DotNetRocks episode with Scott Stanfield ( http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=244 ) I took at look at Grok Talk ( http://groktalk.com/ ). This is a great site filled with a lot of video training material.

The cool thing is each video is a mere 10 minutes in length. This is awesome for the busy programmer on the go. Now you can easily download and learn something new everyday without a huge investment in time. I highly encourage you to take a look, I plan to watch one video every weekday.

Speaking of free training, I have been asked to speak at the Birmingham Dot Net User Group tomorrow, Tuesday June 12^th. The meeting starts at 7 pm, and will take place at the New Horizons training center located at 601 Beacon Pkwy W #106, Birmingham AL. The Windows Live map is at http://shrinkster.com/pv8, or the Google map can be found at http://shrinkster.com/pv7 .

I’ll be speaking on SQL Server Compact Edition, showing you how to get started with this cool technology. My notes and demos are already here, just click the SSCE link under categories. Hope to see you there!

Education the Arcane Way

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you will know I’m a fan of podcasts. They are an opportunity to learn with what Tony Robbins refers to as NET time (No Extra Time). I listen while driving, shopping, cutting the grass, or doing other activities that don’t otherwise involve heavy use of my ears.

One of the complaints I often hear though, when I recommend podcasts as an educational opportunity is “I can’t afford an iPod”. Well, iPod’s are nice, but I don’t have one either. There are other brands, but they can be a bit overpriced from some stores.

So, you want something to play MP3s, but don’t want to shell out big bucks. E-bay is a bit scary, because you don’t know if that seller is really being upfront about that item. As an alternative then, may I suggest keeping an eye on Woot?

What’s Woot you ask? Well Woot ( http://www.woot.com ) has “one deal a day” (although often times they have more deals, if they sell out early). Of late, they have had a huge flood of MP3 players.

Last week on “2fer Tuesday” my wife bought TWO 512 meg MP3 players for 15 bucks. Of course, they were bright pink, but since they were for my daughters that was perfect. Just today they were selling a SanDisk player, 1 gig ram, for 25 dollars. It’s probably a refurb, but since it comes with a new warrenty and Woot has good customer service, you’re not risking anything.

My point is, even if you are a poor, struggling type, you can afford one of these cheap players (even if some of them *are* pink, ugh). Skip that movie rental, pack a lunch a few days, whatever. Getting one of these along with a set of rechargeable batteries will allow you to take advantage all these great educational opportunities, which will pay you back in spades.

Now, I’m sure some will point out that 512 meg or 1 gig is not a lot of ram. You’re right it’s not. But even a small 256 meg player will get you by. Remember, you’re not trying to store your music library on these, you want to load a few podcasts to listen to on the way to and from work, or while exercising.

In looking over my latest MP3 downloads, it looks like 40 meg is about the average size of an hour long podcast at decent quality. That’s 12 shows for a 512 meg player, or 12 hours which should be more than enough even if you listen all day long. Even the 256 meg unit would give 6 hours, plenty even for a long commute plus an hour work out. Then just reload each evening. Most units simply look to the PC like a USB drive, so they should work with any type of OS, such as XP, Vista, Ubuntu, or OS-X (Apple).

A word of safety, most places outlaw driving with headphones on. If you want to use yours on the road stop and pick up a cable to plug it into your car stereos AUX port, or if it has a cassette player you can also use a cassette adapter.

Keep an eye out, and one day you’ll be able to snag your own Woot deal, and be able to take advantage of your NET time to get an education.

If you are looking for a list of podcasts, be sure to check out my Arcane Links page (https://arcanecode.wordpress.com/arcane-links/ ) in the Netcasts area, or my post from August 23^rd of last year (https://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/ ).

Standard Disclaimer: I have no financial affiliation with Woot, other than having spent a bunch of my hard earned cash there.

Passion

I’ve been a bit busy of late and have gotten behind on my blog reading. I recently downloaded a little program for my iPAQ called pRSSreader by David Andrs ( http://pda.jasnapaka.com/ ). This handy little program downloads all my feeds into my PDA so I can read them when I’m away from my desk, which is really nice.

So I’m lying in bed last night reading by the backlight of my iPAQ and catching up on my reading, and ran across an interesting article by Jeff Barnes (http://shrinkster.com/pra or http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/05/21/no-passion-in-the-ms-community.aspx ). Jeff is talking about an blog entry by Mary Jo Foley (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=429 ) in which she basically says Microsoft lacks an empassioned community, unlike the Sun or Linux communities.

Jeff, and others like Wally McClure (http://shrinkster.com/prb ) and Robert McLaws (http://shrinkster.com/prc ) have done a good job of answering Mary Jo, pointing out the many passionate, active user communities. If I may be so bold, though, I have a slightly different take.

With apologies to John C Dvorak ( http://dvorak.org/blog and http://www.crankygeeks.com/ , geez I’m spreading a lot of link love today) I’m going to put on my “cranky old geek” hat for a few minutes. I remember the early days of Microsoft, back in the mid 80’s when they were still a small, young company. In those days, IBM was the “evil empire”, the Goliath to Microsoft’s David.

There were a lot of vocal, passionate groups at the time, who thought Microsoft could do no wrong. ( No, really, there were. ) In those days MS was primarily known for it’s DOS (Disk Operating System) and development tools. So when a large percentage of your customers are developers, it’s easy to get the perception that your customer base is nothing but hard core devotees.

We were too. We flocked to MS events to see the neat tools they were putting in the hands of developers. I recall how cool we all thought Quick Basic 4 was. We came to Microsoft, because of the tools they offered.

Fast forward to today, 2007. Microsoft is now a huge corporation, with a large selection of products. In contrast, development is now a much smaller part of its base. By far, most of the current customers are using things like Office, or some of the Office Backend products like Exhange or Sharepoint. Now I have to be honest, as cool as I think the new office is, even a MS developer geek like me has a hard time getting excited over a word processor.

In addition, there are a lot of DBAs, Server Admins, and the like who didn’t come to Microsoft. Instead they were old time admins using DB2 or Unix, and as MS made in-roads into these markets, these admins had to pick up the new skills in order to keep up (but not, perhaps, with a great deal of passion). For many of these type people, I think Mary Jo was accurate with her comment about dealing with MS software being ‘just a job’.

In addition, there are many programmers I’ve met who made the transition from some other language (like COBOL) as the mainframe platform they were working on became obsolete. These are folks who learned a Microsoft language just to keep up, or because their company made a change, not because they truly thought the Microsoft tools were the best thing on the market and that’s the direction they wanted to take their career. Again, for these people Microsoft tools were brought to them, not they to MS.

As much as I hate to admit it, Mary Jo is right, but only to an extent. There are people for whom using MS Products is “just job”. Some are system admins, some are DBAs, some are even programmers.

But look around, and you’ll see that old fashioned core of developers. Those same types of people who were there back in the early days. We’re still here today, going to code camps, user groups, and yes even blogging. And baby, we are just as passionate as ever!

Arcane Fun Fridays – Step away from the keyboard

It’s been a long week, so I thought today I’d share a little link love, and point you to some of the sites I like to visit when I want to relax.

One of my hobbies is digital photography. I’m on my fifth digital camera (or maybe sixth, I’ve lost count). It’s a Nikon Digital SLR, the D-80. My favorite thing to take photos of is architecture, especially old buildings, and especially old abandoned buildings. There’s something about the effects of nature assaulting a building that just fascinates me.

The site that got me started is called Hours of Darkness ( http://www.hoursofdarkness.com/ ). The site specializes in both night photography and photographing abandoned things like buildings, cars, airplanes and the like.

Another site I love is Opacity ( http://www.opacity.us/ ). This site also focuses on the exploration of abandoned places. The site owner, Mr. Motts does some excellent photoshopping to create some stunning effects. Both Opacity and Hours of Darkness have very active forums, and a lot of great photos can be found there so be sure not to miss the forums on either site.

A few more sites I frequent with the same themes are Art In Ruins ( http://www.artinruins.com/index.php ), Bleeding Shutter ( http://www.bleedingshutter.com/main.php ), and Urban Desertion ( http://www.urbandesertion.com/ ).

When I’m looking for a deal, I check out Woot. http://www.woot.com/ . They only sell one thing at a time, but it’s usually a good deal. Earlier this week I bought a wireless network card for an old laptop I plan to convert to a Linux machine. (Don’t worry, I already checked, it does have drivers.) Even if you are not interested in the deals, the write ups are a riot, some will leave you in stitches.

When I’m in the mood for a podcast, something educational but having nothing to do with computers, I listen to Astronomy Cast at http://www.astronomycast.com/ . Good show, lets me relax and at the same time learn a little something.

When I need a good laugh, I really enjoy the on-line comic, Being Five ( http://beingfive.blogspot.com/ ).

And finally, when I really need a good laugh or a meaningful story, I read the blog of my own sweet wife. You can find the Southern Tinkerbelle at http://southerntinkerbelle.com .

Arcane Holiday

Today in the US we are celebrating Memorial Day, where we remember all of the soldiers who fell in battle. So let me first start by thanking the families and those men who sacrificed themselves for the greater good.

In keeping with the holiday theme, I thought I’d take a brief holiday from the Windows Services series and catch up on a few things.

First, there’s been an update to my favorite Windows add-on, TouchCursor. The new version fixes the issue I mentioned with Virtual PC’s. The only issue since I’ve run across is in using it with Visual Studio and DevExpress CodeRush add-in. CodeRush also wants to use the spacebar for activation. However, I was able to easily change the activation key from CodeRush to something else, and problem was solved. Check it out at http://touchcursor.com/ or see my initial review at http://shrinkster.com/pf4 .

Next, about a week ago I mentioned some great music to program to by a group called Midnight Syndicate. Shortly after posting I found out the Haunted Voices Radio podcast did an entire weekend of Midnight Syndicate, including playing their music and complete interviews. Check out Haunted Voices Radio at http://www.hauntedvoicesradio.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=6 or http://shrinkster.com/pf2 . Each banner ad is to a separate MP3 (the weekend was broken up into 2 hour chunks for easy downloads). I believe there are 17 in all.

Finally I have to confess to a guilty pleasure. I recently received a gift certificate to a book store, and used it to purchase “Windows Developer Power Tools” by James Avery and Jim Holmes. (Amazon link: http://shrinkster.com/pf5 )

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know I’m a “tool freak”, I love add-ins and tools for Windows and Visual Studio. As such I’ve been wanting this book for a while, but since I’ve already got a huge stack of books I’m still reading through I was having problems justifying yet another book. The gift certificate gave me just the opportunity I needed to get this cool new book. At over 1200 pages it’s chock full of toys, can’t wait to dig in!