Author: andy

Following-on from my earlier experiments in ASP.NET custom control writing, I’ve now stirred some XML into the mix. And learned a bit more about ADO.NET in the process.

Storing the contents of the navigation bar in a database table turned-out to be a pain in the butt. Adding and moving entries by directly editing the table and primary key values was just too difficult. I contemplated writing some kind of client app to make it easier, but I just don’t have the time. What I wanted was a storage format that was easy to edit using existing tools. The answer was obvious: So I modified the navigation bar control to pull the menu options from an XML file that I can edit with XML Spy and upload to the site. Nice and easy. I like it when things work.

Today I saw a Vulcan. A real one. She was behind me in the sandwich queue at M&S, and he had really slanted  eyebrows and pointy ears. Obviously part or a Vulcan reconnaissance team. Okay, so here ears weren’t as pointy as, say, Spock – but they were still pretty pointy. She’d probably had them kind of adjusted before landing (or “beaming down” – can Vulcans do that?).

I had a digital camera in my pocket, but I didn’t think it wise to take a photo. I mean, we all know about the Vulcan death grip, right?

Yay!!! I’ve just taken possession of a brand-new 30Gb iPod, and it is without a doubt the coolest, sexiest object I have ever bought.

So far it’s been incredibly easy to set-up. Ten minutes to install a Firewire PCI card, ten minutes to install the software, and then about forty minutes to copy 8Gb of music to the pod. Sweet! I plan to post a review after I’ve used it for a few days.

(And for any RIAA lawyers who might be reading this: all the music was ripped from CDs that I or my partner personally own. Sorry to disappoint you.)

A couple of pieces here and here about how laptops and wifi are changing conferences and lectures. For speakers: if you’re lucky, the people in the audience tapping on their laptops are reading your lecture notes or googling around what you’re saying. At worst, they’re IMing ther friends for readin gtheir email.

Ingo Rammer does a good job of explaining why some of the System.Windows.Forms classes are sealed – thus preventing them from being extended by subclassing. The reason is that winforms controls are just wrappers for the underlying Win32 controls, and, in some circumstances, these controls interact directly with eachother using Win32 message passing – without involving their managed wrappers. At best, extending the wrapper will have no effect. At worst, it breaks the control.

Kudos to Ingo for explaining this. I wish I had more time to spend of winforms, but I’m still exploring ASP.NET. Maybe when Chris Sell’s winforms book is published in the Autumn.

Article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about corporate attitudes to employee blogging. Unsurprisingly, it puts a lot of emphasis on Microsoft bloggers, and Scoble in particular.

Dan Gillmor’s blog has a pointer to Google Alert, a web tracking system. Its a nice idea: you give them a search string, which they submit to Google each day on you behalf. You get an email every time the result of the search changes. Or you can get the results by RSS.

Without trying this, its hard to know how well it works. badly crafted search strings would probably generate too many false alerts, so I don’t know how careful you’d have to be. Also, whats the business model? Ads? If I get time, I’ll try it.

Meowlingual is a cool new gadget that decodes cat-speak. Amazing.

Apart from the significant technical challenge in getting this to work as a piece of consumer electronics, it also creates a totally new market sgement: human-animal communication products. If people spend as much money on this stuff as they do on pet care and pet insurance (hint: a lot), or books to improve their own human/human relationships, then this technology will make someone a lot of money.

FastCompany (a site I find I’m reading more and more) has a facinating article on the impact of women on Microsoft’s corporate culture.

As someone who’s worked in the software biz for a while, I’ve seen at first-hand some of the disgraceful treatment of women that seems to be commonplace in the industry. This has ranged from refering to women as “girls” and assuming they were secretaries, to men who openly stated their opinion that women couldn’t do technical work, to (in one case) blatant victimisation and undermining that led to a bright and tallented woman to resign from her job. It’s one of my great professional regrets that I seem destined to spend my career in male-dominated working environments, with all the bullshit and pointless conflict that comes with it.

Anyway, its good to know that at least one organisation can adapt its culture to get the best from its people, without losing its sharpness and (necessary) internal competition.

Last week I read Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs. Today I read this, about “flash crowds” in New York. Very cool – we truly are living in the future already. This is how it will be.