Category: Uncategorized

Now that Gnomedex is done with, the PDC is the next conference that I can’t go to. Oh, okay then…

Google announced their News Alerts service yesterday. A specialised version of the independent Google Alerts service that I linked recently.&nbsp

Mark Pilgrim announces the Atom 0.2 snapshot.

Lawrence Lessig’s blog has a pointer to a good (as in careful and considered) analysis (pdf) of the SCO/IBM/Linux troubles, written by a US law professor. Interesting contrast to the rants over at Slashdot.

It seems that Yahoo Groups publishes RSS feeds for all their discussion groups. Well, I didn’t know… its not like they actually publicised it or anything… Archive.org has a page that gives you the feed URL for a given group. Neato.

Or it would be if it wasn’t totally broken at the Yahoo end. Yahoo generate an <item> for each message posted to a group, but the <title> is the poster’s name, not the message’s subject. The subject actually appears in the <description>, together with a link to the message text. So, for, say, the wonderful WinTechOffTopic group, you get this abomination.

Okay, so I understand why they don’t provide the full message text in the feed: they want people to register and view their advertisements. But this is fecking unusable! Who ever wants the messages keyed on author name? With a femtosecond’s thought this could have been so good. Bah.

I’ve whipped-up a quick Echo feed, and it validates!

It’s based on the 1st July snapshot, and specifically this example. A few limitations: 1. No topics; 2. All times are in GMT even though we’re currently on BST; and 3. The mimetype is “application/echo+xml” because I can’t find out what it should be!

Yeah! I feel so current!

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.