Privacy concerns: Hand over your social networking username & password!

Ever been concerned about privacy. Well check this out:

"If you apply for a job with the City of Bozeman, Montana - a mid-sized burg halfway across these United States - you're forced to surrender usernames and passwords for every account you've set up with websites of the "social networking" variety." --- The Register

XBox360: Project Natal

When this is released this should change the way entertainment is done:

XBox360: Project Natal

Dotnet FrameWork Redistributable 3.5SP1

Microsoft still seems to make installing the Dotnet Framework rather hard.

Here's a link to the 3.5SP1 Full Redistributable.

Open Screen Project

Interesting project coming out of Adobe.

"The goal of the Open Screen Project is to maintain compatibility across devices, supporting rapid innovation and enabling devices to be seamlessly updated with the latest runtimes. With a consistent runtime environment based on the next major releases of Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®, you can distribute content and applications to consumers worldwide, on virtually any device, much faster and at a lower cost than you can today. Integration of Adobe's award-winning tools with the consistent runtimes helps ensure the ability to develop once and deploy everywhere through an agile design and development workflow." - http://www.openscreenproject.org/developers/

Twitter

Nice little Twitter graphic:

SLI Multi-OS

Nvidia recently released their SLI Multi-OS:

"With the introduction of NVIDIA® SLI® Multi-OS technology, a user now has the ability to fully virtualize all resources in the workstation, including NVIDIA® Quadro® GPUs. An SLI Multi-OS enabled workstation operates in conjunction with workstation virtualization software. Through SLI Multi-OS technology, a user can directly assign a dedicated Quadro graphics board to both the host operating system and a range of optionally loaded guest operating systems." --- NVidia.

Silverlight 2 and 3 development - on the same box

One of the disappointments with the recent Silverlight 3 Preview release is the inability to install Silverlight 2 and 3 at the same time. Now VisualStudio 2010 is suppose to solve this but in the meantime you must choose which one you want to target. And given currently there is no go-live license for Silverlight 3 [reasonable at this point] what can you do? Well Amy Dullard [a program manager at Microsoft] has a work-around.

Blend 3 & SketchFlow (missing)

Recently Microsoft held their annual Mix conference where they demonstrated the next version of Blend (Blend 3 Preview) their WPF/Silverlight design tool. One of the coolest features is the SketchFlow functionality. Unfortunately it's NOT included in the just released 'preview' :-(

"It is important to note, that one of the Expression Blend features demonstrated at MIX09 is not actually included in this preview, namely SketchFlow. Microsoft informed that it was hard at work to ensure that SketchFlow would make it into the next development milestone of Expression Blend 3." - Softpedia.com

How disappointing!

Silverlight Project: Requested Registry Access is not allowed

After installing the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and trying to create a new project in Visual Studio 2008 - I was getting the error, "Requested registry access is not allowed". Doing a little Goooogling I came across this post - basically giving 'Admin' permission to all keys. Seemed a little too extensive. Later in the post is the minimal required to get the Silverlight project to work. I've included the .BAT/ZIP here. As per the instructions:

1) Download and install: SubInACL a command-line tool from Microsoft.
2) Download the SilverLight Project .BAT/ZIP fix file for changing the registry entries here OR copy/paste from here.
3) Unzip and run the batch file.

Everytime I would add some sort of 'add-in' to VisualStudio 2008 and then would try to get the properties of a project I would get the error, "Impossible to open Project Properties - COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used". Doing a little Goooogling reveals this page, and this where they basically explain that removing Resharper and the, "Microsoft Source Analysis Tool for C#" fixes the problem. For me I removed FXCop and installed the latest, StyleCop. FYI: Generic info re: StyleCop here.

Bought a NexStar: GX 3.5 IDE External hard drive case. Seems to be working well.

Features include:
Smart Cooling (Fan turns on/off as needed in 'automatic' mode)
USB 2.0 HUB (3 ports)
Passive Heat Sink (Heat sin seats on the bottom of the unit)
Smart Power (Turns off when you computer does)
Security Slot (Allows you to use a security cable lock to prevent theft of hardware)

Bell and Twitter

Perfect example of the terrrible customer service you get from Bell Canada in regards to SMS messages from Twitter:

"Just for the sake of clarity, this is in no way related to Bell’s policy on 15 cent incoming SMS costs. Bell’s Julie Smithers said “Because Twitter is a third-party service, the messages are considered premium and not covered by our plans…This aligns with industry standards regarding third-party premium messaging". -Cell Phone Hub

Adobe Hiring

So let get this straight:

1) Adobe layoffs 600+ workers
2) Then they hire back cheap student labor
3) Finally they compensate Shantanu Narayen [Chief Executive] an additional $16.4 million [in stock] in addition to his salary of $875,000 in fiscal 2008, up from $600,000 in fiscal 2007.

Nice :-(

Adobe Futures?

Some more cool features coming from Adobe [well maybe coming]:


Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

DirST Beta Release

DirST BETA release!

Project Description
Allows one to replicate a DIRectory STructure without copying files. Written in C#.

Freetards

Another great quote:

"Adobe Systems has spun out an alpha version of its Flash Player 10 technology for 64-bit Linux software users today, to satisfy the needs of freetards everywhere." - theregister.co.uk

Quick Quote

I thought this quote was interesting, "You're not even wrong".

First Snow Fall of the Season

First snowfall of the season.

Adobe: Web Premium CS4 Feature Tour

Here's some information on the new Adobe CS4 Web Premium Edition:

Adobe: Photoshop CS4 Announced

Adobe has announced [not shipping] the next version of PhotoShop CS4.

Spore - The Game

Well it's certainly interesting to watch the huge growth of creatures being created by people using the new Spore game. Incredible really! Currently at: 9,212,376+ [Update: As of 09/25/08 @11:16PM EST -> 27,169,403 !!!]

Contract

Started another contract

Infragistics: Net.Advantage 2008 Vol 2 - ASP.NET - Unable to locate license assembly

Problem:
I was trying to install, "Infragistics NetAdvantage ASP.NET" [2008 Vol.2] on Vista. Though the program seems to install properly there were two problems:

1) The components would NOT show up in Visual Studio 2005/2008.
2) After adding the components manually, dragging any of them to Visual Studio's design surface resulted in the error:

"Unable to locate license assembly."

Solution:
Turns out it's a Registry permission problem.

The solution is to create a command file [as mentioned in the article above].

I'm providing it here.

Great Illustrator Tutorial site

Here's a great site for Adobe Illustrator tutorials: VectorTuts.com

GUI: Disabling menus

Recently Joel of Joel on Software published this quote:

"A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used. Don't do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work. Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there's some reason you can't complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why."

I could not disagree more. When we disable a menu-item we put a tool tip to indicate to the user why the menu-item is disabled. In fact isn't it irritating when you choose a menu-item and then it says something to the effect of, "Sorry you can't do this because you haven't done x". If Joel had his way we'd all be wasting our time.

Good thing Joel in not in charge of designing any software that has any significant market share. With this sort of advance one can understand why.

P.S. Even more scary he's written a book, "User Interface Design for Programmers". Of course no surprise people don't seem to really like it.

Image Processing

Here's the first time I've setup an open source project and the commands I tried just simply work. Amazing! The project is an Image Processing project called Processing.

German Kids - Right to Vote

In what can only make sense to German people there is a proposal to allow all people [yes including kids] to vote in the national election. "A bipartisan group of 46 lawmakers made the proposal that would grant 14 million young Germans a chance to have their voices be heard in political matters." Clearly this is completely illogical. And even the Germans appear to agree having tried passing the amendment in 2005 - but was, "rejected by parliamentarians on constitutional and practical grounds since parents would likely cast their own choices and not of their children's.". NO! REALLY?!?!?! So let's examine this a bit a family which has 10 children, would have the parents vote 10x. YA!?!???!?!?!? So why is it back on the table?

Nice quote, "But wouldn’t this make abortion vote-tampering?" --- Don Surber

Learning Visual Studio

Learning Visual Studio.NET can be made a little easier when you have, "Cheat Sheets". Over at LearnVisualStudio.Net they posted some good getting started sheets:

ASP.NET Basics Cheat Sheet
C# 2005 Language Basics Cheat Sheet
Visual Basic 2005 Language Basics Cheat Sheet


More available on their site.

Joel on Software: Martian Headsets (IE8 Standards)

Joel has written another interesting article on 'Standards', this one centering on IE8.

Free Book: Star Wars - Legacy of the Force: Betrayal

There's another FREE PDF version of, "STAR WARS: LEGACY OF THE FORCE: BETRAYAL" available from the publisher's site.

TV ?

It's over the past 4+ years that I stopped watching television. That's right no cable TV for me for over 4 years. What can I say of the experience: 1) The Internet is a replacement [whether that's good or not - it's unclear], 2) I now dislike advertising even more then before, 3) Stopping to watch TV doesn't necessarily make you more healthy or happier, 4) Since world events are a topic of discussion among friends, family and at work - find another source for this information.

There was a recent study mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, plenty of people commented on it and I esp. like this one.

Visual Studio: Performance Tools

After trying get Visual Studio 2008's performance tools to work, it kept reporting that the file, "VSPerfDrv90 is not installed" I finally found a solution. It turns out on the DVD there's a seperate installer called, "vs_profiler.exe". Installing this resolves the problem(s).

From the [root] start of the DVD, there's a folder called, "Standalone Profiler" then choose your, "x64" or "x86" directory according to your machine. Inside there you will find the, "vs_profiler.exe".

Meet the Femtocell

Motorola has come up with a new piece of technology that hopes to aid consumers with the connectivity problems with cell phones in the house. I like the premise behind this technology. That one can leverage their existing Internet connection, but hopefully there will be better applications for this. Meet the Femtocell.