Vista and NVidia GeForce FX 5200

I was trying a demo version of Modo v2.0.2 the other day and under Microsoft's Vista it would install but upon running would just quit. No error messages - nothing :-( Given Vista's desire to run DirectX 10 [very limited support] I looked to see if there were updates for my NVidia card. There are BETAs here. Problem solved!

Impressed

After Mr.W had asked if there was anything going on tonight I got back to him and said no, later Y'Nick wanted to do something so I referred him to Mr.W - but Mr.W said he was going to bed at 10:30pm since it was a school night. Wow - I was impressed sometimes he shows such a great amount of responsibility. I used to get to bed at a reasonable time but lately it's been really bad. However...I heard a knock on the door @10:30pm and it was Mr.W had decided to catch a bus downtown and to drop by for a surprise. Though it's cool when he comes by I knew that he wasn't going to stay for long, so we didn't really have the chance to do anything but play some Need for Speed. A short but never the less enjoyable visit.

List: Happiness

Life is a balancing act but if you are trying to be happy here's a list of things to remember.

Some 'm'

People came over to relax a bit and watch, "The Butterfly Effect", including Mr.W, Mr. African, Mr. Mex, Yan'nick et [his girl?].

Ended about 12:30pm. Rather early :-(

For those who do NOT need motivation

For those who do NOT need motivation.

Vista Packaging

For those interested in seeing the new Vista Packaging it’s now available online.

Mr. W.

After Halloween, Mr.W had lots of candy. I kind'a thought this part of life would be over but I guess not. He came over, I sketched the new priminary logos for my friends startup PVR company. He's got a new name.
The evening was a little more then boring. After a few days without running MSN Messenger I was enjoying things again. He was irratating. Recently having become too arrogate.

First day of Snow

Rising today, I noticed the first arrival of Snow . A little early this year. I recall last year it was around Nov-15.

Good advice on starting a book, presentation, etc...

Good advice on starting a book, presentation, etc:

Information in E-Mail

I was thinking recently about information stored in e-mail. We all have large inboxes. We keep groups of messages around for different reasons: from legal reasons, receipts, information we need to keep but not refer to often, important documents, etc. The problem is how easy is it for people to find information in their e-mail? One of the problems is storage but the more interesting problem is findability of information.

The first problem has been solved. Storage of e-mail, certainly through the online [web-based] players has made it possible to easily store all your e-mail online. In the last year we have seen all the major players, lead by Google increase their customer’s storage space up to on average of 2GB/user. Yahoo and Microsoft quickly followed suit. This has allowed people to keep all their e-mail online and with a indexing engine such as Google one can easily search across all their e-mail.

The main problem with e-mail now becomes a question of finding information. We can certainly search for text quicker then ever before but finding a keyword or phrase is not the same as finding a piece of information. We’ve all sent e-mail where we have asked a few questions and later got back a response where only a subset were answered. So our day-to-day scenario is sending out e-mail asking questions, reading a response, memorising what we consider is the ‘key’ ideas and filing the e-mail (worse-case by leaving it in the inbox). The problem occurs when 6 months down the road you’ve forgotten some of those things you, “memorised” and now need to find that information. Though some systems allow for the categorisation of groups of messages (e.g.: by creating folders or labels) this is too primitive a system. This is a manual system and these tools exist in the real-world [outside of e-mail] and have failed to organise our personal/professional information. I propose a different solution.

When we send e-mail we typically create paragraphs of information, perhaps include attachments and propose some questions or ask for something to be done. The problem is people receiving the message might miss individual items. Perhaps they answer one or two of your questions but missed the important one or are going to respond to that one later. You receive back a wordy message which you have to read and understand. You have to search if/where your questions are answered and this therefore becomes a time consuming task. And even worse every time you need to refer to this e-mail you have to go through the same time consuming process.

One of the problems with e-mail is how to ask the questions to your audience such that its clear what questions are being asked and how important a particular question is. The system that I’m proposing would allow for an ‘add-in’ to e-mail systems allowing one to ‘tag’ questions as such. An auto-generated sequence number [perhaps a displayed as a graphic] would be inserted before all questions. For those items that are not specific questions but, “to do” items a separate marker can be manually inserted (e.g.. Please send me the latest financial spreadsheet). The appearance of these markers would appear in such way that it would be clear at a glance the number of items being asked [each marker would include the seq. #]. E-mail applications receiving such a message could interpret the e-mail in a different view. This custom view would brake out the items, displaying them in their own view pane. Recipients can view the original e-mail above while clicking individual [marked] items below and responding to each one. The new system in no way prevents any of the standard response methods from being used. The user has the choice to still include standard message responses such as full text paragraphs, attachments, etc.  Once the response is sent back the senders e-mail package can display the original questions followed by the responses below from each of the recipients. This will allow people to easily see which items have been responded to and who has responded. These ‘summary’ e-mails can appear as part of any related e-mail or can be viewed in a separate view pane. The advantage is now to the person who needs to go back and look at this information – they can quickly see the original items and how/if it was resolved. Entire threads of e-mail can be quickly and automatically summarised for later review. People can also refer to items by sequence number and, ‘to do’ items can be parsed and presented for automatic inclusion on user’s favourite to do list manager

By simplifying the use of how e-mail and information snippets are stored and retrieved we can see the long term benefits such a system would bring. People would become much more efficient at responding to such e-mail and therefore more likely to respond. As well once they have responded one can quickly see what the next action item would be. Working smarter not harder!

Implementation Details:

– Show a numbered graphic to display the marker;
– Each type of marker would have a unique colour (e.g.: Questions in Green, To Do items in Red, etc.)
– Using a custom SMTP header e-mail clients can quickly recognise e-mails which include these new markers
– For parsing and displaying in non-rich e-mail clients markers are internally stored as XML.

Geek Marketing 101

Looking for a top ten list for Geek Marketing 101?

DVD, "The Lake House"

If you are looking for a good small romance try, "The Lake House".

The best media...

The best media is no media!

DVD, "V for Vendetta"

Watched the DVD, “V for Vendetta”. Have to say one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. For the matter in the top 10 of all time.

Toronto Vacation

Having a week long holiday from school I decided to go to Toronto. Unfortunately as soon as I arrived I got sick :-(. I spent a week there. Managed to go to the AutoDesk 3DS Max/Maya RoadShow. Visited the Pacific Mall and on the final day scored some new shoes!

Tango Application Server

I happen to be thinking whatever happened to the Tango product I used to work on. After a bit of Google'ing, I found it:

What is Tango you ask?

"A highly scaleable, feature rich, visual development environment for creating and deploying dynamic web sites that can integrate to a variety of non-web interfaces such as databases (ODBC/JDBC/FileMaker/OCI), XML, XPATH, XSLT, file system, command line, POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, LDAP, SOAP, JavaBeans..." - www.WiTango.com

Mr. W Fete

Well it was Mr. W's Fete. Nothing really happened. He got a guitar for his bornday. For some reason he didn't want to have a party. I hope he likes the DVD, "Fast And Furious: Toyko Drift".

Poker

It was: Kev, ML, Mr. African and Mr.W. [and Andy] that came by to try some m$%^#&@#. It was great. We played Poker, people crashed good stuff. Makes up for yesterday.

Windows: Admin Privileges

Here’s an interesting application to change your Admin privileges:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/securecode/columns/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dncode/html/secure11152004.asp

Davey & Goliath

If you are looking for a great [old] 'family' cartoon: Davey And Goliath. It's a little dated but from reading the site we get a sense they might be trying to bring it back.

Geek (.NET) Posters

If you are looking for some FREE DotNet posters here's the place.

DOS [Games] Again?!

For some reason DOS keeps coming back into my life recently. I came across this DOS Game Archieve the other day.

Real Brushes

As we move more and more towards providing a 'real-time' interface to computers we are going to see things like the Optipaint system come along.

New Online Game: The Ship

If you like the Half-Life game engine – there’s a new game called, “The Ship”.

If you need old software and old computer games

If you are in the market for old software and old computer games.

IEBlog : IE + JavaScript Performance Recommendations - Part 1

Some interesting comments on optimizing JavaScript for IE:

IEBlog : IE + JavaScript Performance Recommendations - Part 1.

MultiTouch Interfaces

There's so much going on in the MultiTouch Interface area that it's so exciting to see the potential of what's coming. To start here's a cool video of something that was shown at the TED conference.

Magazine Archive

Came across an interesting archive of Computer magazines.

All nighter

Well it's been a long time since I've pulled an all nighter. Given it was a Friday and the city I'm in is celebrating their 25th(?) anniversary there was an event everyday this week at the local park we were in the mood for something. They setup rides, musical entertainment and fireworks, nothing overly exciting but still it gets the entire population out. It was after that was interesting. I returned home about 12:30pm to meet, "Mr. African". He recently returned from a 2 week vacation in BC. I don't think it went too well but nothing terrible. Just things didn't work out. So we gvaafe ourselves, watch the DVD, "The Butterfly Effect" then went for a walk. It was really interesting he began to tell me the story of what happened on his vacation, but we always got side-tracked and never finished. Really-really interesting stuff.

Poker

Another Poker night. Started kind'a late 10:45pm, but it was fun. It was also the first time that the HS told me about the ADN(?) cell phone business. They all hope to get rich from this, and I wish them the best of luck.

Once in a while...

Once in a while it's nice to make a change and do some, "hard-labour". What I mean is we computer science people do a lot of thinking and planning but every so often I think it's healthy to do some manual labour. Today I did just that. I went Strawberry picking. Starting at 8:00am and finishing at 3:00pm. Though the work was, "back breaking" I did get some sun. Unfortunately I think, "Donald" the owner of the farm was exploiting some people. He had claimed that one could pick $45 worth of boxes by 1:00pm. Logically this works out to be around $100 for the entire day. I managed to pick 11 boxes in the time I was there. At $1.50/box this equals $16.50. No one came close to what he had stated. And from what one of the other workers said was he paid by hour last year. He was obviously try to save money and obviously what he's doing is illegal but unfortunately he will no doubt get away with it. I'm so surprised to see such things going in the year 2006. Truly surprising. So disappointing :-(

Cable Organizer

For those who need to organize your cables, this looks like an interesting product the, "Cableyoyo".

Microsoft should buy Digipede

Given the upcoming end of Moore's Law and the need to expand computing power horizontally I would think it makes good business sense if Microsoft would buy Digipede. They basically have a Dotnet solution for distributed computing. From the sounds of it it sounds easy to implement and the power of such a solution coupled with the easy of use of Dotnet should make for some exciting applications. Imagine with the, "flip of switch" in VS.NET being able to 'distribute' your application. Looks exciting. Microsoft please [pay attention].

Fuzzed myself avec...

Another great evening. ML came over. Watched the DVD, "Thirteen". Great movie when your...

Biking

It being sunny, a holiday and a weekend I decided to go Biking. It was great. I visited a nearby town. One of those perfect country places. Even had an antique place with a dam. Cool!

The End is just the Beginning

As school ends for the year and many friends 'depart' for the Summer I begin to wonder what the next 2 months will bring. I've got many things to do but still there's something missing. I can only hope for a surprise.

Vacation

Visited T.O. from Jun-01 -> Jun-12/06.

Realism

I was watching a, "behind-the-scenes" part of Jurrasic Park III recently and noticed that I fall into the same thing that the filemakers were trying to accomplish > Realism. I came to this conclusion after trying to make a 'graffiti' montage for another person. "Computer-people" spend so much of their time trying to create 'realism' that if we would just go outside we would experience just that. It reminds me of meeting people who don't have e-mail. They are fascintaing people and even more so then 'computer' people. So why are we computer people pinned to our machines trying to do some realistic thing. There has to be a better way to accomplish this. But still I love it!

DVD, "An Unfinished Life"

Watched the DVD, "An Unfinished Life". Though it has big [well huge] named actors there was no story. Too bad. Such potential. It felt like they just ran out of time or money and just ended the movie.

Finished Max's Graffiti & Small visit

I worked on Max's Graffiti today. Actually it turnd out pretty good. There is absolutely a need for exporting layers in Flash to layers in Photoshop -> maybe in a future version.

Later Petit-P, Renault and Fred [nouveau person] came by. Unfortunately boring. My fault the place wasn't ready.

Petit MDB

Another Poker night with: Boris, Mr. Mexican and Daniel Sr. After Mr. Mexican left we watched the DVD, "Dick & Jane". Though I've watched the movie 6-7 times recently and it's always been funny - for some reason it really wasn't funny with them. Parts were good but something wasn't right. Maybe one hasn't to see the movie more then once, putting myself in their place.

Time on their hands...absolutely

I am so pro certification for programmers but this is just missing the point.

Incredible Play

Well now that Summer is here broke open the water gun and 'shot-up' the students after the tutorial session. It's so great to teach them something then relax after I really believe this is the people should be taught. Maybe there's something that makes it stick. They are doing unbelieveably well now.

Mr. W & Julien

For some odd reason Mr. W. [with Julien] phoned late tonight. They wanted to crash. Ok. I was very tired and I was watching the DVD, "ZZZ". But I understand sometimes people just want to do something.

DVD, "Shopgirl"

Watched the DVD, "Shopgirl" - written by Steve Martin. Let me first say I'm a huge Steve Martin fan but this movie is b.a.d. The narration is bad, the main characters are bad, the colour of the movie is bad and nothing exciting happens during the entire movie. This movie has absolutely no redeeming qualities. Eeeech. :-(

Quiet Evening

To my surprise Mr.W. came by for a visit. Very impressive. We did the usual - whatever that is (homework, etc.). Eventually he left ~@11:20pm.

MDB

We had a nice evening: Alex, Max, Renault [+friend] and Zoran came to play Poker. Very enjoyable. Alex and Max crashed.

Adobe Facelift

The Adobe web-site has had a facelift. Check it out.

Office 2007 - MindMap

One of the ways to get information across is to use a Mind Map. One of Microsoft's bloggers (Don Campbell) has done just that for Office 2007, he even posted it. More details.

Office Update?

This is interesting Microsoft has posted a Windows Update that 'detects' certain versions of MS Office. This software, is secretly installed on people's machines :-(

Book: The Emotion Machine : Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind: Books: Marvin Minsky

Looks interesting: Amazon.com: The Emotion Machine : Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind: Books: Marvin Minsky.

Class room sitting arrangements

Want to know where to sit when in a lecture see here for details.

 

Other Families

Today was the first day I met Mr.W's Father. Mr.W phoned me in the mid afternoon to help take his music instrument home. He needed it for an all week-end band 'concert'. He couldn't do it himeself cause he had taken his bike and it's too much to carry. I thought it would take him longer to get home then it did so going to the video store and pharmacy made me late to meet him to deliver the base violin. We had planned to go biking but planning is always a problem. He ended up asking me to stay and have dinner. That was interesting. They gave me a new, "Chessy-bread" that I had never tried before. It's very good but lots of butter! The house is interesting and his Father showed me the "Tub" web-site. Turns out his Father is also a bit of a graphic designer but is now teaching at Petit-P's l'ecole. We talked DTP, etc. It was interesting. I was really interested to listen to his Father, sister and him interact. It's been a while since I've been with my family, since I had missed the last vacation because I was sick.
After Mr.W and I went biking. We did the 'school' route. But then he wanted to continue thru the other town. This is a 'long' route and since it was only my second rid for the season I wasn't ready. But he was kind'a of "gvaafe" so he was up for doing something more. I felt a little sick riding and Alex was phoning trying to organize for tonight. My plans had completedly changed. I ended up taking Alex and Max somewhere in the 'east' of the town, then they wanted to stay longer there. Boris and Zoran came over @~9:20pm and Mr.W had to leave early because he had to get up for 7:30am tomorrow for the concert. He left around 9:50pm and took his bike. The rest of the evening was a "Family Guy" evening plus some Poker.

Book: Software Estimation Demystifying the Black Art

This looks interesting:

Software Estimation Demystifying the Black Art

Dreams

Some strange dreams occured last week.

Dream #1:
I was working for the New York Times in position #17 from the top [does this even exist?] which had a stock option benefit and the job required QuarkXPress skills. Very strange all round esp. since I'm more of a InDesign fan.

Dream #2:
I was invited to a 'secret' section in a large baseball stadium [on the field] where their were famous old hairless burnt baseball players.

USB Keys and Vista

Here's an interesting feature of Vista and using USB keys.

Windows XP on an Intel Mac with "BootCamp"

Apple has annouced "BootCamp" a utility to allow one to run Windows XP on a Mac Intel box.

Can't wait to go the other way round.

Teen-repellent shop siren

I wonder if this really works?!:

Teen-repellent.

 

 

BCS316 - Ass03 & Mr. W. - A late afternoon visit

I was doing my BCS315 homework all day and wanted to stop at some point and do the other homework. Mr.W. had said he wanted to go biking but I had too much work and it's still cold outside. So I suggested he get some food, bike by himself and when he's tired pop-in. I even left it open to 5min. -> 2hr. In the end he probably stayed for 4hrs+.

Word 2003 - Viewing the Comment Pane

In Microsoft Word it seems strange that this is the only way to display a the comment pane. There MUST be another way?!?!?!

CSC310

Spent the day working on the CSC310 term project.

Poker night

Another Poker night. It's been a while since we've had a reasonable amount of people show up. We had: Mr. Mexican, P-A (his friend), Zoran, Alex (+his girlfriend), Max, Mr. W., Julien and a new person Rus (sp). I had a good time.

Canvas

It's been SO long since I've heard about Canvas. What I remember is how it had a, ~'million' features. I wonder if they've cleaned it up?

There's some people!

You know there are some people in your life that you meet that are incredible. You don't necessarily have to know them, but you can just, 'tell' they are great. They have everything together, they are just simply, "cool". The potential you see in them is overwhelming. No matter what they do you know they will be fundamentally cool. It doesn't matter what job/career they get they will just be 'themselves'. It's unfortunate that life throws them all the normal growing 'pains' that it does. But maybe it's how they've handled them in the past that makes them who they are. Some people just have all the manners in the world. And it's so great to see people who are gratefull for even the smallest thing. Today I was reminded that I know one of these people :-)

DVD, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"

Watched the DVD, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", aka HPIV.

DVD: Zathura

Watched the DVD, "Zathura". Similiar to: Jumanji.

NuLoogQ

Too bad NuLoogQ is not available for PC :-(

Do you listen to PodCasts? Then try: Juice

Do you listen to PodCasts? Then try: .

Oracle Releases a FREE Database - 10g Express Edition

Oracle - a long time high-end database vendor today announced a entry level free version of their database Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

Interesting Quote: The Human Brain

"The human brain is able to solve incredibly complex problems. It is estimated that it can process on the order of 2 * 1016 computations per second. It is able to compute at this level without generating extraordinary amounts of heat becaues it is massively parallel - the computation is distributed throughout the brain, and not run through a single "super" neuronal computation facility. The up side is that you can scratch your head without receiving third degree burns. The down side is that you have to invest in tools such as a stove or a microwave, rather than just popping food in your mouth and thinking really hard in order to cook it." --- Chris Jackson's Semantic Consonance

Working At Home

I saw a blog from a Microsoft employee who commented on working at home. I had to comment.

CMap v4.02 - Update now available

This is a tool I was introduced to thru a class I took at university.

"The CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet..." - The CMap web-site

I think it's amazing.

The updated version is here: CMap v4.02.

Privacy problem - Cell phone records for sale

How can this possibly be legal??? Imagine what people can do with this info.

Your phone records are for sale !!!

Microsoft FrontPage - Dead!

Microsoft just announced some of the new packaging for Office 2007. One of the things they mentioned is the fact that they now have two web design tools [maybe even three :-(]: Expression Web Designer [EWD] and SharePoint Designer 2007. Since they believe that these tools do a better job at web design they have announced that FrontPage will be discontinued. I'm not sure if this is good news or not. Let me explain. First I believe that FrontPage is very important in some circles. I was never a big fan myself [after trying early versions it would just kill the formatting in your HTML] however some liked it. I always felt there where better options (eg: HomeSite, HTMLPad and Visual Studio.Net [VS.NET]). The problem is why discontinue the product? Why not do the right thing and let someone else continue it's development? The obvious answer is it would instantly create a large competitor. We don't want that! But it's certainly the morally right thing for Microsoft to do. I also don't believe Microsoft should have three pieces of software that have such an overlap. This was the problem with their development tools a few years ago where they had a different IDE for anything you wanted to do (remember InterDev!). I understand that these three tools are aimed at different audiences but I'm really hard pressed to imagine that SharePoint designers [really developers] would not already be using VS.NET and/or thinking about using EWD when it ships. Could neither of these products be extended to handle SharePoint specific features? I would think so.

New Java IDE - NetBeans v5.0

eWeek recently reviewed NetBeans v5.0. They had some minor issues with x-platform GUI stuff but otherwise they liked it.

P.S. After v5.0 was released I found it a little difficult to find the link to the v4.1 download. Here it is for others looking.

VisiCalc for Free

Want a cool small spreedsheet for free? Try VisiCalc.

Modifying GMail to give presistant searches - Who knew!

Using a combination of tools you can apparently add presistant searching to your GMail account.

Interesting Blog post on Google's GMail API

In this blog entry Jon Udell's talks about a library to access GMail's API. Looks interesting.

Identity on the internet has always been a problem...

Identity on Blogs has been a problem [as well as Blog spam] ...but maybe this company has a solution - Sxore .

Need to control your presentation with your cell phone?

"Salling Clicker is [a] innovative remote control tool. It offers the ability to control popular applications from mobile phones or handheld computers through a user interface similar to that on a portable media player." - www.salling.com .

Need to find events...try...EventFul

Need to find events...try...EventFul.

New Blogging Tool: Qumana

New Blogging tool [well news to me ;-)] : Qumana .

SPAD

Another interesting concept: SPAD .

Ajax Tools

Interesting demo of Microsoft's Atlas tool [for using Ajax in ASP.NET 2.0].

New Book: Prefactoring

Interesting new Book: Prefactoring

Management

I figured out today that bad Managers [or those who are in charge] are able to handle [much less then 100% of the problems of the environment they are part of. That is, a manager of a small organization is only barely able to handle any problems in his environment. Put into a large organization they have no chance.

Photoshop vs. Programming

Recently I've been thinking about how two things that I do often photo manipulation and programming. These are good examples of how some tools help and some hinder your work.

When I'm editting a photo [in Photoshop] I'm given a set of tools that basically allow me to do anything I want and in a more or less natural way. I can completely relate to how if I needed to accomplish what layers allow me to do in the real world I could do this. It's easy to think of layers as pieces of paper stacked on top of each other. I can edit individual layers, I can control transparency, I can erase parts of an image etc. Not only that but I can do things not easily done in the real world for example combining[/merging] layers. And this is my point. I have a tool that takes a real world problem and not only allows me to accomplish what I want in a natural way (eg. intuitive and not combersome] but also extends it to do things I couldn't normally accomplish. And isn't that the very definition of a tool. Allowing one to 'extend' their ability.

Now let's look at the current level of programming - specifically object oriented programming. Object oriented programming (OOP) has all sorts of tools to allow one to imagine things as objects and then go about manipulating them with language contructs. The first problem is not everything fits well into the 'object' senerio. I've been part of many projects where 90% of the code is simply moving things in and out of objects. Secondly, the language restrictions of what can be done and when it can be done in OOP vastly constrain what is possible vs. allowing one to accomplish more [not less]. I have all sorts of restrictions with how I define an object, where I can define a routine, how I can access it, who can can access it and when, etc. Why can't I simply write a program that allows me to get done what I want to get done and without it getting in my way? Better still should it not extend my ability and allow me to accomplish more then I normally could without the tool!? Functional programming allowed one to get their job done and in a much less error prone way, yet today everything is about OOP. And we can see the results. How many times did your computer crash and/or needed to be restarted to fix some bizarre effect?! Does this not show that even today's modern computer programmer doesn't fully understand these restrictions? Let's compare this to computer from 10+ years ago how many times did you restart those machines? I'm betting a lot less. So what's going on? Why are we getting worse and not better? I believe it's the fundamental fault of OOP and with it all the restrictions. Any 'professional' programmer spends many years of their life learning the ins and outs of what can and can't be done in OOP. I dare say most of them never really get it. So now we live in a world where to accomplish the simplest of things takes way to much effort in an object oriented language. We need to re-examine the true usefullness of OOP and to come up with something that's more expressive, reliable and faster at accomplishing things that people want to do.

Photoshop allows me to get things done quick and easy. I'm better off using digital technology here then I am at using a 'normal' camera. Can we say the same thing when it comes to programming with OOP techniques!?

Petit-P's Concert

Tonights was Petit-P's school concert. It took some organizing to get my usual Friday routine completed and get to the concert. The first problem being how to have something to eat before the concert. The only real way to do it was to eat at Petit-P's place. Oddly his Mother didn't seem to want to prepare anything for him. Maybe it was because she was going out as well or maybe she was working late I don't know but I'm sure something could have been done. Anyway a can of soap was the chosen option. The concert was scheduled to start according to Petit-P @7:30pm but since he's playing he wanted to get there early to practice, so we arrived ~@6:20pm. After a little problem entering the school (eg: no doors were open), we got setup. People seemed cool and luckily I had brought a magazine and some water to keep me going. The concert eventually started just before 8:00pm. The first singer was Olivier Chankane. And he was by far the best. I'd label him the upcoming John Mayer. He not only did a solo but sang the only non metal song of the night. With Petit-P's digital movie camera I tried to film all the concert but as with most(?) digital technology if the lighting is dark then its really hard. I'm not sure why they [the students] wanted it so dark but moving on. Olivier sang again accompanied by a fellow guitarist. Another good song. It was during this the Mr.W arrived. He was there for 15 or so min. before coming over and saying hi. I was busy filming. We chatted for a bit but there always seems to be a bit of ackwardness with him with other people. No problem. There were some other people I remembered meeting before and I got to see Petit-P's band. The evening continued. I say Punk-Ass play the drums he was amazing and Daniel Jr. sing - amazing as well. The event came to a close and I drove Petit-P, Mr. W. and Kev(?) to the tea place. Oddly on the way I had accidently went thru a red light. Good thing no one was going thru. and it was a 3 way intersection. After dropping them off I went home. It was ~@9:30pm. I was happy to get home at a reasonable time. I finished watching the DVD, "Lord of War".

Visio 12 - Data Graphics

Interesting stuff coming to Visio 12: - visualizing data on your diagram.

New Google ToolBar v4.0 Beta - Now available

New Google ToolBar v4.0 Beta - Now available.

More Poker

In this weeks Poker game we played a more 'professional' version. eg. little bets, big bets, if you're out you are are really out. I don't know how enjoyable it is. It ends up kicking people out that you'd prefer would continue playing. After all it's a social thing as well. Mr. Mexican [and friend], Daniel Jr., Boris and Zoran were part of the group. Always enjoyable. Haven't seen them in a little while.

The other crowd were at another party.

VS.NET Testing?

This has to say something about VS.NET testing :-(

Reliability of software scheduling

Reliability of software scheduling. Recently I've been wondering why software seems to be inheritly hard to develop and deliver. Here's my current theory. When building software you have to build upon others work. At a minimal you call routines in the Operating System. Now you have to rely on how well these routines work. Question - How many times have you as a programmer (/software engineer) used a routine that didn't work as documented? Any experienced programmer has come across this many times during any one project. So now let's imagine that you are an 'expert' at scheduling the development process. You take into account the pieces you are going to use: OS API's, 3rd Party tools, etc. Now how can you truly estimate the time it's going to take if the pieces that make up the project are so unreliable? Can you really estimate how long it's going to take to, 'work-around' problems that are in key components? Let's take the example of people whos workmenship is important. Those that build houses rely on the tools and parts they use. Would it be logical to use pieces that don't work. Logically not. These people rely on proven parts. Over and over again. The question now is why can't software developers do the samething? Why not use the same tools and parts to build software? Take proven parts and get proven results. The problem is the software field changes so often that tools and pieces are never around long enough to prove their reliability. So it seems illogical to build on these foundations. What's the solution? We need tools and platforms that we can build on for a 'long' time. What do I consider long? Minimally a decade. Why a decade? According to the definition of what is considered an, 'expert' it takes at least 10 years to be an expert. Therefore after building something with a background of 10 years of reliability one should be able to finally depend on it.

Adobe Acrobat 3D

Interesting new product from Adobe - Acrobat 3D. If it can work with tools like 3DS MAX and Maya. Wow!

Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking

I had thought this Peer-To-Peer technology was only available for Windows Vista. Apparently it's part of Window XP SP2.

Life experience

There's some people that have things together not just organizational ability but all the other things in life like: cooking, cleaning, fashion, apprearance etc. Today I talked to one such person. There is no doubt they will go onto great things and I'm happy to know them.

Outlook 12 - Search Feature

Microsoft has said that the new searching features in Outlook 12 will be 'instant'. I've posted a comment to Micheal Affronti (Outlook PM) asking about the possibility of 'down-scoping' a search.

Outlook 12 Blog

Interesting blog about how ToDos and time management features have been improved in Outlook 12 (ETA: Q3/06?).

Mono in Fedora Core 5

Mono, the open source .NET framework from Novell will be included in the next version of Fedora Core (5?) according to Red Hat engineer Christopher Blizzard's Blog.

Adobe Labs - Project: Lightroom

As a competitor to Apple's Aperture, Adobe has begun beta testing, "Lightroom". It appears to be Mac OSX only :-(

Adobe Illustrator to WPF ("Avalon")/XAML Export update for the DEC/05 - CTP

There's an update to the Illustrator CS2 plug-in for exporting XAML code.

Long Poker Night & a win for me!

The original plan was to have a Poker night tomorrow. It would be the last one before school starts and everyone has returned from their XMas vacation. However it being a Friday people could not wait so slowey each person asked to do something tonight. I accepted. The usual gang of people came and we had the best Poker night of all. What made it good. Well I was in the 'finals' with Mr. Punk-ass. He usually wins but tonight we had a long-long final match. In this game we doubled the initial bet after every two games, by the time the game ended we were at 245(?). So just getting an initial bad hand would cost you big. We ended at @3:00am I was up and I basically decided to end it I went all in on 2-9's on the table and I had another one, so 3-9's. I won. It was a great match.

Upcoming Book: Software Estimation: Demystifying The Black Art: Books

Software Estimation: Demystifying The Black Art is the next 'great' book by Steve McConnell. Coming Mar'06.

The Binding Handle is Invalid in VS 2005 Resolved

I guess recently I had tried to disable any unneccessary services, this caused a problem for VS.NET 2005 when running an application. The error, "The binding handle is invalid". Thank God someone posted a solution. The simple answer re-enable Terminal Services.