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.