Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22CFC239-337C-4D81-8354-72593B1C1F43&displaylang=en And that's not all . X64 both Windows Server and Windows XP were both RTM'd and are up on MSDN Subscriber downloads! Now. You have the ability to develop & test 32 & 64 bit apps on the same system. Now let's see, what did they have up there at TigerDirect for the AMD 3400's....

Supreme Court, stodgy old alta-cacca's that they are, really got down to the nitty - gritty today in the first of a series of hearings pitting the entertainment giants against the P2P file-sharing community. Hundreds of mostly young people gathered on the Supreme Court steps in support of the file-sharing companies, chanting and carrying signs. Some camped out overnight to attend the oral arguments. Supreme Court precedent dates back to a 1984 ruling that Sony Corp. could not be held liable if consumers used the company's Betamax tape machines to illegally copy movies. Most of the comments I've read indicate the Justices have a healthy respect for innovation and entreprenuerism, and it will be hard to convince them to make file sharing networks legally liable for the frenzy of P2P movie and audio file sharing that goes on (most of which is, of course, not legal). Justice Antonin Scalia wondered whether innovators would be punished immediately after creating a new product i...

We've noticed a conspicuous absence of the revered Dr. Dexter Dotnetsky on eggheadcafe.com over the last couple of months. However, I recently got an email from him with the photo below attached. He says he is in Phoenix, working on a top - secret project, and will be back soon. On another "Note", have you ever noticed the high percentage of programmers who are also accomplished musicians? Being a former semi-professional jazz musician myself (played bass with the Robert Hunt Trio in New York, played with the likes of David King, Jules Broussard, and Noel Jewkes in San Francisco, even played shakuhachi duets with Schawkie Roth in Mill Valley) I find this particularly interesting. Surely the inventors of C# were musicians, no? (the key has seven sharps)... I think it has to do with brain chemistry myself. Particularly jazz musicians. What do you think? throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot restart Brain that is already in motion.");

Yup. They've done it again. Asynchronous XMLHTTPRequest and javascript to load an XML Document "behind the scenes" in a web page and use it to update the UI. It's so absolutely innovative as a programming concept that they've even given the technique a new Acronymn - AJAX! Just like they gave REST it's name when all it really boils down to is simple RPC over http on the querystring, essentially. (Actually, Ajax was the son of Telamon king of Salamis. After Achilles, he was the mightiest of the Greek heroes in the Trojan War.) Why do these people with their SOA's and their AJAX's and God knows what else feel compelled to do this crap? Sell more magazines, perhaps? Sell more software? The problem is, XMLHTTP has been around for Internet Explorer since version 3.0. By Internet standards, that's ancient history. So now people have resorted to "reinventing" it to gain marketing hype and notoriety. In fact, the first "big" use of...

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Taking a look at the Amex Oil Index Chart since 1985, you can see that the big spike at the end clearly doesn't reflect the real increase in demand, which has been relatively "regular" until about the middle of 2003 (year - over - year, for example from last year, only about a 2 percent increase). What you are seeing is a lot of oil futures traders have unusually low short positions, an indication that prices are peaking (that's correct, the majority of futures traders are exactly wrong around price extremes). So, don't take out a second mortgage to fill up your SUV just yet. Short Crude instead! You'll be able to make enough profit to be buying gasoline for a long time! Amex Oil Index 

When uninstalling December CTP's to install the latest February 2005 CTP's be sure NOT TO UNINSTALL .NET Framework 2.0 first! The CTP's cannot uninstall without .NET 2.0 present. I found that if you install the February CTP of VS.NET 2005, the old SQL Server 2005 from December 2004 can use the latest Framework 2.0 version to be able to be uninstalled. Then, you can install the February SQL 2005 version. Another gotcha - these guys ARE NOT compatible with each other. In other words, if you install VS.NET 2005 February, it WILL NOT WORK with the December 2005 CTP version of SQL Server 2005.

This Richard Grimes thing has really fired up a lot of people! The guy is a pro, he can say whatever the hell he wants in his parting shot at DDJ. So he put down .NET and made a bunch of predictions.Who cares! When .NET first came out I clearly remember one JAVA guru calling it "Vaporware". You really don't want to engage too much in mental masturbation over this kind of thing. Maybe he was having a Senior Moment. Maybe somebody in Redmond got him pissed off. One thing I know, his comments about VB.NET were right on. We don't need no steenking Vee Bee Dot Net! Nyaaa, Nyaa Nyaaa! It's not the language itself (although I've come to hate it). What it really is: Microsoft tried to create a new language for marketing purposes, because of all the billions ( a la Carl Sagan) of VB develpers out there. In doing so, they perpetuated all the helper classes and crutches and Option Strict=off and Option Explicit = off and the result is you have beelions of crybaby V...

I'm always telling the Significant Other, if we are gonna do Blockbuster, let's get a movie that will make us LAUGH! It is just pitiful to me to see how many people are just so damned serious about every little thing in their lives, they may have actually forgotten that life is FUN! Not only fun, but it is downright FUNNY! How the hell can you enjoy yourself if you walk around treating every little thing like a damned crisis! Now here's a blog that is funny. If you are a programmer like me, and you don't get at least two or three GOOD LAUGHS a day, do yourself a favor. Bookmark this guy's blog and visit it. It will make you realize, if only for a short while, that it's not worth it to get too serious ABOUT ANYTHING. We're here for a nanosecond in the spacetime of the cosmos, and then we are GONE. Try to enjoy it a little bit while you are here, OK? http://barryrabin.blogspot.com/

Recently an old article I'd seen several times before surfaced on a couple of blogs, and I went back and re-read it. It's about the On-board shuttle group, and how they write perfect code . And I mean PERFECT. This is the software that makes the Space Shuttle go. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have ever achieved. The last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long --had just one error each. I've lifted out and edited a few lines to save you some searching and reading time; what follows is really the essence of this whole concept: This is all the work of 260 women and men based in an anonymous office building across the street from the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas, southeast of Houston. Their prowess is world renowned: the shuttle software group is one of just four outfits in the world to win ...

Kind of reminds me of the "Mark of Zorro" (Jeesh, I must be getting old). Anyway, basically its a special marker comment in a local (on your box) web page: <!-- saved from url=(0023)http://www.contoso.com/ --> Requirements: The (0023) is the the string length of the URL that follows;at a minimum, the string length should indicate the number of characters in the complete URL up to the end of the top-level domain name (.com, .org, .net, and so on for Internet sites). The comment must contain the Web page's URL immediately following the string length. The comment must appear in the first 2,048 bytes of the HTML document, within the HTML markup. Basically, with XP SP2, local webpages now run as untrusted, and that's why you get that nasty security thing at the top of the page now. Th MOTW enables you to test your active HTML documents in the security zone where you intend the pages to run. Adding the MOTW to your Web pages also enables you to fully test their com...

In 1915, in his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein basically said that the combined speed of an object's motion through space and time is always exactly equal to the speed of light. In other words, as you travel faster, time "slows down" for you. At the speed of light, time stops. In 1971, Haefele and Keating flew caesium beam atomic clocks around the world on a commercial jet. When they compared the clocks to identical stationary clocks on the ground, they found that less time had elapsed on the flying clocks - precisely in accordance with Einstein's discoveries from 56 years earlier! Yes, it took that long, and there was a hell of a lot of testing in - between. There's an important analogy here: In software development, as in quantum physics, theories are wonderful and can be very exciting, but it is only through the rigors of testing that we can determine the facts and capabilities of our product. How much testing have you done on your latest creation? Whe...

Anybody who's ever read some of my rants on eggheadcafe.com knows that I am a big proponent of writing documentation for your creations WHILE YOU ARE CREATING. The reasoning for this should be as objective as gravity to anybody who has walked into a new environment and had code thrown at them for which there is ZERO documentation (Sound familiar?). I wrote a "HOWTO" article recently just to show how easy it is to document your C# classes, then use NDoc and the HTML Help Compiler to create beautiful MSDN style CHM help files with TOC, index and fulltext search (Beats those crappy PDF's by a mile!). Recently I had to do this again with a solution that I and another dev are working on which has about 21 different class libraries in it. Of those, 75% or more had NO DOCUMENTATION at all. What's worse, a few of the C# ones actually had old "//" style comments but the guys put them in using old C-style double-slashes instead of the built-in triple slash ...