Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

William Safire, in his inimitable concise style, writes in his weekly Times Magazine column from this Sunday about "When was the lowercase i before an uppercase anything born, and what did it stand for?" He goes on to record that the first " i -product was the iMAc in 1998." This led to the iBook, followed by Apple's iPhoto, iTunes and of course the iPod. The meaning of i went beyond Internet, to be taken as "individual", "integrated", "interactive", or "what I want when I want it". Other companies jumped in. A furniture company calls its massage chair "iJoy". So keep on the lookout for the iBlogs. I'm sure they are coming. Mine shall remain an "UnBlog", which means, very simply, that it isn't one. Now of course since Miers has gone to the wolves, devoured by both Democrats and Republicans alike, we are presented with Alito, which suggests, as Safire laments, that it's back to "Gove...

And don't forget, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST! If you need help uninstalling beta versions, Aaron Stebner, MS Developer extraordinaire, has posted the latest versions of his "uninstall and cleanup tools" here . Really, these work better and faster than using "Add / Remove" from Control Panel anyway :-) Stebner has additional information that can be helpful in removing "unfound" versions of SQL Server 2005 Betas/ CTP's with the Cleanup Tool (that uses msizap) here .

Yup. I believe I have found a legitimate, really useful (a la "Thomas the Tank Engine") use for Visual Basic .NET! There are lots of scripts out there written primarily in VBScript that enable developers to do all kinds of cool things. If you aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, visit the TechNet Script Center and have yourself a look. Now the cool thing is, you can paste a lot of this stuff into a VB.NET Class Library project, and all you need to do is massage the "Set", "wscript" and other VBS script-generic statements to regular old VB.NET Objects and fix up the code until "It Just Works"! The key feature of this completely innovative and mind-blowing technique that most VB.NET afficionados will really like is that in order to make it really, really easy for yourself - you can Turn Off Option Strict and Option Explicit! ("What?", you say, "I already have them turned off...") My Gosh! I've already...

J.R. of Happy, TX reports he is using Ajax successfully on his SmartPhone. He says it "cleans up that small screen right nice". In other news, a woman from Newburgh, NY is reportedly suing the Colgate-Palmolive Company over a hot bottle of AJAX that spilled off her washing machine and ruined three dresses. Jack Spratt of Horse, IN reports that he uses AJAX every morning to clean his bathroom. Jack says that the product "doesn't mess up the UI of my bathroom mirror " and "there's no flicker or page reload when I flush the toilet." Meanwhile, blogger Don Hopkins reports "AJAX is like cocaine: it seems glamorous until you actually start using it, then the unintended consequences totally f**k you up." Hopkins posts the "Special Hazard Precautions for AJAX": INGESTION: NAUSEA, VOMITING, AND DIARRHEA. EYES: EYE IRRITANT UPON DIRECT CONTACT. SKIN: MAY CAUSE SKIN IRRITATION UPON PROLONGED CONTACT. INHALATION: NONE UNDER NORMAL USE. ...

Yup. Came up again. Other developers came to me with a classic engineering problem (One of those, "Uhh, we think we shot ourselves in the foot", how do we fix it" kind of deals). They were storing Xml documents that represent classes in the database in string form. Problem is, they didn't add a column to show the Version of the class / xml that was stored. And of course, one ambitous developer modified the class in their DAL, and now when they retrieve the Xml, deserialization fails. He didn't ask that magic four word question that developers should ALWAYS ask when making a code change: "WHAT DOES THIS AFFECT?". What's the answer? A simple answer is to add a column to the table that specfies the class version that is stored in the varchar or Text field of the table, and to mirror this in some sort of constant string field in the class that is to represent the deserialized xml string. So when you pull the xml out of the database, you will automati...

I just had to laugh this morning when I read about somebody finally hitting the winning number in the PowerBall lottery, which had gone for 20 rollovers without a winner. People do the silliest things: "Mary Neubauer, spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery, said hundreds of ticket buyers had played a set of numbers from the ABC drama "Lost," which featured a character who won $156 million by playing a string of digits obtained from a patient in a mental institution: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42." I'm getting the idea now. Television actually DOES reduce your IQ! By the way, the famous quote in the title is from Robert Coveyou, the noted physicist who was chief of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs.

Among my other travails in the .NET world, I've been serving as a Technical Review Editor for a couple of upcoming .NET related books. You see some interesting and occasionally VERY ANNOYING statements made by various authors when you get to review these chapters. It becomes obvious (especially with .NET 2.0 where authors are often "rewriting" their 1.1 books, and more often than not, they aren't adding much new value either) that we are making statements and proclamations out of habit, even when they are DEAD WRONG, simply because some tech reviewer from the previous book didn't catch it. I'm not naming names, because that's not the point. The point is, authors should take GREAT PAINS to get their facts straight. If I am a "noob" and I buy and read your book and accept information that you give me in the confidence that it is factual, and it turns out not to be so, you have done me an egregious disservice and hurt not only me, but yourself, y...

Just a thought that popped into my head after looking at the charts of NYMEX unleaded. No question that gas is in a new bull market, OPEC is even considering reducing oil output, although the real problem isn't crude, its refining capacity. If you own a gas-guzzlin' ESS YOO VEE and drive it to work and back every day, and you're the only person in the car (at least that's what I see from the vantage point of my 29mpg Camry every day) then maybe you are thinking about this? According to the experts, it's not that technology is an issue - it's your BOSS! From the Washington Post: "Ronald F. Kirby, transportation planning director of the council of governments, said the main obstacle to teleworking is that some bosses worry about supervising workers 100 miles away. "There is a strong level of resistance by middle managers," he said, even though studies have shown employees are more productive when teleworking." And more - - "Private compani...