Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that." -- Joel Spolsky on IE 8.0 and standards   Well, I just sat through a two plus hour meeting that went right through the normal lunch hour. You know what happens to your productivity when you've been sitting in the same chair for over two hours and you are hungry and the hell with lunch and other perfectly civil human needs, we're gonna finish this meeting if it takes until 10PM tonight, right? Time for a refresher on something I wrote about back in 2001: How to hold a successful development meeting.  The first and best way is NOT to have a physical meeting at all. In this day of intranet discussion groups, Instant Messaging, Remote Desktopping, email distribution lists and other excel...

This is pretty slick. The Database file sizes are small (Northwind = about 2MB), the assemblies to add to an application are small. It supports replication and a lot of other features. No stored procs, but it supports Views and full relational integrity. You can deploy it in a regular MSI project by simply adding the seven dll's and your database file.   Best of all, your System.Data.SqlCe namespace works exactly like the System.Data.SqlClient one. For example in a small Windows Forms test app:   private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             string cnstr=@"Data Source=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v3.5\Samples\Northwind.sdf";            System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeConnection  cn = new SqlCeConnection(cnstr);             SqlC...

A white paper released from IDC ( http://www.idc.com/) revised the research firm's earlier estimates to show that by 2011, the amount of electronic data created and stored will grow to 10 times the 180 exabytes that existed in 2006, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of almost 60% . By 2011, there will be 1,800 exabytes of electronic data in existence, or 1.8 zettabytes (an exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes). The number of bits stored already exceeds the estimated number of stars in the universe, IDC stated. Because data is growing by a factor of 10 every five years, by 2023 the number of stored bits will surpass Avogadro's number, which is the number of carbon atoms in 12 grams, or 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.022 x 10^23). The study, entitled  "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe," also found that the rate at which electronic containers for that data — files, images, packets and tag contents — is growing —  is 50% faster than the data its...

Zen Master: Want  hotdog with everything. HotDog Stand Owner: OK Buddy, here ya go. That'll be $20.00. Zen Master: Here twenty dollar bill. HotDog Stand Owner: That'll do it, pal. Have a great day! Zen Master: What about change? HotDog Stand Owner: Ah, change... must come from within!   This is an area where I (and many others) have been quite vocal in complaining. If you can point the src property of a <script... tag at another domain, and said script can basically do anything it wants, then why can't you make an XmlHttpRequest to another domain (other than the one from which the page emanated)? It's certainly an inconsistent application of the notion of security, at a minimum. So in Internet Explorer 8.0 you have the new IHTMLXDomainRequest Interface. Here's how it works, in a nutshell: Cross-domain requests ("XDR", for short) require mutual consent between the webpage and the server. You can initiate a cross-domain request in your webpage by...

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster touch you with his noodly appendage! -- Pastafarian saying ** Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Plug in Runtime ** Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 (Includes SDK - installs everything except Blend) ** Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview (handles Silverlight 2.0 projects) ** Expression Studio 2.0 Beta (includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.)  This release continues to enable building rich client applications with WPF and also helps designers target Silverlight 2.0 for delivering stunning web applications. ** Silverlight 2.0 documentation and links to Quickstarts, etc. All this stuff was just put out from MIX. Have fun! With version 2.0, now that I can use real .NET libraries in the browser, this is where I start getting seriously interested in Sillverlight . Once you get the bits installed, there is a very nice series of Hands On Lab s that you can download for the f...

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.   - Albert Einstein From the IE Blog : "We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously." The Explanation They are saying that thinking about IE8’s behavior with their published interoperability principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do. And more: "this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue ". In other words, instead of the various quirks mode flags and what-not, we'd rather not get sued, so we'll just default to the best standards compliance we can provide. "Quirks Mode" describes how modern browsers (like IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera) all have different modes for interpreting the content of a web page: Quirks and Standards.  Basically, all the browser...

Since around 2006, the spammers have been using a technique that essentially gets specific pages ranked high in the search engines for certain search terms. Then when the search engine serves results to an unwitting user, instead the spammer site embeds some script or a an HTTP refresh with a zero time delay, or a 302 redirect into the search result. Here is just one relatively innocuous example (don't click it unless you want to examine the script, which is javascript obfuscated) <script src=" http://cappa.pl/sutra/js/random" ></script>. if embedded in a search result link or description, this will redirect you to some sex site or whatever who has actually PAID for this service. Yes, apparently the search engine hijackers actually make their clients pay for this stuff, in effect getting free money for no effort other than a little javascript programming. This particular little scriptlet currently appears in a google search 11,800 times , 111,000 times in liv...