Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.   - Sir Arthur Eddington You probably haven’t heard much about Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has just entered. However if Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, our lifestyles could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse . Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of dramatic long-term change in the climate. According to geophysicist Philip Chapman , a former NASA astronaut, scientist and former president of the National Space Society, "It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age." In recent months the sun has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily be present in significant numbers.  If the sun does not soon revert to its "normal" behavior, and the speculation in the scientific community is growing that it ...

There are hundreds of “Me Too” blog posts about this, so I won’t bore you with more of the same. There are, however, two of what I think are very important considerations about Silverlight 2 RC0 that developers need to know about. You can only find out about this stuff if you take the time to RTFM carefully. In this case that would be the info on Scott Guthrie’s blog and possibly on Tim Heuer’s blog as well.  Pete Brown also does a great job of covering details, and he writes well. Finally, another smart person to follow would be Mike Snow , who is a Senior Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) for Visual Web Developer Tools.   1)   RC0 is a developer release only . You cannot deploy RC0 applications to the web. They won't work. It's only for test environments where you want to ensure that existing or new applications will work with the final Silverlight 2 release. To repeat: there is no end-user installable runtime for RC0, only the developer runtime with the ...

“The last update to the Hypertext Markup Language — the lingua franca of the web — was the 4.01 specification completed in September, 1999.” – Digg Post Recently I read a post on Jesse Liberty’s blog about getting flamed by some commenter who didn’t like what he was publishing. I responded in a comment that I thought he was doing just fine, and that you cannot expect to please everybody. But I also recommended that he put up one of those free poll “thingies” that would allow his visitors to vote on what they did want to see, and Jesse took me up on it. He put up a comprehensive poll that allowed write-in suggestions. I thought it was very well designed. The preliminary results of some 250 responses (including mine) is quite revealing, I think: “The results have held steady from the very beginning – Webcasts have overwhelmingly been the "last choice" for over 2/3 of users and in-depth tutorials have been the first choice; with short videos and short tutorials splitting t...

I’m starting my studies of Sharepoint and MOSS, so it occurred to me that creating a Microsoft Virtual PC image of Windows Server 2008 along with SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and other useful tools would be a good idea. I’ve used VMWare and it’s great. But for a single developer who just wants a portable image that you can zip up and store on a USB stick, where you don’t need a whole virtualization infrastructure, VPC is ideal. One of the reasons I like it is that VPC doesn’t install a bunch of network drivers and Windows Services like VMWare Workstation or the free VMWare player.  VPC is nearly 100% “Self contained”, and doesn’t install any baggage at all on the host OS. Also, Shawn Wildermuth told me that VPC runs faster, so I took him at his word. The nice thing about all this is that the entire VPC control file and VHD expandable hard disk, with all of the software enumerated above,  7Zips down to just about 3GB – small enough to put on my  $7.99 King...

Often you need to be able to View Source on a page that has injected dynamic javascript to see what you did, and,surprise – it’s not there. Here is a neat way to view source (including any dynamically generated elements or script):     javascript:document.write('<xmp>'+document.documentElement.innerHTML+ '</xmp>');   What this does is simply using the <xmp> (“example”) tag to literally render  your “stuff” without parsing. You can add this to your browser’s favorites as an A-HREF link and that way you can simply choose the favorite to view the complete source on any page.  This is extremely useful when using the Silverlight Browser classes to manipulate the DOM of the underlying Page. Here’s a sample like (this may not work as Blogger does funny stuff, but you can still mouse over it): Debug Js

I started out on Twitter maybe a year ago, then decided it was a waste of time. Then, for some reason maybe 4 months ago I picked up again. It might be that  Witty (a very nice WPF Twitter Client) came out, then I found the JAVA TinyTwitter app for my virtually prehistoric AUDIOVOX SMT5600 smartphone (which only runs compact framework 1.0) . At any rate, I currently follow some  88 active Tweeters (Twitterers? Twitterinoes? Twitterheads?)  and have some 62 or so following me. What I've done from the start is try to concentrate on following only people who I know (either personally or through other communications) plus some extras whose work I am familiar with and who may or may not necessarily be familiar with me. I've found that a good many of the people I follow return the favor by following me. I've focused mainly on the .NET developer crowd. If you cast too broad a net, you are likely to be disappointed with the incredible amount of noise you've generated for yourse...