Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

or, "Don't bother building it, cause I'm not gonna come." Ah, podcasts.. I’ve tried a sampling of podcasts and have been very disappointed. It seems that learning how to speak clearly, avoid breathing into the microphone, and not saying “um” after every few words are essential skills to producing a quality radio program, and the production landscape for podcasting is severely lacking in this regard. It turns out, quite simply, that owning a microphone and some MP3 recording software doesn’t make you interesting. We live in a technological era where any Joe Schmoe garage band can burn their own CD and distribute it. That doesn't mean it will be any good. The real issue I’ve found with the few podcasts I've taken the time to sample is that they’re significantly devoid of substance. Often they spend more time talking about the podcast than the topic, or they are full of off-topic "cutsie" "aren't we kewl" type jokes and the like. If you...

Bruce Wood, a frequent poster on the MS C# newsgroup, said it all: "A mediocre standard is better than no standard at all" Bruce was responding to an OP's desire to "innovate" by using a non-standard implementation of event handlers, and he recalled his experience at university where his professor asked, "What is the purpose of writing code?". After the usual answers (e.g. "To make the computer perform some task") he answered "It's to make it clear to the next guy that reads the code how you solved the problem". The point is, if the only objective is to make the computer perform some task, why not just use assembly language? The answer of course is that in a multi-developer environment, or even one where you may someday leave and someone else will take over your code, you want to make it as easy as possible for others to understand not only what you did, but how you did it, and to be able to maintain that code. It is common for ...

Let's sort out some of this stuff. My erstwhile eggheadcafe.com partner and chief geek, Robbe Morris, attempted to set this up. I gotta tell you, this is one dude who doesn't give up easily. He is persistent, dogged, determined. Bottom line? He gave up! Mostly because it wants to hog website "#1" and we aren't gonna mess with the metabase. He even talked to PSS and they basically said "That's what you have to do". Dudes! WebSite "#1" is not going to get changed to accomodate VSS 2005's quirks, OK? Now let's do a little research, mostly by Googling "Sourcesafe 2005 Internet": First big info blog: http://www.hannesschmidt.de/node/35 Prognosis: Not good. Patient might be alive, but we can't communicate with him / her.... Next Victim: http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/categories/softwareDevelopment/2005/11/24.html Prognosis: Success, but had to workaround "Braindead configuration". Next: http://jasonf-blog.blo...

Technorati Tag: IE7 Developers who are interested in playing with "add on" concepts in Internet Explorer 7 would be well-advised to take a look at the MSFeeds.dll COM Interfaces. Here are a few screen caps of the COM-Interop generated assembly classes you will get when you set a COM reference to the MSFeeds management COM server DLL. There are three main classes, the first is the FeedManagerClass: FeedManager provides methods to add, sync and delete feeds from the Feed folder, as well as maintenance items such as IsSubscribed. Next is the FeedFolderWatcher: FeedFolderWatcher offers management of Downloading and monitoring the Feeds Folder, along with a rich set of events related to same. Finally, you have the FeedWatcherClass: FeedWatcher handles granular tasks / events such as the status of a downloading feed, the FeedItemCount and error handling. With a .NET class library wrapping these COM methods/ delegates / interfaces, developers should be able to build neat "Add...

I just read here about how Google is going to add those absolutely nasty interstitials, expanding and floating ads to its Adsense portfolio. Good God! I avoid any site that has this crap like the plague! How could they possibly expect people to put up with this utter crap and even stay on their site, much less click on one of these doozies! The quote: "Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that "float in" from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you mus...

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's XML! Er, no -- its SOAP! No, scratch that - its --- its --- well, dang-it! Its Something, ain't it? Interesting because what with all the so-called web "API's" put out by everybody and their little brother these days, its getting harder and harder to figure out what you are dealing with. if it's XML, did it come from a WebService? or is it just a resultset in XML format? Who the hell knows, right? Yahoo's new Web Search API's get called with REST - and return either RSS or some sort of XML resultset. There's XSD schemas for those, but no SOAP -- yikes! This all became even more clear this evening when I was answering a post on the C# MS Newsgroup about how to deal with something that was obviously an XML Document representing a "result" object, but with no SOAP wrapper. The poster was asking essentially, "what's the best way to deal with this?". Not long after,...

Not long ago I wrote an entry about global warming and energy in the wake of rapidly rising oil prices. According to NASA, last year was the warmest recorded on Earth's surface, and all five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade. A spokesman indicated that it was "fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years." Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed by 1.08 degrees F, NASA said. Over the past 100 years, it has warmed by 1.44 degrees F. Most scientists attribute the rise to emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, with the burning of fossil fuels being the primary source. The 21st century could see global temperature increases of 6 to 10 degrees F, which will bring us up to the warmest temperatures the world has experienced probably in the last million years . Yet, we continue to consume ever-increasing amounts of oil and coal, the byproducts of w...

Mike Krueger (developer of Sharp ZipLib) and his crew have been working hard on SharpDevelop 2.0, the open-source IDE for .NET 2.0, and it looks really nice. The Beta 1 is quite feature - complete, and VIsual Studio.NET developers will find it very familiar to work with. I just checked it out because one of our messageboard posters was complaining that C# Express has no project template for a Windows Service. Well, SharpDevelop does! And that's not all: it has a IL project template if you are interested in getting close to the metal with working breakpoints and a lot more! If you would like to read up more about the features, here's a good recent review . >>>> Snag yourself a copy at Sourceforge.net NewsGroup Spellers I don't know about you, but I've been frequenting the MS C# language group and also the ASP.NET group. Most of the people in the C# group seem to be able to spell. However, a sizeable number of the posters at the ASP.NET group seem to be havin...

Recently I served as a technical review editor for a book on C# and .NET. Among other issues, I noticed that the explanation "bullet points" describing "pass by value" and "pass by reference" semantics were not only unclear, they appeared to contradict each other. Quite annoyed, I wrote up a particularly scathing review comment and the authors took my advice (plus, I hope similar advice from other tech reviewers). Unfortunately, when I read the section in the final published copy of the book, I suspect the authors may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire - they added more content , which instead of clarifying the issue and the major points, served to muck it up even more, in my opinion. A clear and unequivocal understanding of value types vs reference types in .NET is of the utmost importance. Therefore, I present my own attempt. Einstein said that a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. With that in mind (and to their credit...

Ok, we all know this dood is downright dangerous . But, people need to understand how "holocausts" happen. They don't happen because the German people, or the Japanese people are "evil" in some way. They happen because, usually during bad times, some psychotic power-hungry maniac is able to get into a position of power and is allowed to do his thing unchecked. It's the psychology of crowd madness. It's happened scores of times in recorded history. The people are mesmerized by these evildoers, and they follow. And oftentimes, the rest of the world is apathetic, wants to stay out of the way, or just plain doesn't understand the risk of letting them go unchecked. OK? So now, friends, you are staring a brand new one of these right in the face. I mean, for real, right now, not a game, not a sound bite! A real Hitler, a real Osama Bin Laden. You are watching him on TV, he's out in the open. And, he's both NUTS and DANGEROUS, as in "NUCLEA...