Loving that Resharper

First, a caveat: Resharper 2.0 still had tons of bugs in it. In fact, the unit test support still locks up Visual Studio at times. And, they’re horrible about letting people know about patches.

On the bright side, I’ve started using their template system, and I love it! I’m going template-crazy right now, creating templates that do all those tedious tasks that I’ve always done manually. So far, I have:

1. A File Template that creates an NUnit Test Fixture class that has all the right namespaces, methods, and attributes.

2. Property templates for Get-Only, Set-Only,  and Get-Set properties. It automatically tabs through the type and property name .

I’m sure there’s more to come…

6/29/2006 2:24:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

Iron Man is so misunderstood

Today, John Campea, in the Movie Blog, was saying that Iron Man is just a Batman knock off. Now, I don’t want to say that he doesn’t know Iron Man, but he doesn’t.

There are some fascinating twists to the Iron Man story.

First of all, Iron Man has a “day job” as the bodyguard of his public identity, Tony Stark. This means that Iron Man’s always getting pulled into Tony Stark related stuff.

Second, Bruce Wayne is a playboy/philanthropist; Tony Stark is an industrialist/weapons manufacturer. As above, this means that storylines tent to focus on his company, Stark Industries, as opposed to the kind of “general crime fighting” that Batman is up to.

I’m hoping that the upcoming Iron Man movie will be “true” to the character’s origins and have a plot around Stark Industries, industrial espionage, and global terrorism. This is where the Iron Man character really shines.

That alcoholism stuff they pulled was lame beyond lame; they never should have gone there. It was very un-Iron Man.

Finally, you want to talk “Batman knock-off”? Let’s talk Green Arrow!

6/23/2006 4:06:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Portland BarCamp anyone?

This weekend is the San Francisco BarCamp. What’s BarCamp, you ask? BarCamp is yet another form of the un-conference (like Code Camp). The thing that’s different about BarCamp is its only for participants. So, it breaks the speaker/audience model, even further than Code Camp does. Everyone presents (or at least participates in presentations), so its more of a peer gathering.  You can find more information on BarCamps here and there’s a “BarCamp for Dummies Newbies” here.

I’m wondering if this would be a neat thing for the Portland area… Any takers?

6/23/2006 9:25:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general | development

Apparently, America does have talent

I watched part of America Has Talent, last night and was surprised that it didn’t suck. I was expecting something along the lines of the (late, unlamented) Gong Show. And, while there were definitely gong-worthy acts, most of the acts were very entertaining. It reminded me of the good old days of the Ed Sullivan Show and Hollywood Palace.

It’s too bad that they’re purposely putting on obviously bad acts just to give the judges something to do. This is a good show for recording and watching later; then, just skip over the garbage…

6/22/2006 11:38:31 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Futurama Resurrection

Via TV Barn, Comedy Central has announced that they’ve bought the rights to air 13 new Futurama episodes! Yee ha! I was a fan of the series when it was on Fox, but hadn’t appreciated just how good the show was until I started watching the reruns recently. The show is pure, unadulterated genius. Fox really blew it when they mishandled the show. But then, they did the same thing with Family Guy, before reinstating it last season…

Thank you, Comedy Central, for your brilliance.

6/22/2006 11:33:45 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Joel on Bill

Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, posted an interesting article on his first real experience with Bill Gates at Microsoft. It’s a very interesting read, that gives insights into both Bill himself, and how the rest of “techdom” view him (or at least those that know him).

I’d heard similar stories before, though it was interesting hearing Joe’s version. However, the thing that really struck me was that, this isn’t the way its done at Microsoft today and hasn’t been the way for quite some time. In the old days, Bill was central to the company, even after it became “big business”. This was how the now legendary “Internet shift” could happen. I think Bill liked having things this way, and he’s less interested in being just a “figurehead” for the company. This is probably central to his decision to wean himself from Microsoft and concentrate on his foundation, where he can have this kind of central role.

Good luck, Bill. It’s been a fun ride.

As a side note, I thought that it was interesting that last week’s Newsweek included a story on second careers for boomers, even before Bill’s announcement came out.

6/19/2006 10:24:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | development

Adobe vs Microsoft

Adobe is finally talking about its threatened suit vs. Microsoft regarding PDF writing support in Office 2007, and Microsoft’s new electronic document format, XPS. Of course, they’re talking anti-trust and Monopoly, having taken a page from Sun’s strategy in their lawsuits against Microsoft. Several thoughts come to mind:

1. The Justice Department should examine Adobe for anti-trust. After all, based upon Judge Penfield Jackson’s sliding scale approach to Monopolies (Microsoft has a Monopoly on OS’s running on computers able to run Microsoft software, the other computers, like Mac’s and Mainframes, and Unix machines don’t count), Adobe has a monopoly on PDF technology (it’s the ONLY electronic document format, and they own it).

2. Adobe should remember what happened to Sun: after winning their suit, and getting Microsoft to agree to remove Java from their OS’s, they had to go back and get Microsoft to agree to leave in their JVM to prevent Java usage from imploding since very few computer vendors seemed interested in shipping Windows with Sun’s (or anyone else’s) JVM pre-installed.

3. Microsoft also did a job on Sun by placing the C# language definition under the control of ECMA. What happens if they do the same thing for XPS? Just how does Adobe sue Microsoft for implementing an ECMA standard?

Adobe could find its core technology undermined in a big way if it tries to play hardball over this. Remember Ashton-Tate and Dbase: they sued Borland for copyright infringement and instead, wound up losing their own copyright over the database language.

6/19/2006 9:51:03 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | technology

Beginning of the end

News.com is reporting that Bill Gates is stepping down as Chief Software Architect. He’ll stay on for a couple of years, transitioning from time employee to part time employee and chairman. Ray Ozzie (the current CTO of Microsoft) will take over as Chief Software Architect.

This is the start of Bill’s retirement, and typical of entrenched execs who are moving to retirement: they have to wean themselves from their company (and vice versa).

6/15/2006 3:46:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

New Palm, part 2

Well, I’ve been using my Palm TX for a while now, and while I’m still annoyed about how hard it was to get going (are you listening, Palm? and why can’t I tell you about that directly?), my actual experience is terrific. I’ve got all the software I use regularly installed, and even was able to find a new video playing program (open source / freeware this time) that is better than what I had on my LifeDrive.

And, due to recommendations at work, I’m finally giving Rhapsody a try. It took me a while to get used to the interface, but so far I’m liking it. My boss had a good point: the music I listen to changes over time, so why not just “rent” it via a monthly charge? My MP3 player on my TX also works directly with Rhapsody, so loading musing into it is easy.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the purchase now. In fact, I cancelled the MP3 player that’s been on backorder for a week now.

I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen right now. Excellent.

6/15/2006 11:11:34 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

A movie that wasn't as bad as I expected

Yesterday, desperate for something new to watch on TV, I watched the remake of  The Stepford Wives. At first, I found the movie annoying in its one-sidedness. After a while, I began to see that the one sidedness was part of the story, and started ignoring it. Once I did that, the movie was almost entertaining (yes, I said “almost”).

Near the end of the picture, in the first “revelation scene”, I realized that the movie was fundamentally a “role reversal” picture. By switching the gender roles around, the story made a lot more sense, and was a lot more “sinister” in nature. It definitely wouldn’t have been made that way, but it was interesting to look at the picture from that angle.

The final twist was also interesting and one I didn’t expect at all. I won’t describe it so not to spoil the picture for anyone masochistic enough to choose to watch it.

All in all, the final resolution showed some nice balance, though not enough to make the picture into anything but a bad remake. I did think it was interesting that a movie making a statement about the subjugation of women (if that was what they were trying to do, its hard to say) only had one actor with star billing: Nichole Kidman. Even Matthew Broderick was relegated to billing “under the title”.

As a side note, what’s with these remakes that either ridicule (Stepford Wives, Starsky and Hutch) or ignore (all the MI’s) the originals? It’s a safe bet that the folks making these movies weren’t fans of the originals, and they’re basically just cashing in on the name recognition, or are they trying to “say” something more significant? If they are, they’re doing a lousy job of it.

6/12/2006 5:03:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Palm Postscript
I tried to send my previous post directly to Palm, and found that there was no way to do that. Hopefully, they’ll find my post directly. Not a high hope though.
6/12/2006 11:27:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

New Palm, new adventure

I’ve been having “slowdown” issues with my Palm LifeDrive. It’s a great PDA/MP3 player, but has a huge flaw: Palm decided to treat the HD storage like internal (Flash) RAM instead of as external storage. This means that applications are stored in it and must be swapped to RAM to run. This causes a noticeable delay at both startup and when switching applications, and can be really annoying when all you want to do is check your appointments for the day.

I considered just resurrecting my T3, since I was happy with it (other than having decent MP3 capability). However, I realized that I’d miss having WiFi capability (the T3 only has Bluetooth). I remembered that Palm now had the TX model out, and sure enough, it has both Bluetooth and WiFi built in. It also has 100 MB of (available) Flash RAM, so it sounded like a serviceable MP3 player too (like the LifeDrive, it comes with MP3 player software). Since the price was right, I went for it and picked one up.

It turns out that the TX has a few flaws in its OS … Everything went well until I tried to synch up with my LifeDrive’s backup: the synch locked up in the middle, and the TX started resetting repeatedly. The only way I could stop it was to reset it back to factory defaults.

Now, a little history. I’ve been using a Palm OS device since the Palm IIIx days in the mid ‘90s (gadzooks! just about 10 years!). I’ve gone through several “device transfers”, and they’ve all gone without a hitch. Even when there were hardware / OS changes, the system was smart enough to handle it without any major work on my part. So, this reset problem was extremely unwelcome.

I did some Googling on the problem, and found a couple of articles on how to handle it. Apparently, mine was not an isolated case. Plan A and plan B both failed (soft reset, hard reset). Plan C finally got the device working (reset to factory defaults, remove all backup records from the HotSynch database before synching up for the first time). Then, I had to load the missing applicatons piecemeal from my old backup. After a few hours of work, I (finally) have a working TX with my old data intact.

Then, I ran into my next hurdle: While the Life Drive will work as a virtual disk drive through its hotsynch cable, the TX doesn’t. I was surprised by this, since its a standard feature of Palm’s only real competitor, Microsoft. Luckily, I found a third party app (kudos to the Palm development community; they’re the main reason I’ve stuck with Palm over the years) that provides virtual drive support to the external SD card. This actually provides me with potentially MORE storage than I could have had with the Palm’s Flash RAM, since I can get up to at least a 1 GB SD card into that slot. This is MORE space than I was using on my Life Drive.

Anyway, today I’m finally up and running on the TX. So far, now that my startup pain is over, its living up to its promise: its nice and snappy, and has all the nice features that I used with the Life Drive. As an added bonus, the Grafitti 2 interface seems to work better with the TX than it did with the Life Drive. Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the current Palm devices. Both the TX and the Life Drive before it showed a much lower level of quality than the previous units. Frankly, I’d be switching to a Windows Mobile device, except I have experience with it as well, and the quality there is even lower: Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand the handheld market anywhere near as well as Palm does. So, I’m sticking with Palm for the duration, hoping and praying that they get their technological act together. Needless to say, that I’ll be sharing this story with anyone interested in hearing it…

6/12/2006 10:54:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

WinFX is dead, long live .NET Framework 3.0
It looks like Microsoft finally found a “product naming person” with a clue. They’ve decided NOT to call the (next) version of the .NET Framework “WinFX” after all, opting for the much more sensible “.NET Framework 3.0”. Okay, so it still a terrible name (try Googling “.NET” and see what you get!), but at least it has some continuity with what’s come before. We’ve been living with the “.NET” name since before 2002.
6/9/2006 5:08:21 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development