Bob Powell's External Monologue

It's Beaujolais Nouveaux season in France and this year's bumper grape crop, due largely to warmer weather and a little more rain in the summer months has produced some truly outstanding Primeur wines. If you see a sign for these wines at your local store. Don't be shy. Buy a bottle. You'll not be disappointed.

Today, my Apple Mac Mini crashed, locked up, totally unresponsive and needed the dreaded four-second power button to reset it and regain control.

This is not the first time.

The Mac is not infallible, is is not fashioned by gods, it isn't the thinking man's answer to the evil empire of Microsoft.

Once again. It's a computer that runs software which occasionally bombs. Cool!

Am I the only person annoyed by the behaviour of the WPF ListBox?

Create a page with a ListBox, define a nice DataTemplate Stick some data in the DataContext and... nothing happens.

So much for the DataContext being the center of the universe eh?

You have to specifically declare if you want what ought really to be the default behaviour.

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I'll give anyone and everyone a fair hearing. I try to be even handed in most matters so, today, while driving home I decided to depart from my usual diet of science and news podcasts and listen to some Apple technology stuff instead. You see I have recently become motivated again to get my iPhone app and website finished so, after intalling visual Studo 2010 and setting too on the silverlight web site, I thought I would get up to speed on the apple side of things, as I seem to have a foot in both camps.
I listened to the unofficial apple weblog. Blimey what a mistake that was! Three idiots who couldn't even decide on what technology they should use to run their voice chat session. Apparently they were so useless that they couldn't even make Skype work for them and there were literally minutes of awkward silence and blabbering about how they sounded like chipmunks to one another. They also ranted on about the evils of Microsoft in their best scary evil empire tones.
Well, I'm sorry guys but even though I like my little Mac I have no possible intention of joining the one sided techno bigot society that so many Mac users seem to inhabit. Damn it people. Get a life! it's a computer. The most stupid chunk of logic going. They even use the same CPU now so the arguments over the merits of one instruction set over another are moot.

In the past, Microsoft have been almost too careful about licensing for beta versions of tools and frameworks, stating clearly that beta test versions should not be used for production code. The Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 however has a "Go Live" license which enables us to legally use the beta version of the system to develop line-of-business applications and even to get support for the beta version tools and frameworks.

As someone who is very concerned with code quality and application reliability in my daily job I see this move as a testament to Microsoft's testing and quality regime. In the past, the traditional view of Microsoft software has been to wait for the service pack or version 2.0 before adopting for front-line applications. However, with the emphasis that Microsoft and indeed other software providers place on testing and quality these days, we can be more confident that the first release of a product will be useable and indeed reliable.

I have used Visual Studio 2010 in both pre-beta and beta versions for a while now and I can say that the new features in Visual Studio show a marked emphasis on enabling the developer to understand their code and increase quality by systematic testing and reliability checking. I also know from sources within Microsoft that the Team System improvements, some features of which have been included as standard in Visual Studio 2010, are based on Microsoft's use of their own product; eating thier own dogfood. This gives me even more confidence in the tools. Rest assured that you too can be confident in the new reliability and usability of Visual Studio.

I guess I have been priveliged to have lived in the countries which claim to be the bastions of freedom and equality. I was born in England, lived in America and have adopted France as my home. I am also a technology freak who has WiFi networks at my house and children who enjoy music.

Recently in the news, there have been numerous stories, notably the new laws in France and now the Mandleson copycat crimes in the UK, in which big government has interceeded on behalf of the all-powerful music and film industry to both demonise and punish illegal downloaders by providing sweeping powers to "disconnect" repeat offenders who are caught downloading copyright material from the internet by revoking their right to an online account.

In the case of the laws in France and now it seems in the UK too, the burden of proof of guilt seems to have been removed and the only requirements to having ones internet rights revoked are to have been named in a complaint by a copyright holder. In some cases, the laws which have been proposed are so one-sided that even an unfounded accusation of guilt by a third party can be enough to cause this disconnnection.

While some may say that this is all very ethereal and not something which will affect a great majority of people and that the no-smoke-without-fire rule can happily apply to those no-good teenage hackers anyway, I see this as a very dangerous trend which serves to eat away even more at the right of someone to face their accuser and to require reasonable proof of a crime having been committed before arbitrary punishment is meted out. When this attitude is allowed even for what may seem to be the smallest crime, due process for all other matters is eroded and the foot of despotism placed firmly in the door of civilisation.

We have recently seen cases for exactly similar "crimes" which have wildly differing outcomes depending on the faces in the dock. In the case of Pirate Bay, the defense of being nothing more than a provider of links to materiel hosted elsewhere failed because the defendents were young, hip and openly defiant. In other cases, ISP's who have been accused of facillitating copyright theft have successfully defended their cases by claiming to be nothing more than "conduits of content" This clearly shows that the law for big business is different to the law for the common man.

More and more today, we are seeing the prase "human right" associated with The Internet. The european courts are currently considering whether online access is indeed a human right. One could argue that as access to legal materials in written form is a right of all accused who may wish to instruct their lawyers or to better defend themselves is considered as a human right in western civilisation, then access to the internet should fall into the same category.

I have a reasonably secure wireless network. I use a good secure twenty plus character passphrase scheme on my networks with WPA-enterprise 2 encryption, a firewall and MAC address permissions on my DHCP server so that passing hackers cannot piggy back on and steal my network bandwidth. I wonder however if this is enough to protect me.

Returning finally to my original point, which is that I have a wireless network and teenage children I face two immediate problems. The first is that my kids have already downloaded copyright materials even though I told them not to. They are however children who, had they committed some terrible crime, would be treated as minors, unable to be made responsible for their actions. The second is that even though I have done the best I can, restricting access at my router to filter out sites which host torrents or links to torrents, but with the plethora of file sharing methods available, I cannot be certain that an enterprising teenager or drive-by hacker cannot get the latest film or music bootleg online.

Where would this leave me in the case of being accused of having downloaded copyright materiel? I live my life on the internet. I work as a provider of software and need the information on the internet to do my daily work. If I lost my right to have a DSL account, I would lose my livelyhood as surely as if you were to cut off my hands and put out my eyes. Would this matter to a pencil pusher lawyer in a music or film company? I rather think not. They would be quite happy to infringe my human right to an income I'm sure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8305379.stm

Huh? I have EIGHT children!
Can you possibly be serious?