Killer iPhone app

I am a big iPhone user (Sorry MS, I love ya but Apple are the dog's bollox when it comes to gadgets)

My absolute favourite application on the iPhone is Stitcher. It's a neat little app that finds and stitches together podcasts into one long custom radio show.

Being a Brit, I like to listen to UK podcasts from the BBC and the Guardian. Also, having lived in the US for a while I like radio shows such as Car Talk and Science Friday from NPR. The Stitcher application lets me listen to all of these while I am charging around the streets of Paris on my Triumph Bonneville.

Check out Stitcher at http://www.stitcher.com or in the App store on your iPhone.

New content

For a little while I've been busy with projects for a big client and I've sadly neglected my main site bobpowell.net I have recently began putting new content on there with my In Depth section and I intend to do a lot more Silverlight and WPF stuff on there now.

To be honest, I have been so aware of the fact that there is an incredible plethora of information on these subjects available that I wondered about any contribution that I might make being just so much noise. However, after searching for information that was relevant to problems I was working on and finding nothing but out of date and indeed, misleading blather, on the last-but-one beta, alpha or RTM, I am encouraged to imagine that I may actually have something to say if I concentrate on "la derniere cri" as it were.

Watch these spaces, or, if you're lazy, subscribe to my RSS feeds.

Embed a silverlight control into an ASP.Net page

I have been working on a Silverlight banner control for one of my web-sites and had run up against a wall regarding just how to best embed a simple silverlight application or control into a web page on a site created in ASP.Net. To me this seems like one of the most fundamental questions one could ask about Silverlight but, after much searching and many confusing answers that all seem to relate to the beta versions of Silverlight, I eventually discovered how to do this on my own, more or less by trial and error.

I have produced a video using Camtasia that shows how to achieve the task in what seems to be the simplest manner. I hope you like it.

Incidentally, One of my clients is a company that has me creating educational video content for their development teams. I don't have quite the same equipment as they have, a studio and dedicated engineers, but I think that I will do more of these.

To see the video, just follow this link...

Grumpy old man?

Everyone is familiar with the grumpy old man. You know who he is, a bloke of "a certain age" forty going on fifty with a bit - or a lot - of grey and maybe a bald head who just moans and groans about everything.

I am a grumpy old man. I am also proud of being one, in the same way that my darling wife is proud of being a crone.

What do I moan about? I moan about my idiot children who have decided that smoking is a cool thing to do. I moan about the way big business has no room for the little person and how there is no real concept of personal service any more unless it's the service of sycophants that expect to be paid for the honour. I moan about shitheads like Robert Mugabe or those blasted Chinese who commit genocide upon Tibetans and who are ignored because the west loves to wear Nike shoes. I moan about the duplicity of governments who have elected officials who refuse to obey the will of the people that elected them. I moan about religion that pollutes the minds of people so much that they would kill innocent children in the name of their useless gods.

Secretly however, deep inside, I am happy. I am happy that I am fortunate enough to be able to feed my idiot children, even if they don't appreciate it yet. I am happy that I have my health and that I have a very low probability that someone will stick a gun in my face in the near future. I am happy that I can vote for my officials even if I know that they still won't really do what I want them to.

I sincerely hope that wherever you are, even if you're a grumpy old sod like me, that you can enjoy this mid-winter festival free from oppression, hunger and looming death. If you can't, rest assured that I am thinking of you and wish that things could be different for you.

Merry Yuletide.

Life, the universe and everything.

There are several schools of thought that are concerned with the idea of life in the universe and whether we may someday find that we are indeed alone or find that we are competittors for space in a crowded universe.

Frank Drake's now famous equation has been seen, for many years, as a possibility but recent developments in the study of the statistical possibilities of the incidence of life suggest that a much more conservative figure should be expected. Several ideas recently postulated, say that the possibility of life on a potentially suitable planet is only about 0.01 percent. If we take the best case, saying that liveable planets exist in every solar system then we could expect about a hundred million planets should exist in our galaxy with some sort of rudimentary life, some of which would grow to harbour intelligent life.
If we take a very dim view that only one in a hundred solar systems has anything like a Goldilocks zone, perhaps we could imagine a million life bearing planets in the galaxy.

Whatever the outcome, there is still only one possibility. That is that mankind must go out to space, not just as occasional visitors, but en-masse to struggle and probably to die out there but certainly to colonise the universe as much as we can.

In our four million year or so existence we have conquered just about all there is to conquer, at least in a physical sense, upon the earth. In all that time we have also shown that we do our best work when faced with adversity and a frontier to challenge. Having no frontiers remaining on earth will cause humankind to expand to completely fill the boundaries that we have and then to perish in decay.

So many people these days are concerned with the environment and with the destruction we are wreaking on the planet as we grow our technologies. We moan and whine about global warming or carbon footprints but few people see that this planet is nothing more than a stepping stone for the species and that, as the very top of the top of the food-chain, we own the darn planet and we can do with it as we please. If we need to make so much mess on the planet that we have to escape it at all costs then this will do no more than save the human race from the other, more awful possibility that we will one day be wiped out in our complacence and laziness in our own little Zen garden, unable to prevent the sun from evaporating our oceans or an asteroid from erasing us as the Dinosaurs were snuffed out from history.

I love Tigers and Rhinoceroses and frogs and Pandas but really, I don't give a monkeys, if you'll pardon the pun, for any of them if preserving them means that we must endanger our own future. DNA is nothing but software that runs on amino-acids. We can disassemble it at the moment but in a few years we will have an assembler for the stuff too. We can only hope that the democratisation of the gene assembler is used to make things as benign as a new Panda or to raise the Mammoth or the Tyrannosaurus from the dead. You can be sure that before Jurassic park is a reality, a world blighted by pathogens released by religious fanatics will be more likely.

Mankind must have a frontier, men must die to cross it and, as a race, we will never survive if we do not make the supreme effort. Screw the oceans, the fish, the trees and the dammnable Pandas! Grind them all under the wheels of the rocket launchers! Let's get out of here!