Congratulations China.

On the successful docking of your space hardware. This is a great achievement and deserves praise.

Shame on the United States and Europe however for imagining that more earthly financial matters preempt the space race. There are no more frontiers on Earth. The only direction for the human race is up and out into the solar system.

Vast resources, more than have ever been dreamed of by all the oil tycoons of this world, oceans of fuel, entire planet masses of metals, precious elements by the billions of tonnes are just sitting there ready for exploitation if only the powers of the world would make the effort to go there and get them.

Complacency and the belief that "we are the greatest" is the worst possible attitude to take in the face of what is coming. The United States and Europe must fight to maintain its power, not over the earth but over the solar system and the universe.

If we leave the planet we must work to ensure that a balanced perspective leaves it with us...

AI class.. not so much fun today

The explanation of propositional logic and particularly the uninformative waffle about first and higher order logic has been the most obtuse of the course so far.
If you want to educate people, don't write a lot of crummy and abstract examples and waffle about them in some little known dialect of Klingon!

AI class. Light dawns..

When I was a little kid I hated math because I couldn't see a use for it. My grandfather, who was an expert toolmaker, began teaching me trigonometry when I was seven or eight and in those days we used a slide rule to do the calculations. The great thing about slide rules is that they give one a sense of accuracy given a magnitude.
Later, when I became interested in computers, I wrote programs that used little math until I became friendly with a chap who showed me that even seemingly simple problems can benefit from some clever mathematical shortcuts.
Later still, I became interested in 3D graphics and wrote a rather cool, even if I do say so myself, 3D modeling program to generate the scene lists for Polyray and POV ray-tracers. I admit that i worked too hard on that problem and although I succeeded, the path was painful and full of nasty kludges.
Now I am taking the Stanford AI class and Doc Sebastian is introducing me to a lot of math I have never needed or even thought I might need one day. I will admit I'm finding it hard and I wish that I had spent more time discovering the math when my brain was young and fresh.
All that being said however, I'm finding this course a really interesting and enjoyable challenge. I have been frustrated from time to time but as I go through it I find myself understanding it more and more and really enjoying the course content.
My poor old neurons are getting a good workout but its definitely fun fun fun!!!

Rhetoric

Syrian president Predicts an earthquake. Hmmmmmm

Maybe Mr al-Assad should remember Iraq's leader being hanged after the "Mother of all battles" or Muammar Gadaffi being "sodimised with a knife or a pole" before being shot in the head by a disgruntled citizen.
Despotic north african leaders seem to have a miserable record when it comes to their survivability after spouting warlike rhetoric.

The old saying that discretion is the better part of valour may be even more applicable in these interesting days.

Al-Assad... SHUT YOUR GOB AND GIVE UP!!!


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Sir Jimmy Saville

Respect.


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How odd that reviewing my blog I find this post. He fooled so many...

Gesture user interfaces

Many people "speak" with their hands using gesture to reinforce the context of what they are actually saying. Recent innovations such as the Kinect system from Microsoft could enable these gestures to be parsed and to provide user input. Generally, such gestures are subtle inputs which are directed at the peripheral vision of the observer, the listener in the conversation.

Recent moves toward more overt gestural input, such as drawing shapes in thin air or waving one's arms about in "Minority Report" style ate interesting in principle but will undoubtedly present problems for users with regard to repetitive strain injuries sustained from attempting to make precise control movements in a 3d input space.

I recently fitted a light in an awkward place and the strain of trying to do up small screws while reaching in front of me into a restricted space was considerable. This would effectively be the kind of input that a CAD operator might have to repeat while creating a precision drawing for some physical object in a 3d design space.

I think that gesture input will be most useful when used to reinforce the nuance of verbal commands, somewhat similar a to our own innate gesture recognition systems we use as humans every day.


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Hallo Norge.

Du representerer den nest hyppigste besøkende til bloggen min. Enda mer enn Amerika. Fortell meg hvorfor, la meg komme kommentarer.

Hello New-Zealand!

My blog stats are surprising because you guys seem to be the most avid readers of my external monologue. I'd love to know if its because my ideas appeal to your cultural senses or if you have a particularly high interest in the sort of technical posts I make or if you read my posts with that irresistable sense of horror, like someone who privately watches awfully embarrasing soaps or ABBA concerts behind closed doors.

I will admit that I am very much interested in the idea of coming to the antipodes to live and to work. I'm finding the northern hemisphere a bit strange at the moment. I have relatives in Australia and they all rave on about how wonderful life is down there. I know also that Australia is not New Zealand, don't think I'd confuse the two. Anyway, my Australian audience is way down my list of readers.

Please feel free to leave me a comment or two. Except that is if there's just one sad Kiwi stalking me by reading my blog hundreds of times a day...

Science is sexy again!

I can fully see why science program's with stuffy old professor types or middle aged spinsters were not high on the viewing lists. Hienz Wulf, Robert Winston; you can take 'em or leave 'em.

The latter day gurus however are a different proposition. My wife and teenage daughter will sit for hours apparently engrossed in a science program presented by Brian Cox and both my sons and I greatly appreciate a good education by the likes of Alice Roberts or Kate Humble.

I'm amazed that the concept took so long to take off..

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Shutting down a Metro app

Metro apps take up the whole screen. The ones in the examples have no menu and no way to shut them down. If they play stupid distracting music, they continue to play stupid distracting music even when they are in background mode. This makes the UI incredibly frustrating to use.

Why not respond to the Escape key?

If you need to close down a Metro app, for the moment you need to use the Alt-F4 key combination which, I must admit, I haven't used in about ten years!

I can see this being a long and painful road.

Case in point...

Look at this example of an application using the Metro UI:

There is no discernible indication that the "Pick feeds" text is actually active and invokes an action. The link actually brings up a set of podcast feeds but floating the mouse over what seems to be a title has the effect of an almost indistinguishable darkening of the colour. I suppose in reality that the choice of float-over colour was one made by the application designer but when moving to a totally new user interface model, there should be a rather more noticeable change.

I'm all for subtlety but there is a limit below which subtle becomes obtuse.

Metro has me gnashing my teeth

The developer preview of Windows 8 includes the Metro interface that mimics the touchscreen interface of the Windows Phone 7. I'm actually very pleased with Metro on my Samsung Omnia 7 phone and I actually prefer it as an interface to that of the iPhone however, the desktop equivalent seems to be absolutely horrible to use in a desktop environment.
The way that apps take over the screen is touted as a wonderful feature that enables one to give the app full concentration but when said app has no obvious escape route, the multitasking habits of the seasoned desktop user demand a little less insistence from the application and a wee bit more compliance. I have a touchscreen PC in my kitchen upon which I am tempted to install 8 and gather feedback from the all encompassing demographic of my very diverse family who will test it to death in every mode of utilization.


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My new desktop...

Windows 8 / Metro developer Preview

A bit of a radical change just to get Flash working but hey-ho...

Windows 8 Developer Preview

I haven't even booted it up yet and I am already annoyed. Why?

"Getting devices ready 56%" Getting devices ready????? Where the hell did you go to school?

They say first impressions count. I am in a continuing downward spiral of despair.

Flash sucks even more!

So now this miserable crap works some of the time. If I hit a page full of flash ads, the page loads, pauses for a few moments and continues showing the flash ads just fine. If I hit youtube or some other flash video page, the vid begins to load and then the little busy icon freezes and the page dies.

I've uninstalled all of Roslyn, all but a few of my apps, reinstalled Visual Studio and the service pack, uninstalled flash N times and reinstalled it, run registry cleaners and so-on and it still dies on me.

I've been (almost?) a week now with a partially functioning PC. I might just have to wipe it.. :-(

What I really want...

is a jailbroken iPad running Windows 8 and Metro. Mwwwhahahahaaaaaaa...

Nostalgia...

ain't what it used to be.

Kick 'em when they're down.

In response to Gary Stix's article in Scientific American http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-a-genius-yes-a-role-model-for-the-rest-of-us-no-way/

I say that it's a particularly brave thing to kick a chap in the nuts when he's so dead that he can't come back and smack you in the chops! Hey Gary.. What did you do to change the world today?

Steve Jobs is very newsworthy I'm sure but the use of his name for no other reason to get your miserable article published in a respected journal isn't really kosher. If you really want to have a go at Steve, borrow your cousin's boat and row across to see him!

Flash sucks!

I'm somewhat unhappy at the moment because last week I downloaded the Roslyn CTP to my PC which installed just fine. Trouble was I was using Visual Studio to develop some objects in my prototype SigmaBinder library to do probability calculations and Bayesian network calculations for the AI class. VS continued to work but my flash player now crashes all browsers that I tried it on. I struggled for a while watching the lessons on the Mac and trying the math on the PC but it was so frustrating that I decided to uninstall VS and everything that had been installed with Roslyn to no avail. No matter what I tried Flash still continues to crash and I can't reinstall it. I don't really want to reinstall Windows now as I have a couple of programs that I need and for which I have damaged the install disk. Anyway, the upshot of the story is that I missed the deadline on the AI class homework.

AI class AARRGGHH

Just doing the Bayes network part and the test for having cancer given that you get one positive and one negative result. It seems that actually doing a correct calculation is not good enough. Had I done a sloppy calculation and got his miserable result I would have got the question right.
I think if I was paying for this course I would be unhappy at the quality of it and indignant if their question marking during the quizzes had some bearing on my future as an applicant in the workplace.

Bushisms abound in the nucular age

I am watching a program in which Marcus De Sautoy, a bona-fide mathematician, is explaining the recent findings of the OPERA experiment. This program is produced by the BBC, THE bastion of correct English that has the task of protecting the English language against erosion by colonial pollution and teenage text-speak. As I listen I shudder in absolute horror as this supposedly learned man repeatedly speaks of "nucular" physics and the "nuculus" of atoms. He has less credibility than a brain dead Vally girl! I despise him!


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Roslyn arrives

Albeit in CTP form, Roslyn, the new Microsoft "Compiler As A Service" (CAAS) system is the first step towards the realisation of ideas from the tantalising talk that Anders Hjelsberg gave at PDC in 2008. This video is of Anders' talk on the future of C#. The video is one hour and ten minutes long and just the very last ten minutes (time code 58 minutes) talks of using the compiler as a service to dynamically generate executable assemblies at runtime using the compiler as a dynamic tool.

As you know, the process of developing code can be a laborious one with iterations which require constant feedback. You also probably know that code generation isn't new and has been with us for some time but until now, the possibility of an automated, iterative and self adjusting system of code generation has been almost impossible.

For a long time, dynamic code generation and even the principle of self modifying code has been a very touchy subject amongst programmers. To some it is complete anathema while to others it has been an excruciatingly difficult yet necessary task with tools that were not well suited to the job.

Roslyn aims to bring the techniques of automated code generation into the mainstream by providing a set of services that enable that develop and feedback cycle to become part of the running application process.

The first public iteration of Roslyn is available now from the CTP servers. It runs on Visual Studio 2010 and the length of time taken to bring this to the CTP stage, almost three years after the talk Anders gave in 2008 is a testament to the difficulty of getting this right.

Self rewiring electronics.

Oh, you mean like neurons?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15351071

If data be the food of...

Well, everything really, then eat-on.

Historically, creating or capturing data has been a costly task because sensing, or reading or collating the information usually required expensive setup or large scale organisation or both. A network of weather stations for example is a logistical problem only available to huge rich organizations like governments. Trawling through written records of statistics was a lifetime task for not much usable data. Today however, things are really different. The sheer volume of data being generated and the ways to refer two or more seemingly disparate data sets to one another is becoming cheap and possible.
Phone privacy is a big issue today and people seem to have a fear of how data might be used against them. Recent revelations that the iPhone was collecting cell-tower positions was seen, rightly or wrongly, as an intrusion on a person's right to not expose their wherabouts.
I strongly believe however that the more data is available in all forms then the better life will become and the more the individual will be protected.
Telephones are being given more and more sensors. A temperature, pressure and humidity sensor on a large proportion of telephones would generate so much real-time data for weather prediction that the expensive networks of weather sensors we maintain today would simply not be needed and the sheer volume of data would open up huge possibilities for correlation of seemingly unrelated events with that information. Perhaps every mobile phone should be equipped with every type of sensor its possible to squeeze into the package. We could seed the environment with millions of cheap sensor packs by including them on the pages of magazines and even embed them in fast food packages.
More data would mean more anonymity, not less. Modern man needs to accept that his whereabouts are pretty much known all the time if he wants to participate in society. Those that don't wish to participate are often wierd anyway so society can probably do without them. Floods and floods of data would serve to make an individual's contribution far less interesting. Like the importance of one fish in a shoal of sardines.
As we generate more data, our lives will be affected by it to a greater and greater extent. It would be foolish to try to stop it because the benefits already far outweigh the inconvieniences.

Time travel

Might be relatively simple but would you want to go back a second in time and find yourself 240 miles above the earth or a minute and find yourself past the orbit of the moon or a million years and be floating alone in the depths of interstellar space? Time travel is probable. Calculating where you want to be when you get there is highly improbable.

AI class homework 1

I have no clue how but I got 82% correct even though I felt I had done badly. Ok, I suppose there must be a lot of 100%-ers out there but I don't feel bad about that.

AI class /again/

I hate the format of the AI class. The guy said its difficult so if you get a question wrong you can look at the explanation to the question. The dude waffles on with a complicated explanation of something or other and then the solution, which might be nice to look at and let sink in for a couple of seconds disappears at the same moment that his last pen stroke ends.
Perhaps if these guys applied some of their own intelligence principles to the presentation it'd be less frustrating and more educational and interesting!

Windows Homegroup Sharing

It's not often I get absolutely fuming mad with an application or some aspect of my IT setup but if anything is guaranteed to drive me to total flip-out mode its that ridiculous heap of steaming DUNG called Windows Homegroups.
I have a large house. It has four staircases to go up and down, there are computers in the bedrooms, in the workshops, installed in the infrastructure of the kitchen, even in the garden. The house is almost 400 square meters of floor space and the furthest computer in the network is about 50 yards away from the central hub so having one printer or one scanner is a pain. Hence we have the now tamed and subservient HP printer in the main living room, an epson inkjet in my workshop and an epson laser printer in the office.
The trouble is that one can go through all the required steps to erase and re-initialise homegroup membership on all the machines in the place and within a week there is one machine or another that can no longer access a printer or a scanner or connect to the media server. This means that to reinitialise one machine requires an almost complete reset of the whole system and so all the machines in the network.
Windows Homegroup utterly and completely SUCKS!!! In order to make it work, all the machines have to be on the same workgroup, ok, not difficult, and on a familiar network with all the clocks syncronised and then everyone within a one kilometer radius of your house has to put their left index finger in their right ear and stand on one leg in a bucket of icy water before you can print a blasted test page!
Once you comply with all this, one or other machine decides to invent a new network connection which throws the whole lot off kilter and you have to start again.
Microsoft. Get your bloody act together and sort out homegroups! This is for non-technical people to use and its too dammned complicated and unreliable.

Baelzebub.com

Check out Baelzebub.com. The Evil Search Engine. Whatever you type in it always finds the most evil or wicked results.
As the internet is made of cats and fluffy bunnies I tried those first..
Its all just good clean fun.

Dennis Ritchie

It seems like this is a bad time for groundbreaking computer pioneers. Maybe its a mark of maturity for the industry that the people that effectively invented our business and the way we use our machines are dying. Dennis Ritchie was a brilliant fellow who literally wrote the book on modern programming. I still have a copy of K&R on my bookshelves, right alongside my copy of Stroustrup's book on C++ and they are both still referenced from time to time..
As someone in his fifties, I've worked in the industry from it's infancy. I went from learning about valve radios and televisions from the context of a TV repair engineer because there were still many vacuum tube TVs in the mid 70's, to designing discrete transistor amplifiers and creating computers with 4004 and 8080 processors.
I guess that we'll see the great names of the computer industry pass away more often now. I really wonder if there are any new names that will create as much change in the future or whether the next generations of those will be like the Zuckerbergs of this world who have merely used the tools of others to create an idea that captures the imagination of a chunk of society. Ok, so he's rich but his fame is a crass celebrity style recognition of the same type as that of someone like Madonna or Lady Gaga. I don't suppose I'll have any copies of Mark Zuckerbergs books on my shelves alongside the others that have had true value for so many years.

Up!

DSL back on again! Its not fibre optic but at almost 8mbps its waaay better than it was before considering i'm out in the countryside far from the nearest DSLAM.

AI class at Stanford

I signed up for the Stanford AI class and got notification that the class has started and the first videos are available. Well, this might be so but one would have thought that a proper AI system would be able to see that there are many requests from iPad users and re-encode the video so that flash isn't required.



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Steve Jobs

I think that in the history of computing there can only be a handful that have had as much influence as Steve Jobs. I just can't think who they might be at the moment.

Update from the shed...

What’s going on then? Well, I have returned truly to my roots and I am working on electronics projects that will be available soon online and possibly in a store near you.

As I mentioned some time ago, the announcement that Google were adopting the Arduino open-source hardware platform for Android phones smacked me in the forehead like a well-aimed Cricket bat. I’ve never been a great proponent of open source but the idea of open source hardware somehow pushed my buttons (see what I did there?) Anyhoo, hacking, making, re-purposing and general interest in electronic hardware fiddling has resurfaced in a big way recently. Even in political circles, a realization that so many people are consumers of “stuff” and yet not many have the faintest inkling of how that stuff really works. Eric Schmidt tore the British Government off a strip for allowing education to bypass technical subjects (and rightly so Eric!) so now there is a scurry to create classes that teach programming in schools.

I am about to don my grandfatherly hat now and say things that I shuddered to hear when my own grandfather spake them many years ago. He said (and I reiterate) “Young folks of today have no clue of what it was like in my day, we had to….”  and then he went off on a long rant about bicycles and motorbike engines and how to make a steam engine out of discarded tin cans. I feel the same way about kids who consume XBox 360 games or Facebook apps without the slightest understanding of how a computer program functions or having never had to sit through the annoying whistle of a Sinclair Spectrum program that one wrote oneself loading via tape-cassette.
I began my career as a radio and T.V. engineer fixing things that still had vacuum tubes in. I had to know what a triode valve did and how to do the math to allow me to bias one correctly. Later, I wrote software in assembly language which drove the MIDI equipment I had designed and today, I have come full circle because I am still looking up the functions of TTL and CMOS integrated circuits to complete my designs for electronical gizmos that I am creating.

Lately, I have become aware that the desire for real understanding has surfaced again. We want children to learn Ohm’s law and to be able to actually program the computers that they use. Why? Because if we don’t, the next generation of electronic design engineers will suffer the same fate that this generation’s chemical engineers have suffered. There won’t be enough young people to take over the task of designing and building tomorrow’s iPad or tri-corder or whatever is needed. This is scary. I challenge you to find 10 people that you know and ask them what a spark-plug does. If more than four of them even know that one goes in a car engine I will be surprised. Then ask them where a nand gate is used…

I have begun a series of videos, soon to be released, that show how to make clever stuff with things like Arduino or PIC or Propeller microcontrollers. I have proven to myself that I can program an Arduino using Visual Studio 2010 and that I can use cheap or even free tools to create seriously cool electronics. There is a new move towards comprehending our complicated world and simplifying it in such a way that kids can grow up in it without thinking that they must consume but cannot control. The time for re-understanding has arrived. Be part of it!

The more I use Visual Studio the more I'm impressed by the way it outshines other development systems. The surprising thing is that I use Visual Studio for writing software on all sorts of platforms, not just Microsoft ones.
Currently, I am using VS for writing code to run on Arduino boards thanks to the Visual Micro addin.
Visual Studio can manage makefile projects easily as well as the VS solution files. This means that given the right makefile, one can edit and compile all sorts of code on the same IDE.

Parallax

I just took delivery of two PARALLAX P8X32A Quick Start boards. These micro-controller boards have 8 32 bit cores each. 

I’m thinking parallel programming of some kind of complicated sensor mechanism.

Arduinos in the kitchen!

Had a couple of days of pure fun. I have been having a new kitchen fitted and one of the requirements from my wife was a touchscreen PC for recipies and streaming radio built in to the cabinets.
This was duly done with a nice little Asus touch screen running Windows 7.
The PC fits in a frame that hangs nicely in the 600 mm wide cabinet that is really designed to take a built in fridge and behind it there is a lot of unused space. I fitted an electrical socket in there to power the PC and the under-cabinet lighting (All LEDs) and wondered if the PC could be used in some home automation applications too.
I had an Arduino board hanging about and a relay adapter which I have assembled into a big PVC junction box. There are three mains sockets on the side and the arduino can switch mains power to each socket in response to a message sent to the USB port.
I have written a little program on the PC that sends commands to the arduino to turn the sockets on and off so now the lighting in the kitchen is all driven by the touchscreen.
The family are now realising the potential of this and have asked for an alarm clock that will start the coffee machine at 6:50 so that coffee is ready by 7:00 AM.
Wake up and smell the arduino...

So, now I'm impressed.

After a hard day upgrading the Mac I thought I would sit in front of the box for an hour and rewatch an episode of Stargate Universe just for a break. I fire up the PC in the living room and ITunes shows the list of episodes on my library but when I tried to play it; nothing.
Checking on my library, the three pilot episodes have been deleted. I know they were there someplace but in the reorg of my Mac they got trashed.
I'd never actually used Time Machine in earnest before so I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which the backups were found from a few days ago and restored not to their original positions but to the new directory where I had placed the iTunes library.
Time machine is a brilliant bit of kit!


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Big Mac Day

Installing Lion and the new version of Monotouch as well as Xcode 4 and such began to push my 80 gig hard-drive that the Mac Mini came with to its limits. Moving my iTunes library off of the main disk helped but still didn't give me that feeling of security that a nice large disk provides. I could have shopped for a terabyte drive but on rooting around "chez moi" I discovered a 2.5 inch SATA drive with 500 gigabyte capacity and thought I might swop out my main hard drive and replace it with that.

I attacked the hardware side of it with confidence having already upgraded the memory in the machine some while ago so apart from my fifty plus year old eyes having trouble with tiny screws (tip, don't get any older) I was ok.

Rebooting the machine was uneventful, inasmuch as nothing happened, but after I plugged the old main drive into a spare external drive case, the machine booted with no problems.

I downloaded Carbon Copy and did a brain dump of the old drive to the new one then rebooted. Two hours start to finish for a Mac Mini hard-disk upgrade including drive cloning was a seriously hassle free experience. Could I have performed the equivalent on a PC in as short a time? I really do wonder.

Thanks to Carbon Copy it definitely went smoothly. My donation is on it's way!

Stats...

My blog stats seem to indicate a preponderance of traffic from the Russian Federation. One hopes it's programmers and not spam robots or hackers.

MonoDevelop on Lion

I installed OSX-Lion on the Mac at the end of last week and consequently updated all my Mac dev-tools. The latest version of Xcode 4 is far more of an integrated environment than before but unfortunately, the process of UI development for the iPad or iPhone when used in conjunction with MonoDevelop and MonoTouch isn't a clean one.

XCode has changed the way that outlets are connected and have opted for a code modification system that requires an actual Xcode project to be used. MonoDevelop hasn't as yet taken this into account, they are working on it, but this has rendered my ability to develop for the iPad to a very limited state.

I guess I need to concentrate on the C# aspects and wait for MonoDevelop to catch up.

Scroll wheels

I am now a fully integrated Mac and PC user. I found however that motor planning plays a part in one's Mac/PC experience because I am constantly annoyed that the Mac scroll wheel works counter intuitively. As a UI designer, the concept of scrolling the mousewheel towards me immediately equates with pulling the scroll-bar down, on a Mac, the process pulls the page down, effectively scrolling up.
When I switch from one system to the other with my handy-dandy TrendNet KVM switch I have a moment of confusion before I get reoriented again.

------------

I reckoned that there must be a setting for this and so there was. On the Mac, the mouse options have a checkbox one can select.

Back to work...

A couple of hectic weeks away in the Rhone Alps and camping with the family for a few days and I'm back to find my web-site broken and a pile of stuff to do.

OS-X Lion is installing on the Mac Mini as I type and I wil probably be upgrading the hard-disk in that machine to something more suitable for requirements. At least one Terabyte, possibly two if I can find a small drive with a big capacity to go in it. I just put a 1 terabyte external drive on it but have decided to use that for a Time Machine drive.

My site is broken because of what seems to be a problem with the global.asax being denied permission to run. That is still under investigation by the admins at Brinkster.

More later. I have to update all my stuff..

Web site broken

The component I put in place to translate HTM requests to ASPX requests on my website is broken,

Unfortunately at this second I am on holiday in the Rhone Alps with limited connectivity and no development system to try fix the site.

All .htm pages were recreated as .aspx pages a while back.

Sorry for the outage.

Mac webcam

Macs are so easy! I just found a Logitech USB web cam and plugget it in to my Mac Mini so I could use FaceTime and...

NOTHING!!

So, ha ha a Mac can't recognize or use something as simple as a USB webcam?

Hmmmmm.

Apple OS-X on an intel box?

I have become an Apple fan simply because the stuff they produce is great. I like the iPhone and iPad hardware and I am willing to pay for it. I have however been kind-of blackmailed into buying a Mac Mini box because I wanted to do development work on their platforms. Don't get me wrong. I love the Mac Mini too but despite the fact that it's neat and pretty its really just a well thought out but expensive PC clone with a security chip in it. I could throw away the OS and install Windows on it if I wanted. As I could Linux or even Google Chrome.

So, here's the thing. Apple are still trailing market share behind Microsoft. Why? Not becuse OS-X is bad. It's really quite good. They trail Microsoft because the Apple Mac is a western world toy for rich folks who can afford do drop a couple of hundred bucks or even a couple of thousand bucks extra for a sexy white box, cool design and a pretty white logo that is as technologically useful as the "swoosh" on Nike shoes.

Apple just made a big deal about the low cost of upgrade of their OS to Lion. 29 bucks gets you all the cloud enabled goodness but in spite of the fact that OS-X really is competittion for Microsoft Windows, Especially for the non-professional user, they will never break out of the niche market unless Steve Jobs announces that OS-X Lion or whatever the upcoming iterations will be called can be installed on a cheap box that a family in Bangladesh can afford.

We have an OS-X that can run on Intel hardware. Go the last step Steve. Kill the Trusted Platform Module and see how real compettition will drive an industry that doesn't need to innovate much at the moment.

Pour rend mes ex collegues jalous...

Je me réveille à 9 heures (environ).
Un de mes chers enfants me donne une tasse du thé.
Je prends mon iPad pour lire mes e-mails reçu pendant la nuit, je réponds à quelques une des mails, surtout celle qui m'apporte du business.
Je me levé à 10:30 (environ) et je prends ma douche, un p'tit toast et de la marmelade pour p'tit dej.
Je bosse un petit peut sur mon appli Android just pour me familiariser avec le mode d'utilisation.
Un p’tit facebook pour voir les délires de mon frère ce weekend.

Cette semaine déjà j'ai:

Réparer mon gros onduleur qui est capable d'alimenter mon ordi pendant une heure si nécessaire.
Reconfigurer mon environnement de dev PC et MAC avec un seul clavier, souris et écran
Ecris un appli Android en utilisant VS 2010

Aujourd’hui je vais m’installer avec tous mes matériaux dans mon abri de jardin tout climatisée ou je vais bosser et qui est tout près de la piscine si jamais j’ai besoin cet été.

Le seul bruit est le vent ou la pluie ou de temps en temps un coq qui chante (je vais peut-être le manger plus tard si il m'embête plus)

Paris, La Défense, le train, le bruit, les abrutis dans leurs voitures et dans le bus, le "bur" me manque tellement PAS que je ne sache pas comment je peux supporter tout cette calme.

Ha ha ha, bonne journée a tous!

The best environment for mobile phone development?

I am currently working on an appplication for iPhone and iPad. An application for Android phones and an application for Windows Phone 7.

One might imagine that changing between Objective C to Java to C# and Silverlight languages would be a mental challenge for an old chap like me. One could also assume that having a handle on the various API's that each system requires such that the aforementioned old chap could develop a well architected application on all three platforms would be a bit of a challenge too. The reality however is a bit different.

For all three platforms I use the same development kit, the same programming language and the same familiar set, or subset, of the API's I have been very comfortable with for the last ten years. You see, I use Visual Studio 2010, C# and .Net for everything.

I am able to create between 80 and 90 percent of the code using nonspecialised C# and the rest of the system, intractions with specialised APIs or the various graphics systems required by the different platforms. can be done using the Mono versions, MonoTouch or MonoDroid.

So, the conclusion for me at least is that Visual Studio 2010 is by far the most useful development system no matter what platform I am developing for.

Monodroid splash screen

If you're interested in such things I just answered this over on Stack Overflow...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6560675/monodroid-splash-screen/6588089#6588089

One screen or two?

It seems that the norm for development systems has been a multiple screen approach for a few years. I have currently come to challenge that view thinking that one screen can suffice if the resolution is good and the aspect ratio is wide, say, 16 by 9.

I have a particularly interesting development setup requirement which implies that I use both a PC and a Mac simultaneously. Until a few days ago this implied rolling my chair from one end of the desk to the other and physically switching machines.

I tried a remote desktop approach which was ok but not as responsive as I had hoped due partly to the wireless network. Finally, I found a TrendNet keyboard, mouse and video switcher that seems to have done the trick.

So, my setup which I have begun to develop for Windows Phone 7, android and iPhone / iPad has a wide ratio LG screen, a Mac Mini, a quad core PC, a single keyboard and mouse and removes the need to scoot up and down the office on my wheelie chair to get to the other keyboard. It has the other advantage that my Mac Mini detected the fact that that stylishly White yet, to me, esoteric Apple keyboard, which is unwell since I poured tea into it anyway, has been replaced by a single ergonomic Microsoft 104 key keyboard that I am more used to working on and hence more productive.

My only problem was the fact that the LG screen only has a single audio input so my solution to that was to connect the Mac to the screen and the PC to the line-in of the Mac and to use this free LineIn program to retransmit the PC sound to the screen speakers.

So now, a simple click of the button on the KVM unit switches from Mac to PC and back all on the same keyboard and mouse. An added bonus is that I am now saving the cost of running two other screens which is going to be a bonus when my 100% off-grid power generation system comes on line in the fullness of time.

FREE AT LAST!

Well, the corporate lifestyle is OK. I admit it's well paid, but for someone who has spent so many years working on my own exiting projects and not worrying about office politics or how further up the ladder one should climb, the strain of working full time in heirarchical companies has taken a toll.

Yesterday was my last day with my last client in Paris. I've had offers of work but I've decided to go back to my roots and begin to create innovative software for many diverse platforms. Working in a more disconnected mode will give me opportunities to be with my family for longer too.

So, even though I will be taking on short consulting contracts and serving the needs of customers when no-one else will do, my role as CTO at Daraize Technologies is taking a more visionary turn and I will be responsible for broadening the scope of their offering by creating some new and useful stuff.

Right now I'm working on ideas with Peter Gabriel blasting out of the stereo!

Bob is back!!

IPad 2

I am currently ramping up my mobile device development capabilities with accounts in the Apple, Microsoft and Google app stores as well as development kit and new hardware to test on.

Yesterday I finally took the plunge and bought an iPad 2 with which I hope to do a tablet version of the first application I have in mind.

I find it difficult to express the perfection of the experience that Apple provides when one opens the box and the thing you just Paid a small fortune for works perfectly, smoothly and integrates with your life as if you had always had one. Am I gushing? Well, maybe I am. Congratulations to the Apple team and thanks for a joyous experience!

I am mortified to say that my Windows Phone 7 experience has not been so wonderful. If things don't start going right a certain MVP not far from me might be tempted to write unkind things about the company he has supported for so many years.

DropBox

I don't often do recommendations but I just started using DropBox for online storage. I am really impressed with it and usage is free!
Basically, DropBox gives you an online storage space that synchronises automatically to a folder on any machine you use.
I am currently using it to synchronise files between my Mac and my PC for when I do iPhone and Windows Phone 7 development. I am using Monotouch for the iPhone part and so all the common .Net code gets synchronised via my DropBox.

Check it out here for a free no-strings-attached account !!

3D and Quantum Physics

It is said that Albert Einstien had an advanced spacial awareness and a sense of three dimensions that enabled him to imagine the structure of the universe. He also had the mathematical chops to prove this thought experiments afterwards which certainly helped his credibility.

Extending that idea a bit, and supposing that both matter and antimatter were created in equal measure in the first billionths of a second of the early universe, one could also imagine that the properties of the antimatter were all diametrically opposed to the properties of ordinary matter. The theroretical gravitational carrier particle, the Higgs Boson, would have it's antimatter counterpart and, theoretically, its effects would be reversed.

A common line of thought in physics is that gravity is attractive over short distances and repulsive over large ones. Correspondingly, anti-gravity would be repulsive over short distances and attractive over large ones.

Going back to the idea of three dimensional space then, we could imagine that at the moment of the big bang and for some time after, as the matter and antimatter were near to one another the antimatter would form a sort of shell around the matter. This would repulse to continue to maintain a sort of container around the early universe and the antimatter would all remain on the outside and expand space in front of it as it went.

As the universe aged and the distances became large enough, the antimatter began to attract and so is even now pulling the universe apart in all directions. This would explain both the lack of antimatter and the expanding state of the universe.

Technically, that expansion should continue to acellerate and spread the universe thinly. This accounts for entropic heat death.

As to the rest of the missing universe. the dark matter, it is inside the black holes which are more numerous and larger than was once thought,

Now, if only I could do the math. I might get a Nobel!

I wonder if Stephen Hawking reads my blog?

Windows Phone 7 keyboard

My experience with Windows Phone 7 continues with some thoughts on the quality of The on-screen keyboard.

Maybe my thumbs have taken on some motor programming thanks to the iPhone keyboard but I find the Microsoft OSK layout to be very hard to use. Fatfingering the wrong character is too easy and the cash register feedback that pops up like whack-a-rat is too lrge and unsubtle enough to make me want to position my finger lower on the key which seems to exascerbate the situation.

Arduino and android, a match made in heaven?

As an electronics designer from aincient times and having been playing with arduino systems for some time I find myself hugely inspired by the news of Google's open hardware accessory initiative based on arduino designs .
I am currently working on two arduino projects. A power control system for an autonomous house and a cruise control for my Land Rover. Sadly project 2 is on hold as the Landis needs a new clutch. The ease of programming and simplicity of the ATMega microcontroller design makes this an almost perfect match for a smart accessory choice.
I was looking for a way to return to my hardware roots and this seems to be an ideal opportunity .

Ceres and Vesta better than Mars for a first try.

While the technical achievement of a mission to Mars would be phenomenal, the danger involved in such a mission would be huge in comparison to those that didn't require descent into a deep and unforgiving gravity well.

Mars is also known to be arid and has a poisonous atmosphere so there would be a need to take every ounce of air and water required for the whole trip even if recycling was good..
Furthermore, the explorers of old didn't launch themselves on a journey into the unknown with a high probability of no return without first trying things out in more familiar and friendly local waters.
It's relatively easy to get a spacecraft down onto a planet. You can fall mos of the way. You just have to be travelling slowly enough that the last few feet are not a problem. Getting up off the planet later is however an enormous challenge.

A mission to Ceres in the asteroid belt would pose far fewer problems however. Ceres has water in the form of ice and so air, fuel and drinking water would be far less of an issue. Even rocket fuel can be manufactured by electrolysis using sunlight so a mission to Ceres would require far less material to be taken with the mission and the duration of stay could be longer and simpler.

We may not discover quite so much on such a mission but it would be far more useful from the point of view of learning how to do an interplanetary voyage.

Finally, getting off Ceres at the end of the mission would be a walk in the park in comparison to trying to loft a spacecraft from the surface of Mars back to orbit safely.
I strongly recommend manned asteroid missions before manned missions to Mars or anywhere with a significantly steep climb out.

Seeking Julie

On Saturday March 5th 2011 My family and I went to Mont St Michel in France. It was a beautiful day and a lot of other people had dcided to take the trip also. I had remarked to my wife that there were a lot of japanese tourists around that day, stylish girls and thin young men, all having fun.

We picnicked in a walled garden near the top of the mount and my children played hide and seek in the bushes and rocks of the garden.

They were befreinded by a little Japanese girl of two or three years who came and picknicked with us, much to the amusement of her parents. The couple were a young man of European and Japanese extraction who spoke good French and a young woman in her twenties. He told me that the little girl's name was Julie, a coincidence because my own daughter's name is Julia.

They were obviously on holiday so one supposes that they returned home sometime during the last week or so. Now, I am haunted by the vision of that beautiful child and her young strong parents and I wonder what may have become of them given the awful circumstances of the recent days. I just hope that they extended their holiday or live in the south west away from tsunamis and radiation.

I would dearly love to know that they were well.

Design tutorials

I have absolutely no artistic talent but I fervently wish that I did have.

I see the web sites and applications that are created by those designers that instinctively know how to assemble colours, images and layout into something that is intrinsically pleasing to the eye and I become purple with jealousy.

Well, like me, you may have the artistic talent of a gnat and all the creative abilities of a turtle but you'll have no excuse whatsoever for saying that you don't understand how to create a UI experience with Blend because now you can use this great site to learn step by step how to utterly fail to be talented and stylish in your UI design.

http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox

Do not track considered harmful

Despite ones desire to remain anonymous these days it is important to keep sight of the fact that participation in any civilised society must come at the price of some loss of anonymity. In years gone by, a postal address was new and scary to some yet America's mail system was more influential than any other single factor in the stabilization of the frontier into a country. 
Having a telephone number requires a loss of anonymity that we accept even though some of us don't publish our number in a directory. We might still be reached by officials and the agents of the phone company as well as by robot random diallers. 
The Internet makes the hackles of the privacy advocate rise even more quickly, especially when the subject of tracking cookies and targeted advertising is broached.
I believe we are walking a fine line today between a vibrant, open an competittive internet and one that is far darker, closed and oppressive. Strangely, the thing that may stand in the way of vibrancy and unbounded freedom is privacy. 
Today, the internet is interesting because it makes a whole heap of money for loosely regulated businesses. Businesses that enable new technologies and new freedom of access to almost unlimited and ubiquitous information and all you have to do in return is put up with a few adverts. I don't suggest that unbridled advert targetting is a good thing but i certainly do think that if privacy stopped the advertisers fron spending then companies like Google would cease to enable free and instant access to everything possible. Without a little loss of privacy, maybe, the only people willing to share information would be our governments and we all know how much we can trust those guys to give us free and instant access to all the information we want. 
Opt in to freedom. Allow the advertsers to track your netwok usage a bit. Sure, become net savvy, limit what they know if you think its important but don't demand strict regulation or tight control from your government. Privacy is important but freedom is more-so. 

Odd thought about PI

I was just looking at an article that suggests replacing PI with Tau which is not shocking in any way. The relationship to the circle is just a multiple of what we're used to. However, in thinking about this I thought that the reason PI and indeed Tau is such an odd number is because they are based on a single dimension rather than a geometric relation between two two-dimensional values. A radius is always the same radius whether it is thought of in two dimensions making a circle or three dimensions making a sphere. It occurs to me that the complex nature of PI is so because it has to do with the relationships of a particular value expressed in different dimensions.

Extra unwanted empty namespace when adding XElement

I've been scratching my head over a problem today. While writing a program to modify an XML document I discovered that adding an XElement and then writing the document out to file results in an extra and unwanted xmlns="" being output. For example:

Original XML=

<root>
 <doodaa>value</doodaa>
</root>

When we add an element to the root we get:

<root>
 <doodaa>value</doodaa>
 <wimwam xmlns="">value</wimwam>
</root>

This often upsets things which is a pain and happens when the XML document has a namespace specified somewhere.

To overcome this problem we need to ensure that the namespace of the added element is the same as that of its parent so we can interrogate the parent element and set the namespace accordingly.

In my example I just looked at the document root element but you may have a more complex scheme to cope with. The actual code I used was as follows:

XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("somestuff.xml");
string docNS=((XElement)doc.FirstNode).Name.NamespaceName;
XElement ne = new XElement(XName.Get("wimwam", docNS), false);

Now, writing out the document I get the desired effect of:

<root>
 <doodaa>value</doodaa>
 <wimwam>value</wimwam>
</root>

Guns don't kill people

The American archetype of today is a tall blonde man shouldering his way through a doorway with an automatic pistol clenched in his doubled fist. This image seen on popular television programs, films and movie publicity posters all over the world shows an American who is impotent without his 9mm weapon in his hand.

The more this image diffuses into the consciousness of the world, the more violence we see, not only from the youth of America whose "right to bear arms" affords them easy access to the tools of death but from the other young people of the world who are too so inured to death and violence through Hollywood anaesthesia that it becomes an option to solutions that no unpolluted person might consider.

Teenage school rampages and the gunning down of persons who lead lives that place them in the public gaze is so commonplace that we are almost immune to the shock of it now. I remember the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. I was too young to understand but shocked all the same when my mother told me about what had happened and the world was shocked too because the rarity of the events made them exceptional.

The more we see of men peering from behind guns, the more it becomes an accepted part of
our field of view. 

Will we ever rise from the barbaric throwing of stones and stabbing with sharp sticks to solve problems and become truly civilized enough to forever leave our brutal ape heritage behind? I often admit that we are nothing more than sophisticated monkeys. Perhaps it's time to become people instead.

Visual Studio 2008 dies without error when editing XAML

I only post this because working on a client's machine recently I had a new install of Visual Studio 2008 that just disappeared whenever I tried to edit XAML files or even XSD files. This was due to a known problem with the Visual Studio editor system and some time back a hotfix was issued for the problem (KB968760).
It happens that this hotfix has been superceded several times now and in order to fix the problem Mark Wilson-Thomas from Microsoft kindly provided be with the link to the hotfix that worked. I now have my VS 2008 up and running again. If you need the fix it can be obtained from here

WOO HOO!!!!

Been talking about this and looking forward to it for more than a decade!


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12124887

A window on the Drake equation

Frank Drake's famous equation for the number of detectable civilizations is based on one seriously flawed idea. That a civilization wants to be detected.

This is not a given and there may be all sorts of reasons for this. A planet populated by a prey species may have a serious problem with advertizing their presence, for example.
Thre may also be another factor, that of the digital revolution. We have discovered that analogue signal transmission is horribly wasteful of overcrowded electromagnetic radiation bandwidth. As a result, we have moved relatively swiftly towards low power, digital transmissions. Our massive radio and television transmission arials are becoming rarer as we switch to digital signals. The off planet transmission of high power signals are slowly being phased out, not because we want to hide but because analogue signals are too expensive to transmit and totally unneccessary.
In this case, the case of Earth, the high power transmission phase will last for about a hundred years. We began pumping the airwaves full of high power signals in the 1930's and it will have stopped well before 2030. Other civilizations may have made the digital leap earlier on and so will not need a high power analogue transmission phase.
This means that civilizations which have surpassed the analogue transmission phase that bleeds vast amounts of signal into space, will have to take a positive decision to transmit something visible over great distance.
Ten thousand detectable civilizations may be reduced to a half dozen who are stupid enough to advertise their positions through the use of low frequency, high power analogue signals.

Utterly brilliant use of phone data (and a little scary)

Not often that I do nothing but post a link but here goes...

http://senseable.mit.edu/network/network&society2.html

Metadataattribute???

The person who came up with this idea obviously hadn't had his or her coffee that morning.

The death of the post-script

One has to laugh these days at people who still insist on using the post script form in electronic communication.
When you read over letters of old, usually penned in ink with a pen dipped in an inkwell, it is easy to understand the value of being able to add a thought to the end of a laboriously constructed letter without redoing the whole thing again. Today however, the P.S form should be dead and gone because it's nothing more than an admission that the author was too lazy to use the arrow keys and put the completed tought into the context of the unfinished ones above.
Often in a movie, you will see the "deleted scenes" but no one would be idiot enough to run all the credits, sign off with the producers logo and then come back with "oh bye the way, here are two scenes that we thought would clarify scene 27 and 31a"

Breaking out of an iframe.

On CiteYa I wanted to provide a link from the rating wiget to the main site so that people could go see what it was all about.

I tried the usual javascript parent.document.location.href setting but that caused an error because the contents of the iframe doesn't have the rights to access the stuff int he parent page.

In the end I found that top.location.href worked a treat.

CiteYa

I am an avid science junkie and I read loads of scientific posts, papers and books that use citations as a way to validate the paper. If a work cites another then it is an acknowledgement of the original work by the author of the new work.

We live in a world where trust cannot be taken for granted. Trust must be earned and the best way to earn it is to have other people say how good your work is. When we use a hyperlink however, that trust is implied. I will go to your site and see what you have to say.

This is the moment when the popup box tells you that your computer is infected with a Trojan virus and, oh, we can scan your computer for you. It's free.....

Wouldn't it be nice to have a measure of trust for a hyperlink? One measure of course would simply be to know how many people link to that page. If loads of people have created a link, then we can assume that the content is good and follow the link.

Google of course do this. They use billions of watts of power to crawl the web, searching for links and noting where each and every one goes. This is proprietary information though and using it comes at a price. We either pay for advertising or we pay by giving away information about ourselves when we use Google.

I awoke at 2:30 in the morning, a couple of weeks ago, and thought that it would be great to have a system that gave you a measure of trust in a page before you click the link. My solution is CiteYa.com

CiteYa enables you to create a link that tells you how many others link to that same page. It can also tell you how users rate the site before you go there. It works with some simple ASP.Net and javascript and is in need of users.

The site is simple, free, easy to use and does nothing but enable you to build trust for your pages. Try it out...

http://www.citeya.com/

Cross domain scripting is a pain

I'm working on a project that has both inspired me to learn new stuff and frustrated me immensely.

The system is akin to a page rating database which enables users to give an opinion on the quality of a page. The wiget is delivered as an iframe and uses a little bit of javascript to perform the mouseover and click detection. The wiget is then supposed to send the data back to the server where the database can be updated. All this runs a treat on the local server when debugging but as soon as the code gets a sniff of the live server, the iframe has no access to the parent page so the rating of the iframe source gets updated, not the page that contains it.

Another problem which I had was to deliver a popup containing the rating information, this was messed up again by the fact that my script was unable to access the web service from which the data was to be delivered. Access denied to the XmlHttp object.

I have solved part of the problem by delivering the popup information as an image, The way to deliver user ratings back from the inside of an iframe however still escapes me.

Any suggestions?

If a job's worth doing...

Years ago, there used to be a saying; "If a job's worth doing it's worth doing well"

A tradesman was judged and employed according to his skill and quality of work. Today however, in the disposable "made in China" world in which we live, quantity at low cost has become the norm and quality that you enjoy because you pay well for a job well done, is a thing of the past.

As I go through my working day I hear the phrase "quick win" more and more. Unfortunately, the idea of a quick win is more about "how can we make it look like we didn't screw up" than it is about improving the code.

Computer programming is not a craft, like blacksmithing is a craft. Programming is an art, like painting or like musical composition. A program must be carefully designed to be pleasing to the user and to use the resources, the C.P.U, memory and network bandwidth in a sympathetic manner.

If you attack the artist's canvas with a paint roller and a hammer you are unlikely to end up with a work of art. If you start the project with an eye to composition and attention to detail and aesthetics you are more likely to have a work of art that has no need of a "quick win"

Fixed the supportsearch page

Conversion to ASPX wasn't a good idea for some pages. My support search page which some of my users kindly use for their google searches was busted.

Its now fixted.

Mac crashes more.

Well, after all these years of listening to Mac users tell me I was an idiot for even thinking of buying or learning to prograam a PC I can say with my hand on my heart that the Mac crashes more than the PC.

I bought a Mac Mini about 18 months ago and, I admit, I like it. It is however not easier to use than the PC, In fact I find it downright pig headed but that may be just because I am so used to Windows. I can say however that the software is uneccesarily expensive, the range of stuff available for it is poor and it certainly crashes more than all of my Windows PC's put together.

Worst of all the thing keeps locking up in Apple software, not even third party apps. It is sat here now next to my PC with its lovely little rainbow cursor running and a totally unresponsive iTunes running.

I don't even know if there is a process killer or if I have to reboot...

Conversations with a doctor

Imagine this situation: A woman goes to her doctor and tells him that her leg hurts. She explains that she's a professional athlete and running and jumping became difficult just after she fell down some stairs.

The doctor gives her a thorough examination and is horrified to find that her leg is badly broken, has been for a few days and is likely to cause her really serious problems if it doesn't get fixed straight away.

The doctor explains that the bone needs to be set, the leg immobilised and a plaster put on the leg for anywhere between six to eight weeks.

In response, the woman gets up, hops around the room, grimacing a bit with pain, but saying all the time that she is fine and that there is no way she could possibly have a plaster as she was so busy with her job and a plaster would really get in the way on the hurdles track. She refuses treatment and in a week, dies of septicaemia brought about by a bone infection.

Of course, this is something that would be very unlikely to happen. A woman in this situation would be physically unable to walk with a broken femur and she would be grateful to the doctor for any help that he might be able to provide. Unfortunately, the relationship between the software architect and the client is often very similar to that of the lady and the doctor in the story you’ve just read.

As an architect, I have seen more than one example of this scenario. After being called in to consult on a job and after having advised the client of serious problems with the state of health of the software, the client decides that hopping around is easier than fixing the problem. One company in Surrey (in the UK) for which I explained that the problems in their architecture would end up costing them more in maintenance than they could afford in development, went bust because they were unable to continue due to maintenance costs and the haemorrhage of unhappy developers who quickly went to look for other jobs when the boss of the company put more and more pressure on them to deliver what was effectively impossible.

Sometimes the patient is simply not qualified to make a good diagnosis of their own illness. A company that has pressure to deliver product may believe that the status quo is more desirable than the risk of change. If you fall down stairs and you can’t walk anymore, go see a doctor and take his advice. If your software isn’t working, is costing you more to maintain than it does to upgrade, go see a good software architect and take his advice.

Silverlight and Mr. Muglia

I have spoken to several friends who work for MS and they all said that it was all news to them too,
I have been reassured by one friend, who is in a good position to know, that all is cool and there is nothing to worry about.
I guess the moral of the story is that some people should never give an interview without someone first approving the script.

Muglia back-pedals on Silverlight. Too late?

There are sometimes when I loathe ZDNet's approach as they seem to be very anti Microsoft but there are others when I think that they are the only people who can really find out what's going on.

In an inteview with Mary Jo Foley, Bob Muglia reduced Silverlight to the development system for Windows Phone 7, angering developers, myself amongst them, who have listened to the hype over the Silverlight, browser, desktop, cross-platform for several years now and have comitted to following the line laid out by Microsoft by investing in that technology.

Many years ago, after speaking to top level program managers within Microsoft, I believed that the only reason virtual machine technologies existed, particularly those that enabled delivery of Windows CE applications to hand-held machines that ran a variety of processors, was specifically for enabling standardised Windows programming across all devices. I waited in vain for this to come to fruition because I truly believe that to have a virtual machine system capable of running the same p-code on all devices would be a fantastic solidifier for an industry that has too many diverse standards.

Recently, with Silverlight I had begun to believe again in the possibility of a unified developer platform that could adapt seamlessley to many, or any, form factors and devices. Now, with this latest development I can see another period of wandering in the wilderness looking for some sign of sanity from what seems to be an insane guide.

Microsoft pulled a similar stunt on the Windows CE developer community back then, virtually dropping Windows CE, reducing it to a minor player and now they're back to the same old tricks.

People at high level, Like Muglia and Ballmer don't say this stuff off the tops of their heads and retract it because it was an unfortunate mistake. You can bet that this has been on the table for a long time inside Redmond and that talking about it in this way has become so second nature that Bob Muglia never even thought it would be a problem when he spoke about it.

I know of front line silverlight applications that companies have, and still are investing millions of Euros in which will be in some doubt after this statement. It's one thing for a company to change strategy on an immature product and, despite Silverlight's relative youth in the marketplace, it is after all a version 4 product with a large amount of promises and "trust us, this is the future, believe in it" messages having come from Microsoft.

This is a problem that destroys trust and causes immense turmoil that Microsoft doesn't seem to care about. As an architect I feel a responsibility to guide my clients down a road that is beneficial to them. I need to be able to trust Microsoft to deliver on promises. In the case of Silverlight I had been reticent to push clients towards it until version 3. Recently however I have been looking at the possibilities of using it for some seriously important applications but now, I predict another struggle trying to persuade conservative IT departments in two or three companies to even allow a sniff of Silverlight code into their applications.

Way to go Bob!