rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
March 12, 2010 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am extremely annoyed with Windows Virtual PC.
It is markedly slower than Virtual PC 2007. And startup times are six to ten times worse. Same host, same VHD. Painfully slow.
I have witnessed this on three different host machines. I’ve seen other complaints of this online, but all of the suggestions of help completely miss the point.
There are some threads that suggest that it is caused by aggressive CPU throttling. In a comment on a post, Virtual PC guy suggested that installing SETI@Home might solve the problem. Seriously?
Virtual PC 2007 didn’t suffer from this problem, so I’m not going to bother with that. It would be great if I could find confirmation that either:
- Microsoft decided that Windows Virtual PC needn’t support laptops.
- There is a new bug or major flaw in Windows Virtual PC that is going to be fixed.
I have rolled back to Virtual PC 2007. I shouldn’t really care, except that I prefer the integration in Windows Virtual PC. I suppose I should move onto VMWare, but I really don’t want to hassle with this anymore. It works well enough for now.
Microsoft, are you acknowledging the problem? Perhaps you can blame it on the laptop vendors, but the customer experience is just terrible.
BTW: I recorded a video of starting a Windows 7 guest using Windows Virtual PC, but a 3 minute video of a crawling progress bar seemed intolerable.
Tags: Virtual PC, Windows, Windows7
February 3, 2010 at 2:55 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
All this talk about Flash on the iPhone/iPad . . . Why does Apple freeze out Flash? Here’s why:
- 1% battery life. If Apple is willing to cripple the phone with no background applications to save battery, then I can believe that disallowing Flash supports this same cause.
- 1% of this is that Flash is “lame” or proprietary or any of that nonsense.
- 98% of this about the App store. Apps delivered through the browser can’t be monetized (and to a lesser extent controlled) through the App store. If Flash was enabled on the iPhone anybody could write apps for the iPhone without Apple’s permission.
That’s it.
The iPhone is as open as is useful to Apple. I’ll bet that if they could get away with shutting off Javascript on the iPhone they would do that too. Of course, that would also cause an enormous uproar, so they won’t. Javascript in the browser is the leak in the App store. Their only defense is to make their browser lame (or be slow to adopt new standards).
One thing that backs up my point about the App store is that neither the Flash nor Silverlight runtime is actually banned from the iPhone. You just have to build it into an iPhone application for the App store and you are in business. Miguel de Icaza and his excellent team proved that last year (with Mono anyway) as has Adobe with Flash.
What do I think about this? I find it irksome to say the least, but I didn’t buy the iPhone thinking it was anything but a closed platform, controlled by someone who thinks they know best. I’m OK with that for now – the phone works pretty well. Eventually something will work just as well without the restrictions.
And then I’ll jump ship.
November 18, 2009 at 4:05 pm · Filed under .NET, Attention, Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Lots of great new stuff in today’s beta. A few things that stand out:
- Hosting HTML
- Context menus
- WCF and REST enhancements
- Support for RIA Services
- Drag & Drop
- Running out of sandbox for trusted apps
- Sharing components between .NET 4 and SL 4
Lot of other things too. I’m excited to start using this. Also a shout out to Tim Heuer – he has helped me on a few things before and I got a chance to meet him today.
Those of you following NewsGang will know why I am very excited about these Silverlight developments.
Tags: .NET4.0, NewsGang, PDC09, PDC2009, Silverlight
November 18, 2009 at 11:27 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
Sinofsky talked about the new features of Windows 7 and some of the new hardware. I didn’t think it belonged in the keynote, because there weren’t any announcements.
He did announce they are giving away laptops to all attendees, though, so I suppose it was worth it. 
Tags: PDC09, PDC2009, Windows7
November 17, 2009 at 6:41 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Lots of improvements to EF for 4.0:
- Model-first development.
- Lazy loading through relationships (i.e., no longer have to call Load)
- POCO (i.e., define your own data classes against a model).
- POCO only (i.e., define the model fully in code).
- Code Generation options using the new T4 facility of VS 2010.
- Testability improvements through IObjectSet
- Can override SaveChanges
- Better disconnected workflow (both by writing a little code and a no-code option that uses a different code generator).
- Much better SQL (more compact, more efficient)
- Execute arbitrary SQL
- Easier Stored Procedures
- Functions (a little strange how this was implemented, but now they are available).
- Foreign Keys in the entities (no more manual interpretation of the Reference!)
- Better Binding for forms apps and WPF
Pandelis, what do you think?
Tags: .NET4.0, Entity Framework, PDC09, PDC2009
November 17, 2009 at 6:31 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Web 2.0
At last year’s PDC, I posted
It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner.
This last point is an important one. Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud. While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit.
The offering was rich then, but since then Microsoft has continued to push these offerings forward dramatically.
At the time, my biggest concerns were the one-size-fits-all approach to their provisioning model and their lack of full trust (two things that could make it harder to deploy the Digipede Network onto Azure). Today those issues have been taken off the table and help support many more use cases, opening up Azure even more to non-Microsoft technologies and fortifying the extremely important IT bridge.
So what are the improvements in openness?
Allowing full trust opens up the door to, well anything. Unmanaged code, PHP, MySQL, Java, TomCat, etc. can all run on Azure. Matt Mullenweg of Automattic demonstrated a WordPress instance running that way. Kind of anti-climactic, because it would have been a big deal if wordpress.com was moving to Azure. Simply running a WordPress instance isn’t really that interesting.
Custom VM images are also coming to Azure which will make it much easier to put whatever you want on a VM and deploy it efficiently.
For IT?
Too many items here to enumerate. SQL Azure integrating into SSMS; Azure integrating into MOM; SQL synchronizing with cloud instances; (this list really does go on and on . . .).
Another important part of this IT bridge? Not Microsoft’s new App Server, AppFabric. Though I am excited about this – it is something that has been missing from the Microsoft stack – the key point here is that it runs on premises and in Azure.
Conclusion?
These new features in Azure push Microsoft out even further than the other cloud vendors. No one else has the depth and breadth in tool support and service offerings. No one else is innovating so quickly on so many parallel fronts.
Will Amazon and Google cede the space? Of course not, but I think they’ll need to reposition their cloud brands.
Tags: AppFabric, Azure, PDC09, PDC2008, PDC2009
November 10, 2009 at 10:37 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
I’m going to PDC 2009 November 17th – 19th.
Aside from releasing Azure, I expect it will be mostly about VS 2010. I’m sure there will be a “reveal” or two to get excited about too. At least I hope so.
The best part of conferences is meeting new people and catching up with friends and colleagues.
If you are going too and want to meet up, let me know.
email me: robert at rwandering dot net.
Tags: Microsoft, PDC, PDC09
October 9, 2009 at 9:59 am · Filed under Web 2.0
I control my online identity as much as I can. I don’t like using email addresses / identities that are controlled by a vendor. Like phone # portability, this allows me to switch vendors when I want without (much) disruption. That is the main reason I host my blog and email on my own domain. I used to maintain my own servers to do that (literally in-house). Then I moved them to a hosting company. Then I moved email to Google Apps for Domains (GAFD).
GAFD is pretty cool. It allows you to put many services (i.e., mail, calendar, docs, sites, chat) behind your own domain. Other Google services don’t exactly fit this model, and so they aren’t supported. For example while App Engine does allow you to use your own domain, you probably don’t need to host your App Engine development portal from within your domain. Not too big a deal.
But for the services that use your contact list (e.g., Voice, Wave, and Reader), I really don’t want to use my GMail address and certainly not the contacts list I have there.
I am at a loss to understand why Google doesn’t have a corporate policy that products must support GAFD. Isn’t GAFD an important part of Google’s business model? Obviously not as important as trying to sell us things we don’t want, but certainly strategic against Microsoft.
What gives?
Tags: GAFD, GMail, Google
September 9, 2009 at 5:48 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I received my Beatles Box sets by FedEx today. I haven’t had a chance to listen to them yet – and I only really care how they sound – but I did open them and want to share a few impressions on how they are packaged.
First some background. There are two Beatles box sets (i.e., The Beatles Stereo Box Set
and The Beatles Mono Box Set). One contains the stereo mixes, and the other the mono. Several people have asked me why I would want the mono recordings. The mono mixes are interesting because they were the top priority back when these recordings were originally released. Great care was taken to get these mono mixes right. The stereo mixes took a backseat. They got less attention, and the Beatles / George Martin weren’t always directly involved. So does this only matter to audiophiles? I don’t think so. In many cases, the stereo mixes involve different source tracks – e.g., the vocal or guitar are just different.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, the mono set is way nicer than the stereo one. Remember though, these are non-audio opinions – I’ll post those later.
Stereo Set
I first opened the stereo set and was struck by a few things:
- The whole box is inside of a paper sleeve that looks just like the box. My first thought was “am I supposed to put it back in that sleeve or throw the sleeve in the recycling?” I’d rather there were no sleeve.
- Inside the box, the discs are stacked in two piles. You can’t get any but the top one out without pulling out the whole stack. Kind of lame.
- Each disc is in its own shrink-wrap. Why?
- The covers have a white stripe and the Apple / The Beatles logo on them.
- No extra book, though there is a documentary disc.
- No Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet (though included as a page in the booklet).
All in all, I’m thinking they should have done better.
Mono Set
- The sleeve is sturdy cardboard and slides off of the inner box.
- Once the sleeve is off, all of the discs’ spines are available to pull out the one you want.
- Each disc is in its own resealable wrapper.
- The covers are replicas of the original releases. No superfluous Apple logos on pre-Apple records.
- A nice book that talks about the mono recordings and goes into details on the “Mono Masters” disc that is included.
- The Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet.
Simple, yes, but much nicer than the Stereo.
Tags: audio, Beatles, music, TheBeatles
August 27, 2009 at 8:44 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
It will (likely) be here http://www.building43.com/realtime/. While I won’t be on the show, something I have been working on should surface there.
That is as much of a pre-announcement as I can make . . . vague and conditional as it is.
Tags: Attention, GestureBank, GillmorGang
Next entries »
About me
Main feed
Email subscriptions
