rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Miscellaneous
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 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
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
May 19, 2009 at 10:45 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I didn’t really make it to the IIW yesterday, but I did make it to the dinner. I hope to make it there by lunch today.
Instead of going to the IIW yesterday, I got pulled into a meeting to help work through some client issues. The actual problems were completely tangential to my role on the project, but given my background I was happy to help.
That morning meeting became contentious. After the fifth time of hearing the same inadequate solution with a dose of attitude . . . well . . . I don’t cotton to that.
Kind of a mess, really. I wouldn’t have done it at all except that I was helping out a friend.
And now, off to the IIW 2009A, day 2.
Tags: IIW, IIW2009A, Software-Development
May 10, 2009 at 10:09 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I’ve been running Windows 7 RC since Thursday. My impressions are mostly quite favorable. It is all I wanted Windows Vista R2 to be. Actually it is all I wanted Windows Vista RTM to be, but I’m happy to have finally gotten there.
I’ll post more on this later . . . as time permits.
April 29, 2009 at 9:12 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Ironically, this message is intended for those who won’t find it in their feed reader.
I had hoped the transition to rwandering.net would be mostly automatic, but it seems that many feed readers ignore the “permanent” in the 301 redirect. That is, they are happy to redirect but ignore the fact that the feed URL changed. So when the old feed stops redirecting, b’bye.
The feed for this blog is http://feeds.rwandering.net/rwanderingMain.
I am making this statement for completeness.
April 16, 2009 at 5:08 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
This is a public service announcement to release engineers and developers out there.
Your installers — and core components for that matter — shouldn’t be performing checks that preclude new versions of Windows.
This is particularly relevant with a new version of Windows coming soon. In fact, I’m writing this because recently someone told me that his team’s software wouldn’t install on Windows 7. The release engineer fixed it by increasing the high version limit.
That is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate any upper bound on a version limit. The premise is that developers shouldn’t assume that their software won’t work on future versions of Windows.
Windows Logo requirements have required this for some time, and in fact there is a certification test called the HighVersionLie that tests for just this case. The test sets the Windows version to an artificially high number to see if the tested software still installs and runs.
BTW: One reader from Microsoft told me a similar story at last year’s PDC – this posting was prompted by a different conversation altogether.
Tags: HighVersionLie, Windows, Windows7
April 13, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I use speech recognition a great deal – and I recently switched to Windows Speech Recognition on Vista. And I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for Google Apps, because I think it offers superior performance for JavaScript apps.
Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR. According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).
Google: when are you going to put the effort into this? The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.
Rob Chambers: how easy is this really? You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.
So now, I’m using IE8. Google Docs with WSR works great there.
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, IE8, Microsoft, WSR
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