I was going through my morning blogs and Jeff Atwood cited this as his favorite programming quote.
“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.” -Nathaniel Borenstein
Alright, all of you out there that have been drooling over OS X’s Expose functionality for the past few years and wishing that somebody would write a decent version of that to run on Windows, your prayers have been answered.
Granted, there are plenty of these applications out there already you might point out, and you would be correct, but all of them feel a little forced and unless you are running a top notch machine, they drag quite a bit.
But here comes Switcher. It uses the built in functionality that powers things like Flip3d in Vista and gives you a smooth as silk task manager that is incredibly easy to use.
Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?!
Wow… so lots has been going on lately. Adobe is trying to encroach on Microsoft’s turf with Apollo and in reply, here comes Silverlight.
Now, Silverlight by itself is alright. I am not going to profess that it is going to kick Flash to the curb by any means. To be honest, it has a ways to go before it will be a major competitor against the offering that Adobe already has out there.
However, given that Flex is still being adopted for RIA development if Microsoft focuses their efforts with Silverlight to that front, then they will most likely succeed. They will succeed due to the sheer mass of people developing against their technologies.
The big announcement that a lot of people seem to be overlooking in the big Flash vs. Silverlight debate is that beneath Silverlight lies something so massive that it could change things all by itself. CoreCLR. CoreCLR is a trimmed down CLR with all the goodies of the larger .Net Framework that runs cross platform. So what? Microsoft has done some cross platform stuff in the past and ditched it. I don’t see that happening in this case however. I think Microsoft is finally starting to come around on the fact that Windows, while holding a massive amount of the market share, is not the end-all-be-all when it comes to things like… the internet. Microsoft is realizing that it is time to start competing against people like Adobe/Macromedia who have ruled the internet for quite a while now, who have gotten so cocky with their market share on the internet side of things that they have started working toward a desktop takeover.
The other nice little inclusion with Silverlight is the DLR or Dynamic Language Runtime. The DLR allows Ruby, Python and other traditionally NON-.Net languages to be compiled into IL code so that they can utilize the CLR. This is being done with respect to the language as well. i.e. Microsoft is not trying to assert their way of doing things into these community run languages, but rather are taking the accepted ways of doing things and incorporating those into the DLR. If that wasn’t enough, Microsoft has released the DLR to the community so that it can be built upon and more languages can be added in over time.
There are too many things to list here and to be honest, since I am not at Mix and am relying on News and Blog Postings toget all of my information, I am going to quit writing for the time being and go continue reading. I would highly recommend reading Scott Hanselman‘s post on the subject though
I leave you with this: It is going to be interesting to watch what happens over the next year, between Adobe and Microsoft, things are going to move even further off of the desktop and this is going to cement the RIA into the mainstream environment. I am not going to say that one technology is better than the other at this point and I am going to concentrate on learning both Flex/Apollo and Silverlight/WPF over the next few months so that I can be proficient in both, because much like the battle between BluRay and HD-DVD, this is just getting started. Just don’t write Microsoft off because they are behind. They aren’t the underdog by any means. They’ve been sitting back and watching, silently plotting, and they’ve just made their move.
I am sure that many of you who use Vonage have been watching the various financial / tech sites with eager anticipation the past few weeks. For those of you who are not aware, Vonage was found to be in violation of many of Verizon’s patents surrounding VoIP communications. As a result, a judge issued a stay against Vonage preventing them from signing on any new customers.
crap
I’ve used Vonage for nearly 2 years at this point and I have to say, I love it. Sure, there were problems in the beginning, but it turns out that it was my internet connection that was the root of all the issues, not the Vonage service itself. Of course, I suppose if you want to include the quality of any VoIP service; throwing more bandwidth at it is the solution. hrm…
In any case, when I read the terrible news about Vonage, I assumed, like so many others, that it was a death knell. So, I started my search for an alternate provider and was not able to find anything that offered the same features for the same price. AT&T’s callvantage came close, but while it matched in price, it didn’t offer some of the niceties, like local phone #’s etc.
As a quick sidebar, that is probably one of the cooler features that Vonage offers, being able to get a local # in a different area code. This way my parents and boss can both call local #’s and still get through. I don’t have to pay long distance, and neither do they. Good stuff.
Anyway, getting back to Vonage. I have been looking and looking and unable to come up with anything that was decently priced and still got good reviews. So, I decided to wait.
Turns out, waiting can pay off, and not just in the stock market. Perhaps Verizon is the one that is acting a little shady in this whole thing. Perhaps Verizon stole those patents from somebody else…
So, Long story short, Vonage has gotten a stay on the stay.
They can sign up new customers again…
They’re still in business…
at least for now…
I was going to change the title of this post, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. After taking a 6 month… break, I figured it was as appropriate as anything else.
Wow, so a lot has happened in the past 6 months. Not only in the world, but also in my life. My wife and I have begun to decorate the house at long last, I’ve begun to wire the house, and after discovering that we both tried to make the other happy when we purchased our first couch, we’ve since bought entirely new couches.
Work is still going very well. I love what I do there, and not just because I get to work from home. I am getting to work with some technologies that are stretching my abilities past just the normal web work that I typically do.
I am hopefully going to be doing quite a bit in my personal life over the next few months. It is time for a change. It is time for me to step out and start learning new technologies other than just .Net, although there is plenty to learn on that front as well. I have a few ideas for products that I am going to launch soon, I have grand plans for myself and my wife financially, and I am going to make a promise to myself to get into shape.
I know that people normally do this kind of thing at the beginning of the year, but sometimes despite the time of year, you just have to haul yourself up by the bootstraps (or sandal straps in my case) and start making some changes.
So, I am going to be writing more frequently again. I will keep you posted with my progress, as well as try to share some of the insights that I come across when expanding my horizons.
… ’til then.