December 2005 Blog Posts
Scott is blogging about some upcoming releases for ASP.NET 2.0, one of which is CSS adapters for controls, allowing us to more easily build CSS based sites. Hoorah. A pity it's only a side-project, and won't see its first preview for a while.
[Listening to: Helen Mayhew - - ]
Julia is talking about the Google Book Search system, which allows you to search within digitised copies of books. As an author I've though about this, and to some degree the technical field is the one most at risk. After all, technical and reference books are ones that need the search most, and ones whose readership is probably most tech savvy. Someone at a conference once said to Alex "I'd quite happily pay $60 for a book if it had the one piece of information in it I need", and I think many people would. I've been in that situation...
Todays software sucks is Windows Media Player, a product I'm generally happy with. It's one major downside is it's really slow with a large library, and my library isn't that large - only 11,000 songs or so (so far, I hven't finished ripping the classical stuff yet). But two things I've hit this morning. First, after a rip it crashed. No surprise there, it does it occasionally. But the annoying thing is that when you start it up again it disables the plug-ins because "they may have been the cause of the problem". Right, wouldn't be your own code would...
I know young people can be, well a bi clueless about the world, but honestly this takes the biscuit (a good cheese biscuit obviously). Via Neil Gaiman's blog.
[Listening to: White Kite Fauna - K's Choice - Paradise in Me]
OK, here's my gripe today. I'm writing a class in C# that has static methods, so I type:public statand IntelliSense pops up. But it doesn't have static as an option at this point, so you have to cancel the IntelliSense window. You can't even type the full word static because it still insists on 'helping', converting static to StaticParticalCachingControl, which I'm sure is a wonderful thing, but not quite what I'm after. In C# 2.0 you can have static classes, which enforces the static on each method. Personally I'd rather have had this mean that methods are automatically static, altough...
Am I really turning into a bitter old man? Today's rant is websites, in particular those that do product reviews. I'm reading one at the moment, of a Media Center build from a large tech/hardware site, where they are explaining each piece of equipment going into the machine. The trouble is, each piece (case, graphics card, disc, etc) is a separate page, but the description only takes two paragraphs, with a small picture. So a quick read of a paragraph or two and I have to click the Next button for another short page. The total length of the page...
I can see this topic running for a while. Three things today, both multi-monitor related. First, why can't I switch an application between monitors when it has a modal dialog visible? You can't access the title bar (where I have a smal button to quickly flip the window to the other monitor), not can you use the context menu in the task bar. This sucks, and I only discovered it because of my next problem.
Second is PaintShopPro, which I've generally been a fan of for a long time and use for screen captures mainly. I have a very old version,...