February 2006 Entries
The Web 2.0 stuff is something I've not really looked at; just a bit wooly and mostly not pratical for what I'm doing, but one part is - Identity 2.0. Remember the ideal of Passport - single sign on? A good idea, but now it's only MS sites. I have a fingerprint reader which gives the impression of single sign on, but it's not really, since it just stores credentials for each site. We all want single sign on, but getting all of the big companies to agree will be hard, maybe even impossible. Identity 2.0 is a solution, and...
MS has released an MS Build Toolkit to allow you to target .NET 1.1 applications from Visual Studio 2005. Excellent news.
Yay, I finally received my ship award. Microsoft employees get awards when they ship products and because many of us put in so much effort into making Visual Studio 2005 a better product, we've been given ship awards too. It's hard to take a good picture with my cheap digital (not much control over the flash), but it's a solid block of glass/crystal, engraved by laser. Very cool.
Todays sucky software is PowerPoint, in oh so many ways. I feel a Jesse moment coming on - "Today I am mostly complaining about PowerPoint":
Why can't I have two presentations open on different screens? I can open two presentations, and they show as separate windows, but move one to my second screen and they both move. I have a presentation with a whole bunch of art in it, and I use that in other presentations, but having to alt-tab is such a pain.
Why, when I cut and paste within the same text area, does the pasted text get a different...
Aaron comments on my post about documentation. While I'd like to believe the documentation isn't great just so I can earn a living, I don't think that's true. And even if they produced great docs, would that leave book authors out of a job? Probably not, as there's always a need to practical discussions.
The trouble companies have, and this applies to big ones such as Microsoft, is that finding technical people who are good communicators and writers is tough. Those with the skill often don't want to be tied into writing API documentation which, and let's face facts here, isn't...
BlogML 1.0 has been released into the wild. Go get it here. I'm atually surprised this hasn't been done before, as it seems like such as simple idea. I'll be using it to back up, and migrate the blogs on my servers over to Cummunity Server, once the final v2 of CS ships.
[Listening to: Bob Harris Country - Coleman Hawkins - Body and Soul [RCA]]
I've spent the last day or so looking into web services and security, a topic I've managed to avoid for quite a while. I've done lots of reading, which has left me less thaan clear on my options, and have now started on WSE 3.0. Sadly the documentation here is also poor - lots of half-hearted bits in the documentation for the toolkit, but very little in the way of practical usage. The samples themselves aren't simple enough to give a beginner in this a good understanding of what to do to just achieve the basics, such as securing a...
Some time ago I had a copy of a disk space view, that showed the space in a graphical format, with blocks sized depending upon the size of the underlying folder. Can't find it now, nor can I remember what it was called - sure it began with seq, but googling produces nothing. Anyone remember what it was called?
[Listening to: No One Like You - Scorpions - The Best Of Rockers 'n' Ballads [UK]]
I usually have no interest in these sort of things, but you can learn alot about people form this one. And it's harder than you think.
Four job's I've had:
Unix System Programmer
Windows Application Developer
Microsoft Trainer
Writer
Four movies I can watch over and over:
Bladerunner
Monsters Inc
Truly, Madly, Deeply
Pirates of the Carribean
Four places I have lived:
Bucks
London
Edinburgh
Wilds of Oxfordshire
Four TV shows I love:
QI
Top Gear
Rough Science
Grand Designs
Four places I have vacationed:
Portugal
Malta
Italy
Florida
Four of my favourite foods:
Risotto
Sausages and Mash
Really Good Bread
Rare Roast Beef
Four sites I visit daily:
The Register
The Daily WTF
BoingBoing
Gizmodo
Four places I would rather be right now:
Tuscany
Game Park in Kenya or Tanzania
Galapagos Islands
Anywhere warm
[Listening to: Limbo - Eliza Carthy...