JCooney.NET

Do Australians care more about horses than the US Presidential Elections?

Joseph Cooney — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:39:00 GMT

I was just looking at the Vertigo Obama Newspaper cover deepzoom page and noticed all (bar one) of the Australian news papers didn't feature the Obama victory on the front cover, they instead featured (mostly) details about a particular horse race. Does this mean Australians don't care about what's going on outside their own borders? Nah - it's just that these are all the Wednesday newspapers....printed early some time on Wednesday morning or late Tuesday night. The election wasn't really called until Wednesday afternoon here. The only paper that does feature Obama on the cover is MX, the freebie paper you get when you're getting on the train, and which usually features celebrity gossip and the like. It is an afternoon paper. I was glad to see a number of non-Australian newspapers running stories unrelated to the US elections on the cover - such as football. Perhaps they also suffer from the terrible problem of not being in the same timezone as the continental united states.

Running Windows7 on my EEE PC 900

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:58:00 GMT

I guess somebody had to do it (and probably has done it before me) but goog...err windows live was only filled with search results for stories of announcements from ASUS and other netbook vendors of future machines that _will_ run Windows 7, but no word on anyone actually doing it. Armed with a copy of vLite and a blissful ignorance of all the things I didn't know about creating cutdown windows installs I went in a chopped out anything that looked non-essential. After installing in a VM (with a resultant vhd size of about 4GB) I was encouraged enough to burn a disk and give it a shot. It installed without a hitch, although I had to use the second, larger 8GB SSD in the 900 and the installer took a little while to complete. Only 3 devices didn't work “out of the box” - the video card (fall-back to VGA, and a display res of 800x600) the network card and another “unknown” device (still not working...who cares). The wireless adapter picked up immediately, and before the install was complete it had identified my wireless network and was asking me if I wanted to join. There are almost 2GB left on the 8GB dirve (so that's a 6GB install for those of you playing along at home) with the other 4GB drive untouched. The performance is fine for what I use my EEE PC for (casual web browsing, and reading PDFs and RSS feeds at train stations, and there are a number of additional tweaks I can try. Overall I thought this would be difficult, but I was completely wrong.

Music Recommendation Data Visualization

Joseph Cooney — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:19:00 GMT

Joel sent me a link to this Wired article on the new zune recommendation data visualization, which looks quite nice (although there seems to be a strange ghosted male face up in the upper-left corner....rikrolled???). Joel is on a recommendation engine bender after tech.ed where he demod one he'd written in F#. I saw him checking out the prices for ram on MSY so he can go to 8GB at home and remove his dependency on SQL Server. The article mentions an equivalent recommendation feature in iTunes named the “Genius”. This isn't like a code-name or anything, it actually says that in the title bar and context menu. Can anyone spell 'hubris'?

Too bad zune has such a low market penetration that their sexy new visualization won't give iTunes the smackdown it deserves.

Update: it seems the “genius” may have hosed itself quite nicely without any outside assistance.

Holy Cow! Red Gate taking over development of Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector

Joseph Cooney — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:07:00 GMT

After 8 years Lutz says he wants to move on to different things, and has handed over the reigns of Reflector to Red Gate (makers of a number of SQL and .NET tools). There is a Q&A piece here on what the change means. I have mixed feelings about this: if it was a choice between no reflector, and a reflector supported by a commercial entity then naturally I would prefer to have reflector, but I would have preferred to see this project maintained and moved forward by the community. Fortunately Red Gate have comitted to keeping a free version available. The “things they're going to do” with it is try to improve the usability - but how can you improve on perfection? I guess I should give them the benefit of the doubt, but from my point-of-view reflector works pretty much exactly as it should. I have often mused “how much would you pay for reflector if it wasn't free” (in much the same vein as asking “how much would you pay for google if it wasn't free”) - perhaps in the future I'll have a chance to test my answer.

Windows 7 Engineering Blog starts up - kicking off the conversation

Joseph Cooney — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:25:00 GMT

The windows 7 engineering team have started a blog, which talks about future disclosure by that team without actually saying a great deal...but it's a start! They also foreshadow some announcements at the PDC and WinHEC in late October.Up until now the team has played their cards pretty close to their chest (and who can blame them after the Vista marketing debarcle....I'm looking at _YOU_ Robert Scoble!), so this is a welcome change. The first post of any real substance describes the makeup of the Windows 7 team, and it's interesting to see what are considered “core” features and how they're grouped. I have high hopes for Windows 7 - I use and like Vista, and consider most of the adoption problems it has to be perception issues rather than technical issues (as the recent Mojave experiement re-affirms). Vista has a number of UI warts, and is facing strong competition in the consumer arena from OSX [disclosure: I bought a Mac mini last friday- I like it, but wasn't blown away by how much better the usability/look and feel is].

Microsoft seems to do well in the face of strong competition - remember when people derided the reliability of windows (pre Win2K)? Then Win2K professional and Server came out and knocked the ball out of the park WRT reliability. Remember when windows was laughed at for being so insecure? Server 2003 and IIS6 have a great security track-record, with Server 2008 continuing to follow that trend. Security-wise things aren't quite so peachy on the client, due partly to the culture of runnig as admin (which Microsoft tried to curb in Vista), and to the inherent problems surrounding providing secure computers to end users who would gladly trade a reliable system for the chance to see dancing bunnies, but still Windows has made great improvments in the security arena. This leaves usability. Will Vista be the last version in its lineage to be so brutally cudgelled with the “ugly” stick? That's probably too much to hope for, but I'm still anticipating (hoping for?) a much cleaner, more useful and well-polished operating system in Windows 7. Go team.

LeastPrivilege vs. UAC - is there any point leaving UAC on if you run as a standard user?

Joseph Cooney — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:17:00 GMT

I have a confession to make. I've left UAC on on every single Vista machine I've used since using it as my primary OS in mid-2006 (Vista beta 2). On all but one of those machines I also run as a standard user without any specail permissions. Is UAC + least privilege a huge waste of time? It sure does seem so. Am I just slow to have taken this long to realize this? There has been sooo much vitriol and chest thumping about UAC it is hard to find any balanced discussions of it, and the impact of it on people who are already doing the right thing.

Should I install Hyper-V on my new Laptop?

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:54:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Snagy (don't worry, he's not always as serious as he looks in that photo on his blog) got a new laptop - an extremely large and amazingly spec'd 17” XPS (raid, SLI video cards...a laptop!). At the same time he forwarded around a great offer Dell were running here in .au - 25% off XPS laptops over $2500. Fast-forward a few weeks and I now have a brand new XPS 1530 with 4GB of ram, a dual-core 2.6 GHz CPU and an 8600M GT GPU, good enough to score a sweet 5.1 on the Windows Experience Index out-of-the-box (the same score as Snagy's SLI monster). And then I went and installed Server 2008 x64 on it.

I spent plenty of time getting Vista beta2 running on my previous notebook melty, and I've been running Vista x64 on two of my machines at home, and one at work so I'm able to tolerate (and even relish) a small amount of driver pain. After a day of concerted effort about half my devices work properly, and I'm generally lovin' life on my new rig.

The question I have is - should I install hyper-V? It gives me great virtualization, a feature I don't use _that_often now that I'm deeply in WPF land where running on _real_ GPUs is much better than virtualized ones, but which I'm keen to play with a bit more. I lose fairly important laptop features like “sleep” and “hibernate” in exchange. Should I stick with Server 2008 (to break the Vista homogenity) or roll back to Vista x64? Regardless of the answers I'm hoping the current state-of-affairs won't last tooo long, and I'll have a Windows7 drop in the next few months. Leon is indeed right in that there aren't too many original ideas out on the internet. While I originally thought running hyper-V on a laptop was a little unusual there are lots of people doing it.

Steve Jobs Invents Threads!

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:59:00 GMT

Leon forwarded me this gushing NY Times regurgitation of this apple press release. This part on upcoming advancements in OSX Snow Leopard's use of mutiple cores was interesting:

Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs.

The NY Times quoted Steve Jobs as saying:

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

And Apple's “snow leopard” landing page says this:

Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Colour me sceptical. Concurrency is a hard problem and current programming models rely on the developer to (try and) keep track of what is shared and what isn't. Apple is certainly not the first company to notice the rise of multi-core, and not the first company to try and ease the pain for simple-minded developers. On top of the “normal” concurrency stuff (threads, monitors, locks etc) that are built into .NET Joe Duffy and co have been cranking out parallelfx releases for at least 6 months (and discussed for nearly a year and a half). Joes upcoming book on concurrency looks awesome. I've done some sholder-surfing while Joel has been flicking thru some of the chapters in the rough cuts version and I can't wait. You can pre-order form Amazon.com here.

One thing I did like about the Apple press-release was the announcement that they are working on “foundational” enhancements in snow leopard rather than a lot of user-facing features. This is something that Microsoft tried with Vista. Time will tell if it has paid off for them or not, but I certainly think there is a lot of work that could be done on “foundational” stuff and “fit and finish” in Windows, rather than going for bullet-points-on-the-back-of-the-product-box features.

Data grids - lack of imagination or abdication of design responsibility?

Joseph Cooney — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 05:50:00 GMT

Paul recently wrote a great blog entry that called out something I've felt for a long time, regarding the absence* of an editable datagrid in the “out of the box” WPF control set. While many hard-core winforms users bemoan the lack of a data grid in WPF, I think the absence of a data grid in WPF is a good thing. Why? To me the editable data grid is an over-used UI device, which shows either a terrible lack of imagination or understanding as to how data is going to be entered, or an abdication of UI design responsibility. To be clear - I'm not talking about displaying of tabular data ala the ListView (WPF's list view is very powerful for this). I'm talking about banging in data, row by row, cell by cell. We don't give users a copy of SQL Management Studio, show them how to open up underlying tables and let them go nuts, but (to me) giving them an editable grid is not that different.

The reason editable data grids fall short is that when a user enters some data that means something, and I believe data grids don't do a great job of capturing that meaning because all data entry operations look the same. A bank employee changes a customer credit rating from “good” to “credit risk” using a drop-down list in an editable grid means the nature of that customer's relationship with the bank is about to change fairly dramatically. Why was the change made? What validations need to be applied? What other processes need to be initiated as a result of this change? As Chris Stevenson pointed out a while ago, editable grids don't do a great job of capturing these subtleties. Data grids are the “one size fits all“ data entry solution you don't even have to think about. Sure, the data you get may not be as good as it could have been. The user might have had to jump through a few hoops to get what they wanted done, and they may have been exposed to some implementation details of the system but the data got in there.

Users and analysts will often request an Excel-like interface to data. Some people think that given Excel's ubiquity this will reduce training. However Excel is a commercial product with hundreds of person-years poured into its code-base. Is the grid you're using going to be as fast as Excel (given that unlike Excel your data probably has to come from a remote server)? How will your grid handle concurrency (Excel doesn't have to care about concurrency)? Excel has hundreds of features and tweaks to make editing of tabular data faster - how many of those are you going to implement? Which ones? When Excel v.Next comes out will you rev your application to continue to “be like excel“? If end users want Excel why not just let them use Excel?

When the only tool you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a miniature in-line version of Excel. By keeping the data grid off the table for a while the WPF team may have forced people to get a little more creative in how they interract with their data. At the end of the day “it that makes me find creative ways to work around its deficienceis“ is not a great selling point for a framework (although it never seemed to hurt the adoption of HTML) and the WPF team have come to the party and said they will provide a grid. That still doesn't change the fact that I think they are generally a bad idea.

* There are 3rd party WPF grids from Xceed and Infragistics (both of which are free IIRR).

Thinkgeek should sell cologne, shampoo etc with the distinctive aroma of solder

Joseph Cooney — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:25:00 GMT

I love the smell of solder. You know solder - the alloy (typically of lead and tin) used for creating electrical contacts between components. Well, I love the smell of it. I also know that breathing in the vapours is not good for me. I wish I could exude that beautiful, crisp and slightly acrid “I just finished working on a cool hardware hack” smell all the time. I wish think geek sold this kind of thing.

Software engineering is blessed to have 90% of its practitioners located in the top 5%

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:18:00 GMT

seen here

Pex is now available from MSR

Joseph Cooney — Mon, 26 May 2008 06:14:00 GMT

Super-smart-guy Peli disappeared into MSR a while ago to work on Pex, an exploratory testing framework for .NET. There had been lots of teaser blog entries, a few conference appearances, chats with Hanselman, a video or two but no release, until last monday when Pex 0.5 was released. Testing Supremo Bruce McLeod is planning a series of posts explaining all of this tentatively titled “the Joy of Pex”. He then plans a follow-up article “how to explain to your spouse why you're staying up a night reading something on the internet called 'The Joy of Pex'”. Can't wait.

My ReMix talk slides and demos on WPF 3.5 and 3.5 SP1 are available here

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:32:00 GMT

I just finished delivering my WPF talk at ReMix melbourne, which seemed to go OK. The talk was on WPF 3.5 and 3.5 SP1, and was somewhat based on the talk that Rob Relyea delivered at Mix08 in Las Vegas. Here's the slides, and the demos (one of which was borrowed from Kevin Moore here, and the pixelshader one is based on Greg's demo here). Leave me a comment if you have any feedback.

World Wide Telescope - nice app, shame it isn't WPF

Joseph Cooney — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:54:00 GMT

I had a look at the new World Wide Telescope created by Microsoft Research today. Like scoble I also wanted to cry when I saw it, but perhaps not for the same reason. Unlike scoble (who did it for publicity) I felt like crying because it seemed like what COULD have been a great showcase for WPF instead stooped to “legacy” technologies. Please MS - WPF was _made_ for creating these kind of apps. If you're not going to use it to build things like this then why should anyone else?

CodeCampOz 2008 slides - Silverlight 2.0 and WPF

Joseph Cooney — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:18:00 GMT

Here are my slides from the talk I gave at CodeCampOz 2008 on “Silverlight 2.0 and WPF - what's the same and what's different”. Thanks to everyone who came along to my talk. I'll be doing the same talk in June at the QMSDNUG in Brisbane. I had to cancel on Mike for the May session because of ReMix, where I'll be talking about WPF 3.5 and the coming improvements to WPF.

slides as PDF [691K] (the WPF logo looks a little weird in the background...something strange with transparent PNGs and export to PDF from Powerpoint?)