JCooney.NET

Tumblr - I just don't get it

Joseph Cooney — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:08:00 GMT

My awareness of the blogging site tumblr was pretty much zero, until recently I read a “shocking” story of someone's tumblr subdomain being “stolen” from them. So why would a tumblr domain be worth “stealing”? From all I could tell tumblr was a me-too blogging service, with a name trying to cash in on the popularity of flickr/twitter, with all the usual web 2.0 trappings: big text, goofy colours, hipster “social media directors” living in lofts in NYC writing code on their Macbook Pros. So I asked this friend of mine who knows a lot about the internet what it was all about. This guys knows it all, from zombo to ninjas to LOLcatz. He'd rikroll your mother in her sleep without even thinking twice about it, anyway, the conversation went down like this:

Me: So...tumblr....what's it all about.
Him: Well, it's kind of like an internet micro-blogging site.
Me: So it's like twitter?
Him: Well, not really, you can post much bigger content.
Me: So it's like wordpress?
Him: Well, not really. See, wordpress has this ecosystem. Plugins, themes etc. It's not just a hosting service.
Me: So tumblr is like blogger?
Him: Well, kind of, except blogger has got google behind it.
Me: Windows live?
Him: Errrr....
Me: So why would I use tumblr and not just set up my own blog?
Him: (shrugs)
Me: So why is tumblr "cool"?
Him: Well Joseph, tumblr is written in ruby on rails, and that makes it edgy and cool, even though it doesn't actually haven any _qualities_ that make it either of those things, the fact that it is written in Ruby just makes it POP.
Me: Right. It looks like I've got a lot more to learn about the internet.

Granted, I'm posting this on a blog running dotText 0.95. There are a list of tumblr features here, and some of those don't look so bad. I guess I just don't get it.

Sorry for the outage

Joseph Cooney — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:44:00 GMT

of the homepage at least, RSS feed and individual pages seemed OK. "Touching" the web.config file to trigger an app-pool recycle seemed to do the trick. Aaaah, the joys of shared hosting.

Bulk Re-Encoding Home Videos with Handbrake and Iron Python

Joseph Cooney — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:23:00 GMT

Recently Scott Hansellman posted an entry describing his IJW experience recording videos from his digital camcorder to his Windows 7 PC using some of the Windows Live applications. Spurred on by his example I extracted a few hours of footage from some digital tapes I'd been meaning to back up for ages, also with great success. Except that the resulting videos were bloated AVIs. Using Handbrake and Iron Python I was able to cook up the following script to bulk-encode a directory of videos. I expect you could do something similar with the command-line version of Expression Encoder too.

import System
from System import *
from System.IO import *
from System.Diagnostics import *

for s in DirectoryInfo("D:\\path\\to-your\\family\\videos\\").GetFiles("*.avi"):
    arg = String.Format('-i "{0}" -t 1 -c 1 -o "{1}" -f mp4 -w 720 --loose-anamorphic --detelecine --decomb -e x264 -q 20 -a 1,1 -E faac,ac3 -6 dpl2,auto -R 48,Auto -B 160,auto -D 0.0,0.0 -x b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50 -v 1', s.FullName, "D:\\output\\location\\forvideos\\" + s.Name.Replace(".avi", ".mp4"))
    print arg
    proc = Process.Start("C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Handbrake\\HandBrakeCLI.exe", arg) #path to handbrake goes here
    proc.WaitForExit()

Sitting at the feet of the masters - the science of creditcardology

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:30:00 GMT

Imagine this:
<Smiling soft-focus pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit fill the screen>
husky voice: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are two of the most beautiful and successful people on earth
<more close-ups of Brad and Angelina>
husky voice: What many of you may not know is that they also share the same credit card number!
<swirling, glowing numbers and astrological symbols appear over the faces of Brad and Angelina>
husky voice: And thus the science of creditcardology was born!
Leon thought this up yesterday. I am truly amazed how, with the utterance of one word the man can invent a whole new discipline of endeavor.

Remember, Remember

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:12:00 GMT

With November 5th only an hour away (in my part of the world anyway) I'm planning once again on watching V for Vendetta like I do every year on Nov. 5th. This year I'm doing something a little different, and starting on the 4th such that the 1812 overture scene, and the blowing up of the old bailey happens at around 12:00. V is the inspirational film that keeps me going until xmas, when the Albert Finney/Alec Guiness version of “A Christmas Carrol“ (especially the first half) re-fills the well of good feelings for another year.

Not All Beta Testers are Created Equal

Joseph Cooney — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:13:00 GMT

I'm writing an application in my spare time that I hope to release soon, and I've been asking a few favours from friends to give me feedback. One such unfortunate soul is the internet's very own secretgeek. This is what my inbox looked like a few hours after sending Leon an email (on the week-end!!!) announcing my desire to get my application put through the wringer (with a little “fish-eye“ showing the type of feedback he adds to each image).

Now I'll be the first person to concede that my software isn't that great, but Leon takes feedback to the next level, hitting where it hurts* but leaving me walking away smiling because this is EXACTLY the kind of feedback I want to help me improve my application. This is the perfect antidote to “developer UI“, because after a while I've stop seeing the flaws, and stop feeling the clunkiness so keenly.

* Leon is immune from retaliation - not because his app timesnapper is so great [it is, sheesh why do you think Hanselman puts it in his ultimate tools list every-freakin'-year? because Leon's a NICE GUY???? ROFL], but for other reasons. It's the only software development shop where “cod” and “normal” aren't being used in this context.

VS 2010 - I want my "Document Map Margin" AKA "Document Mini-Map"

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:18:00 GMT

I've just installed VS 2010 Beta 2 and want my “Document Map Margin” feature AKA “Document Mini-Map” like RockScroll. While there are a plethora of recent posts that mention this feature in VS 2010 it isn't turned on for me, and I don't see it anywhere in Tools -> Options -> Text Editor where other aspects of the text display are turned on (like the boring standard vertical scroll bar). Nor can I find it anywhere else in Tools -> Options. Or View -> Other Windows or anywhere like that. Normally I'd just read the help, except it wasn't installed by default. After jumping through a few hoops I was able to install it....but it doesn't work properly (perhaps that's why they didn't install it in the first place). On-line help on MSDN site for VS 2010 doesn't have anything obvious, but then it's using BING! for search so I never really got my hopes up. I've searched the Online extensions via the Extension Manager (just in case it was an add-on and not part of the base product) but without success. If you can tell me how to turn on this feature I'd be most grateful.

Dear Win7 Disk Properties Dialog - 1981 called and they want their palette back!

Joseph Cooney — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:53:00 GMT

It's hard to believe that in 2009 the disk properties dialog is still using two colours for its pie chart defined in 1981. Lets target the Midori release to replace this with a glassy 3-D pie chart that I can rotate and fly-through using the mouse. Please.

DEV360 - slides and demos from my session with Dave Glover at TechEd Australia 2009

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:35:00 GMT

This year I co-presented with Dave Glover on “what's new in the windows7 UI and how can I take advantage of it”. The main takeaway from the session was that the Windows API CodePack makes leveraging all the new UI goodness in Windows 7 horribly easy, and as a result was a little “lighter-on“ as far as coding went compared to previous ones I've done. Demo-ing multi-touch is always fun (as everyone would have seen in the keynote). You can grab an updated slide deck here (with a few extra slides we had to leave on the cutting-room floor) plus the larger address-book demo (based on this code from codeplex) and the smaller .NET4 multi-touch demo (written from scratch by me the night before). Thanks to Dave for getting me on board as a co-presenter and to Tatham Oddie for his special guest appearance on search providers. If anyone has any feedback about the session or the demos I'd like to know how you thought it went.

5 MicroISV Kick-Starts

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:37:00 GMT

Thinking about starting a small software company? Here's 5 links to help kick-start you:

Secret Geek's 25 steps to starting a microISV
Andy Brice on running a microISV
Your product is free because you're lazy and scared Ian Landsman on why you shouldn't be afraid to ask for money
Steve Pavlina on Amateurs vs. Professionals on the shareware scene
Nick Bradbury on the joy of tech support and how it helps you connect with users.

Each one of these guys have launched products and made money (in the case of the secret geek $erou$$ money...he offered to buy his own lunch the other day) running their own small software company. It is great to read about and be inspired by their successes.

Whining about an application using 15MB of memory? STFU!

Joseph Cooney — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:32:00 GMT

The spirit of ted dzubia reached across space and time with an important message for me to share with the rest of the human race. If you're the kind of vacuous panty-waste who complains about a desktop application using 15 MB of memory then either go back to 1990 or kill yourself now.

I was reading a forum post recently where some asshat complained about a utility using 15 MB of memory. Now I'm no spring chicken - my first PC had 640 K of memory. I know you can squeeze a lot in to a few MB, and in some scenarios like on mobile and embedded devices 15 MB would be huge. But this was a windows desktop utility. In 2009 if an application using an extra 15 MB of system memory makes the slightest appreciable difference to you then you're either running on horribly old hardware, or you're using (or rather deluding yourself into thinking you're using) far too many applications at once. In either case this is YOUR problem, not a failing on the part of the application developer.

On Changing Australia

Joseph Cooney — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:30:00 GMT

Former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo was in the news last week after a keynote where he claimed he “changed Australia”. I found this quite interesting, as only last week-end I heard a story from someone at a social gathering. She was being charged for a service which she claimed she had never asked for and was disputing the claim. After several interactions with Telstra's escalation process she was told somewhat forcefully that they would not be refunding her money because they had a call recording on a particular date where her husband had asked for this service to be started. She found this most interesting since on the date they had nominated her husband had been dead for several weeks. Later she was called back by another representative of Telstra, who appologized and said that the dispute resolution service was outsourced, and the outsourcer was financially goaled on having disputes settled in Telstra's favour. I'll leave it up to you to decide if Sol changed Australia for the better or not.

4 Levels of Architectural Fail

Joseph Cooney — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:40:00 GMT

A few years ago a friend of mine was working on a small to medium intranet project for a large customer. About 6 months in to this little gambit he heard about a poison pen email one of the architects had sent to several of the project stakeholders (many of them non-technical) criticizing their use of Flex for the UI of the app. He then provided a laundry list of reasons why he considered this a very bad technology choice.

His criticisms of Flex were mostly all technically wrong - like “Flex uses JDK 1.7, which isn't deployed to the SOE, and requires a direct connection to the mainframe at all times“
He had been one of the principal architects on the project from the get go and had had ample opportunity to set the technical direction
His means of distributing the criticism, as a scaremongering “we're doomed” rant to a non-technical audience without any “next steps” meant the team would be fighting fires for months to come
They weren't using Flex anyway

While I don't want to ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, I can't help but wonder if we shouldn't consider adding a CompleteFuckingSociopath “bit” to go along with the Bozo “bit”.

Blu doesn't seem at all happy on my Win7 RC0 x64 laptop

Joseph Cooney — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:28:00 GMT

50% CPU and steady and upabated memory growth, without even a hint of UI showing...And blu was the whole reason I started using twitter...

How to appear bigger than you actually are as a microISV

Joseph Cooney — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:01:00 GMT

I saw this comment from Martin on Joel Spolsky's Business of Software forum, answering the question “How to appear bigger than you actually are as a microISV” and thought it was too funny not to re-post. Laughed until my eyes watered reading this list. Kudos to you, Martin.

>How do you appear larger than a single person company?
*Remove all prices from your website
*Require all sales to go through layers of sales reps and account mangers before being directed to an approved reseller.
*Remove all support
*Sell consultancy to fix any problems in the software
*Never return calls or emails except for canned response about how the inquiry is very important to you and is being looked into.
*Rename and rebrand yourself and your products repeatedly