Domain names are so cheap everyone should have at least one. Registrars like godaddy and aplus can register a .com domain name for you for between $7 and $10 per year. I own several. You’ll pay around the same amount for “privacy” where the registrar will act as a level of indirection between your contact details and every random crackpot in the world with a TCP connection. The best news is there are still lots of great domain names available. »
“The successful professional for the twenty-first century is either a business-savvy technologist or a technology-savvy businessperson” - Alan Cooper The Inmates are Running the Asylum When it comes to “business“ I’m a little less-than-savvy. I bought a car when I could have leased it for less. I bought stock in Pan Pharmecuticals. I spent hundreds of hours of my life for a ROI of -24 cents per hour. Fortunately not all technologists are as clueless as me when it comes to financial matters. »
DreamScene, one of the ultimate extras for Vista was released yesterday (according to Windows Update at least). This thing has been in “preview” for most of the year, and since Francois had been running the “preview” version without issues for a few days I thought I would give the release version a shot. For those of you who don’t follow this stuff too closely, DreamScene plays video wallpapers on your desktop.
The installer worked fine, and it displayed OK but now my CPU was idling at 22% instead of the regular 3-8%, causing melty to run a good 5 degrees celsius hotter. Ever since Joel introduced me to RMClock (and since part of my laptop had previously melted) I’ve been keenly interested in the temperature and voltage consumption of my CPU at all times. I quickly disabled DreamScene and I was back to 3-8%. I wonder if it has got anything to do with the wacky “near-real-time” video thread prioritization in Vista? The real yawn here is that you could do this before with XP and ActiveDesktop. Maybe my Core Duo 2500 CPU isn’t the stuff that ultimate dreams are made of.
Although the smart money is on sticking with 2 cores for the time being, I went out and bought myself a new quad-core Q6600-based system today, with 4GB of RAM and a nice graphics card. Vista64 installed without a hitch, and now during the downtime while Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installs I decided I’d share my thoughts as to why I bought a quad-core. Although as Jeff points out most people will be better off with the fastest duo-core CPU they can afford, I believe this is largely due to today’s software - it just hasn’t been written to be highly parallelised. As most decent developers will point out, some tasks can be readily parallelised, and some can’t. Those same devs will tell you that word won’t get any faster just because it’s running on 4 cores instead of 2. Maybe not doing the current workload it is doing, but I’d like word, visual studio and a host of other programs I spend sizable chunks of my life working with to forget about saving a few milliseconds of their time here and there and start thinking about my time. What if word was using 2 of those 4 cores to run evolutionary AI in the background trying to figure out what to do when I past some text, rather than me having to tell it what to do.
Surely if a computer can learn this way to beat just about everyone at checkers then surely it can figure out that whenever I paste from internet explorer into word I want to match the destination formatting, or that when I paste from Visual Studio I want to keep the source formatting. If all you care about is running todays software, then by all means stay at duo core, but if you want or need to be building the software of tomorrow then maybe embracing parallelism is the way to go.
You’ll have to excuse me, now that Visual Studio 2005 SP1 has finished installing I need to go and repro some x64 CLR JIT bugs.
I did yet another “intro to WPF” talk at ReMix 07 Australia in Melbourne, and Michael K the delicate genius has put it up on-line along with all the other ReMix AU sessions. Michael botched the post-processing of the video because after all his promises of fancy filtering, digital re-touching and voice modulation I still look like a complete dork. He emailed me and told me Microsoft’s cluster of super-computers with special software designed to make developers look and sound like demi-gods had been re-tasked to work on something special called the “justice project” . I didn’t manage to catch many of the other sessions at ReMix, so I will probably download a few myself. One that I did go to was Lee Brimelow’s Rapid Fire Design and Prototyping in WPF session, which was good value. Lee recently joined Adobe to work as an evangelist - it will be sad to see him leave the WPF community.
- ok, it’s late and I just made all that stuff up….
ClickOnce is a deployment technology for .NET 2.0 rich client applications with admirable goals
While the technology is not without its issues (for example I never want to be on the end of a support call where I have to tell end-users to open up a command-prompt and run “mage –cc” to get the latest version of the application) it mostly achieves its aims. There is one area where I think ClickOnce drops the ball though, and that is the ClickOnce application update dialog (shown below for WPF RSS Reader RikReader written by the very talented Doug Stockwell) 
What’s the problem here? Well, I’m convinced most users don’t actually SEE this dialog, what they see with their “end user” eyes looks more like this:
Users want software that works, but they also seem loath to allow systems to automatically update themselves (perhaps better the devil they know). As a result of this I worry that a lot of users will become conditioned to skipping updates, and once an update is skipped once the user isn’t presented with the option to install it again. Not asking again is considerate behaviour, and probably the right thing to do, but it means that as an application developer if you’re only dropping new releases every couple of months and users are regularly choosing “skip” they might be several versions behind. I’ll be measuring just how many users choose to click “skip” as more updates to thoughtex are rolled out, and I’d be interested in seeing any more concrete data on this.
A powerful way to encourage users not to skip those updates is to ensure downloading the update doesn’t cost them any time. Currently if you elect to update you have to wait to start using the application you just launched while the update downloads. Another option that seems totally absent is to “background update”. Surely a nice shiny dialog using Vista’s new “command links” with 3 options:
would remove the “get out of my way and just let me do my work” barrier that the ClickOnce updates currently represent. The dialog could be a lot smarter and tell the user how large the download is, and how long it might take.
I was reading the biography of 1st-century author Suetonius today, and noticed some amusing-sounding books written by him including “Lives of Famous Whores” and “Greek Terms of Abuse”. Sadly the former is completely lost, and the latter exists only in part, with no english translation. Suetonius sounds like an interesting character - he was dismissed by emperor Hadrian (form whom he acted as Emperial Secretary) for disrespectful behaviour towards Empress Vibia Sabina (whom Hadrian did not really like that much, according to most accounts). You can download Suetonius’ most well-known work “The Lives of the 12 Caesars” from project gutenburg.
Automobile dashboards are a great counter-point to the notion that only software developers suck at user-interface design. While the major features - steering wheel, gear stick, accelerator, breaks and maybe cluctch have become standardized, after over a century of cars the fine details of the dashboard are still evolving, sometimes in confusing and unhelpful ways. I was particularly amused to hear about a usability enhancement from SAAB on the usually-savvy signal vs. noise blog which I have been on the pointy end of - the “blackpanel” feature in the SAAB 900. »
I ran it twice - once after install to check it out and once again to show it off to my house mate - then never thought about it again.
My main issue is that since I’ve gone back to a single-monitor setup (damn monitors breaking…) I don’t have enough space to SEE my desktop. sigh
Gotta keep saving. I have my eye on a couple of Samsung 20" LCD’s…