JCooney.NET

Logparser is a free command-line tool from Microsoft that is great for querying various kinds of log files using a SQL dialect. Every developer who has ever asked themselves a question like “I wonder if this error has ever happened before” and the proceeded to scroll through screens and screens of event log entries looking for possible matches, or has just received an error report from testing and wonders “has that page ever been hit before, and if so by whom” should acquaint themselves with logparser. For those not enamoured with the command-line interface there are “wrappers“ like Visual LogParser, and even ways of integrating with it programatically such as this ADO.NET data provider for LogParser on CodeProject. Me? - I like the command-line interface.

Logparser takes a simple concept - querying log files in various formats in a relational way - and realizes it fully. As a result there are a plethora of options for controlling it, over and above the power of the query dialect which includes features like group by, order by etc. My favourite option is the -o:NEUROVIEW switch which displays the output from the query in a manner similar to scenes from “The Matrix”, proving that the authors of LogParser were not only talented hackers, but had a sense of humour as well.

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My boss at Paradigm Logic, Dan Green posted the notes from his “tips and tricks” session from CodeCamp Oz 2007 online. Dan’s session was the hightest-rated one at CodeCamp Oz, and I think most people came away with at least one new trick. Inspite of the architectural focus in his day-to-day work he is the only architect I know who knows more VS keyboard shortcuts than I do, so there is plenty of very practical stuff in there. Unfortunately a PDF can’t really capture the dynamism of a great talk, but it should serve as a pointer to those who recall seeing something interesting and need some URLs. »

I’ll be speaking at ReMix07 in Melbourne on WPF. It should be an interesting conference, and a great place to meet up with and talk to people using the new silverlight stuff. The next week-end I’m conducting a day of hands-on WPF training at New Horizons in Brisbane. On the same day Deepak Kapoor will be doing the same thing in Sydney, and Paul Stovell will be covering Melbourne. What other vector-based, hardware accelerated rich client platform has that kind of training coverage? »

Ian Griffiths recently wrote this excellent post on UAC. I’ve been running with UAC ON since Vista RTM’d, and actively developing under Vista. I really don’t see what the problem is. The one area where I question Ian’s logic is regarding where the “blame” lies. I don’t have enough historical context to know which came first - did developers run as admin, and write code requiring “admin” privileges because that was the out-of-the-box behaviour, or did Microsoft make it the out-of-the-box behaviour because that is what the applications are written for (come to think of it, I’m not even sure if a standard user on XP has “admin” level privileges - I think they do). »

Leon asks the important question “can programming become the intellectual equivalent of clicking coloured plastic bricks together” - I don’t know, maybe we’re already there. As soon as my son can land a job as a biztalk consultant I can retire, although there may be some special legislation pertaining to the maltreatment of children that specifically mentions biztalk, that I would run afoul of. Looking at the pictures below is like playing one of those “spot the difference“ games.

Lego Mindstorms NXT programming (image courtesy of here)

Biztalk Orchestration
 

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Microsoft have hinted that there is a “big announcement” forthcoming at Mix regarding Silverlight (see #10 on Tim Sneath’s list). I think everyone is kind of expecting that expression blend will be officially released then, but that isn’t going to be a huge surprise now is it. Then the other day I came across this blog entry by John Lam. Now for those who don’t know John Lam is the guy who was working on the Ruby to CLR bridge which Microsoft hired about 18 months ago (John has been actively involved in the Microsoft community for ages on various things - AOP in the CLR, code generation etc you don’t get a domain name like iunknown.com by coming to the party late).

John says in his blog post entitled “Silverlight” that “This was a major reason why I moved my family to the other side of the continent…”. WHAT? Up until now the only publicly known reason for John joining the CLR team has been to work on the Ruby bridge. John also has a little bit of flair on his blog saying he’ll be speaking at Mix, but interestingly enough he doesn’t appear on the session list. Microsoft have done this in the past - obfuscating conference session schedules to prevent news of things leaking out.

Maybe John just copied the wrong piece of flair to his blog….or maybe he really is speaking. Assuming he is which session is he co-presenting? There are a number of sessions that touch on Silverlight, but my pick is the session “Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET” with Polita Paulus and Mahesh Prakriya. This one specifically mentions dynamic languages, Mahesh is (AFAIK) one of the “dynamic languages on CLR” PMs and John has presented with him before. The third person in this (fictitious) trio is Polita Paulus AKA BLINQ. So Silverlight + RubyCLR + BLINQ = RoR/AJAX killer? (althought this is pushing my tea-leaf reading abilities to the limits).

The other question I have is Ruby going to be on the server, or on the client? On the server Ruby joins a pretty crowded room filled with C#, VB.NET, JScript.NET, Iron Python which all have or are getting much more “dynamic” features in their next incarnation (plus a host of third-party languages). On the client we have jscript and vbscript. Getting a new language down to the client is a very big deal, and the current Ruby redistributable is 5MB which is pretty heavy-weight for Silverlight. On the server the same Ruby stuff could probably be shared by ASP.NET etc and not be a “Silverlight-only” thing. My bet is on the client, but maybe that is just wishful thinking.

Update: It looks like I was mostly correct. John did not speak with Polita and Mahesh, but many other bits were pretty much correct. Interestingly John has removed the post in question that started my speculation.

Update 2: It seems that Jon didn’t “take down” that post, his whole blogging engine died. I guess I can put those conspiracy theories to rest then.

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My masochistic instincts recently forced me to go and check for driver updates for “melty” - my slightly hot but lovable ASUS VX1 laptop. Specifically I wanted new graphics drivers that might increase my Windows Experience Index rating from 3.5. Most other components were pushing 5, while my “business graphics” and 3D graphics scores were at 3.7 and 3.5 respectively (giving me an overall score of 3.5). My laptop works fine. I’m not a gamer, and even the more involved WPF stuff I’ve done hasn’t pushed it but I wanted a higher score. Melty has a Geforce Go 7400 from NVidia - but NVidia don’t release driver updates directly for notebook graphics cards, so I got my updates from the very intermittent ASUS download site, that makes my $10/month webhost4life hosting look like 5 nines enterprise. After installing the updated drivers (released early March this year, for Vista naturally) I re-ran the “Performance Analysis and Tools” app from the control panel to update my score. My “business graphics” score went DOWN by 0.1, and my 3D graphics score was un-changed. Disappointing to say the least, given that the previous driver was written by MS and this one was from NVidia, which I had assumed would be able to write a decent driver given that they MADE THE CHIP. This underwhelming driver upgrade triggered a slew of other driver and bios upgrades by me to see what could be done to improve my perf but to no avail. An hour later I had rolled everything back. From here it looks like the NVidia Go 7600 and ATI X1400 mobility chipsets are what is required for stellar 4.5+ graphics scores. The SLI-capable GeForce GO 7900 GTX can get a 5.9. Wow. 

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Steve Jobs, fearless leader and paragon of good taste to millions of mac fanboys and girls around the world used to wash his feet in the toilet. Not in a kind of cool, post-modern metaphoric “I’m a Mac and you’re a PC hardy-ha-ha-ha” kind of way, but in a very real “place feet in bowl of toilet and flush” way. Want proof? - check out page 54 of the Jobs biography iCon:

I think this calls into question the whole mac movement and their black turtleneck wearing I’m-cooler-than-you attitude. Next time a mac Fan(boy|girl) compares PCs unfavourably to Macs you can pull out this little gem. I don’t believe there is any comeback or recourse from this fact, and it requires no further embellishment. A plain unemotional recounting of the facts should be enough. I’ve told a few people about this in the past and have always been met with astonished looks. Unfortunately in the past I’ve not found any credible evidence on the internet to back me up (which is part of the motivation for this post). I hope Steve Jobs entry on Wikipedia gets updated to reflect this fact.

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