rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Miscellaneous
October 16, 2006 at 12:28 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
[tags]Live Writer, feedDemon[/tags]
Nick Bradbury said he’ll support Live Writer natively in the next version. And he did. And this is what it looks like. Cool.
[tags]live Writer, FeedDemon[/tags]
Glenn Slaven has written a handy tool which enables posting to Windows Live Writer from FeedDemon. Glenn, thanks for sharing this!
PS: I’m planning to add native Live Writer support to the next version of FeedDemon.
Source: Post to Live Writer from FeedDemon
Originally published on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:01:23 GMT by Nick Bradbury
Tags: feedDemon, Live-Writer
October 13, 2006 at 6:02 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I was a bit late to checking out Windows Live Writer. The reason: the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress. I didn’t see the point in authoring in a tool and then having to edit it in my browser.
Then I found the instructions for how to do the UTW tags from Live Writer: here.
Now I write and post all from Live Writer. Cool.[tags]UTW, WordPress, Live Writer[/tags]
Tags: Live-Writer, UTW, Wordpress
October 10, 2006 at 8:08 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Dave got us tickets to the ALCS game in my adopted hometown of Oakland. From left: Lee, me, Dan. Dave is somewhere else.
This picture is of us having fun before the game began to go south. Final: Oakland 1, Detroit 5. I’m not sure which was the worst part: the pitching or the hitting. At least it wasn’t a shutout.
Here is to the A’s playing better in game 2.
Let’s go, A’s.
Tags: ALCS, baseball, MLB
October 5, 2006 at 7:54 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Robert Scoble came to tape it and Dan Farber and Denise Howell have written at some length about the AttentionTrust luncheon yesterday. So I won’t report on it, per se; but, the big news of the event:
- Steve Gillmor is back as the President of the Attention Trust.
- We (i.e., Steve and I) have gifted the GestureBank to the Attention Trust. More on this later.
If you aren’t up on the Attention Trust, this is the important part: the Principles.
October 2, 2006 at 4:47 am · Filed under Attention, Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
On the recent Gillmor Gang (MidTail Gang), you can catch me disagreeing with Jason Calacanis on rollups. He argues that only “loser” entrepreneurs sell their companies into rollups.
I argued that this is simplistic — that sometimes a rollup is the best choice for a company to make. He conceded that in a weak market (and again, if you are a loser), this might be the way to go.
Interesting that Jason articulates his point purely in terms of the entrepreneur: if you are strong, you find a way to win or fail trying.
Failure is a part of being an entrepreneur, but successful companies are made up of more than just the entrepreneur(s).
What about other stakeholders? What if the options are: “fail” or “rollup”? Your employees all get jobs and maybe the investors get to let their money ride.
I think that this will always feel like losing to the entrepreneur. This will never be the grand vision he or she was working towards. But winning and losing is not so black and white.
Am I defending a loser mentality? No, I think I’m just defending pragmatism.
Disclaimer: I have never been a part of a rollup nor am I seeking one out!
Tags: acquisition, Calacanis, Gillmor, Gillmor-Gang, Startup
September 27, 2006 at 8:37 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Most of the time I lose track of where people blog. I only view posts in my reader.
I’m constandly reminded that some are on Blogger because their feeds keep switching back and forth between full and partial: Dan Ciruli, Kim Greenlee, Dr. Chadblog. I’m sure many others.
I understand the switching cost (I’ve done it twice now), but please get off of Blogger. Use a tool that works. WordPress.com is free and it works. Use that.
Please.
Tags: Blogger, blogging, Wordpress
September 25, 2006 at 9:06 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
. . . or how I learned to stop worrying and love .NET 3.0.
There has been a petition out for a while asking for the reversal on the decision to move from WinFx to .NET 3.0. I’ve been kind of busy, but it has been bugging me that I haven’t mentioned this, so here goes.
I have blogged on the change and have requested for decoupling .NET 3.0 from the release of Vista (here and here). This latter point is a bit different from the petition where it is being requested to go back and decouple WinFx from .NET.
In my previous posts I come around to not caring what it is called and hoping that Microsoft will not bring us back to those “good old days” when there was no hope knowing what versions of Visual Studio 6 was installed.
So, here are my responses to the petition:
1. Future versions – .NET has defined a very solid convention for version numbers: major.minor.build.revision. Major version increments indicate structural changes; minor version changes indicate breaking changes. .NET 3.0 is neither a major or minor version change – it’s not even the same product. Future CLR improvements and API improvements will have the same interlocking naming. Worse, at this rate, the more significant CLR updates will be given the “.5″s while the “additive” (non-breaking) changes will have whole major versions.
This is an assumption that there was any commitment to the predictability of the .NET numbering scheme before this change; well two points define a line in three points define a plane, to three versions define a numbering scheme?
2. “Bootstraps” – .NET 3.0 does not have a “bootstrap”. It offers libraries that provide functionality as needed (just as it’s always been for .NET applications), but the “bootstrap” is in fact the .NET 2.0 CLR; “.NET 3.0 applications” merely make use of its libraries. Not only is this misleading, it impairs the modular paradigm of the .NET Framework. In terms of “kernels” and “bootstraps” as in the Channel9 video, the microkernel structure of the .NET Framework has been traded for a monolithic kernel.
I agree with that.
3. WinFX is an API, not a platform – Admit it. There are very good reasons that this distinction is made, namely that they are developed on separate schedules and are different things altogether. Though you express concern that without the version number increment it seems as though the platform has not improved, this is an invalid concern because a) .NET 2.0 is less than a year old; b) it is a lie to say that the platform itself has advanced.
WinFX may not yet be a platform, but that had always been the idea: WinFx was supposed to become the platform on which all Windows development space. So I think, we should give Microsoft some leeway on this one. The Microsoft Windows platform has in fact advanced a great deal.
4. WinFX is a better name – The name “WinFX” is more indicative of advancement and innovation than “.NET 3.0”. Furthermore, even though .NET 3.5 is where the real meat of changes to the framework stands, due to the previous major version number change, 3.5 is now a minor version change. This does not reflect the major additions that .NET 3.5 makes. Future versions will suffer in impact due to this change as well.
Pure opinion that WinFX is a better name. Odd that this is in a petition. In regards to what this means to .NET 3.5; would call in the next version .NET 4.0 solve this problem?
5. Non-Win32 (Microsoft and non-Microsoft) implementations – Other implementations of the .NET Framework, such as the Compact Framework, SPOT OS, Singularity and Mono will suffer from naming confusions. The CLR team took very, very careful steps to make sure the .NET Framework works on other platforms as well. Mangling the .NET framework with Win32 specific API breaks that, isolating the entire framework to Windows.
I agree that this is a problem, but one easily dealt with. As long as the .NET BCL (whatever version) continues to be portable, then the problem is solved. I do need to point out, though, that .NET 1.1 contains a whole Microsoft namespace that is not portable, so this isn’t really met today anyway. All that said, I do agree that convolving .NET 3.0 and WinFx makes this more confusing for Non-Microsoft implementations.
6. Where’s the “3”? – The current versions of all implementations will be stuck at .NET 2.0; the next version will be forced to be called .NET 3.5 even though the “3” portion is absent on non-Win32 implementations.
And why does that matter?
7. Explanatory confusion – on learning to program in C#, with the older naming, one can learn C# (2.0), and learn WinFX for Windows programming. Now, with .NET 3.0, one will have a hard time understanding why he needs to buy a C# 2.0 book that teaches .NET 3.0. In otherwords, it forces all .NET books to be updated and reprinted needlessly. Also, how are companies to “decide” what to use?
Artificial. C# was in version 1.0 until .NET 2.0, not “1.1”; and this was basically chance. There is/was no gaurantee that the C# language (or any other language) for that matter would move along with the .NET versioning scheme. The line “force all .NET books to be updated and reprinted needlessly” makes me chuckle. Why?
8. Merit – You justify the move chiefly by explaining the installation process. However, this does not add any value to the installation process. WinFX, ultimately being a library of .NET classes that can be installed to the GAC just like any other, is best installed by a normal installer like DirectX.
OK, you have me here. I don’t think there is any merit to this change from a practical perspective whatsoever. None. Zilch. I do think, though, that there is some merit in the marketing message: .NET 3.0 is how you develop on Windows. Period.
Look, versioning is a bitch. Naming is too. This is made way harder with a system containing lots of different components, and the WinFx name change is just a part of it.
I’m OK with it. Let’s move on.
September 25, 2006 at 8:18 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
And lastly, a surprise appearance by me. I didn’t really contribute much, but I wasn’t supposed to.
What was I doing there? Fair question. I was there to discuss the tech on a topic Steve never really got to.
Tags: Expert-Texture, Gillmor-Gang
September 25, 2006 at 8:17 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Gabe Rivera was a bit cagey about some announcements about TechMeme for Monday. He suggests what it might (or might’nt) be about. He also said he’s rolling out some ads on his site.
One thing I thought was funny is that he said he suspects we might find TechMeme at the top of TechMeme on Monday. Sure enough, there it is.
But, Gabe, you can make that happen whenever you want, right?
😉
Tags: Gillmor-Gang, TechMeme
September 25, 2006 at 8:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Jason Calacanis says he’ll quit his job if AOL buys YouTube. He concedes that he wouldn’t quit if AOL buys them at a steep discount to exclude all the illegal content. I agree with Jason’s sentiment. (I will definitely quit my job if Digipede buys YouTube).
Most everyone agrees that YouTube’s great strength is the user-contributed content. YouTube has been a great enabler of it (in terms of distribution, discovery, and development of the community). But how much would that community have grown without the illegal content as a magnet? Doc says that if you strip out the illegal content you still have lots of value. But what if the illegal content was never there? How much would it have been worth then? How much would it have grown then?
And again, I agree with Jason: we shouldn’t reward entrepeneurs for leveraging illegal content.
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