December 2004 Blog Posts
Santa keeps track of who is naughty and who is nice. How could he do it? He must hook into the Echelon and Carnivore systems, wiretaps, mail tampering, cctv and so on. The present delivery mechanism must be quantum, Santa is a wave function that allows him to be everywhere with a certain probability and only when you look to see if you have a present or not do you collapse the wave function to detect whether or not Santa has actually visited you. Either that, or he's a Q, which would explain his presence in multiple stores over yuletide,...
Forget internet controlled lights, jgaynor decided this year to create a 'christmas lights frontend' to his Network Management System. It came out well and has had a definite impact on response times. Videos of the results are in various formats wmv, avi and real.
[via slashdot]
All hail Jon Galloway. He has released a little utility that will parse shoutcast playlist files (.pls) and then point Windows Media Player in the right direction. He even wrapped it in an installer so you don't have to mess with file associations (now Jon can we get an icon and stop IE prompting me to open or save? Or does that make me an undeserving user?)
You have to love the technorati ego search, especially when trackbacks still aren't being sent by the majority of blogging clients (annoying, as it took a while to code up support; due to sheer laziness) It does produce the most random stuff;
Cool design from thelearner's link blog.
Design? Someone believed I had a design? <g>
Nosce te ipsum blogrolls me under Personalities. Probably one of the more polite things I've been called!
Of course my trackback code could simply not be working, which would serve me right for rolling my own blog engine. But no-one has reported any problems (except you Peter, and...
The MSDN subscription feed has just announced that XP x64 and Server 2003 x64 release candidate 1 is available for download. Can someone buy me a 64bit machine?
While we're poking scoble with a big stick, he's ripped into the Windows Media team. He's both misguided and unfair. For some reason he thinks that the Windows Media team produce portable media players. This is news to me. They produce codecs, SDKs and help OEMs make media players. What they do not do is produce some mythical iPod equivalent. Scoble expects the team to drop their position, piss off the OEMs and produce their own portable player. Setting aside how that will annoy the channel and raise the spectre of more anti-trust investigations he wants the team to consult...
Dana summarised Scoble's thoughts on The difference between newsgroups and blogs, given during a talk at the American Marketing Association's seminar. Obviously my heckles rise whenever I read the word marketing, but Robert appears to be looking through rose tinted spectacles on this one.
The writer decides what you read, in that IF you want to stay up on the happenings of the group, you have little choice but to wade through their stuff.
Robert seems to say that the reader decides what to read in blogs because they can subscribe and unsubscribe? The power of choice is good, but there's no...
The thing about reading /. every day and post the off pro-Microsoft post is that you get to see linux activism in action. Generally it's well reasoned, although sometimes boneheaded, sometimes it's outright mad. Apple have the same sort of following, although the activism seems less technically based and again their have their own nutcases, including people who sent hate emails to the author of a joke article about taking the guts out of a G5 and replacing them with PC parts. Now it appears that Microsoft and in particular the MS smartphone have their own rabid "activist" who is...
If you're writing a tracing and logging component you may well want to pass the current method name to your logging component. Rather than hard code it (then forget to change it when you change the method name) you can use reflection and the MethodBase class to retrieve the name.
System.Reflection.MethodBase currentMethod = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod();
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(currentMethod.Name);
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(currentMethod.DeclaringType.Name);
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(currentMethod.DeclaringType.Namespace);
The adoption process has changed since I was driven up to my parent's house and handed over. One of my friends, a sql geek, is currently going through the process. After months of social services visits and checking that he washed behind his ears they've been matched, with a delivery date in January 2005. The run up to it is very different, the child is in foster care and they must go over for introductions and then over a week or 2 spend time each day getting him up, changing him, putting to bed until eventually we'd bring him home....