Testing Windows Live Writer

I am just testing out the Windows Live Writer beta. Available Here

It looks quite nice so far. Has the "Office 2007" look and feel. Live Writer hooks into most popular blogging engines such as WordPress and Blogger. One thing with Microsoft currently though, who is coming up with the names? Windows Live Writer - bit of a mouth full. Some of the other names they have come up with recently are equally verbose. A list off the top of my head

• Windows Workflow Foundation
• XNA Game Studio Express
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer
• Windows Communication Foundation

I guess it tells you what it is, but I like catchy one word names.

One option I wish that Windows Live Writer (WLW?) had was the ability to insert Tags from Technorati and others - I can never remember the correct format. 

Blogging

Free Framework to create games in Win and Xbox360

Info Here

Microsoft have created a framework called XNA specifically aimed at the Student / Hobbyist market. It is built on C# Express and is completely free. Initially for Windows, but it will create binaries for the XBox360. There is a US$99 fee to allow creating and debugging on XBox360 though. This is for membership to the "Creators Club".

I haven't read too much about it yet, but on the surface this looks really cool. Just wished I had a little more time to spend exploring this. I used to make 2D games in DOS using Borland C++, back in the days when VGA ModeX was pretty leading edge. Back then you wrote directly to the VGA memory. I suspect things have moved on a little since then.....

programming
games
microsoft

Turbo is back!

Borland Brings Back Its Turbo Tools

I spent my formative years (in both programming and life terms) learning how to program using Borland's Turbo range of tools. I started in the late eighties using Turbo C/C++ 1.0 and Turbo Pascal 5.0. They were great tools, and well ahead of the competitors at the time. The were pretty much the first toolset to use the IDE paradigm to its fullest.

It's great news then that Borland (or whatever they will be called) have decided to go back to the future, so to speak, and rebrand the current toolset under the Turbo brand.

It has been stated that the Turbo range - Turbo C++, Turbo C#, Turbo Delphi for Win32 and Turbo Delphi for .NET - are aimed at hobbyist, student and independent professionals. The professional version for example will be under $500US. I think this is a good move, as in my experience, most Delphi users are independent contractors or small software shops.

If this is the sort of thinking we will see under the new DevTools spinoff, then I think the future is bright for Delphi.

Blogged with Flock

Delphi
Programming
Borland

Bunch of Free Microsoft software

The Road to Know Where: Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft

Microsoft take a lot of shit about being money hungry and are the arch villain in the software world. Those of us who aren't penguin zealots know differently. They give away a lot of free software development tools and database engines. The source isn't published sure, but I really dont care about that.

If you add the free software Microsoft makes available, to the wealth of free information in the form of things like Webcasts, Documentation and websites such as Channel 9 then they really should be commended not lambasted.I really fail to understand a lot of the time where the angst is coming from. I will acknowledge that in the past there has been some fairly dodgy practises at Microsoft, but from my point of view as a developer, they go out of their way to supply all the information and training that I need - all free.
Bashing Microsoft is the easy option to take in my opinion. I say good on you Microsoft. Keep up the good work.

TradeMe etc

Nic posted this:

The Chicken Coop - TradeMe gets all Web2.0 (kinda)

I'm with him - the best way to do AJAX is where it's needed, not whether it's needed or not. Nic mentions the "Smart Bunnies" at TradeME. I have mixed views about this. I guess being the countries most successful and biggest website they are always in the public eye, but if I see another wanky "Look Sam did this" article in a reputable magazine or T.V. Show, I'm gunna hurl. I mean good luck to him, I'd love his bank balance, but there are other smart people do great things in the Web arena too.

They can't be that smart anyway - I don't work for them ;-). Someone there has a sense of humour though. Just right-click the webpage and go view source. Thats a pretty novel way to find employees!

Blogged with Flock

Delphi IDE comes out tops in several sections in IDE survey

Evans Data Spring 2006 IDE developer survey lists Delphi first in several categories

I use BDS2006(Delphi) and Visual Studio 2005 a lot. The editor in VS is far superior in my opinion to anything else I have used. Having said that, BDS fights back with having a much faster debugging and compiling engine.

BDS is the only IDE that allows C/C++, Pascal(Delphi) and C# from the same IDE and it also compiles Win32 or .NET for Delphi and C++. If you are doing Win32 and are looking at upgrading to .NET in the future, Delphi offers a more or less painless upgrade path - no rewrite is necessarily needed.

It's a pretty impressive result for BDS and highlights again that there is a valid alternative to Visual Studio. Keep up the good work guys!

Programming
Software Development
IDE
Delphi

Compact Framework 2 SP 1 Released

Available here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c1b0a88-59e2-4eba-a70e-4cd851c5fcc4&displaylang=en

Includes a quite a few bug fixes and a couple of new features.

Office 2007 Beta - Initial Impressions

First off I've gotta say I don't really get "hot n bothered" over an Office release. I like and use Word,Excel and Infopath and use Access a bit, but they don't really light my fire so to speak.

However, I am mighty impressed with my first play with 2007. Office apps have been resetting the benchmark as far as GUI goes for years, but they really have raised the bar with 2007. I really like the RibbonBar menu system and have been waiting for years for someone to come up with a better system than the traditional fixed menu. It groups actions in a logical manner and I found it made finding things really easy. I can see how it is going to confuse and annoy heavy Office users (that's people who use Office a lot - not people who eat a lot), but once they get over the shock and get into the new system they should start to like it.

The eye candy is nice too I guess, but wearing my IT Manager's hat (it's the dusty one in the corner I don't like wearing), I hope it doesn't add to the overhead when using via a Terminal Server session. I haven't looked into this so hopefully it doesn't.

Outlook was a little sluggish, but hey it's a beta. It doesn't appear to be too much different at intial view from the previous version. I tried to use the built in RSS reader feature, but it was slow and buggy so will wait until the next release before I comment further on that, but suffice to say it has some work still to be done IMHO.

Overall, judging by the Beta I think the next version of Office is going to be a good one.

Blogged with Flock

Hmmm....

I came across this from Scobles' blog, Life of a Geek » Blog Archive » I hate fake computer geeks

I'm not going to bag the guy who wrote it, many people have done that already. I kinda agree with Cody, a geek would rather do it themselves than have someone else do it, and I'm sure if Scoble was a college kid with all the time in the world, he could/would install his own Wiki software or run his own version of WordPress. I mean these sorts of thing aren't exactly difficult...

But, as Cody will learn, as you get older and more responsibilities, you learn not to sweat the little things. When you're young without too many ties then time is something that passes, rather than a valuable commodity. If someone can save you half a day by hosting your blog rather than doing it yourself,  then you get someone to do it. That's half a day you get to spend doing other things - like spending time with your family.

Is Cody more of a Geek than Scoble? Probably. Is Scoble a "fake geek" because he get s someone else to setup his wiki/blog? Definitely not.

Blogged with Flock

Blog of the year....

This blog is one of the list up for Blog of the year....
Vote Here

I'm not sure if I'm worthy to be honest. I had meant to post more code on my blog, but got caught in rant mode most of the time ;-)

Having said that I got a couple of notible commentators - Greg Stein from Apache and a lead developer on the Infopath team. Must be worth a couple of votes?!

Nic (Chicken Coop), Tim (Haines) and Jonesie (.NET Jonesie) blogs are probably more worthy though.

Good luck to all and whomever wins will deserve the lovely rubber ducky.

Blogged with Flock

Broadband Pricing: A Study - Part 2

It has now been almost 3 months since we started this study. It's now time to check back and see what (if any) movement there has been since the Local Loop unbundling announcement was made.

Changes in Pricing?

Slingshot
No change - all the prices are the same as they were three months ago

IHUG
No change - even though the website claims to have "all new plans"

Orcon
No change here either, but the Light data cap has been expanded to 5Gb

Xtra
What a surprise - no change.

I guess three months was a little to soon to expect a major change. The other companies are pretty much limited to hanging off Xtra's coat tails. I don't expect to see much of a change in the next three months either.
I did read in the press that Telecom are bringing out 24mbit/s to the major CBD's by Xmas. I guess that is a start to real broadband - time will tell.....

Blogged with Flock

Bad Luck Aussie, you were robbed

As a New Zealander I have had my fair share of World Cup misery (in Rugby of course), but I can only imagine how inconsolable the populace of Australia are this morning.

I mean when we have dipped out of previous RWC we have been fairly beaten - Australia 2003, France 1999 with the possible exception of "SuziGate" in 1995. To my mind however, Australia were robbed. They were as good if not better than Italy and looked the stronger, fitter team heading into extra time. Then the referee in what surely is the single worst decision in the history of football gave the penalty.

32 years of blood sweat and tears ruined in a blink of an eye. Surely the time has come for television officials in football, it would n't take long for a TV official to realise that it was no foul and play on. It may slow the game down a little bit, but surely no team deserves to lose by way of a terrible decision?

Head up Aussies, you were awesome, and I'm sure this isn't the last time you reach the second round of the WC.

Blogged with Flock

What the future holds?

I was looking at my daughter in the week end and wondered what new tech will she see by the time she reaches my age (30), that wasn't around today?

For example in my life time I have seen the invention (or popularization) of things that my parents couldn't have imagined. Such as:

VHS Video, Color Television, CD's, Personal Computers, DVD, Laptop Computers, the Internet, Satelitte Television to name a very few.

The are things that were popular in my youth, that children of today have never seen, things like Tapes and Records instantly come to mind.

Looking forward, I would imagine that by the time Maddy is a teenager, CRT TV's will be fossilised making way for I guess LCD and Plasma or some new tech - OLED maybe?

I think there will be a new platform for computing by the time she is say 20 also. I definitely think the current desktop model will be obsolete, and our reliance on single vendors will be gone too. I would like to think that you could take your data anywhere by then, with a number of different devices, but I still think there will be a place for the humble desktop style PC. My mind boggles at what the speed of the things we be by then.

I guess convergence will be the big thing, with the blurring between PC/Tablet/Phone/PDA/Camera disappearing.

If you compare games from 1986 to games of 2006 for example, I can't even imagine how the improvement from 2006 to 2026 will be. Obviously realistic graphics, but Virtual Reality maybe?

And what will I be doing? Still involved in the Software Development industry, because one thing is certain - no matter what the future holds platform or hardware wise, there will always be a need for software. Great isn't it!

Blogged with Flock

Maddy is finally here

My amazing wife Kim gave birth to our first born last night.

We decided to have the baby at home. I was initially sceptical, but it was great being in familiar surroundings. The only downside is that there is no pain relief, other than aromatherapy and hot or cold flannels.

Unfortunately, the baby was facing front forward and twisted a bit so Labour was intense at times. Kim was amazing and got through it and Madison Anne was delivered at 11:35pm 29 May 2006. Weight was 8lb 2oz and all doing well, if a little tired today!

Pics available HERE

Towel Day

Today is towel day!
Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

I left mine at home dammit.

The Directors Head to Head

I have been looking at this:
The Movie Times: Top Grossing Films of All Time Worldwide
sorted by Worldwide Profit and broken down into director.

I decided to pick Peter Jackson and Andrew Adamson because they are Kiwi's, Lucas and Spielberg go without saying and James Cameron because he directed the biggest grossing movie of all time. Then I decided to take their total Worldwide Profit and total movies in the top 150 and see which director averages the most money per flick.

	Jackson	Lucas	Spielberg	Adamson	Cameron
# Movies	4	4	11	3	3
Total Profit	2955.6	2864.5	4602.3	1808.3	2317.1
Average Profit	738.9	716.12	418.39	602.76	772.36

*In $M
Note: Not all Steven Speilbergs' movies are added to the list because they didn't have budget information.

James Cameron comes out on top, followed by Peter Jackson and George Lucas rounding out the top 3. Interestingly Speilberg come last on average per movie, but considering he has 11 (with budget info) movies in the top 150 grossing movies of all time says a lot about him.

The other interesting thing to note, that isn't portrayed above, is that of the Top 10 grossing films of all time (worldwide) 4 of them were directed by a New Zealander. I think Hollywood should drop sticks and move all it's business to Wellywood....

Auction closed: Australia sold for $200 million

The auction finished after about an hour of people auto-extending. I was a little worried about having to pay success fess, but TradeMe had left a message on my home phone saying they would pull the auction as soon as it closed.

They said they usually pull things like this, but decided to let it run because it was getting back at the Aussies. (In so many words)

Good on them. It shows they have a bit more of a sense of humour than eBay. My local budgie liner got hold of the story and did an interview too. Unfortunately it ended up on the front page with a huge photo. Groan.

Story is here.

Anyway, it was a fun ride while it lasted, and good to see that there are funny people everywhere and that Trans Tasman rivalry is still alive!

Total stats: around 500 questions I think and over 20,000 pages views! Australia is a little more popular than I gave credit for.

TM Auction: Way outta control

This auction has got way out of control. I had about 600 views up until 6:58 last night. Then something was mentioned on the news - I missed it - and it has created a life of it's own since. It's amazing how a 10s mention on the news can create interest. It has had over 12000 views in about 14 hours.

It's really hard trying to be humourous answering the questions. Most people are funny and positive, but there is always a few who are offensive. It's probably a good social study really.

Hopefully TM don't get too shitty - any publicity is good publicity right?

For Sale: Australia

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=55824140

Ok I admit I put this on TradeMe. It was in response to an auction selling New Zealand on Australian eBay. The eBay auction has been taken down.

He who laughs last laughs loudest.

I learnt something today

You should always learn something new everyday. Today mine was something I probably should have known.

I was playing around with IE and realised you could start typing in the address bar, and it will autocomplete with your the nearest item in your favorites. Cool. I've always wondered what the extra items that didn't started with http:// were. I have never really thought about it until today.

Geez and I call myself a geek.