Primordial Ooze

Eric Gunnerson asks How do your organize .NET. He offers two suggestions and each suggestion is applicable to different groups. Picking one over the other is probably going to be a problem for someone. I guess I'd suggest the documentation be documented in such a way that each new item is assigned categories or attributes so customers can view the information in a way that's appripriate for them. In this way, it should be simple to show a look at what's changed in C# by finding all new items with the C# attribute. The results can then be categorized by the other attributes. Likewise, you should be able to, for example, view enhancements for the IDE, either showing both C# and VB.NET enhancements, or narrowing the changes to a single language. I saw dynamic filtering like I describe on the MSDN site, where you can filter the sample code by language. Anyway, that's my two cents.

By Nick at 6:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm writing this entry with movable poster, a Windows application. If you see this post, seems like it's working fine.

By Nick at 8:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I created a slideshow of the evening's festivities, and they can be found here: SSDLanParty2-21-2004.wmv Unfortunately, I became familiar with the last screen way too often. If you play, you know what that means. Cheers.

By Nick at 11:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to my first LAN party tomorrow. Seems like there will be upwards of 18 people playing (though we expect a few to drop off). I've never been to one, but I've heard that they're a lot of fun. I just can't imagine what it must smell like in that room. I hope people take showers beforehand. Better yet, I hope the room is ventilated. I don't know what to expect. We'll be playing these games: * Raven Shield—1.41 * Battlefield 1942—1.6 * Desert Combat—.7 * Unreal XMP—7710 plus community map pack * Savage—2.0b I heard we'll also be playing the brand new Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo. All of these downloads are freaking huge. In addition to installing the game itself (which usually weighs in at around 3 discs), you need to download patches and map packs that are easily 250-600MB each. Finally, I must say that I fully expect to get my ass handed to me. I've played online against these guys before and I really don't belong on the same subnet as them. We'll see...

By Nick at 12:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This took me much longer than it should have, but basic HTML formatting is now available in my RSS feeds. What a pain that was.

By Nick at 9:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

While a cool hack, it doesn't seem like a common thing for blogs to offer so I nixed it. If you feel this was a mistake, let me know about it... Please redirect to either the: RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 links.

By Nick at 8:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have about 35 hours of DV video that I’m moving into my hard drive. I just bought a 250GB drive for this purpose. However, 35 tapes @ 12GB per tape totals 420GB of storage. Some of the tapes have blank sections and some of the footage sucks (some people would argue most of the footage sucks, but they better be careful since any shot of my kids is awesome!) so, once I hack and slash the sucky parts, I hope to get all of my valuable clips on my drive for easy access. While "producing" or "authoring" a home video project, I’ve found that monotonous clips of birthday parties, lasting 30 minutes a clip, are very boring to watch. Most of the footage is usually shaky, and the rest is composed of whole sections where people are talking about nonsense or walking through the house. I've found that "themed" montages are much more interesting. I create these from many short outtakes, mixed in with music and stills, usually having a common theme. Having all of my clips on a drive, categorized by date and subject matter will make the creation of montages much easier… and better. I don't claim to be an expert, but I do have a few tips for you amateurs out there... wait, that's me! * Don't follow your kids around. You'll be amazed at how much footage you have of the back of your kids. * Don't always take video standing. Your kids are small and some shots at their level are more entertaining. * Use a tripod for God's sake, or at least use the image stabilization feature of your DV camera. I get a headache watching a lot of my own stuff before I started paying attention. * Save your original DV tapes and don't re-use them. Writing your video's to DVD loses a lot of the video information that's on the original recording. This is even mre true or Video CD or Super Video CD formats, MPEG1, and MPEG2 as well. 10 years from now, when authoring software is far better than it is now, you'll appreciate the extra image data as the image-enhancing software available for professionals today will be avaialable for you tomorrow. Without that extra image data, there is not much that good software can do. * Let your kids taks some video. They love it and they tend to take some interesting footage. If they break the camera, you have an excuse to get a new one, which will probably be better than the one you have. * When creating slideshows, avoid creating it from simple slides that flip from one to the next. Crossfades are nice, but still not nearly enough. You can do better! You need to utilize slow zooms, music, and narration. Luckily all of this is easy using Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition, which comes with Microsoft Photo Story. I definitely recommend you drop the $20 and get a hold of it. If your authoring software doesn't like the WMV files it produces, generate 800x600 WMV with the software (available via their "more profiles" page), import the clip into Windows Movie Maker 2.0, and generate a DV file (best quality output) that should import fine into your authoring software. If you want more explicit directions, write me and I'll make a more advanced post. happy shooting...

By Nick at 4:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Chris Sells pointed out how Nathan Dunlap and Jonathan Russ created Splitter Bars in Avalon. Chris went on to describe how important XAML is going to be in getting designers and coders working more efficiently. This hits a chord for me and represents something that has always excited me about Avalon. You can design something in Illustrator (or have it designed), and import it into your code. I can see a great opportunity for an Adobe Illustrator plugin that allows a fine-grain of control over the export process (XAML markup, class attributes, etc.) Or, better yet, an Illustrator plugin for Visual Studio! Amateur illustrators, but who are really developers [like me] would appreciate that side of the coin. A key feature of this integration would be, of course, the ability to allow the visual to evolve as the code evolves, as a separate entity that can be checked in and out of source control, etc. The day is coming, indeed.

By Nick at 11:33 PM | Permalink

I'm writing this on the train, sitting next to, what appears to be, vomit. It's not on my seat, it's on the seat next to mine and it's dry, and it doesn't smell, and it's keeping everyone from sitting next to me, which is pretty cool, especially when I'm writing run-on sentences for my blog and I need the elbow room. Trains were a mess today in general. There was some kind of blockage in the tunnel, which caused a lot of delays, and this causes a massive blockage in the waiting areas. Not wanting to deal, I went back to work! When I eventually went back, I couldn't help but to silently time how long people considered the vomit seat, each miserable commuter pausing in the aisle next to me for longer and longer moments as the train got fuller and fuller. Bliss.

By Nick at 11:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just a confirmation from MSDN Magazine for my renewal. The letter I got had some bizarre wording: "As a subscriber, you'll be equipped with the advanced information you need to succeed in the exciting world of Windows and the Web. You'll get all the latest information on Windows 2000, e-commerce, COM and DCOM, XML, ASP and much more." What about Windows XP, Windows Server 2003. What about .NET? Holy cow this must have been written 4 years ago.

By Nick at 2:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I am now using a built-in feature for Movable type to access the Google Web API's. My last post seems kind of naive but it's all good. I've had some problems getting it to work right, however, so stay tuned...

By Nick at 2:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just stumbled across "Google Web API's":http://www.google.com/apis/ . Looks to be some very cool stuff. I hope to play with them soon. The service is free and once you sign up, you're assigned a license key that gets you 1000 queries a day. It looks like you can issue a general search, duh, and get the results back in XML so you can traverse and process the results any way you'd like. Second, you can get a binary cached representation of any URL, so long as Google's crawlers visited the page. Third, you can get spelling corrections, just like google does, when you make a query. This is useful if you've mistyped a word or words in your query and want to know if an alternate spelling will yield the search results you were really looking for. Finally, you get a lot of options for all of these query types. Most or all of these options are available through Google's standard browser interface, but perhaps you can envision a better interface or an interface that conveniently compares results when various filters are applied. Yum.

By Nick at 2:30 PM | Permalink