I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Wow, this is a fantastic IDE.
To get started I brought Professional ASP.Net 2.0. There are a lot of ‘where to put things’ changes in ASP.Net 2.0 so doing a book walkthrough is a great way to get started.
So far the things I like are:
Code formatting. (ctrl+k, ctrl+d) just cleans up your code, indenting quoting etc.
The HTML Hierarchy displays where you are at all times.
The new controls seem to work very well. Databinding was very easy.
I like the file approach rather than the project approach. Seems cleaner.
The only negative I have so far is that the IDE is fairly slow. But it’s doing a huge amount of work on each keystroke so I guess that’s the cost. However I have a new laptop with lots of memory and grunt so it’s a bit of a surprise.
Anyway so far just scratched the surface. I don’t have much time but wanted to get my head around it.
Continuing my Google fixation …
How long until they enter the Directory Assistance Market? Telco’s concerned yet?
Second part of Cringley’s Google Speculation …
Part one here … GoogleMart
For my own reference, this TSQL script shrinks the database logs.
DECLARE @DB varchar(100)
SET @DB = DB_NAME()
BACKUP LOG @DB WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (@DB, TRUNCATEONLY )
Useful chart of Google Services from News.com
Google–what you get for $400 a share
I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in 12 months.
Still nothing on http://calendar.google.com/
MikeP just sent me a link to Net Snippets.
Looks like a very useful tool.
Also check out this event for next year. www.webstock.org.nz
Thanks Mike.
AfterMail manager makes Segway into sales
The Segway is a marketing expense … really, officer!
Microsoft makes the commitment for 64 bit with the announcement that Exchange 12 will be 64 bit only.
Gartner: Begin Preparing Now for 64-Bit-Only Microsoft Exchange
This creates a gap for maturing alternative providers such as Scalix. Expect this to continue across the server products.
Never been a more exciting time to be in software.
On news.com: FAQ: Behind Tivo’s play for iPod, PSP
So once you’ve recorded your shows on Tivo you can sync them to the iPod Video or PlayStation Portable.
That is cool and opens up a number of useful scenarios!
Incidentally I saw my first iPod Video this week. Michael Sampson picked one up in Oz. The 30GB model was very slim. Screen was excellent.
Given the relatively small file size, will this mean than ‘mini screen TV show swapping’ will take off. So say you wanted a series of Amercian Chopper on your Video iPod, you just know you’ll be able to download that soon.
Microsoft now allows you to map your Domain (e.g. www.drury.net.nz) to Microsoft Services such as MSN Spaces.
Now this is starting to get interesting!
FWIW,my top 3 Wellington Cafe’s are
- Eva Dixon’s at the Zoo. Best coffee in Wellington. Meerkats to keep the little guy amused.
- Chocolate Frog at Palmers in Miramax. Most friendly staff.
- L’affare, College Street. Best biz breakie.
PhilC put me on to this.
Cringely: Google-Mart
Google Data Centres everywhere providing near local cache.
I’m growing quite fond of Tom Scott …
The day before …
The morning after …
I’m not usually a fan of Helen, but no doubt she played a key role in this one. I’ll be mid forties when it arrives. That’s sobering.
I really cut my teeth on Microsoft Access. Is was one of those ‘Change the World’ development tools. Really easy we could build custom Line of Business (LOB) applications.
I still use a few Access apps for internal admin jobs.
Access hasn’t has a significant upgrade in some time but in O12 it looks like some real effort has been made.
Good walk through here … Overview of Access 12
Boarding House: North Shore. 5 pro surfers staying in a beach house for the Vans Triple Crown surfing event.
Sunny Garcia and Damien Hobgood are the names.
Different from normal reality shows, these are famous people you already know and usually only see them through magazines and contest footage.
Sunny is the hard man of the WCT surf series. To see him dropped in on, and then ordering the offender out of the water is something you read about but would never normally see. Priceless.
Then when a drunk guy talks to his wife, Sunny has to act.
This show is fascinating. Reality TV, but a window into the pro surfing world and fantastic surf action.
Produced by Mark Burnett, so big budget.
An interesting twist when I had written off reality TV completely.
Guy Haddleton and Sue Strother have just surfaced with their latest big idea since Adaytum.
They’ve already won a Popular Science Award.
Guy and Sue are NZ business hero’s, very generous with their time and advice to a number of NZ entrepreneurs. This will be one to watch.
At Authoring time, or Reading time.
I attended the VS2005 launch yesterday. Yawn! I was hoping that the key note would give me the 2 hours guided tour though VS and SQL. Instead it was customer propaganda. Still good to see a great turnout from the local dev community.
Anyway, it got me thinking that the current web dev model assumes smarts on the web server when the page is hit. A huge number of web sites have only semi dynamic content. In the case of my blog, our company web site and most product catalogues, the content only changes when authoring takes place. So I author a blog item, hitting the database, and each user that sees my site or pulls down my RSS feed, brings back exactly the same data until I load up a new posting. If I get 1000 hits per day my database hits are 1 (write) +1000 (read).
On my web site I run ASP.Net and SQL Database. What overkill.
Really I just need a local publishing database and push out HTML. Then I could store all my content say in Access, and I wouldn’t even care what type of WebServer I have. I could just publish HTML pages. So no database on my website.
Serving straight HTML is so much less effort, and also allows caching around the network to reduce server load significantly.
Even if there was some true dynamic content, like if I had personalisation, then still 95% of my website is semi dynamic and could be pushed out. I may still need a database but the number of hits would be substantially reduced, and therefore scalability significantly improved.
My point is that the Dev Tools assume a big server. It’s not straight forward to use the same dev tools for a ‘push out HTML’ type model. I still would want to author in Visual Studio, but I would have to write a custom app to flip my model around to this much simpler way of working.
Update: Darren sent me this …
I was just about to set aside a rainy sunday afternoon to develop client-side or HTML-push authoring tool when I found this
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/
fits the bill rather nicely.
HTML Push Authoring Tool! Yes that’s exactly what I meant!
Just added the Google Analytics code to my site …
http://www.google.com/analytics
Update: Like everyone else, I’ve waited the 12+ hours and nada, zip, zero, nothing. Dave5 has finally had results so I’m still optimistic.
Google base also you to ’attributize’ data. So to list a Vehicle you get a default list of properties you can assign values against. E.g. Color:Red
This ’sloppy data typing’ is the next step to being able to ask meaningful questions from Google like “Find me all yoga classes in Wellington that happen on a Tuesday”.
Simple. Powerful.
On Google, I was chatting to Phil about Google is becoming everything. Having the majority of their software server-side frees them from the drag that Microsoft has with a massive base and legacy of client installations.
In most cases this installed base has been Microsoft’s strength, but from a Google Point of view they have an advantage by being so nimble.
Wow, the ultimate USB peripherable.
A big knob.
I have no idea what I’d use it for but I want one.
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