shlock (1) - Nigels Retrospective : Miscellaneous Stuff

Microsoft and Open Source: Two cats in a sack?

shlock — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:09:00 GMT

Jorke pinged me with details of an event he and Professional Geek Nick Hodge are running in Melbourne next Wednesday night, aimed at discussing Microsoft's relationship with Open Source, the Open Source community, and how we as an organisation are embracing Open Source. This may seem strange, given the common dogma in the community that OSS is the antithesis of Microsoft's commercial model. But I think that this position - like many other dogmatic beliefs - doesn't survive analysis once you start to scratch beneath the surface.

There will be some presentations to frame and elicit discussion, but it's the discussion that is the aim of these sessions. Nick and Jorke are looking for frank and unfiltered feedback from you on what Microsoft should be or could be doing to work better with the Open Source community. Having read the feedback from simliar sessions the guys ran at WebDU I can promise it'll be an interesting evening. If you want to come along, it's on in Melbourne next Wednesday night (24th June), 5.30 to 8.30. You can get more details - the venue etc - at the registration site. They are also running sessions in Sydney (23rd) and Brisbane (25th) - register via the same link.

Report just in: www.architectureforum.net.au is down...

shlock — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:40:00 GMT

Got a report this evening (thanks, Michael) that the Australian Architecture Forum site is down. It'll be back online asap, so hold tight if you are trying to register, and keep checking back in with us.

In the meantime, check this little fella out:

We were on the road between Traralgon and Woodside this weekend, on our way to visit P's mum, and came around a corner to discover an 'ex-Roo' laying in the middle of the road. Being a moderately blind corner, it wasn't a great place to suddenly come accross for a large amount of animal at 100Kph, so after a bit of discussion we decided to turn around and move it off the road. Lucky we did, as this little guy was still in it's mum's pouch.

Although sadly it's mum hadn't survived, the Joey seemed to have escaped trauma. We gently pulled it out of it's mum's pouch, wrapped it up nice and warm and called Wildlife Victoria when we got to P's mum's place.

They were amazing, and had a local carer over within the hour to pick it up for fostering. The carer said that it's very common for Joey's to be found alive in their pouches days after their mum's have been hit by vehicles. It just goes to to show - if you hit something, it's really important you stop and check whether it had any young that might have survived (as well as assessing whether the animial you hit can be saved and/or isn't suffering, and doesn't represent a risk to other people on the road).

8 Little Known Things About Me

shlock — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:22:00 GMT

Dave recently pinged me on this little meme that's going around that lets you inflict random factoids about yourself on unsuspecting visitors to your blog. I'm up for it. The ground rules are as follows:

Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Little-known facts about Nigel

I'm half-Maori. My Dad was from Taranaki, on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. On my mother's side, it's all Scottish and German from the deep south.
I worked on a shearing gang when I was a student. I was the guy who scraped the dags away from the fleece during shearing, and then gatherered the shorn fleece to be transferred to the classing table. I always held jealous aspirations of working the wool press, which was the most advanced piece of technology in the shearing shed at the time.
I am addicted to an online world-war-II combat flight simulator called Aces High. My call-sign is 'whisk' and I'm in a squad called the "Airborne Kitchen Utensil Assault Group", along with several other kitchen implements. My preferred ride is the Pony.
I once played drums in a progressive country punk power trio called 'The Hyphen-Ears', with Steve Watson and the late Kevin Smith. Kevin went onto become an actor of some repute, most notably as 'Ares, God of War' on 'Xena, Warrior Princess'. Kev was an amazing guy, who's sorely missed by all who were lucky enough to have known him.
I studied computer science at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch. My undergrad degree was a B.Sc, and my master's degree was (somewhat bizarrely when I think about it) a M.Com. Really, the post-grad degree thing was all about avoiding getting a job in the real-world.
Most of my work prior to joining Microsoft was on un*x based platforms. I have worked for Microsoft for 6.5 years now, and I still spend quite a bit of time fiddling with various flavours of Linux.
My partner's name is Princess. No really, it is.
I'm a cat person, but allergic to cats. So we have a dog.

So, onto the viral part of the meme - the tagging:

I hate myself but...

shlock — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 06:38:00 GMT

I couldn't resist it.

Check out Frank's blog for more TechEd LOLCATs madness.

Better living through sugar...

shlock — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:06:00 GMT

I'm all in favour of innovation, but this is going too far.

When words just aren't enough...

shlock — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 06:46:00 GMT

How about sending a cake instead?

Any guesses on who the IE team sent this (poison-free) cake to?

Princess is having a rant

shlock — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 12:16:00 GMT

Princess is having a bit of a rant over on blogspot about the shady dealings of a certain well-known internet-based mobile phone ring-tone outfit. These charlatans took funds out of a prepaid mobile phone account she holds, which would be cool except she never signed up. They don't have a local phone number on which they can be contacted, and their email-based customer service staff seem to be expert evasionists.

Unfortunately, it seems that she's not the only one out there who has experienced issues with their practices. Putting my web(vn) hat on, I guess it's a valid business model: start randomly gouging money out of people's phone accounts, and then when they contact you to complain, play dumb forever in the hope they'll just go away. Niiiice one.

Office ate my homework, Vista stuck a finger down it's throat... :)

shlock — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 10:09:00 GMT

I've been running Vista RC1 (5728) for the last week or so on my main laptop (a Tosh M4), and so far I've been pretty impressed with it. Perf and stability are both excellent, and I've had no major problems with drivers for my machine (unlike my early experiences with B2). Not only that, I've had quite a few admiring comments regarding the look of Aero/Glass, which works great on the Tosh, looks rather fetching and is definitely an improvement over the look n feel of XP.

So, I'm planning on installing RC2 in the next few days, and in prep for the update I figured I'd better back up my local mail folders. I closed down Outlook, and performed a normal file copy of my .pst's into a back-up directory. Everything appeared happy - EXCEPT - that when I restarted outlook it complained that my Offline Cache file (.ost - where the local copy of my mail state is stored) wasn't a .ost. Hmmm.. perhaps Outlook hadn't closed the file properly when I was shutting it down... Further checking revealed that the file was definitely corrupt. Arrrgh! Last time I looked, my .ost was around 650MB, so a resync with exchange was going to cost me the better part of a half-day give or take a month of Sundays.

Good thing I was running Vista. I simply used Vista's new shadow copy feature to recover a previous version of my .ost file (that had been secreted away by the O/S late the previous night), restarted Outlook, resync'd changes since the shadow copy was made, and everything was good.

Ok, so I might not have lost the file had I not been running O2007 and Vista (which are pre-release after all). And I could have waited the eternity it would have taken to resync my mail. So this wasn't really a mission-critical occasion. However, I can imagine (in fact REMEMBER) many other scenarios where corrupt/missing files have caused me anguish, and I for one feel a bit safer running Vista (yes, even a pre-release) on my laptop.

Hmmm - I have hair

shlock — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 15:48:00 GMT

And in case you were wondering, here's Tech.Nigel. Yes, those are my undergarments - I've been working at home a bit lately :)

Get your own Meego at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/teched2006/

New Reality TV show idea...

shlock — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 13:28:00 GMT

I've got a great idea for a new hit TV show that I'm seriously considering pitching to Endemol Southern Star. I'm calling it "Big Bother" - a working title until something better occurs to me.

I think the main problem with the current Big Brother formula is that it encourages us to evict odious people from the house back into the real-world, where you and I live. In my humble not to mention personal-and-definitely-not-an-official-opinion-of-my-employer-opinion, what would be better is if members of the public could vote to keep these people permanently IN the house, and out of society. Sure, feed them nice, and give them bouncy balls to play with and stuff, but lets try and keep them in the house so that they're a nice safe distance away from the rest of us. Finally, something worthy of the cost of sending the text message.

What do you think? Does the idea have legs?

Great post on Migrating .NET 1.1 apps to 2.0

shlock — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:38:00 GMT

Peter Laudati has an excellent post discussing the ins and outs of getting code across from 1.1 to 2.0. One thing that I wasn't aware of was that the ASP.NET team recently released a new Web Application Project template for VS2005 that essentially replicates the ASP.NET 1.1 project model, making it easier to bring web projects into the 2.0 world (without going through the migration wizard). Check out ScottGu's post on this here, as well as the Web Application Projects white paper on MSDN. Finally, for more information on migrating .NET web apps, check out the beefed up ASP.NET team migration site here.

Peter also sagely points out something that often gets lost in the noise and excitement as new versions of technology are rolled out: if it aint broke, don't fix it :) There are lots of compelling technology reasons to upgrade to 2.0, but unless you can scrape back some of the upgrade costs through reduced operating costs (increased developer productivity on sites that are being constantly maintained/revisioned springs to mind), then it's usually better to leave 1.1 sites as they are.

Self-inflicted injuries: Spade 1 - Nigel 0

shlock — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:03:00 GMT

Following in Dave's footsteps of blogging self-inflicted injuries, I had a run-in with a garden tool on Anzac day that I thought I'd share. Think of it as a cautionary tale against gardening with only your limbic brain engaged.

I'd spent the afternoon in the garden, removing weeds and generally tidying things up. I decided that I'd move a Yucca tree from it's location near the garage to a more permanent spot on the other side of the garden. I needed to dig a hole to receive the tree, and had started digging, encountering quite a few bits of hard stuff beneath the surface of the ground. At the time, I thought little of this, instead relying on brute strength and my ability to lift hevvy fings to get me through.

Here's the spade I was using (yes it's all metal)

The sequence of events went something like this. Nigel attempts to push spade down into ground. Encounters resistance. Hmmm more force required. Nigel lifts spade up and brings it down vigorously at a significant rate of knots. Unstoppable force meets immovable subterranean object. Physics takes over, and redirects force back up the handle of the spade. Spade handle flicks back and around to score a direct hit on Nigel's conveniently positioned right cheek bone. Check splits on impact. Princess takes Nigel to nearest clinic for medical attention.

Here's the aftermath if you are interested. I swear the doctor who attended me was giggling while I wasn't looking - I mean, who manages to whack themself in the face with a spade?!? I guess that means my cat-walk (and neurosurgery) career is over :)

Lipstick on a swine, or something divine?

shlock — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:47:00 GMT

This evening I presented at the Victorian Dot Net User's Group on ATLAS. For those of you who attended who are interested in the code, it's attached to this entry. Also, I should thank Mr Glover for providing the basic materials/slides/resources for the session :)

All in all, I think ATLAS is a pretty good step in the right direction if you are looking to build a rich user experience in DHTML. One of the things I really like about ATLAS is how well it protects you from having to think too hard about the browser the code will run in. In the ATLAS model, you code against the ATLAS core, and ATLAS takes care of translating this into the DOM of whatever browser the client-side app happens to find itself in. I remember from a previous life how hard it was to get DHTML code working convincingly well with cross-browser targets. In short, the development experience was horrendous: Netscape's DOM was different from IE's DOM, and IE 5.5 on the Mac was different from IE5.5 on Windows. Some products like GoLive from Adobe seemed to help a little, but they still tended to break down when things started to get, well, complex. ATLAS on the other hand seems to handle this very well indeed - the ATLAS guys have done an excellent job of this.

I also like the declarative model for binding control data, and the UpdatePanel/PartialRendering functionality is just magic. It'll be cool once there's more designer support for ATLAS in VS2005, so I can use intellisense instead of clogging what's left of my short-term memory trying to remember the properties and methods of various ATLAS objects.

Bill McCarthy (who had presented earlier in the evening on DSLs) asked me during the session whether ATLAS required any ActiveX controls on the client side in order to work. I confidently replied 'of course not, ATLAS is basically a bunch of very clever client-side scripts that are downloaded as part of the normal browser page-request process...'. Of course, I forget that in fact there IS at least one ActiveX control that is being consumed by the ATLAS framework, at least in IE. That control is - duh - MSXML. How else is the ATLAS runtime going to parse all that XML declarative stuff on the page? :) Ok, so my somewhat shaky defence to this faux par was that I was thinking about the nasty kind of activeX control that hijacks your machine and sends your browser off to the nether regions of the internet to purchase stuff from online drug-stores, not the benign kind of ActiveX controls that are COM libraries for doing useful stuff on behalf of a script. For the record, that other browser - it's name eludes me right now - has an XML parser built in. You can see what I mean in the following code from atlas.js:

There was some philosophical discussion afterwards about the nautre of browser applications. I must admit to feeling somewhat... ambivalent... about AJAX as as model for developing applications. Sure, AJAX helps address user experience shortcomings with HTML/HTTP round-trip latency, and libraries like ATLAS address the coding experience side of the equation, especially in the face of diverging DOMs and a rather average scripting language in the browser.

However, the key point here is that there is a tension between what we WANT to do in the browser, and what the browser can actually do for us. ATLAS, and libraries of it's ilk are a response to this tension. If you extrapolate this thought, the tension becomes selective pressure for the browsers to get better, from both a UI as well as development perspective. I think that this actually means we are staring down the barrel of a good old fashioned arms race in the browser world (which shouldn't be news to anyone). There are things we'd like to do in the browser that we can't because the technology isn't up to it. AJAX style libraries go some way towards addressing this, but what is really required is innovation in the browser, or innovation in other technologies that provide a better experience for web users and developers. Think XAML, flash, embedded .NET controls, embedded Java controls, and other technologies that haven't been dreamed up yet.

The outcome of this arms race is unclear, but was is clear to me is that the browser's we'll all be using in five years time will be quite different current beasts we know and love (or hate) today. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.

In the meantime, is AJAX dolling up the swine? Perhaps. Is it useful technology and here to stay for the next while? Absolutely.

[UPDATE] - Tim Heuer has posted some great samples that work with the Jan ATLAS CTP at http://www.asyncpostback.com/

Oh, and...

shlock — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 07:59:00 GMT

Happy new year everyone! I hope that everyone managed to get a break of some sort over the holiday period. If you were in Melbourne, then you probably experienced something similar to the picture below on the afternoon of the last day of 2005.... ;)

This photo was taken at the end of a journey of around 20 minutes (from Bunnings Moorabbin to Elsternwick) at around 5.00pm on New Year's eve. When we got in the car, the temperature was reading something like 43 degrees. Normally, the gauge reads hot after the car has been parked for a while, and the temp goes down once the car starts moving and some fresh air gets to the sensor. However, in this case, once we set off the temperature went UP to around 46 degrees, and then finally settled at 45 degrees C (that's 113 degrees F for those of you who are C challenged :) ) for the rest of the journey. Melbourne was like the inside of a blast furnace, and the streets were nearly empty. I suspect most people were at home laying on the floor of the bathroom or something trying to stay cool :)

"Java is the new COBOL"

shlock — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 07:44:00 GMT

My mate Hugh just spent a weekend hanging out in Melbourne with Princess and I. Hugh works for an Australian company who build FIX (Financial Information eXchange) engines and assorted ancilliary software products. This generally means that he spends much of his life up to his ears in financial software environments - particularly in trading houses and brokerages and the like. This gives him a unique perspective on life (and legacy systems), part of which emerged with the pithy observation "Java is the new COBOL".

Now before I have to reach for my teflon suit, I'd actually like expand this maxim to include C#, or in fact any other contemporary 3rd generation language presently being used to hand-craft business logic components in the wild.

MDA, software factories, and DSI are all about enabling models to drive the auto-generation of the necessary code and infrastructure artifacts to do the heavy lifting in a system. This is a long-term thing, but it's my belief that these initiatives will - eventually - fundamentally change the way we build solutions, with tools doing most of the work and leaving us humans to apply our frontal lobes to the actual business challenge we are addressing. This is right, and good, and somewhat overdue in my humble opinion.

But, with this in mind, what becomes of code that is being built today in ye olde development environments using current people-intensive approaches and contemporary languages such as Java and C#? All that code that has been lovingly (or not so lovingly) hand coded to exacting (or blurry) requirements will eventually become legacy code that will more than likely have to be maintained. Now if you accept that most people who are currently specialising in writing code by hand will eventually move onto other things, it seems likely that we'll be in a similar position to the one we are in today with COBOL - that is, a shrinking population of developers who understand at a deep level how the code works, and how it can be modified to meet a new or changed business requirement.

There of course always be people who understand these things, but I think they'll become a rare and possibly expensive resource. Just like COBOL developers are becoming today. Interesting thought, yes?