http://blogs.msdn.com/stevenpr/archive/2004/06/30/170289.aspx

Hi everyone My name is Steven Pratschner.  Im the Program Manager for the CLR that ships as part of the .Net Compact Framework.  I intend to use this blog to post information on various topics related to the Compact Framework, including versioning, interop, diagnostics, performance and so on.  In many cases Ill cover topics that either havent been covered by the formal product documentation yet or are new in the publicly available pre-releases of Whidbey.  Ill also look at features that behave slightly differently in the Compact Framework than they do on the full .Net Framework

I'd be keen on a bit of insight into how the Garbage Collecter differs from the desktop...

Pippa, my cousin, has written a book on Juice- my aunt sent me a copy to go with my new Juicer.

The book is nice and light on the 'health nut' side of juicing which is a good thing. Too much focus on 'liver cleansing wheat grass tonic' gives me visions of Jeanette Fitzsimplesimons and her merry band of hippies.

The book is set out based on times of the day. Don't know if my juicer cleaning skills are quite up the the degree of regularity encouraged by the book but there are some really bizarre but quite decadent sounding recipes in there. On my list for this weekend is Strawberry Must: Strawberries, Balsamic Vinegar, Cream, Honey.... sounds strangely divine ...

Thanks Pip! You're on juicing juty[sic] for my post wedding brunch in Feb!

I find that every time I dive into doing something with Regular Expressions I look for a tool to help me test them... and every time I spend a good wee while looking for a good tool.

So here is a good tool- http://royo.is-a-geek.com/iserializable/regulator/ - selfishly posted here so that I can easily find it next time I'm dealing with RegEx stuff...

Air New Zealand has just announced that they will be implementing a Super Economy class on their 747 fleet and the new 777 ERs and one assumes the 7E7s when they arrive. Details here.

The most significant thing is that there will be in seat power and an extra 5-6 inches of leg room. I'm sold already!

I just hope that 'Premium Service' doesn't mean that I'll have to pay for expensive NZ wines and fancy food.... Give me airline stodge and a can of coke any day as long as I can have a power socket for my PC!

Now if they would just install Boeing Connexion it'll be just about perfect.
http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/

http://www.hohto.to/forums/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=17720

[At Isengard]
Gandalf: "sup dawg, i r g4nd4lf da gr3y!"
Saruman: "Foo! U R teh noob!"
Gandalf: "***?!"
Saruman: "Sauron pwns joo!"
Gandalf: "Sif, I R leet"
**Sarumon beats the **** out of Gandalf
Saruman: "Pwned!"

In his opening keynote at JavaOne on Monday, Sun Microsystems President and COO Jonathan Schwartz stressed the return of desktop Java and introduced new tools to provide a richer user experience.

Urm.... can you say Smart Client.... be sure to come and see me speak about all the cool things we've been doing with Smart Clients @ Tech Ed this year.

OK... I'm sitting in Changi (Singapore) Airport bumming some free wireless so I thought I ought to blog about the past day.

I was delayed by 30 minutes out of DUnedin on the way up so connecting to my SQ flight @ CHC was a bit of a rush. Didn't get much of a look @ CHC international.

Flight over on SQ was a bit strange really. The scenery was great. Have some photos of Ayers Rock (Uluru) from 30,000 feet which is really cool. I was a little disappointed with the much vaunted Singapore Girl cabin service to be completely frank. THe crew were not particularly friendly and they duffed up the meal service something cronic- I missed out on half of my second meal :-( Food was OK though... as good as one can expect in coach. The entertainment system was pretty cool variety was great but the UI was pretty cludgy and slow- anyone want to tag team on a CE based plane/hotel video on demand system?

Singapore has been a blur. Arrived and took a Taxi into town with the guys I was sitting next to on the plane. Stayed @ the Furama Hotel booked via Rates To Go. Hotel was well priced (internet access a little expensive) and about 4 Star standard in NZ terms. Location was OK. I used the Subway (MRT) to get around- be sure to print out a copy of the subway map from the MRT site- it was very useful.

My body clock woke me up at some ungodly hour this morning but I had been well advised that most places don't open in Singapore until 10am. The exception is the 24 Hour Mustafa Center. I went there at about 8:30 following a brief buffet breakfast @ the hotel- worth having. The Mustafa Center is exactly what an Indian owned shopping center should be like- colorful and hideously over crowded. The stock ranged from complete junk through to high end (D70, EOS300D) cameras. I didn't buy anyhing there, but, it was worth a visit to scope out the prices. To get there you want to get off the subway at Farrer Park and follow your nose.

From here I went to Sim Lim Square- bad move. Unfortunatly, while the “things don't open till 10am adage” is broadly correct, Sim Lim doesn't open until about 11am. So I had an hour of going up and down the escalators waiting for the place to open. Sim Lim is hilarious! Imagine, if you will, taking all of the 'dodgy little IT shops' in a city the size of say Sydney and sticking them in a Six story early 80s era building. That is Sim Lim. It is well worth a look but I'd probably go to Furama (see below- Furama is more Department store style shops and less 'Neons and Quad Cooling Fans in your Case' style like Sim Lim) first. Anyway I kicked around Sim Lim looking at most everything. In the end I settled one of the larger (but no less dodgy) stores to buy my goodies. The arrangement g@ Sim Lim is interesting- the Wholesalers for the goods and the retail stores are in the same building. THe wholesalers will only bsell to the public @ a fixed RRP whereas the retailers can be squeezed a bit. The Wholesalers (being somewaht more professional) open earlier so I had already scoped the upper level of pricing before I started shopping proper. I bought some parts mainly:

• D-Link WiFi Router- 'cos my Nokia isn't powerful enough to cover my whole house.
• Wireless Powerpoint Remote - Paid a bit much for this really, but, needed one for Tech Ed and was getting sore and grumpy by this point.
• Hauppage WinTV PVR250 Card- So I can build a Windows Media Center box.
• 512MB CF Card- It was much cheaper that buying @ home- Got a SanDisk one too....

When it came time to pay my bloody Amex wouldn't work on their machine. THe Mag strip was stuffed- Mag strip is a stupid technolgoy IMHO anyway. Despite much coaching/coaxing by me to get them to manually enter the number it ended up going on my Visa Debit card== no airmiles and no interest free period. Needless to say I was pretty pissy so I got on the blower to Amex in USA then Japan then NZL. NZL rang Singapore and arranged for a replacement card for me to pick up that afternoon. Now that is was I call service! I was bloody stoked with Amex actually- they were most helpful.

Prior to going to pick up my card I wandered theough the Chinese Mal next to my hotel. I wanted to grab a digicam for Dad and ended up getting him a DSC-W1 @ S$699- which I thought was pretty good as it also had the international warranty and a free bag and 128MB memory stick. They guy was so friendly that I went back and got a Samsung Camera for my brother later in the afternoon.

When I went to pick up my Amex card the Taxi driver dropped me off in slightly the wrong place. This was great becuase I stumbled across a dive store. I had wanted to find a dive store to buy a new dive computer but hadn't rated my chances with only 24 hours in town. Anyway I went and picked up my card and came back down and purchased a Mares Airlab AI computer for S$731 which IMHO is a steal for the latest model AI computer- that's about 1/3 of what you'll pay for a Suunto Cobra in NZ. The AIrlab has IR computer integration and a proper RGBM algorithm to boot. VERY HAPPY with this purchase.

Went from here back to buy my brothers camera and finished the day with a chinese foot and back massage before catching the MRT to the airport.

Had a great time in Singapore. The shopping is so good that I am going to ban my girlfriend from even contemplating a trip here. Save for the Taxi drivers I didn't find Singaporeans overly friendly or helpful. Finally in Singapore there seems to be a prominently displayed penalty for pretty much any indiscretion that you can think of. Yet there seems to be little to no enforcement capability.

More from me tommorow. Gotta go and grab a feed- fli9ght to PEK (Beijing) leaves @ 1:30am *groan*

IMAGE_00002.jpg

Zarbo is a really cool Deli in Newmarket, Auckland...

Frolm Kurt Cagle

A new Open Source project has been started to port Michael Kay's Saxon 8.0 (and hence XSLT2 and XPath2 at a minimum) to C#, at http://www.x2x2x.org/x2x2x/home/. This is some of the more exciting news I've heard in a while, especially as Microsoft itself has been VERY ambivalent about adopting XSLT 2.0, preferring instead to go with their own "custom" XML transformation technology in Longhorn.

If Saxon is ported to C#, this could very easily prove the foundation technology to get XSLT 2.0 onto Windows in a major way. While not perfect, XSLT 2.0 is considerably less verbose, easier to build extensions and capable of group filtering and manipulation far in excess of what version XSLT 1.0.

I went to the Cop shop the other day. What I wanted to acheive was trivially simple- I needed a copy of a bank statement and my drivers licensed certified as copies.

So the first station I go to is the little community station and I'm told that only the senior sgt. (or above) can sign the documents for me and he is away on a call. Fair enuf says I... so I head into the main station in the middle of town.

I get there and rock up to the counter and a coppa comes out who is either;

• Extremely ignorant
• Extremely rude
• All of the above

He was about as much help as tits on a bull. I had copied both the statement and drivers license onto a single sheet of paper. he refused to sign them on this basis- or at least I think that's what I could make out from his mumbles and grumbles. No effort was made to be helpful though... no 'oh I'll just pop out the back and make another copy for you'... just a 'piss off and come back later thanks very much'.

Now this pisses me off something cronic. Our Police seem to have lost the community focus that they really should maintain. If they want people to be helpful when they need to investigate serious offences and the like then they should be a bit nicer when we law abiding citizens go asking for a favour.

So anyway... I buggered off and have yet to get this stuff certified. When I got home I thought I look up a bit more on the guy in question to see if he was some big cheese - maybe I had pissed him off by asking such a menial task of him. He did look about ready to Perf. But no... he was a Senior Constable (kinda like going from Private to Lance Corporal in the Army on the basis of 'long service')... so he would have been a fat lot of good when it came to signing it anyway.

Last time I try that approach- next time I'll try a nice friendly, elderly Justice of the Peace.

I wonder what sort of impact blogging is having on the Google ranking system.

The ranking system (search ranking based on number of inward links) was certainly a clever idea from Google but I wonder how much relavence it acutally has in the new Blogger oriented internet. My logic is that most blogs are extremely diverse in their content. For example I range from information on Windows Mobile Devices right the way through to some fairly abrasive commentary on religion and social freedoms. In the past I might have run three different sites to give my views on these issues, today they all get bundled as one.

Now if my Google ranking is boosted by a few inward links (particularly from 'A-List' sites) into one of my technical interest areas that ranking is also applied to the more controversial rants that I have too. It kinda means that the democratisation of information nut that Google had pretty well cracked runs into problems. I wonder if Google are doing any work to try and compensate for this phenomenon.... Maybe building some sort of content grouping mechanism to assgn search rank on a content basis...

A friend posted this on our New Zealand Dot Net mailing list.... I laughed my ass off so much that I just had to share (with permission it).

[When should I use interfaces in my code]

I use them when I need a common API across dissimilar objects  - a little bit like getting drunk eg, take the following 2 classes..

 

public class hotChick

...

 

public class fatSlag

...

 

Obviously, 2 quite different classes... however if we get good & drunk we can make them implement the same interface eg:

public class hotChick : IShaggable

...

 

public class fatSlag  : IShaggable

...

 

When programming against the interface you dont want to care about the actual implementation - getting drunk has the same effect...  as long as the interface is the same you generally dont care...

eg

public void myMethod(IShaggable myShag){

  myShag.ShagRotten();

...

 

... as if by magic the fatSlag class, with a 10 pint handicap, all of a sudden appears to have some of the same properties and methods as the hotChick class

 

[UPDATE}

Lauren with the great comeback

 

class SexistPig: ILonelyBastard

ILonelyBastard TimHuffman = new SexistPig();

ILonelyBastard.Shaggable = false;


Lauren

I rank as number 5 for the search

Happy Clappy Church

http://www.google.com/search?q=happy+clappy+church&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=30&sa=N

But, really, in the end, not seeing "F9/11" would be like allowing your First Amendment rights to be abrogated, no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

Yes, Fox News!

via NZ Pundit

Club iMate has the new Smartphone ROM here...

http://www.clubimate.com/index.asp?PageAction=DEVICE_SP2_UPD

Herewith the slides for the lecture tonight.

16th June - Form State.ppt (413.5 KB)

Hi guys the slide deck for the Mon 14th NZ DNUG ASP.NET Lecture are here....