Time was when I was all about being a year ahead of the Redmond releases.  Time isn't that way any more for me.  Got a bit tired of the growing restrictions.  Call me an old guy but it just ain't Bill's Redmond anymore and the heaps of heaps on top of heaps isn't the "You can do what *you* want on Microsoft" that made me leave the IBM fen DOSes ago.

MS sent a gift surface unit and I really love the thing for looks, LOVE the keyboard to death (and I am a Unicomp user).  BUT, RT kills flash for the little guy and that I hate.  Hate.

This site is 100% hand coded using .Net power (not .Net-playtime abstractions) but for Vids and Audio it is a real paid-for Wowza server and my own SWFs.  Till I get done with my current work and can get in and recode for the lesser power of HTML5, here's how to get Flash if you are on RT.

Coding out and about without my libraries drive and hit that old, old, old bug of user controls not making it easy to tell you when you're in Designmode if you nest subclassed UCs. Felt like a noob fool, had to waste time running through all of the forum posts of hacks that still don't work.. till I found this one. It's not mine but it's better than mine in that it works (for me) across the nesting scenarios even when called from a grandchild control. Now I'm glad I forgot my drive :).

The code is in an Anonymous comment, in case that page goes away, I put it here.

Why does the simple DesignMode feature that was spot-on in the VB5/6 era still elude the VS team after ten years of .Net? 

Thanks Anonymous!

Teaching myself chip level programming and found that having a TRS-80 100 (or two) was a great way to have an example of the "Why" clearly in my mind.  Thanks to the REX and NADSBox from Club100.org the unit(s) is(are) more than just a retro novelty though.. they are actually quite useful even 30 years later. 

Alas, the power of the tech shows the issue that made ALL later machines less useful to collectors and users... peripherals with moving parts suck.  The 100s don't have any moving parts, but many of the professional software packages back in the day came on cassette and these don't work so well.

Here's a show of trying to get Traveling Software tapes from eBay to work.

Amazon.com review of Spinnaker Eight In One Integrated Office Suite for DOS.  (Yes, for DOS!)...

... This suite was my best friend back when I had a 286 at home and my work was all IBM-XT. The Database applet does xBase files compatible with dBaseIII+ so I could compile the WHCN Top 1006 Countdowns and catalog all of the carts, DATs and 15inch reels in the legendary radio station "Basement Tape" collection and just carry a 5.25 inch floppy between home and work to tweak the data. Also, the WordPerfect/MS-Word5 style Word Processor links up to the DBFs so mail merging was a snap ... IN DOS 3x, no less.

... It makes my HP200lx DOS 5.0 palmtop even better. And the manual is just plain stunning compared to the manuals written over the past several years. There is something to be said about the days when software couldn't be updated instantly over the internet... they put full effort into making things rock solid BEFORE SHIPPING.

Wow.  If this is what a "Professional" is now expected to know, I'm sad for .Net.

[more]

I've been taking a great Interplanetary Flight overview course at the Art Center in Pasadena.  The sessions are run by JPL alum Dave Doody and it's all been more than worth the tuition price.

The other week my class had a private visit to JPL.  Following a nice leasurely time in the Spacecraft Museum (so much nicer than being in the shuffle with thousands at the yearly open houses) we got a mega-big-screen (Windows OS on all demonstration 'puters, by the way) show of the new JPL online feature applet Eyes On the Solar System directly from project Technical Consultant Doug Ellison.

"Hi Smith! Remember the project that needed to allow entry of date values but the users couldn't be forced to any specific precision?  I have the same requirement and can't remember how you did the precision metadata, we're on SQL Server, not Oracle, was it a PLSQL ability?"

:)  Uh... you're thinkin' too hard, budd.  All I did was add a sibling column to the DATE field and packed it with the id/enumval of the desired datepart precision.  

I gotta laugh about my saying that you're thinking too hard, it's ironic...

[more]

Still looking for MARIE and the public release of information on Space and Mars Radiation directly related to Humans higher than LEO. 

I've found something odd in the 2006-released NRC report "Space Radiation Hazards and the Vision for Space Exploration, Report of a Workshop".  

This 88 page book which you can buy from Amazon or download "free for Personal Use Only" from the National Academies Press is all that we (publically) knew of concerning Space Radiation up to the 2005 Wintergreen Workshop.  It is almost as tedious as other NRC reports but worth the read if only to find out that in decades of human "Space flight" our country really hasn't done a whole heck of a lot to figure out exactly what Hazards are out there or how to get around them. 

Even the writers seem astonished by this.

Plus... why not Windows7 in a spacecraft?

>>Update April 8th 2011:

After seeing a number of hits coming into this page from all around Huntville,  I checked and the Careers page at the Al-Razaq "Computing Services" site no longer returns an immediate PHP server error.  Now, that menu option is linked to the address "http://192.168.100.95/hrapplicant", which fails to load.  Is it me or does 192.168.... look a lot like in internal router address?  If so then the folks inside the Al-Razaq network think that they have fixed the issue while anyoone testing from the outside is still getting a failure.

<<

If we save billions in launch and space hardware costs thanks to COTS, does it add up to a real savings in total NASA costs?

I was about to toss my eWeek into the recycling and the pages flipped open and my eye caught a sentence in the review of the GalTab and Dreak:

"Unlike Apple's iOS with the company's comparatively easy access to FaceTime video conferencing, Android users will likely need to wait until 3rd party developers start exploiting the hardware for their own video apps"

It was a Jerry-Sees-GratefulDead-In-The-Dictionary moment.

Yeah, eWeek is another iLoveJobs rag and like them all it will ignore anything good unless it came from 'Tino but this one seemed way over the top.  But then I thought about it.. there really aren't that many apps out ther taking advantage of the video hardware and if that continues then Android FFCs will likely stop being part of the spec.

But is this because devs are stupid or that the platform is harder than iOS?  As to the former, sure ;-), but definitely not the latter...