on updating from WinXPSP2 RC1 to RC2

Tools

I read the instrux, went to the update windows site and sat and waited and waited and waited while it said “checking for updates”.

I stopped it and started it again. And waited and waited and waited.

After at least a 1/2 hour of this nonsense, I finally noticed the very small and very unnoticable notice above the i.e. box that i.e. was blocking activex scripts and I should press some key or another to let the activex script run.

So Windows XP SP2 RC1 was preventing itself from updating itself. And I, a “professional” couldn’t figure it out. Hmmmm….

Joel on Software on Windows API vs .NET and so much more

Just Rambling

This very long post from Joel Spolsky speaks to me and depresses me on so many levels.

I have been a programmer for a long long time. I have been programming to DOS and Windows and for a few years, thanks to some great innovations by the Fox Software folks, to the Mac. I have always accepted that Microsoft is in the business of selling operating systems and if they own the developers, they own the world. It is one of the reasons that I have nearly jumped ship a few times. But, well, they own me –  Joel drives this point home (and how they do it) pretty clearly in this post.

He also talks about the “Raymond Chen Camp” – which represents those at Microsoft whose biggest interest is to keep Windows and dependent applications running, no matter what – no breaking changes. He quoted some great posts from Raymond Chen’s awesome blog as examples. He compares this to the MSDN camp – which he says is compartmentizing software tools too much and encouraging developers to use disjointed and complex “code chunks“. And he says they’ve won – because they have gotten away with breaking changes quite a lot lately. Not only breaking our code but breaking a lot more in our lives in order to try to keep up.

I definitely get frustrated with the changes and the effort of keeping up, but change is necessary. I believe I have quoted Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel winning theory of chaos and disorder in the universe on my blog before: “You can’t have order without change“. I accept that. I stomped and whined a whole lot  when .NET came out and I saw what it meant for my vb6 applications and skills. But I learned and I am writing better applications.

I don’t think Joel is decrying change, but breaking changes. I’m sure Paul Vick could easily explain why it was maybe close to impossible to move VB to .NET,give it the power it can have now without breaking VB6 code.

He also talks about Windows .NET apps vs Web .NET apps which was the point that one of my user gruop members took away from this post and is thinking maybe it’s time for him to go back to FoxPro if he wants to focus on Windows applications.

I have too much work to do and to much invested in all of this to step back and think about what he is saying (this week or this month or this year). Doesn’t that sound awful? Self-serving? Uncaring about the big picture?

There is much to read and absorb in this article. It’s a pretty interesting look at software regardless of if you agree with him or not – and you will probably find yourself agreeing with some, disagreeing with other parts or just realizing that you really don’t want to think about it at this level…

[just a note – yes I deleted the post. I realized my gut reaction did not express my opinions well, so I have modified it a bit and reposted. And I still am a bit uncomfortable with this because it’s a huge thing to think about and I haven’t taken the time that I think it deserves…]

10 Reasons why I am getting excited about DevTeach

Just Rambling

I am really looking forward to many aspects of the upcoming DevTeach conference in Montreal.

1) It is a great conference with great content
2) It is a small conference which makes it quite intimate. It has a wonderful community feel. People are not divided up by interest and speakers and attendees are always together.
3) Many people that I think of as friends will be there
4) Because of the spouse program, a lot of people are bringing their spouses or families to enjoy beautiful Montreal. Rich is coming with me Saturday through Monday. I will get to meet the families of my friends and I finally get to introduce Rich to so many of my friends that he has heard about for so long (and show HIM off to them!).
5) Montreal is beautiful
6) Montreal is only about a 2 hour drive from my house
7) A bunch of people from Vermont.NET are going
8) I get to share my many discoveries in the Whidbey BCL again and try to help people who don’t grok generics quite yet
9) I get to show off all many of the cool things you can do with the tablet pc sdk.
10) I gotta get out of the house once in a while, y’know?

Yup, I am definitely excited about this confernece. Thanks a million to Jean-Rene Roy for making his dream of a community oriented developer conference a reality.

Michele is a content machine!

Community Cheerleading

In the last month, not only has Michele started a weblog , been part of the team that started the Interop Warriors blog, coordinated the Web Services Interop Day, and presented at TechEd, but she also has put out an notable amount of very high quality content:

Here are some of them that I have seen:

WSE2 Security WebCast

ASP.NET Scalability article on MSDN Online

WSE2 Article in Code Magazine

Sending Text or HTML via Socket Commands in ASPNetPro Magazine (June 2004)

She is definitely one of those people who constantly amazes me.

 

My field of Lupine

Vermont
Rather than a big lawn to mow, we have about 1.5 acres in front of our house that is a field with wild flowers. It’s history is that it was a big field with an old house down closer to the road. Ten years ago that house was removed and what is now our house was built further back. The original owners wanted “lawn, lots a lawn”, so they let people from all over town come dig up the wildflowers to transplant

at their homes and they turned the beautiful field into a lawn. Much to the chagrin of the neighbors, the owner mowed about 4 times a week. He loved his lawn. Then he sold his house to the next owners about 5 years ago. The first thing they did was dig up  a swath of about 10 feet perimeter around this area and seed it with wildflower seeds from the Vermont WildFlower Farm . So right now the lupine are at their peak and the Sweet William (dianthus) and early phlox and flax as well are all over. It is phenomenal. I tried to take pictures but it just doesn’t capture what is really there. So I walked around the path with my little digital camera on video and made a few videos. They might make you sea sick as I’m walking around and it’s not very still. And it still isn’t really very good but the best I can do. too bad the previous owners didn’t do one – he is an emmy award winning filmmaker for National Geographic. Or maybe I can get Eric King to come and do it? Heh.

And turn off the sound – it’s just the wind hitting the camera. These got saved as QuickTime videos – I have no control over that.

The first one is (egads) 17MB and lasts about 3 or 4 minutes. The second is the tail end — about 2.2 MB. Also they don’t seem to stream very well. I think it downloads the whole thing first. No way my folks can see them on their 56K dialup!