.Net Rant
This is a stupid error to have. Using Left and Right you can get the Left X amount of characters from a string. With VB6 if X is more than the number of characters, it gets them all. .Net errors out. So you have to right a protection if statement incase there are not enough characters. Makes code more error prone and verbose for little reason. A program is not a mathematical statement. It’s a creative work and there will always be some sloppiness. Behavior like this in a language is the parent forcing you to color in the lines or throw the whole coloring book away.
VB6
sReturnValue = Left(strValue, nLen)
C#
if (strValue.Length>nLen)
sReturnValue = strValue.Substring(1, nLen);
else
sReturnValue = strValue;
TiVo HME Brainstorming
After 5 minutes of toodling around. I think it would be for two things, a faster way to enter text or at least allow a computer to setup the TiVo apps. And I want to see my calendar and contacts on TiVo. It would be an easy way to not loose phone numbers. It’s not like your TV is walking off and you always eventually find the remote. Maybe a website like planzo where you enter the info and view it on TiVo or let other people in your group view it. Birthdays! This would make it easy to keep birthdays handy and if it were tied to a FTD for sending flowers that would be cool too. lol enough brainstorming.
An app that would download an iCal file either from a redirct in an rss file or a url could get the calendar info. Then you have to write an HME app to display it. I don’t know if contacts come is a standard file format. Birthdays are just a reocurring appointment in the calendar. You would want it to work with several online calendars since this market hasn’t stabilized.
Another useful app would be making a photo viewer that worked with the open source Gallery program. It is the one I use on this site. I’m loath to let someone else host my pictures; it’s none of their business and I don’t trust them with all the hard work it took to get them the right size. I don’t think this would be too hard, use FTP? to get file lists and display the thumbnails, Gallery does all the hardwork of organizing.
TiVo Update
I got home tonight and found that my TiVo got a software update today and what an update. TiVo can now get on the Internet, in a somewhat limited way. There are now several services that TiVo offers. For example, Yahoo Photos, Maps, and Movies let you share photos, get directions and lookup movie times. I think one of my favorite features will be the integration with podcasts. Did I just write that up 3 days ago? I often listen to TiVo as I get ready in the morning. Some shows have to be watched, like the Colbert Report. But a podcast would work great for this. There’s about an hour a day there. I’ll post a write up and some photos soon. This looks very exciting. Thinking about my grandma being able to see photos through the TV, without the complexity of getting on the computer, sounds like a dream.
Yeah TiVo!
What is a Podcast?
I’ve become very experienced with this term over the past few months, but most of my family and friends probably have no idea. It’s to be expected, since this term was created only ~18 months ago. I thought I would take a few minutes and explain it.
A podcast is nothing mysterious and the way that you use a podcast is not new, remember Napster in 2000? Maybe not. 
For the listener, all you have to worry about is clicking on a link and downloading a sound file. MP3 is a very common, I use it for all my CDs that have been copied into the computer. A podcast is very much like a talk radio show, not the political nonstop blather you usually hear on AM radio. It is specific to a subject; quilting, beer making, technology news, etc.
Why is it this “new” term if it’s like talk radio and uses files like the ones 6 years ago? And why is it called podcast? Where are the body snatchers, should I be concerned? As technology has evolved things have gotten cheaper, objviously. This includes audio recording and playback technology, remember when everyone had a Walkman? Today they have iPods made by Apple computers, the same Apple that sold lots of computers to schools when I was in High School. An iPod is a about the size of a tape player, maybe a little smaller. Where a tape held about 45 minutes of music per side, an iPod holds 20 hours or more. You plug the iPod into your computer copy those CDs from your computer onto it. Songs are fine, making them portable is great. Most Americans have a 30-60 minute commute to work everyday that gives them an opportunity to use that iPod (Amarillo is great, 8 minutes baby). Some very inventive people started recording themselves talking about their interests. They would sit near the computer with a microphone or a digital tape recorder and interview or discuss something that they really got into. Then they posted this recording on the internet. Boom, Podcasting is born. Coupled with the iTunes music store and a technology called RSS it’s easy to find Podcasts and get them when they are created.
The basic process it that you find something your interested in on the Internet, subscribe to it, plug in your iPod to copy it, and listen to it while you’re away. What if you don’t have an iPod? Great, I don’t. Burn a CD for the car or listen to it on the computer while you’re working on something else. The result is like having a talk radio where you pick each one of the programs. My favorites are TWit (This Week in Technology), EUP (Explaining Unexplained Phenomena) and BBR (Basic Brewing Radio). It’s free, easy, and educational.
Twit is created by Leo Laport of Tech TV fame. Answering the question what do Tech Journalists do when they’re laid off. EUP is an actual Public Talk Radio show recorded in Lincoln, Nebraska. BBR is someone interesting in making home beer. Very information intensive, his sessions with the Wyeast founder are very helpful.
So, that’s all there is to it. Just a file you copy off the Internet and play on your computer.
.Net Rant
My favorite part of .Net development is the buggy IDE that crashes 2-3 times a day. It’s interesting that it comes back up so quickly and in the place where you left minus bookmarks, search history, etc. Did this happen a lot when it was being built? If they had only spent that much time fixing the bugs. I can deal with an IDE that takes 30 seconds to load as long as I only have to do it every two weeks. Instead I’ve got an IDE that takes 2-3 seconds to load 20-30 times in two weeks. It’s all about trade offs.
.Net Rant
How can .Net be considered a decent replacement for ASP? There were some things ASP did extremely well. One was be script. Script doesn’t have to be compiled. You make a change save you file and boom your changes are there for everyone. For .Net you must compile and since your files are in use you have to stop IIS, kick everyone off, insert your new files, start it back up. A one line change used to take as long as hitting the save button. Now, it’s a C++ application with all the associated build wait times. Give it 30 seconds or so. It may seem like a small time, but 30 seconds is 30 times longer than it used to take. That’s progress.
.Net Rant
Visual Studio searching is needlessly click intensive. I used Visual Interdev 6 search for years and liked it better than VB6. You can search across files or in the one file. It’s annoying and silly to resize the one search both to suit your application. The other alternative it to dock the find tool, but that always struck me as extemely space wasteful. You only need something that’s 30% of the screen width not 100%. Then I got use to VC++ search and it’s better, though very different. There are two modes, searching across files and searching in the file. They have two different dialog boxes. Searching across files leaves a list of found items in docked window that suddenly appears. But you usually need every bit of width you can get out of it. That was usually the reason for resizing VI6’s search box. Searching in the file jumps to the place where it found your item. Each had it’s own button. You usually know the scope search.
VS03 combines the worst of both methods. There’s one search popup. You use two-three button clicks to switch between local document, entire solution. And the results are always displayed in the docked window. So, now I’m required to keep that POS on my screen. I want my one click back!
VS.NET 2003 Rant
Ok, I’m pasting code from VB6 into the editor and the stupid thing adds a tab to each of the lines. So, this…
function fooBar() as string
Dim myVar as String
...
end function
becomes…
function fooBar() as string
Dim myVar as String
...
end function
.Net Rant
What’s wrong with the new dictionary objects? I can’t just go to the one item in the list that I want. I have to cycle through the entire list iteratively until I find the one I want. This is incredibly wasteful, stupid, nonobvious, and verbose.
VBS
myValue= myDic(myItem)
C#
foreach(DictionaryEntry obj in myDic)
{
if (obj.Key.ToString()==myItem.ToString())
{
myValue = obj.Value.ToString();
break;
}
}
.Net Rant
How does .net make me feel stupid? With over 7 years of professional experience and 13 all together, I can’t find/figure out how to convert a string to an integer. I must be fucking moron. Not!
I see after, 20 minutes of hunting and finding that everything wants to be as string with the ToString function, I found System.Convert.ToInt32(string). Wow, this is such an improvement over CInt(string) or Val(string) in VBScript and VB6. Oh look Val is in VB.Net, but not C#, because that makes sense seeing that they both compile into the same code.
Hybrid Tax Credit
I was researching the Toyota Prius and stumbled upon the fact that there is up to a $3400 tax credit next year for if you purchase and use a hybrid vehicle this year. Note, this is next year’s filing. You should buy earlier. This only applies to the first 60,000 of each model hybrid any particular company sells. There is a tax incentive for last year, but you must have purchased your vehicle by 12-31-05.
Yet Another Einstein’s Gravity Tweak
It seems our understanding of gravity is in flux these days. This is from another scientific pair who dispute the existance of Dark Matter. For those that don’t know, when astronomers tried to apply our gravity formulas to larger bodies like black holes and galaxies the results didn’t match observed behavior. To resolve this Dark Matter was invented. This reminds me too much of the concept of ether. I like to find things that attempt to disprove it. My favorite idea is that gravity changes over extreme distances, like between stars or galaxies and is not constant. Perhaps it even changes over planetary distances. The first probes launched out of the solar system 30+ years ago are off their expected track by 400,000 miles. This seems semetrical, because of the formula for speed (velocity). In our experience on Earth speed is simply distance/time. However, in the extremely fast other factors begin to have more affect. Einstein’s equations show that mass increases the closer to the speed of light that you move and time dilation effects begin to become noticeable.
Why is this important?
I think it could lead to an improved understanding in a basic part of science. Understanding like this results in nuclear power, fiber optics, solid state circuits, radios, satellites, etc. Personally, I’m hoping for a new type of engine that would allow flying cars.
Anyway, enough rambling…
From PP.\RC.
…
A new law for gravity, developed by Dr Hong Sheng Zhao and his Belgian collaborator Dr Benoit Famaey of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), aims to prove whether Einstein’s theory was in fact correct and whether the astronomical mystery of Dark Matter actually exists. Their research was published on February 10th in the US-based Astrophysical Journal Letters. Their formula suggests that gravity drops less sharply with distance as in Einstein, and changes subtly from solar systems to galaxies and to the universe.
…
They have created a formula that allows gravity to change continuously over various distance scales and, most importantly, fits the data for observations of galaxies. To fit galaxy data equally well in the rival Dark Matter paradigm would be as challenging as balancing a ball on a needle, which motivated the two astronomers to look at an alternative gravity idea.
…
Pandora Review
I heard about an Internet radio station called Pandora from Inside the Net. For those that don’t know, Internet radio is a website that plays music on your computer like a radio. It can consume a lot of bandwidth so I think you’ll need a fast internet connection. For comparison, a modem runs about about 56 kbps and a song plays at about 96-128 kbps. Normally, I wouldn’t care about Internet radio. It sounds rather foolish, why waste my bandwidth on a song that plays over and over when I could just buy and download it once. Pandora is different in that they use the Music Genome Project to classify songs. It takes about 20 minutes to classify each song and there are many different parameters. When you tell them what songs or artists you want to hear it will look for related songs. Some from popular sources and some from unknown or small bands. The website is free (ad based) or subscription based. Subscription is $36/yr or $12/quarter.
So, how is it?
I’ve been “programming” it for a couple of days. There are a lot of songs that are the only one I like from a band. It’s taking me a little while to tune it. Sometimes it finds songs that I would have added myself. That seems to indicate that it’s working. The interface is a Flash player. It works extremely well. You can have multiple radio stations for your moods and you can add songs or artists. As songs play you give them either a thumbs up or thumbs down to tune it. Signing up was very easy. It’s pretty much just the one web page with the Flash based music player on it. Overall, I like it. Since, I don’t like taking up my bandwidth for it I use it to find songs and then buy them. I’ll see how much it sticks with me.
My ideal would be to submit a playlist from Windows Mediaplayer or WinAmp and let them use that as a basis, instead of typing everything in. And then buying playlists from them or as a front end to purchase songs. Everything would have to be ultra cheap (compared to iTunes) around 10-20 cents per song and playlists at $3-$5.
New Exact Solution of Einstein’s Gravity Equation
From Physorg.com.
…
“Dr. Felber’s research will revolutionize space flight mechanics by offering an entirely new way to send spacecraft into flight,” said Dr. Eric Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin and STAIF peer reviewer of Felber’s work. “His rigorously tested and truly unique thinking has taken us a huge step forward in making near-speed-of-light space travel safe, possible, and much less costly.”
…
The field equation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity has never before been solved to calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light. Felber’s research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow ‘antigravity beam’ in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger its ‘antigravity beam’ becomes.
…
Online Calendars
This was on the blog before it died. I have been looking for an online calendar & contact list program for 2-3 months. Planzo was the first one that I found. I was very excited when I found it, but there wasn’t enough there. The sharing is great and it couldn’t be easier to add events, but the screens seem a little prototypical, unfinished. Recently, I discovered Airset. It seems much more like the one I was looking for.
I’m looking for a place to keep addresses and phone numbers on the internet, in case of computer disaster and to allow access to my family members. We are a far flung bunch and address and contact information can change quickly. This should allow us to keep track of each other. Correct your own information and view everyone else’s. By my count, there should be anywhere from 30-50 people in the contact list.