Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

From Internet Week > Java > Java On The Desktop: An Idea Whose Time Has Come ... And Gone (Column By David Strom) > September 19, 2003:

But, silly rabbit, Java is for servers, not for desktops. J2EE is a fine application development platform, and that is where Sun rightly should be placing its dollars, coders and talents. Unseating .Net makes a lot more sense and has a chance of success.

Okay, in some senses he's right, but ultimately he's missing the big picture (or his picture is implicitly smaller and he hasn't quite admitted it).

What's not important for Mad Hatter, Sun's desktop OS, is to knock off Windows for the personal computer user. Sun is not making an OS to bundle with what people are picking up at Best Buy -- at least not yet. What Sun absolutely does need to do is have a business workstation client OS that'll readily interface with their server-side, J2EE apps, whether through port 80 the normal way (with Mozilla, included in Mad Hatter) or through Java Web Start, Sun's preferred method of distributing true client applications nowadays.*

The article's author even realizes this without realizing it, shown when he says:

That isn't to say the Mac is perfect, either. Many times, my Web-based apps just don't run on my Mac browsers, and typically it is because someone has decided to pick the Windows-only version of Java or Active X that precludes any Mac users.

What he misses, as any regular reader of freakinname knows, is that .NET programmers often assume IE, never testing on Mozilla, much less IE on Mac, Safari, or some other Mac-specific browser (see the above link why Mozilla is different).

The point being that any Web Forms app or even Java applets and applications ("Write once, test everywhere") isn't going to work just like you'd expect crossplatform. .NET can assume good, compatible clients without much of a loss -- Windows and IE are everywhere. Home users, business users, everywhere. Sun has no such server/client combo in the business workplace, until now.

By putting Mad Hatter together and standardizing the client's interpretation of the Java app (with Web Start already installed & configured on the OS) or JSP application (standardizing on Mozilla instead of IE), Sun finally has a cradle-to-grave approach to delivering server-side, n-tier, business applications. That's why Mad Hatter is so important.

And as a final point, this is just bad thinking (from the article again):

I became completely turned off to Java on the desktop when I saw Scott talk several years ago about how he runs his own Java desktop at work on his own thin-client desktop.

He talks about how the desktop took 20 minutes to start up, etc. Sun's shifted focus now. It's not a Java OS, it's a standard OS with Java preinstalled (futhermore, see what they've done with OEM vendors and JVMs). Java needs to be parasitic. Now they've finally created a host OS that won't take them to court and do its best to scratch them off its back.

* That said, Web Start isn't the answer for truely crossplatform Java applications. And do note that what J2EE needs to fight .NET really isn't truly crossplatform client applications. The problem is that Sun sells Web Start as if it were the way to deliver Java desktop apps xplat to Joe Q. User.

Check out how I deliver The Digest Handler -- you need apps that look native, not downloads and installation for downloads and installations, when you're pitching to the typical PC user (who sometimes puts CDs in the drink holder the wrong way). For Mac OS X, there's a dmg file and one file you copy to your Applications folder. Simple. For Windows, it's a simple exe that the user can put anywhere on the system, and that checks for a valid JVM before running, telling the user where they can download a more recently released one if theirs isn't up to snuff or a JVM doesn't exist on their box at all! Not a perfect solution on Windows, but much less esoteric than Web Start.

Think the extra installation isn't a big deal? You must be a power user. It is a big deal, and this is the sort of thing Joel's talking about in his article Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!. Web Start throws up about three serious hurdles to installation, losing you about 75% of your possible user base! Take a look at how Excel became king over at Joel's site (link above)

From a post from the VB.NET mailing list at Yahoo:

I want my windows form to draw a line automatically when the form loads. To do this i am trying the following code:

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load Dim g As Graphics = Me.CreateGraphics g.DrawLine(SystemPens.ControlDarkDark, 10, 10, 50, 100) g.Dispose() End Sub

but the line is not seen on the form! This code runs perfectly fine if i put it behind a button or other events but not on form loading. What should i do to make a line appear on form load?

I've ranted before and I'll rant again... Why should simple html tasks be so difficult? Really, what's the advantage of putting another layer (Web Forms and C#/VB.NET) between you and the code (html/javascript) you're making? For simple forms, etc, where you'd like to reuse some Windows.Forms code, I can see using the .NET web forms. But if something doesn't work the way you'd like after one shot, you really should kick the project to a web developer and use codebehind to seperate UI from logic -- or, imagine this, learn html!

I think there are still quite a few lessons to learn from asp.net programming.

In other news, be careful what news aggregator you use!! I tried and like RSS Reader. It's freeware, it's in .NET (just neat to see a useful client app in the new tech), and it does a great job parsing RSS feeds.

The problem? It uses the infamous MS Internet Control, which means it's just as vulnerable to security flaws in Internet Explorer as IE itself. That's a bad place to put your eggs, if you ask me. I've been complaining recently that end users need to be better educated about the risks of using a computer online -- this is a nasty sort of backdoor for virii. An app that looks totally unrelated to IE to the typical end user -- even one using Mozilla or Netscape for daily browsing -- can cut loose a nasty virus. Naturally, you'd hope the RSS feeding sites would be more likely to be on the up and up than your daily pr0n sites, but it's still a gaping hole that could blindside even a relatively well-informed PC user.

The answer? Well, luckily that's easy. Wrap the Mozilla ActiveX control I mentioned yesterday in a .NET wrapper (or just use COM-interop if you don't mind rewriting a bit of your .NET code), and stick a safe(er) rendering engine in your app.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, October 30, 2003
I almost got excited reading this quick "review" of Xcode, Apple's "built-in" IDE for Objective C and, at least ostensibly, Java. Some of the new features sound super. We've got code-completion (finally! A native app with code completion! No more pick your poison with Netbeans or Eclipse!), background compilation, and Rendezvous editing! Super! Not so fast. Here are some comments at the end of the review: Thanks for the interesting review. A couple of questions: Does code completion work in Java projects ? Also, is it extensible ? Is there a documented way to write plug-ins ? * Code completion in Java 2003-10-25 06:50:10 anonymous [Reply] The release notes (and my experience) state that code completion does not work in Java. My guess, and hope, is that it will in a future version. I'm also finding that errors and warnings for my Java project aren't being displayed in either the 'errors and warning' group or the gutter, as described in this article. For Obj-C, it's working, but no dice for Java. [snip] * Code completion in Java 2003-10-28 10:20:39 anonymous [Reply] I've been using XCode too for Java. Or rather I haven't. Sure would be nice if code completion worked (I know the Java keywords and don't need to be reminded) and errors were shown anywhere at all." Java is still a second-class citizen on Apple. posted by ruffin at 10/30/2003 11:07:00 AM

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
ongoing · The Web's the Place: I think I've told this story before here, but it's a good one; at a content management conference, a woman from the Tandem-that-was saying "It was so wonderful when the browser interfaces came on; the vendors had to discard all those stupid sliders and cascaded menus and eight-way toggles, and only leave the stuff that mattered." Which is to say, WinForms is not the way forward. posted by ruffin at 10/28/2003 08:38:00 AM

Monday, October 20, 2003
Google has apparently buckled under just a bit to living in a capitalist world. Google Ad Word adverts are typically pretty useful, and often even more useful than the search results themselves, but there's been a subtle change I don't remember seeing at Google before. Now tabbing from link to link takes you through the ad words before going to the search result links. A small change, perhaps, but a little evidence Google is moving towards being an ad site first, not a search site. "They're just trying to make a buck, bless their hearts." posted by ruffin at 10/20/2003 01:08:00 PM

Here's an interest take at ONLamp.com: why commercial companies should document open source software: "Since Pragmatists are reluctant to move forward with a technology without supporting services, where can they find the Whole Product? To solve that problem, they need to look within their own organization and create the Whole Product themselves." That's pretty obviously what the article is about -- if it was going to take you $10k to license closed source software, why not pitch $1500 to make the docs you need that the open source alternative doesn't have? Though at first I thought here was an open source hacker trying his best to hide his begging for handouts, it's actually much better than that. In fact, it's a great idea. He simplifies a number of considerations (like db admin, training, etc, costs) when doing his cost-benefit analysis sample, but unsimplify and you're golden, so to speak. posted by ruffin at 10/20/2003 12:18:00 PM

Thursday, October 16, 2003
MacRumors.com - Live Apple Music Event Coverage: - Jobs says it is the best jukebox on the PC - Runs on XP and 2000 - Probably the best Windows app ever written. :) - Windows iTunes - exactly the same thing - One more thing...'Hell froze over' It's a shame that iTunes 4+ and the iTunes Music Store will come more quickly to Mac users who've switched to XP or 2k than those who still use OS 9- daily. posted by ruffin at 10/16/2003 02:19:00 PM

How long until Mexico realizes that if they get a good PR campaign going for some nice province (with, um, low crime, good fiber cables, and good hospitals), Americans (and others) will figure out their cubical jobs can be handled just as easily in that nice warm, low cost of living country as easily as anywhere else? I can't imagine too many single 20-somethings that wouldn't rather live on the beach in Mexico than the frigid American northeast. posted by ruffin at 10/16/2003 11:45:00 AM

Tuesday, October 14, 2003
If you're not using the DOS version of VIm for editing .bat's and .log's on Windows, you're doing yourself a disservice. Do it all from the command line, yo. posted by ruffin at 10/14/2003 02:37:00 PM

Welp, here is the most interesting URL Google brought up for a site that's similar to this one: Belief-O-Matic -- A personality quiz about your religious beliefs and spiritual beliefs - a quiz answering What Religion Am I -- Beliefnet.com Huh? posted by ruffin at 10/14/2003 01:26:00 PM

Saturday, October 11, 2003
Hey look, freeware for OS X that... enables any Cocoa application able to read plain text to open Microsoft Word documents, for example TextEdit or DEVONthink Personal Edition. posted by ruffin at 10/11/2003 08:15:00 AM

Friday, October 10, 2003
Hotmail Popper: "Hotmail Popper is a small application that allows you to check your Hotmail account e-mail from a normal POP mail client" posted by ruffin at 10/10/2003 03:37:00 PM

Here's a quote from a pretty good article on how to refactor. The code's in Perl, but start on page one (I'm linked to pg 2, above) and take a look. I admittedly don't recompile and test after inserting whitespace, but overall it seems to do a pretty good job showing exactly what I'd recommend (read: "require") anyone I'd hire to have a compulsion to do to any code that flies past their IDEs. Anyhow, here's the quote, which is a pretty good lesson I haven't quite learned (or, the really anal part of my mind says, "learned all too well"): This is an important lesson of Refactoring. Voltare said, 'the best is the enemy of the good'. We often get so wound up trying to make code great that we fail to improve it at all. In refactoring, it's not so important to make your code great in one leap, just a little better all the time posted by ruffin at 10/10/2003 11:05:00 AM

Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Yahoo! News Search via RSS: "The News RSS Feeds are great if you want to follow a particular category of news. For example, you might want to read the latest Sports (RSS) or Entertainment (RSS) news in your aggregator. But what if you'd like an RSS News feed generated just for you? One based on a word or phrase that you could supply?" posted by ruffin at 10/08/2003 02:21:00 PM

nntp//rss: "nntp//rss is a Java-based bridge between RSS feeds and NNTP clients, enabling you to read your favorite RSS syndicated content within your existing NNTP newsreader" posted by ruffin at 10/08/2003 12:37:00 PM

fetchrss: Home: "Read weblogs in your e-mail client." posted by ruffin at 10/08/2003 12:35:00 PM

And the 10,000th visit to freakinname comes from this right popular search. Woohoo. Poor schomes. Why somebody (like me) doesn't write an article on the subject (not mentioning it so searches don't come to this blog), I don't know. posted by ruffin at 10/08/2003 10:57:00 AM

Joel on Software - Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity: "There are still scads of programmers who defend Netscape's ground-up rewrite. "The old code really sucked, Joel!" Yeah, uh-huh. Such programmers should be admired for their love of clean code, but they shouldn't be allowed within 100 feet of any business decisions, since it's obvious that clean code is more important to them than shipping, uh, software." posted by ruffin at 10/08/2003 10:53:00 AM

From Internet Week > Java > Java On The Desktop: An Idea Whose Time Has Come ... And Gone (Column By David Strom) > September 19, 2003: But, silly rabbit, Java is for servers, not for desktops. J2EE is a fine application development platform, and that is where Sun rightly should be placing its dollars, coders and talents. Unseating .Net makes a lot more sense and has a chance of success. Okay, in some senses he's right, but ultimately he's missing the big picture (or his picture is implicitly smaller and he hasn't quite admitted it). What's not important for Mad Hatter, Sun's desktop OS, is to knock off Windows for the personal computer user. Sun is not making an OS to bundle with what people are picking up at Best Buy -- at least not yet. What Sun absolutely does need to do is have a business workstation client OS that'll readily interface with their server-side, J2EE apps, whether through port 80 the normal way (with Mozilla, included in Mad Hatter) or through Java Web Start, Sun's preferred method of distributing true client applications nowadays.* The article's author even realizes this without realizing it, shown when he says: That isn't to say the Mac is perfect, either. Many times, my Web-based apps just don't run on my Mac browsers, and typically it is because someone has decided to pick the Windows-only version of Java or Active X that precludes any Mac users. What he misses, as any regular reader of freakinname knows, is that .NET programmers often assume IE, never testing on Mozilla, much less IE on Mac, Safari, or some other Mac-specific browser (see the above link why Mozilla is different). The point being that any Web Forms app or even Java applets and applications ("Write once, test everywhere") isn't going to work just like you'd expect crossplatform. .NET can assume good, compatible clients without much of a loss -- Windows and IE are everywhere. Home users, business users, everywhere. Sun has no such server/client combo in the business workplace, until now. By putting Mad Hatter together and standardizing the client's interpretation of the Java app (with Web Start already installed & configured on the OS) or JSP application (standardizing on Mozilla instead of IE), Sun finally has a cradle-to-grave approach to delivering server-side, n-tier, business applications. That's why Mad Hatter is so important. And as a final point, this is just bad thinking (from the article again): I became completely turned off to Java on the desktop when I saw Scott talk several years ago about how he runs his own Java desktop at work on his own thin-client desktop. He talks about how the desktop took 20 minutes to start up, etc. Sun's shifted focus now. It's not a Java OS, it's a standard OS with Java preinstalled (futhermore, see what they've done with OEM vendors and JVMs). Java needs to be parasitic. Now they've finally created a host OS that won't take them to court and do its best to scratch them off its back. * That said, Web Start isn't the answer for truely crossplatform Java applications. And do note that what J2EE needs to fight .NET really isn't truly crossplatform client applications. The problem is that Sun sells Web Start as if it were the way to deliver Java desktop apps xplat to Joe Q. User. Check out how I deliver The Digest Handler -- you need apps that look native, not downloads and installation for downloads and installations, when you're pitching to the typical PC user (who sometimes puts CDs in the drink holder the wrong way). For Mac OS X, there's a dmg file and one file you copy to your Applications folder. Simple. For Windows, it's a simple exe that the user can put anywhere on the system, and that checks for a valid JVM before running, telling the user where they can download a more recently released one if theirs isn't up to snuff or a JVM doesn't exist on their box at all! Not a perfect solution on Windows, but much less esoteric than Web Start. Think the extra installation isn't a big deal? You must be a power user. It is a big deal, and this is the sort of thing Joel's talking about in his article Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!. Web Start throws up about three serious hurdles to installation, losing you about 75% of your possible user base! Take a look at how Excel became king over at Joel's site (link above) posted by ruffin at 10/08/2003 10:24:00 AM

Tuesday, October 07, 2003
n6te t6 se3f Avid Free DV Overview posted by ruffin at 10/07/2003 03:47:00 PM

Conducting Black Operations in the Corporate IT Theatre: "When meetings just aren't hacking it. When you've tried and tried to get people to listen. When you've emailed and phoned and faxed and even descended to sending memos to get your point across, and it all hasn't worked. When you've resorted to quoting company IT policy to get the point across and you're met with bloody minded stupidity or even malicious intent, it's time to act. Normal channels aren't working. " hardy har posted by ruffin at 10/07/2003 12:55:00 PM

From a post from the VB.NET mailing list at Yahoo: I want my windows form to draw a line automatically when the form loads. To do this i am trying the following code: `Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load Dim g As Graphics = Me.CreateGraphics g.DrawLine(SystemPens.ControlDarkDark, 10, 10, 50, 100) g.Dispose() End Sub` but the line is not seen on the form! This code runs perfectly fine if i put it behind a button or other events but not on form loading. What should i do to make a line appear on form load? I've ranted before and I'll rant again... Why should simple html tasks be so difficult? Really, what's the advantage of putting another layer (Web Forms and C#/VB.NET) between you and the code (html/javascript) you're making? For simple forms, etc, where you'd like to reuse some Windows.Forms code, I can see using the .NET web forms. But if something doesn't work the way you'd like after one shot, you really should kick the project to a web developer and use codebehind to seperate UI from logic -- or, imagine this, learn html! I think there are still quite a few lessons to learn from asp.net programming. In other news, be careful what news aggregator you use!! I tried and like RSS Reader. It's freeware, it's in .NET (just neat to see a useful client app in the new tech), and it does a great job parsing RSS feeds. The problem? It uses the infamous MS Internet Control, which means it's just as vulnerable to security flaws in Internet Explorer as IE itself. That's a bad place to put your eggs, if you ask me. I've been complaining recently that end users need to be better educated about the risks of using a computer online -- this is a nasty sort of backdoor for virii. An app that looks totally unrelated to IE to the typical end user -- even one using Mozilla or Netscape for daily browsing -- can cut loose a nasty virus. Naturally, you'd hope the RSS feeding sites would be more likely to be on the up and up than your daily pr0n sites, but it's still a gaping hole that could blindside even a relatively well-informed PC user. The answer? Well, luckily that's easy. Wrap the Mozilla ActiveX control I mentioned yesterday in a .NET wrapper (or just use COM-interop if you don't mind rewriting a bit of your .NET code), and stick a safe(er) rendering engine in your app. posted by ruffin at 10/07/2003 09:25:00 AM

Monday, October 06, 2003
perl.com: Identifying Audio Files with MusicBrainz [Oct. 03, 2003] posted by ruffin at 10/06/2003 02:48:00 PM

Good software (and better) is unfailingly the result of neurosis. posted by ruffin at 10/06/2003 02:35:00 PM

Whether Moz should split into Firebird and Thunderbird or stay a suite is still, apparently, up for debate: " >> Brian, I did the math. 18.7 M (Firebird/Thunderbird) to 15M Mozilla >> App/Bloat Suite. These are compressed not extracted footprint numbers :-) >> Now we have everything as a 'stand alone' distro which is *increasing' >> the bloat not reducing it. > >That's just because it is still a work in progress. Also in the future a >shared GRE will reduce this further. >There could easily be a release that includes both Firebird and >thunderbird as standalone apps, but sharing the same GRE, which would be >smaller than the current 15M" Boy, there's a great idea. Split the suite, then recompile the suite by sharing innards. It sounds like there is another project in here somewhere -- specifically that Mozilla's core needs to be rewritten seperately, and then you can lay applications on top of that (read: Thunder & Fire 'birds). I think they'd gain some advantage checking out the Mozilla ActiveX control project. Yes yes yes, I realize that's Windows only, but the point is well taken and could be extended to DCOM. Make an engine, a DCOM object, that supports a very simple API and make it easy to build around that. A browser would be child's play, the way making a browser with VB6 and the Microsoft Internet Control (or the Moz ActiveX control) is now. Thunderbird would use this plugin for message display... and probably message composition. Let other UI choices belong to the two projects, from menus to sidebars to... That's all nasty overhead you don't need in the core object, which should concentrate on great rendering of standards, speed, and stability. And, afaict, Mozilla's code's setup already favors the break. So I think there are three projects -- a browser, an email client, and a refactored, common, core rendering engine. What's more, the browser should keep the name Mozilla. There's too much name recognition there -- and name recog that's browser-specific -- to throw away. Oh well. Random rant. posted by ruffin at 10/06/2003 11:16:00 AM

From I really hate the kitchen sink: "While the opinions on the matter differed greatly, I think what everybody will agree on is, that Mozilla QA, which is mainly bug-triaging, could be greatly improved. " posted by ruffin at 10/06/2003 11:03:00 AM

Friday, October 03, 2003
Mo' good Java desktop news (a little over a week old): SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- September 23, 2003 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced five new Java technology distribution agreements with Acer, Gateway, Samsung, Toshiba and Tsinghua Tongfang. These companies join the rapidly expanding roster of vendors that to date includes Apple, Dell, HP, Lindows.com and Red Hat that are shipping the most current and compatible version of Java. posted by ruffin at 10/03/2003 02:57:00 PM

Merrill to Sun: 'Cut and Focus' or Be Acquired: "The note was also hard-hitting about Sun's Java strategy, urging the company to spin off its Java division, asserting that 'Java has been a technology success, a so-so branding effort, and a financial failure.'" posted by ruffin at 10/03/2003 10:27:00 AM

From an article linked to by /.: Attorney Dana Taschner of Newport Beach, California, filed the lawsuit [against Microsoft] on behalf of Marcy Levitas Hamilton, a film editor and "garden variety" PC user who had her social security number and bank details stolen over the Internet. "Something fundamental has to change to protect consumers and businesses," Taschner said. How many things are wrong with this picture? You can't just grab a computer and leave it on the Internet. Doesn't anyone watch the AOL commercials when the wall to your home crashes open when you plug in the box? You can't leave your SSN sitting around on a sign posted in your Window! You can't tatoo your bank acct number on your forehead and expect people not to see it. You can't leave the keys in a running car with the door unlocked in a bad neighborhood and... you get the point. Let's turn to the Pinto. 1.) Ford releases Pinto. Let's hope they didn't know it'd blow up. 2.) Ford finds out the Pinto blows up. 3.) The public is educated that Pintos blow up. 4.) Anybody using a Pinto today realizes they're taking their life into their own hands. Or that they should at least ensure they've got all review mirrors aligned properly and one foot always on the gas. If you're an admin, you've got to be smart enough to know the pratfalls of having live systems. Make backups; use firewalls. If we determine that garden variety computer users don't yet realize that it's a scary Net out there, how should we educate them? Why not sue DSL and cable modem companies for allowing the stream in or not educating users of home PCs of the Net's dangers? Sorry. Not a complete rant, but I think you see where I'm going. Step 3.) is obviously running behind. That's where our attention should be going. Until then, unplug the cable modem from your grandmother's box. posted by ruffin at 10/03/2003 10:12:00 AM

Thursday, October 02, 2003
From a blog at Joel on Software: Slashdot reviews my book: "Aimed at programmers who don't know much about user interface design and think it is something to fear, Joel Spolsky provides a great primer, with some entertaining and informative examples of good and bad design implementations, including some of the thought process behind the decisions..." Look, I like Joel. I quote him all the time. I give out links to his piece on not rewriting code from scratch to everyone I meet. He talks a good game and I imagine his book reads fairly well, but has anyone ever tried using CityDesk? It stinks. The UI sucks. For someone who complains about Mozilla not supporting "alt-space, n" to minimize a window, he's got a lot of gall selling those 0s & 1s. And look at his new training video. The image editor is atrocious. No good keyboard shortcuts, horribly mouse-dependant, and it just plain looks like something someone made with VB 6 for a high school programming class project. Why is this? Why is the only programming company owner that talks like he's got sense release a product that undercuts so much of what that same guy espouses on his site? Heck, undercuts what he's writing a book about? Why wasn't that time spent cleaning up his own pot before telling everyone else how to ensure theirs don't turn black? I could guess, but none of my answers undercut the undercut. Hey, my app stinks right now in the UI front (though it got a lot better with 1.1) -- and the web page is horrendous -- but I haven't even started spending any money on advertising, much less started writing a book on UI design. Unless you count this rant. Oh well. It's all about who you know and how you say it, not what you do. (PS: Fwiw, here is a shorter version.) posted by ruffin at 10/02/2003 04:47:00 PM

One of the advantages of a small company is that there are loads less "invisible costs" to figuring out what's most economic -- making decisions more closely match the ones you'd make for your own household. Need a new box? If I were buying at home, I'd throw an AMD XP into an nForce2 motherboard with twin RAM sticks, put it in a case, and grab some castaway drives for it. Voila. Cheap. At a large company, forget that. You need to have a box from the supplier with whom support works best to lessen the load on your internal IT staff. You need to keep pieces relatively standard so that driver issues are pretty regulated. There's all sorts of stuff that, at a small scale, simply aren't costs. And then you've got coordination to worry about -- a hidden cost just for figuring out what the hidden costs are. So then you get slow responses or overly high hardware costs and, contrary to popular belief, worse return on your dollar than you'd get at a small company. Anyhow, just today's random insight. posted by ruffin at 10/02/2003 11:29:00 AM

Here's an interesting take on AOL's dropping Mozilla, from an ex-AOL/Netscape employee: Anyway, it is worth pointing out that AOL cutting the cord with Mozilla may actually open up new possibilities for the project once it recovers from the blow. It may well lead to greater community development, standards adherence and industry support than in the past when it had a single vendor yanking the strings. posted by ruffin at 10/02/2003 09:02:00 AM

Wednesday, October 01, 2003
147815 - HOWTO: Create a Flashing Title Bar on a Visual Basic Form: "HOWTO: Create a Flashing Title Bar on a Visual Basic Form" posted by ruffin at 10/01/2003 04:37:00 PM

untitled: "FlashWindow The FlashWindow function flashes the title bar of the window specified by hwnd. fInvert specifies whether the window is to be flashed or returned to its original state. The window is flashed from one state to the other if this parameter is TRUE. If this parameter is FALSE, the window is returned to its original state (either active or inactive). " posted by ruffin at 10/01/2003 04:36:00 PM

Can we all agree on much day-to-day usage module-level variables being evil? At the very least prefix the vars with "this." or "Me.". My main beef is that module level vars, by defn, mean that you can't cut and paste code from one location to another. Every method that references a module-level variable instead of receiving that same variable as a parameter is, refactoring aside, forever bound to the variable declarations. This makes for cluttered, harder to read code that is essentially passing parameters through the back door to its methods. Perhaps I'm too procedurally minded (okay, that's really not it at all -- but I'm trying to be nice), but I like to see a spot where these objects are initialized and then passed to individual methods that can live anywhere in your code. Need to reuse the methods? Grab the object, even out of context. Need to see what's being done at a glance? Check out the procedural "main" method, however you've written it. But all this back-door spaghetti really gets on my nerves... posted by ruffin at 10/01/2003 02:47:00 PM

CataList, the official catalog of LISTSERV lists: "" posted by ruffin at 10/01/2003 10:09:00 AM

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