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Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.


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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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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Wow, the Xamarin blog tells us that Xamarin 3.0 is out, and that it's got this great new package of features to make creating cross-platform UIs VB6 IDE easy called Xamarin.Forms. Awesome, right? Let's download the new version.

Got it.  And now to open a new project.


Take one didn't work out so well.

Okay, let's close it and try again with a new Xamarin.Forms project.  First, it didn't give me all three projects like it said it would, only Android.  And then, when I ran the Hello, World that was preconfigured...


Wow.  That was great fun.  I can't try it out without spending $299.

Why let the starter version create the project type if I can't even F5 the out of the box skeleton?

Looks neat and all, but I think I'm back to where I was yesterday, finally getting iOS UIs created programmatically, skipping Interface Builder entirely.  Actually insanely easy, and I'm upset I didn't start doing this months ago in what little iOS Xamarin time I can squeak out.

UPDATE: From today's (5/30) webinar:

Q: Any chance we can get Xamarin.Forms working with the starter edition?  Right now, it's past the size the starter lets you compile.
A: We're looking into that. :-)

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posted by ruffin at 5/28/2014 07:07:00 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Here are my current Sublime TFS settings. Note that foreslashes are used for paths, and that tf_path ends with TF.exe.
{
    "tf_path": "C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0/Common7/IDE/TF.exe",
    "tfpt_path": "C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools/TFPT.exe",
    "auto_checkout_enabled" : true
}
I'm not up to date on Power Tools, however, having recently installed TF 2013. I might remember to update that later.

In other news, I finally added overflow to my blogger's css for code (in <pre> tags) so that I don't have to keep wrapping code before I post it. Welcome to 1999, mfn.

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posted by ruffin at 5/27/2014 03:13:00 PM
0 comments
Saturday, May 24, 2014

I've often thought of the 3.5mm headphone jack as one of the most impressive wins for open standards.  Everything I've used to listen to music portably since I was listening to a tape of my Falco album during runs as a kid to my iPhone today has had one, which means that there's one type of hardware with the potential to last even longer than my monitors -- my headphones.

There's really only one company that has the proven ability to kill a hardware standard, and that's Apple.  Sure, Microsoft has killed a few software specific standards, and pushed forward others, but nothing quite as powerful as a physical connection.  I can't think of any move as bold or successful as the iMac's killing serial ports for USB.  Maybe Napster and CDs?

You can say it's just a barrier to entry thing, and you wouldn't be wrong.  But Apple's standing in the music player space -- and that includes every iPhone-qua-glorified-iPod -- is quite a bit more substantial than even their psychological footprint with the iMac.  Given enough push, they could establish a new headphone connector.

But why would they?  That is, if you make the audio port proprietary and keep shipping the same serviceable but not great Apple earbuds on the other end (and I have probably eight pair sitting around that I don't use), that's a huge negative for prospective music-loving buyers (aka, "Those that care enough to buy 3rd party 'phones").  If I like serious, quality sound, I'm not buying an iPhone with a limited headphone selection any more than digital serious comic consumers are buying an iPad now that Amazon has pulled Comixology's (sp!) impulse buy feature.

So how do you keep what we'll call the popular-audiophile (that is, people who don't need "neutral" sound, and enjoy bass-heavy dance/rock tunes) interested and still allow yourself to make an ever-thinner player/phone?  Bluetooth headphones haven't played out as an alternative.  You can't expect everyone to settle for crappy white Applebuds.  So you buy someone who makes popular headphones.  If the new connector isn't licensed, then Beats users have to be iPhone users.  Win.  Though not win-win.

So I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that Beats doesn't just mean great 3.5mm sales and industry connections, it also means Apple would like to kiss the 3.5mm jack goodbye.  If so, I'm really going to miss it.  In five to seven years, when I'm thnking of upgrading my iPhone 5s, which replaced my Optima V (look it up; it stunk).  Maybe.  And only if I buy another iPhone.

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posted by ruffin at 5/24/2014 10:24:00 AM
0 comments
Friday, May 23, 2014

On the Future of MetaFilter — Technology Musings — Medium:

Additionally, mobile web traffic has grown substantially (especially at certain times: nights and weekends we see 60-70% of all traffic on mobile/tablet) and ad performance on mobile is much less effective, where mobile pages only make about 1/3 to 1/10th as much as a desktop page. 

I understand the point Marco Arment's trying to make about MetaFilter, which is that Google really is the 800 lbs gorilla when it comes to ad supported web sites.

But for me, it's the decrease in ads revenue in the move to mobile that's the most interesting.  Why did people stop clicking links?  Are folks really clicking less?  Were traditional browser viewers opening links in new tabs and never really paying them attention?  Is it because mobile devices are so poor at dealing with more open windows?

If there's at all a correlation between mobile users and number of windows users would have open, let's go ahead and admit that most ad dollars are coming from very technical users.

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posted by ruffin at 5/23/2014 08:00:00 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, May 14, 2014

iMessage purgatory: (via Gruber)


I recently switched from an iPhone to Android, and discovered shortly thereafter that my phone number was still associated with iMessage, meaning that any time someone with an iPhone tried texting me, I’d receive nothing, and they’d get a “Delivered” receipt in their Messages app as though everything were working as expected.


Wow, who missed that test case?  The worst I can say about Apple, and I don't think it's a huge stretch to say this problem is related, is the implicit hubris.  "What happens when someone leaves iOS?" apparently didn't occur to a pretty serious team from the richest company in the US.

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posted by ruffin at 5/14/2014 02:33:00 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Vim 101: A Gentle Introduction to Macros:



Press qq to start recording and save the macro to register q
Enter some commands
Press q to stop recording
...
To use the macro you've just recorded, type @q.

I keep having to clean up lines of parameters from autogenerated NHibernate SQL to slap into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio that looks like...

@p1=N'80901',@p2=N'29588',@p3=N'29588',@p4=N'29579',@p5=N'29572',@p6=N'29588',
@p7=N'04032',@p8=N'17033',@p9=N'53202',@p10=N'28736',@p11=N'94110',@p12=N'28736',
@p13=N'89109',@p14=N'06155',@p15=N'10121'

Making a macro for :. s/@p[0-9]\+=N//g is pretty useful.

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posted by ruffin at 5/13/2014 01:45:00 PM
0 comments

Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture

vs.







 

Great compare and contrast.

posted by ruffin at 5/13/2014 12:45:00 PM
0 comments
Monday, May 12, 2014

Fluent NHibernate Where Clause - Stack Overflow:



session.QueryOver() .Where(x => x.UserName == "Abcd") .And(u.Password == "123456") .List();


That's the one I needed.  ;^)

posted by ruffin at 5/12/2014 12:53:00 PM
0 comments

On Streaming: Apple, Beats & Spotify | Om Malik:

Just for giggles: I compared how many people followed Beyonce and Taylor Swift on Spotify and the numbers were 1.59 million and 1.55 million. On Beats, Beyonce had about 80,000 followers and Taylor Swift had about 26,000 followers. In other words, for now, Spotify is a better place for musicians to make a push.

I realize you could call this a barriers to entry issue, and that growth from 80k to 1.6 million is set up to be geometric rather than linear, but I haven't seen a better example of how far behind Apple must be in streaming for them to push out this much cash for Beats.

I also understand that Beats is allegedly making insane revenue selling its headphones.  That makes the purchase price make more sense, not the purchase itself.

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posted by ruffin at 5/12/2014 12:06:00 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, May 06, 2014

c# - LINQ to SQL: Return anonymous type? - Stack Overflow:



EDIT: Others are suggesting returning dogs, and then accessing the breed name via a property path etc. That's a perfectly reasonable approach, but IME it leads to situations where you've done a query in a particular way because of the data you want to use - and that meta-information is lost when you just return IEnumerable - the query may be expecting you to use (say) Breed rather than Ownerdue to some load options etc, but if you forget that and start using other properties, your app may work but not as efficiently as you'd originally envisaged. Of course, I could be talking rubbish, or over-optimising, etc...
It's a younger Skeet, perhaps less wise than he is now, but I like the way younger Skeet thinks.

posted by ruffin at 5/06/2014 09:54:00 AM
0 comments
Saturday, May 03, 2014

Programming Sucks:
This file is Good Code.... Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday...
The opening metaphor tries to translate what it'd look like if bridge building was done the same way as the way large software projects are, far too routinely, built.  Scary and sad.

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posted by ruffin at 5/03/2014 11:47:00 AM
0 comments

Support freedom
All posts can be accessed here:


Just the last year o' posts:

URLs I want to remember:
* Atari 2600 programming on your Mac
* joel on software (tip pt)
* Professional links: resume, github, paltry StackOverflow * Regular Expression Introduction (copy)
* The hex editor whose name I forget
* JSONLint to pretty-ify JSON
* Using CommonDialog in VB 6 * Free zip utils
* git repo mapped drive setup * Regex Tester
* Read the bits about the zone * Find column in sql server db by name
* Giant ASCII Textifier in Stick Figures (in Ivrit) * Quick intro to Javascript
* Don't [over-]sweat "micro-optimization" * Parsing str's in VB6
* .ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); (src) * Break on a Lenovo T430: Fn+Alt+B
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