The Dancing Poodle

OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released. Get it here. CD ROM image downloads are also available, but only as bittorrents.

I’ve been learning the ropes of ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (Beta 2). Recently I decided that I better see how the site runs in Firefox (as opposed to Internet Explorer). To do this, I needed to host the site on a real Web Server (OK, IIS isn’t Apache, but this IS Microsoft…). Installed IIS 5.1 on my WinXP Pro machine and copied the site across. Easy, right?

I have spent the entire day until now (3:00pm) battling with ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server Express, IIS 5.1 and Microsoft in general trying to get the thing to work! Mainly the problem was due to write permissions on the database. So I don’t forget, here’s the trick: Create an HTTP server based project of the same name, preferably based on the same template, and play around for a while so that all the required database files are created. Then, kill SQL Server and IIS, and copy your data over the existing site. Start up IIS and SQL, and you’re set! Of course, if I’d just created an HTTP-based project to start with, I never would have had this problem…

Ah Microsoft, how do we love thee? Let me count the ways…

The Mozilla Firefox Project has just announced the release of Firefox 1.5 RC1.

The E-Mail Time Capsule - What a cool idea! Now, if I just think of anything worth saying to myself in 30 years time… Maybe a reminder to pay the electricity bill?

4,000 Days ago, I had just left university and my total Internet experience had been browsing FTP sites and Newsgroups for stuff for my Amiga. Phew…

This from Gadgetopia: Thought it sums up the situation so far. Particularly liked the comment about…

… attempting to rob a bank and finding that God Himself was in line to deposit His paycheck at the same time.

Certainly Sony are taking a lot of flack from this, and rightly so. There seems to be a movement now to boycott Sony music (and other products) - I’d join in, but I’m afraid that the amount of money I actually spend on Sony music (nil in the last 5 years) probably wouldn’t worry them too much…

In other news, I had a job interview yesterday for a defence company that would involve programming in Ada (among others). Grabbed out my Ada textbook from Uni the night before the interview and brushed up my fading memories of the language. It’s funny - when I learned Ada, I thought it was fantastic! The only other (decent) language I knew at the time was Pascal (upon which Ada is based), so I guess it was a pretty good step-up. Looking back now, comparing it with modern C++ and C#, the feeling is rather different….

Still, if they want to pay me to program in Ada, who am I to complain?

I’ve now added this site to FeedBurner.

To all of you who utilise the RSS feed for this blog (I think there’s still only one of you…), please change over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancingpoodle/ for your feeds. I’ll update the links on the site once I get to a computer with decent access to the ‘net…

I have just placed code for an old version of DVB Decoder into the CVS repository on SourceForge. At the same time SourceForge have gone and completely redesigned their site (looks good, by the way), and while I’m not sure if this is related, the code I put onto CVS does not appear to be available on the public server… Anyway, I’ll keep checking and see what happens.

The version I have posted is for Visual C++ .NET 2003, and is the (fairly complete) original version I have worked on over the past year or so. I have yet to decide what I’ll rewrite it in - at the moment it’s a toss up between C++ (MinGW) or C#. C# is possibly winning at this point, as I need the experience in Windows Forms based applications. It may (possibly) be cross platform thanks to Mono, but since I’d be using the free Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and hence .NET 2.0, maybe not at this stage…

Decisions, decisions…

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Update: dvbdecoder2003 has now appeared in the public CVS area.

Went to the Microsoft Ready Launch in Sydney yesterday. They had PCs set up for free internet access, and I tried to write a blog from the event, but couldn’t remember my Wordpress login. Oops! One of the banes of the “Do you want Windows to remember this password” dialog box - Windows remembers, I forget!

Anyway, I’ve got to say that Microsoft sure know how to launch a product! It was pretty impressive. A couple things really stood out. Firstly, the focus of Microsoft has changed. I’ve noticed a change in the way they do things, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I understood how. They’ve become more transparent in the way they release products, as was evidenced by the beta and CTP releases of VS2005. Through this, they have been able to get more feedback from development teams before the product is officially launched, and that seems to be a good thing. The other big change in focus has been switching from a developer focus to a development focus. This is a big deal, particularly with the new Visual Studio Team System products begin released. Tasks, buglists and project requirements are now available through Visual Studio, but also through more “managerial” applications, such as Word, Microsoft Project, etc. If Microsoft’s quoted statistic that 70% of bad business decisions are made due to insufficient information, the communication offered through VSTS should go a long way to making that information available. Now, if we’d just talk to each other…

The other thing that stood out for me yesterday was the demo on Smart Client applications. Sort of a mix between web-based and desktop-based applications, they offer the power and GUI experience of a desktop app and the updatability and supportability of a web app. Yes, they only work on Windows platforms running .NET 2.0, but to be honest, that’s not such a bad platform…