Madd0's Tech Blog

Wow, it's been a while... Hopefully, now that I'm putting the finishing touches on the project that's been taking up all of my time, I'll be able to write more around here.

I'm starting with good news! At least for those lucky enough to have access to a MSDN subscription. As it was announced on Friday, the final version of Visual Studio 2008 is available for download as of this morning!

Slightly under 4GB, the ISO for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (32 and 64-bit version) DVD is just waiting to be downloaded. Go get it quick before people actually start waking up and download speeds are affected ;)

(Disclaimer: although I'm all for constructive criticism most of the time, this is clearly nothing more than a rant, which by the way, does not even deserve translating.)

Lets start with a dictionary definition of the word seamless:

adjective. perfectly consistent and coherent

Now lets take a look at a quote from the website of a product I decided to work with while writing my book on WPF (highlight mine):

Expression Design is the perfect companion to Expression Blend, letting you quickly build sophisticated vector assets. Then seamlessly transfer — by way of XAML — your graphics to your Expression Blend projects.

Finally, lets take a look at what actually happens when the product in question "seamlessly" exports to XAML:

Do you see it too? How its not at all consistent or coherent, but rather the outlines become horrible thick black blotches and the gradients simply disappear? Ah, thank you... That's a relief. For a moment there I thought it was just me.

In whoever wrote that clearly fallacious marketing crap's defense, they do seem to know what the imputed word means. Take a look at this other quote:

Or seamlessly copy and paste your images into Microsoft Office while preserving transparency.

Ah, now this one does work, as you can see in this screen-shot:

You have to wonder what kind of black magic is behind this magnificent feat:

Oh, a PNG. Why not?

In the good sense of course… Today was a great day! It was a day of discovery, of rediscovery, of new things in general.

So, what’s all the excitement about?, you might wonder. Well, let’s see, more or less in order:

I might be onto a gig in Malaysia, how cool is that?

I was one of the winners of the Trick-or-Treat category in MAKE’s Halloween contest! I get the latest issue of MAKE magazine. Check out all the other winners in all categories. Next year, the Hack-o-Lantern will be mine :)

I installed Simon’s newest release of My Exposé for Windows Vista. It’s a CTP (Community Technical Preview), but it’s pretty stable and bug-free. It features a new placement algorithm, way more organic than the original grid placement. An improved trigger interface, so that you can write your own triggers. As a matter of fact, it comes with a new trigger for Voice activation and control (of which I wrote a first version, but Simon pretty much rewrote it afterwards). Oh, and it also comes with extremely cool icons, made by yours truly ;)

Last week I was notified that I had won a book, two books actually, on Certifdotnet, by getting a top score last month. Both books arrived today: Ajax : le guide complet and XAML, which happens to be part of the same collection as my own book. (Yes, all in French, sorry)

I got the serial cable for my Lego Mindstorms yesterday. I can’t believe how hard it is to get the right serial cable these days. What’s worse, it’s also hard to connect it to a “modern” laptop computer, since they don’t have serial ports any more. But no worries, I borrowed a RS232-USB converter from a friend (who will remain anonymous, just in case ;) ) and, after recharging and buying batteries today, I got to use my RCX again after about 3 years (OK, I’ll admit I could’ve looked harder…).

So, I’m geek enough that playing with Legos (albeit very technological and not-necessarily-childish Legos) is already exciting, I went ahead and downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Robotics Studio November 2006 CTP. Yet another CTP, but this one, sorry Simon, is way cooler that My Exposé. I guess the “new technology” factor + the “moving creations” one makes it more exciting. The only feature I’ve tried for now is the Visual Programming Language (VPL), which allows you to program your robots using drag & drop, but that was enough. I can’t wait to play with simulator and the runtime. I think it’s safe to say that this weekend I’ll be playing with Legos quite a lot :)

Finally, just before starting this post, I learnt that Photosynth, from Live Labs, is now live! Well, a preview is live… If you don’t know what it is, I suggest to get my OPML file and subscribe to most of the feeds to stay informed and/or click here for their explanation. There’s also videos here.

Well, I guess that’s pretty much all. Sure it might not be everybody’s idea of an exciting day, but then again, it’s not everybody’s blog ;)

Oh yeah, and I won 25 cents at poker, which doesn’t seem much, but I actually doubled my stack :)