Polishing OSs...

Here's a great media player for Linux: Banshee 1.0 beta2.

As noted by ArsTecnica:

The latest beta, which was released on Friday, offers a wide variety of impressive features and a highly polished user interface.

Uhmm, highly polished user interface, here's something I miss on Linux. Some of my friends are great Linux fanatics and just refuse to accept Linux as a desktop still lacks the final polishing that we can get with Vista and Mac OS. But they're heading the right way.

An OS is not an isolated island, it depends on what we put there. And when great applications like Banshee appear they help lowering the distance between mainstream OSs built with the contribution of designers and user interface gurus, and Linux, built with the contribution of geeks. Though I must confess, Linux has one advantage: the ability to collect new concepts out of the mainstream packaged body of knowledge, try out new solutions with innovative users, mostly unattached to the obligation to maintain running businesses.

Man, I'm loving the time we live in...

Isn't pipeline a great pattern?

Yesterday I finally bought a grip for my old EOS 10D. I got it on eBay, and when I tried to pay with VISA I've found out it had been canceled - my bank canceled the old one and I'm waiting for the new one to get through mail...

Anyway, I did pay for the grip. How? Experimenting the beautiful pattern of pipelining. Here's how:

1. on my homebanking, got a token to MBNET (Portuguese temporary VISA service);
2. with this token, got a temporary VISA card;
3. with this temporary VISA card, registered myself on PayPal;
4. with my PayPal, sent money to a German guy that is selling the grip.

If these services didn't pipeline, the German guy needed to know how to interact with my Portuguese bank. Isn't pipelining just great?

kalyway

It seems like there is a hacked version of Mac OS that runs on non Apple computers. It's called kalyway, and is out there on the torrentsphere. Ok, if not already, it will soon be crippled on a future update, but what the heck, it's fun!

If I had not bought an iMac I'd probably give it a try. As I've written so many times, Mac OS X is a great OS and should be allowed to compete on a free and transparent market. You should go ahead and free Mac OS, Mr. Jobs, if not for other reason, just to annoy me (now that I bough a Mac...) :P

Wink

We have been demonstrating a lot of our products, and found out that a great way to do it is with webcasts.

Here's a great tool to create the webcasts: Wink. Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software.

The coolest thing about Wink is that you can easily update your capture webcast. A simple way to describe it: Wink differentiates itself from a simple movie capture, as a .psd file differentiates from a .jpeg format.

Oh, did I mention? It's freeware!

Like a kid on a candy shop

That's how I feel on my Mac: like a kid on a candy shop!

I'm trying everything I can get my hands on. I've installed macports, an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for getting, compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on Mac OS. There are currently 4788 ports there! You just have to type something like:

port install apache2

And that's it! I'm now using macports to install CocoaSharp, a project geared to bridge OS X with the Mono development environment. It seems like I'm getting C# and .NET into XCode.

And Eclipse, the evil brother, also got same space on my drive. Not that I will use it often, but there it is if I get sleepless...

And above all, good old Visual Studio keeps getting most of my attention on my XP VM. With Safari as a browser :)

These are happy days for this bored old developer. I know, as an old guy I should be talking about the good old days of THINK C, Turbo Pascal and MSC 5.1. But the exciting time is now, and is getting better!

PS: ok, the cool and fashionable dynamic languages couldn't get into my disk. As an old man, I'm entitled to some irrational hate, don't I? Maybe one day...

Microsoft Source Analysis for C#

Great little tool. Here's it is:

The ultimate goal of Source Analysis is to allow you to produce elegant, consistent code that your team members and others who view your code will find highly readable.

[...]

Specifically, these rules cover the following, in no particular order:

• Layout of elements, statements, expressions, and query clauses
• Placement of curly brackets, parenthesis, square brackets, etc
• Spacing around keywords and operator symbols
• Line spacing
• Placement of method parameters within method declarations or method calls
• Standard ordering of elements within a class
• Formatting of documentation within element headers and file headers
• Naming of elements, fields and variables
• Use of the built-in types
• Use of access modifiers
• Allowed contents of files
• Debugging text

Source Analysis for C# can be downloaded here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis.

I've tried it with some LINQ sources, and got this annoying violation:

SA1513: Statements or elements wrapped in curly brackets must be followed by a blank line.

Ok, fair is fair, this was a inner select and this tool predates LINQ. Cool tool.

Unit testing Silverlight

I am no longer capable of writing code from ground up out of a safe and cosy unit testing environment. The fact is, I never was... Even before the coming of unit tests frameworks I could never design an object model without firing up a separate console application or web page.
So you can imagine the horror when I found out there is no unit testing support for Silverlight!

But there is, it is just hidden as part of the control source code package that you can download here. Heard about it from Jeff Wilcox, that wrote a cool post about Unit Testing in Silverlight. Be sure to get the templates.

PS: hopefully SP1 beta is now supporting Silverlight unit tests. Or it isn't?

Hyper-V RC1

Great news, Hyper-V is keeping its schedule. Here it is.

[update]

Here's some : Hyper-V RC0 to RC1 Upgrade Considerations:
*Saved-state files are not supported between RC0 and RC1 releases of Hyper-V.  All virtual machine saved states should be discarded before upgrading to RC1, or prior to resuming virtual machines after upgrading to Hyper-V RC1. 

*Online snapshots contain virtual machine save-states and thus online snapshots taken with Hyper-V RC0 are not supported after updating to Hyper-V to RC1.  Either apply any online snapshots and shut down the VM or discard the virtual machine save state associated with the snapshot before or after the update to Hyper-V RC1.

*System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Beta does not support Hyper-V RC1.

*New Integration Components (ICs) must be installed for your supported guest operating systems.  Integration Components are specific to the build of Hyper-V.  RC1 Integration Components for all supported Windows Operating Systems are provided using the ‘Action’ -> ‘Insert Integration Services Setup Disk’ action.

VMWare Fusion rocks

What I love in VMWare Fusion:

• it is incredibly fast;
• I can project both cores into my good old XP;
• Unity is just awesome:
  • it is absolutely transparent;
  • if you use the "Application" menu, you'll just don't need to get into the client OS anymore;

I still have a few problems with Fusion:

• some of my keys are not correctly mapped;
• disabling Map OS keys only works on Full Screen - there goes F10 on the debugger...
• it sucks a lot of processing power out the host OS;

And with Apple:

• dear Mr. Jobs: your obsession with tidiness and design is beginning to get into my nerves:
  • why in G-D's name don't you print the bloody characters on the keyboard? Yes, I know, it would be a geek keyboard, but what can I say, I'm a geek! And as a curly brackets old school geek I'd like to get my curly brackets printed on my beautiful new Portuguese keyboard;
  • ok, from the design point of view it just a beautiful concept, but how in the hell can you justify that such an item as a start button is hidden on the back of the monitor? It's a start button, for crying out loud, it should be discoverable! Self announced! You should make it difficult for people to start it. Placing a standard on/off on the front row would help, but if it isn't possible, I'd consider using the Apple sign :)
  • and what about USB sockets? Why do you think most of the computers nowadays have put them on the front? Hello? To be handy! Not beautiful, just handy!

PS: wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft implemented a Unity like feature on remote desktop?....

Silent gives way to sound

When silent gave way to the sound movies, not all of the stars made a successful passage. We could be experiencing the same experience with the passage from blog to podcast.

Take http://stackoverflow.com/. stackoverflow is an initiative from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, two of the greatest tech bloggers out there. According to them, stackoverflow is not getting a lot of attention. Are they the first victims of the silent to sound movement?

Let's hope not. One thing is for sure: they can always get back to JoelOnSoftware and CoddingHorror, and that is more than the stars from the silent movies era could. And even if they can't make them, my bravo to them for trying a new thing out of their zone of comfort. Best of luck!

Enterprise Library 4.0 - Unity 1.1

No, it's not a sport's result: Enterprise Library 4.0 and Unity 1.1 just shipped!

Yes, I know, this is not terribly Alt.Net for someone that just bought a Mac, but what can I say, I just love EntLib. Ok, Enterprise Library has it's flaws, but it is so nicely packaged together that I often end up choosing it over other better tested, solid and scattered solutions. Not always a great idea, yet a fact.

And Unity brings great promises... let's wait and see.

Here they are:

• EntLib 4 
• Unity 1.1  

Moonlight is out!

Moonlight, the Silverlight Linux port, is out! This is a great day for:

• people who believe great software shouldn't be confined to proprietary system;
• people who believe .NET is too great a platform to be confined to the Windows platform;
• people who believe HTML and javascript have passed their design limits.