I’m not the first to report this, but Fry’s is coming to Renton in mid-July (30 minutes from MSFT Campus). That’s Fry’s Electronics, not Fry’s Food & Drug. 😄 Scoble called it the “most important news of the day”. Matt calls it “Heaven”. +1
I moved up from Los Angeles to Seattle about 2 years ago and was shocked there wasn’t a Fry’s anywhere nearby. (I didn’t know about the one Matt mentioned in Oregon). Glad to see this oversight is going to be rectified by next month.
I just got a chance to check out the latest Coding4Fun article on MSDN. The article is about writing macros for VS.NET and one of the examples in the article shows how to build a macro to insert regions into your code by selection. What a great idea! Why didn’t I think of that? 😉
Seriously, thanks Duncan for the link to my region insertion macro and for calling it “much more detailed”. It wouldn’t be without Richard Childress, John St. Clair, Yves Hanoulle and Tim Walters who contributed bug fixes, support for VB.NET and undo contexts.
I upgraded my weblog slightly today. Primarily, I updated my RSS feed to support Timothy Appnel’s RSS Core Profile Draft 2. In addition to mundane changes (pubDate becomes dc:date), I’m finally supporting xhtml:body for my content. Also, a la sTimothy’s sample feed, I’m using a default namespace to finally move all of the RSS elements into a namespace. According to the profile draft, using a default namespace should be considered “optionally permissible”. RSS Bandit handled the updates. Since I’m curious, email me if your reader doesn’t.
I also added support for CDF as per Don’s suggestion last month. It was simple, so I figured what the heck. I did have to search a little to discover that for CDF, the contentType has to be set to “application/x-cdf” in order to get IE to recognize that it’s not just vanilla XML. I had to use Google to find this info, since searching MSDN for “cdf contenttype” came up blank.
But here in the states, we’re screwed, for one simple reason. Telephone companies are powerful here. Too powerful. Service, essentially, is equally bad, regardless of carrier; basically, you will either have a signal or not, based on where you are, not based on who your contract is with.
So, when I ask myself why my I can’t write my own applications for my phone, why I cant send MMS messages to my friends containing pictures or sound, or why I have to change my voicemail to let everyone know that I switched numbers, I can answer myself by saying, “Because North American phone carriers are greedy and lazy”.
+1.
My mobile phone died last week. I’d go get a warranty replacement, but it would be the 5th time in 6 months that I’ve done so. I was hoping the sales rep for my wireless provider would have contacted me by now, but of course that hasn’t happened.
I’ve spent the last three hours trying to get my new photo site posted to no avail. Will have to check with the webmaster tomorrow – any page with a code behind throws an exception that I can’t seem to catch or echo to the screen. 😦 I guess I’ll have to build a simple HTML front end in order to post a bunch of new Patrick pictures for my parents.
In other news, Dare’s back from his world wide trip. Looking forward to the new builds of RSS Bandit. But it took him a while to make any sense of my last post in the objects vs. entities discussion. Apparently, I’m not as lucid at 11pm as I thought. Given that it’s 11pm as I write this, here’s my single attempt to make a coherent point.
XML, even with Infoset/XPath 2.0 Data Model/XSD/etc, has it’s roots in a text based format. Attempts to hide this with strongly-typed object-oriented mechanisms will always be leaky abstractions. But that’s OK, since XML actually works for loosely-coupled cross platform services while strongly-typed object-oriented mechanisms only work for tightly-coupled n-tier applications. And I’m out of the application business.
Since I’m going to have to build some XML entities for interoperability purposes, it makes sense to build all my entitles that way, even the ones that are private to my code. This way I have a single architectural model, improve reuse, reduce training, and avoid writing any annoying XML <–> OOP conversion routines.