it's getting better

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

<dnm> "Gentlemen! You can't rm -rf here! This is the server room!" [Hack the Planet]

God I'm a geek.

10:39:37 PM comments () trackback []

comments are here.

7:25:48 PM

Today was the second day of the .net class/seminar. I bailed about two hours in because it was not really covering anything other than "Gee, isn't Visual Studio a cool tool?"

It is a cool tool, but I wanted to know more about the actual libraries. I want to know more about what is in the 64,000 classes in the .net runtime. I don't need to sit in a room with someone explaining to me that it's really cool that VB is really OO now.

I figured that there were two ways to look at .net:

Once you learn to use the resources in the .net runtime, learning a new language merely means taking the short time to learn the syntax. Since all the languages use the runtime, you can be productive almost immediately. We now have a standard runtime library.

Then there is the classic:

We can now be locked in to a single development tool manufacturer. We can now become completely reliant on one particular platform. (Bill is evil! Bill is evil!)

While taking a shower this morning, I happened upon:

Rather than having to learn the VB way of doing things or the VC++ way of doing things, RTL vs. MFC or whatever, you can learn .net and be able to do everything you need to do, on the Microsoft platform.

I can't really go completely negative about it. There are a lot of cool things there. Suddenly, development on the Windows platform can have garbage collection, no matter which language you use. All those things that I left the platform to find are now there. That can't be completely bad.

Smalltalk is a supported language, in the guise of SmallScript (that's a really ugly background under OS X). That's pretty damn cool.

I also think that it will probably have the most appeal to a corporate developer. Hell, a lot of code gets written that's not written to go to market, but merely deployed internally.

There's a lot of code out there that pushes data around with a broom.

But mostly, it's good to be up on this stuff if you like being a utility player. (Yea! Spring Training!) (sorry.)

6:31:10 PM comments () trackback []

Note to other Radio users: Sometimes the 'Save a Copy...' command can cure your ills. I was just suffering from an inability to download the latest Radio updates. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong. It worked fine on my Win2K box, but the TiBook wouldn't have any of it. The download kept failing because the connection was prematurely closed.

Or at least that's what the error message was saying.

On a whim, remembering hearing the 'Save a copy!' advice back in the Frontier 5 days, I closed all of my Radio windows and did the 'save a copy' thing. Shut down Radio. Threw out the old Radio.root. Renamed the just-saved Radio New.root to Radio.root. Restarted Radio. Updated Radio.root. Blam. It all works.

I wish I knew more about Radio internals. I'm sure the ODB code is fascinating. And scary. It's been living for a long time, and any code that's been living a long time is ...interesting. There are usually some very fascinating lessons to be learned in any long-lived code base. I mean this all in a good way.

update: I turned off 128-bit WEP, and the network connections got more stable. What's that all about?

6:19:26 PM comments () trackback []