Feb

15

Doing a lot with a little

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So I attended a Microsoft marketing deal on Vista and the .NET 3 XAML declarative language for writing new rich applications and it seemed pretty nifty (from what I’ve seen).

A friend and I later showed one of the demo applications to someone at work and they were less than impressed.  Their thought was that code was getting sloppier and less efficient as hardware improved.  There’s some truth to new applications being less efficient, but I don’t think it’s because code is getting sloppier, so much as an increased use of abstraction to ease the pain of engineering large systems.

These days developers take advantage of standards-based tools and frameworks instead of spending days writing software from the ground up.  It’s simple, really — why bother writing in C and dealing with Win32 when you can just drag and drop a GUI in VS.NET (or Netbeans, for that matter), and write the logic in C# (or Java) to save time?  Althought performance is an issue in some spaces (e.g. medical monitoring devices, space shuttles, etc), one can use high level languages for the majority of tasks.  The advantages (still decent performance, much quicker time to release, better use of resources, more features possible in the same time, etc.) out weigh the downfalls (slightly slower performance, need underlying software, etc.) in my opinion.  Need more evidence? Try writing webapps using Ruby and its Rails framework, or Haynie’s Seam(less) framework.

Low level languages and development are not going away — that’s a good thing but why not write more usable, feature-filled software, when applicable?

Feb

5

ambackup.net Launched

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www.ambackup.net

Feb

5

AMBackup 3.4 Released

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3.4 supports Windows Vista.

Feb

4

AMBackup 3.3 Released

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This is a minor update to AMBackup.  Grab it from the AMBackup page.

Feb

4

Crab “Leggs”

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WTF? I could understand difficulty spelling a word like “nauseating,” but the word legs?  What the hell?

DSC00103

Feb

4

Back to gallery2..

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Back to gallery2 since it seems to integrate best (although it’s fragile, imho).

Feb

4

spoke too soon

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it sucks. going back to gallery and it’s terrible integration

Feb

4

gallery

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so the gallery was hosed in the server outtage and i’ve redone it in coppermine — took a while to get all those pics back in.  it’s still a work in progress — fyi.

Feb

3

website outtage

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Unfortunately, the server hosting my site died a couple of days ago and site5 had to replace it all together.  There shouldn’t be any more downtime, hopefully.