www.nickhodge.com

Time to get ser­i­ous on my res­ol­u­tions. Well, at least one any­way; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gad­get post­ing, and a gen­eral feel­ing that gad­gets are where it is at for non-professional pro­gram­mers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer cen­ter

Decision time: what to gad­get up? A Cricket gad­get is under­way. I am sure that one of the vari­ous national reli­gions of foot­ball will fol­low come March. For weather I can use my real win­dow to look out­side. (note: grow­ing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by look­ing through the win­dow at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyr­ics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small data­base, and ren­der­ing text smartly onto a ran­dom Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to con­fuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and down­load the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javas­cript. Easy. I have a loc­al­host web server run­ning, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, cod­ing music in the ears.

How to test out the gad­get? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of har­ness­ing your local gad­get to Inter­net Explorer and the live.com serv­ers to test out before embar­rass­ing your­self pub­licly! Hmm, seems like you can dir­ectly access the test har­ness with the cor­rectly formed URL. There are three ver­sions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gad­get test­ing Javas­cript har­nesses, Inter­net Explorer 7 and cross-site script­ing are in the midst of a con­spir­acy to stop test­ing. Time to hit the pro­duc­tion serv­ers with the code.

This post­ing on the new Gad­gets for­ums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of clean­ing up and renam­ing things as per the recom­mend­a­tions, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Fur­ther com­ment live.com gad­gets are simple to cre­ate. XML file mani­fest, or list of what’s import­ant; a CSS file to style your con­tent and the Javas­cript. This Javas­cript con­tains the logic of your gad­get which is essen­tially insert­ing HTML into the stream. It can gather text extern­ally to gen­er­ate this HTML into some­thing more inter­est­ing than a picture.

Microsoft pre-released their XAML-in-the-browser tech­no­logy, WPF/e earlier this week. XAML inside.

XAML “smells” like the W3C’s Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics (SVG). DOM-inside-a-DOM, Declar­at­ive anim­a­tion, 2D graph­ics. XAML maybe not SVG, but it cer­tainly tips its hat to SVG.

Adobe today pre-released their XML-in-a-PDF tech­no­logy, Mars, for Acrobat 8. Essen­tially, Mars as a tech­no­logy is presently delivered as plu­gins for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional. You can save an exist­ing ‘bin­ary’ PDF out as a .mars file. These .mars files are like .jar or .war files: mani­fes­ted, struc­tured ZIP files. Look­ing inside a descrip­tion of a page, you have an SVG Tiny 1.2+ (as Adobe state, SVG/FSS0 rep­res­ent­a­tion. The spe­cific­a­tion clearly doc­u­ments that .mars takes the cur­rent concept of PDF, a doc­u­ment format, and extends this as XML.These tech­no­lo­gies do not dir­ectly inter­sect: an XML rep­res­ent­a­tion of SWF rather than PDF would be closer to XAML. Hav­ing cross-platform viewer sup­port for Microsoft’s XPS would be closer to PDF.

I was pre­ma­ture in say­ing SVG was deprec­ated.

Watch­ing the Par­al­lels web site, I noted that the engin­eers had pos­ted some more info, and a later build. 1896.2 I don’t know what the .2 means; prob­ably that .1 wasn’t quite right.

Wait­ing for a bet­ter video driver (to use up the 256Mb of the Mac­Book Pro, without resort­ing to Boot Camp)

Any­way:

Is Vista RC1 build 5600 installed and launched OK. Office 2003 installed per­fectly on RC1; now I am hunt­ing down an installer for Office 2007. Dontcha just love software?

Beta Tech­nical Refresh 2 on Beta 2 on Release Can­did­ate 1 on build 2 of Release Can­did­ate 2 on MacOS 10.4.7. Schwar­zwaelder Kirschtorte.

Speak­ing of cakes, Acrobat 8.0 is announced. I don’t have Acrobat 8 in any form, so I can­not add the cherries.

Today, at least in the US, it is Programmer’s Day.

Maybe it should be called “Inter­na­tional Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage Peace Day”. The level of advocacy for vari­ous pro­gram­ming lan­guages reaches rhet­or­ical heights last seen dur­ing the one of the not-so-successful 18^th cen­tury revolutions.

When not speak­ing to humans, other pro­gram­mers to read­ing the latest advocacy on their lan­guage of choice: pro­gram­mers stitch together the wild thoughts of oth­ers to munge data into inform­a­tion.

Pro­gram­mers are the people who use com­puter lan­guages, in their vari­ous forms, to get com­puters to do cool things. From bliken­lights to cool online maps: there are a pyr­amid of pro­gram­mers respons­ible for your com­puter exper­i­ence. A pro­gram­mer is behind the “ding” in the lift you used this morn­ing; and the soft­ware that val­id­ated your ticket on the bus ride to work.

The beauty of com­puter lan­guages is that they never seem to stag­nate: like mod­ern, spoken lan­guages: they evolve as the world changes. Except those that are aban­don­ware.

Microsoft has recently released my cur­rent favour­ite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, Python, as a CLR/.net lan­guage: Iron­Py­thon. This imple­ments Python as a dynamic lan­guage on the CLR engine.

C# is the lan­guage of imple­ment­a­tion for CLR, as is Sun’s Java is for the JVM. A# (Ada), B#, D# F# (OCaml), G# (Gen­er­at­ive lan­guage), J# (Jsharp), P# (Pro­log), L#. More sharps than Beeth­oven.

The lan­guage wars has returned to an old field: dynamic lan­guages. The grand-daddy of dynamic lan­guages, LISP, has received some recent pos­it­ive PR. One per­son, Paul Gra­ham, is the poster mil­lion­aire for LISP. Laz­arus of LISP.

This week, Sun Microsys­tems par­ried Microsoft’s Iron­Py­thon by hir­ing the team behind JRuby. The aim here is to imple­ment the Ruby dynamic lan­guage on the Java Vir­tual Machine (JVM). Some months ago, this team was able to get a Ruby on Rails work­ing on the JVM.

Whilst the big lan­guage guys battle it out, is Erlang the next Ruby, or is it just a vik­ing proto-language with the best non-pun name? The Erlang com­munity is start­ing to come out of their tele­phone exchanges.

No lan­guage has deemed to have arrived in the 21^st Cen­tury until there is a web frame­work writ­ten around it. C# is ASP.NET, Python has Dyango, Ruby has Rails, Erlang has Jaws, Scheme has Magic… and so it goes on.

This broken thing called Javas­cript that has been reborn with AJAX, and is receiv­ing daily blood trans­fu­sions of new features.

All of these lan­guages just remind me of my per­sonal all­time favour­ite lan­guage love of my life: Hypercard’s Hyper­Talk. As Hyper­card is no longer sold, and “Clas­sic MacOS” is a battle to get going on my Mac­Book Pro — sadly it is a lan­guage as use­ful as Cornish.

So, for a short period of time it is back to one of HyperTalk’s chil­dren: Applescript. Bas­ketweav­ing for the mind.

Down­load the 21Mb update to Par­al­lels (to build 1884)

Boot Win­dows XP to ensure all is OK before I install Vista. Win­dows XP “seems” to boot a little faster. Unable to quantify exactly how much.

Backup exist­ing 15Gb Win­dows XP .hdd, just in case. Cre­ate a new 15Gb image to install Vista into.

Pararl­lels settings:

Install into the fresh 15Gb image, 1024Mb of RAM alloc­ated to image. Vista is marked at (exper­i­mental) as OS. Installing onto a Mac­Book Pro with 2Gb of RAM and MacOS X 10.4.7

• Beta 2 Build 5384 DVD (thanks, Frank Arrigo at Microsoft Australia)
• Star­ted install at 11:05am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:35
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:43am
• Ques­tions (loc­a­tion, time, user­name) at 11:46am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:47am
• Into Vista Beta 2 at 11:50am
• Install Par­al­lels Tools from the Par­al­lels VM menu. Note that these don’t seem to be signed drivers, so ignore all the warn­ings and install away
• Manual Vista Restart
• On restart, if the “Wel­come Cen­ter” doesn’t appear, choose it from the Start menu. Click on Add Hardware.
• Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Also note that Vista also finds “PCI Bridge Device” which I asked Vista to ignore
• Restart; Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Note that the Net­work Adaptor set­tings for the Par­al­lels VM set “Bridged” worked OK

In short, it works. Note that I haven’t stress tested this; and the Par­al­lels guys say its exper­i­mental. Beta OS on exper­i­mental hyper­visor vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion. Your mileage may actu­ally turn into inchage quickly.

RC1 Note from 8:20pm

You can­not install Vista RC1 on Par­al­lels. Bug­ger. ISO, DVD burnt or upgrade from Beta 2 to RC1. None of these paths work.

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0×50434146, etc)

“The ACPI Bios in this sys­tem is not fully com­pli­ant to the spe­cific­a­tion. Please read the Readme.txt for pos­sible work­arounds, or con­tact your sys­tem vendor for an updated bios.”

File this into the why basket.

FreeDOS works with Par­al­lels. So now for the full 1987–1992 retro-experience, the Mac­Book Pro can learn about HIMEM.SYS, FAT32 and other evil that Win­dows has shiel­ded us from.

How to:

1. Down­load FreeDOS ISO image
2. With Par­al­lels, cre­ate a new VM (vir­tual machine), Hard drive
3. Set the CD as the boot device, and select the VM
4. Start the VM
5. Fol­low the onscreen install instruc­tions: note, be care­ful eras­ing your hard disk image!

The VM set­tings screen will look some­thing like this:

Win­dows Vista the last of its kind: Win­dows will go vir­tual, Gart­ner agrees with my assess­ment that the future of Win­dows is com­pon­entised, vir­tu­al­ized and smaller.

Gart­ner expects a sig­ni­fic­ant update to Vista in late 2008 or 2009 that will add vir­tu­al­isa­tion (in the form of a com­pon­ent called a hyper­visor) and a ser­vice partition.

You read it here first, 4 days ago.

In an effort to re-ignite my first love whilst on my leave of absence — I’ve been look­ing for a good TRS-80 emu­lator to rekindle the flames of tech­nical desire. Also over the last 4 weeks I’ve also had a small “side pro­ject” watch­ing the goings on in the desktop vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion space, espe­cially on the Mac. Par­al­lels has been an excel­lent invest­ment to get Win­dows XP run­ning on the Mac­Book Pro; just wait­ing for the ACPI/Direct3D (or VMWare for the Mac) ver­sion so I can run a build of Win­dows Vista.

Admis­sion #1: the first com­puter my dad pur­chased for me was a TRS-80 Model I. Not the pret­ti­est, nor the most power­ful of machines — 1.77Mhz with 16Mb Kilo­bytes (I even acci­dently put Mb!) of RAM. Wel­come to 1981. That’s right, 1981. 25 years/ a quarter of a cen­tury ago.

The best emu­lator for the TRS-80 is writ­ten by Mat­thew Reed. Found thanks to
Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site. So, I have TRS32 run­ning inside Win­dows XP in Par­al­lels on MacOS X. Shells within Shells.

Admis­sion #2: the TRS-80 we owned stored data onto a cas­sette, not a floppy disk. Way-back when I was one of those computer-store kids. Thanks to the sales guys at Tandy Electronics/Radio Shack, we’d spend all day sit­ting on the com­puters typ­ing in pro­grams and occa­sion­ally demon­strat­ing to pro­spect­ive buy­ers. As floppy disks were expens­ive, we didn’t get access to stor­age — so TRSDOS was not an envir­on­ment I was ever exposed to. Get­ting the emu­lator work­ing involved remem­ber­ing how to get BASIC work­ing, and learn­ing yet another OS.

Admis­sion #3: I’ve watched zero minutes of Lord of the Rings. Even from DVD. Ever since the school lib­rar­ian sug­ges­ted I bor­row The Hob­bit, attempt­ing to read a single page, and quickly return­ing the mush — I’ve act­ively avoided the fantasy genre. World of War­craft drives me nuts. Sorry Neil and Mark!

Before this dis­pas­sion arose, I did get into one fantasy-style game on the TRS-80: “Quest for the Key of Night­shade”. It is strange how you remem­ber names such as these for many years. Last week I found a ver­sion of the BASIC pro­gram, ori­gin­ally typed all the lines from a com­puter magazine into Basic and saved to cas­sette, on Ira’s web­site. From memory, this was writ­ten by a Cana­dian pro­gram­mer and won “TRS-80 game of the year 1981″ in some US magazine and was reprin­ted in 1982 by Aus­tralian Per­sonal Com­puter.

The screen dump above is from this game. Ahh, the fond memor­ies of our first loves.

Microsoft is on the cusp of ship­ping a whole forest of new products. Vista, .Net 3.0, Office 2007 and *.live.com stuff than you can poke a branch/stick at. All of which presents Microsoft with some tall chal­lenges. How does a single tree get noticed? How does the world find the sap­lings that are going to be the next Sequoi­aden­dron giganteum? Does the forest work together as a cohes­ive eco-system?

Today, thanks to Microsoft Australia’s, Frank Arrigo, I atten­ded the Blogger’s Brunch. Great of Microsoft to reach out to a sec­tion of the local tech­no­logy blog­ging com­munity. None of the attendees (except Angus Kid­man and Nic) are fam­ous in the blo­go­sphere, but on the inter­nets — noone knows you are an Australian.

Whilst hav­ing been a Microsoft cus­tomer since 1984 (Microsoft Basic 1.0 on a Macin­tosh 128K — and the box is in stor­age some­where), I am a rel­at­ive noob to “mar­ketec­tural” Microsoft. The speak is strangely famil­iar to my ears.

The fol­low­ing are some ran­dom thoughts and un-expressed ques­tions from this morning’s session:

• To the Microsoft PR people. Sorry it par­alleled Microsoft-Groove/Ray Ozzie his­tory with Apple-NeXT/Steve Jobs. To Frank Arrigo. Sorry I stated that the *.live.com people are hav­ing fun being com­pat­ible with all the ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer rather than imple­ment Fire­fox sup­port. Both of these were inten­ded as jokes, not memes.
• Today’s Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review’s IT sec­tion has quotes from vari­ous large Aus­tralian fin­an­cial organ­isa­tions stat­ing that they are tak­ing a wait-and-see approach to Win­dows Vista. Some are only now installing Win­dows XP. These organ­isa­tions state they will install Vista in 2–3 years. I find this quite inter­est­ing as it has taken them 4–5 years to install Win­dows XP. Per­son­ally, I am con­cerned if a large fin­an­cial organ­isa­tion is not run­ning a recent, up to date, tested and secure OS on all their desktop com­puters. I’d love to know what fea­tures in upcom­ing products are dir­ect feed­back from Aus­tralian cus­tom­ers. This would show that the soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­cess is a two-way street.
• Share­point should evolve into *.live.com server for the Enter­prise. If Vista has all the hooks, and the connected/disconnected world and new applic­a­tions are going to be mashed (lashed?) together with live stuff, this seems like a logical move. How­ever, large organ­iz­a­tions will be reluct­ant to put all their data into the world’s cloud for all to stumble upon. I am no expert on Share­point and all the pos­i­tion­ing stuff, but it seems there might be a little “ten­sion” (not a bad thing, mind you) between these two environments.*.live.com is gar­ner­ing the mind­share as it is new-ish; many of the APIs and licens­ing mod­els are to be determ­ined. Come to think about it, these are prob­ably the two reas­ons why they are still sep­ar­ate. Rev­enue and developer penetration.
• After hear­ing about the IT pro­fes­sion­als fawned over the cool­ness of Vista infra­struc­ture deploy­ment … I left the ses­sion (both men­tally and phys­ic­ally) ask­ing “what are Microsoft’s cus­tom­ers going to do with all these fine trees?“Customers doing mean­ing­ful stuff with Microsoft’s soft­ware so that they can impress their cus­tom­ers is where it is at. Mar­ket­ing people might call it Unlock­ing the value of the plat­form.
• Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion on the desktop has been one of my “things” for a while, so it’s inter­est­ing to hear that Vir­tu­alPC is to be included in the Enter­prise ver­sion of Vista. Whilst listen­ing to the intric­a­cies of Vista vs XP deploy­ment, my mind was racing think­ing about the future of oper­at­ing systems.So here goes: why is the Enter­prise desktop so fat? Why not have a Singularity-based OS with .Net 3.0 Frame­work as the API. Win32 + other leg­acy apps could be vir­tu­al­ized to the desktop. As the world and work becomes more con­nec­ted, the smart cli­ent at the edge of the net­work will have a dif­fer­ent face.

In sum­mary, I groked that Microsoft groks (sorry, Hein­lein) the world as it exists today. Ensur­ing that no trees are felled in the rush to mar­ket is going to be an inter­est­ing challenge.

An excel­lent art­icle from the New York Times: Weigh­ing a Switch to a Mac. Inter­est­ing, as it goes through the two options: Boot­Camp or Parallels.

You don’t need to leave your Windows-mind behind when switch­ing. Now that I am dis­con­nec­ted from the Adobe-mind, I rarely use Win­dows applic­a­tions. But then again, I’ve not really done much in the last two weeks apart from fill this blog up with stuff!