IE8 passed ACID2

Ok, if you haven't heard it yet, the dev guys working on IE8 have just announced they have checked the code into source control allowing IE8 to pass the ACID2 Test.

As you can imagine, this seems to have created a massive buzz around the web. It's an important step to having IE8 "standard" compliant, though all it really means at the moment is that IE now renders a large set of CSS2 and 2.1 correctly AND handles errors gracefully. I'm sure there is still more work to go before IE8 fully supports the full set of standards (Pick a standard, any standard.. there are plenty of them..).

Interestingly, IE8 will need a special DOCTYPE tag to indicate it's should be processed in "Standards" mode. Why does it do this, it's pretty simple. It means IE8 won't break the web. It will continue to render everything the way it does in IE7.

What it means though. especially for all of us developers, we will now need to start paying a little more attention to web standards (By Us I mean everybody else, if you've ever worked with me or talked to me, I don't do web dev...), but hopefully, we won't need to write web sites differently for all the different browsers.

Anyway, after reading this, it took me a little bit to work out what it really means to me as a non web developer. The answer was actually really simple. I'll hear less complaining from web developers. This is a good thing. Second of all, the only web site that I've ever had trouble with in IE6/7 (Slashdot) may now actually render correctly. This is great as I can now enjoy reading their tripe and constant complaining the way it is intended..

A quick catch up

New Job
So, here I am, sitting at my desk, enjoying the challenges of a new contract, learning all the faces, the project and investigating why things are done the way they are. This last part for me is probably the part I both enjoy and hate the most. I always enjoy looking at processes and technology to see how they have been used in creative ways, yet at the same time find it sad that some opportunities go begging for seemingly small petty reasons. I have to say though that so far the I have not found any of these things yet, which is really exciting.

Blogging Friends
I'd also like to just throw out a quick shout to Dave and Glenn, two of the great guys I worked with on my last contract who are both now blogging (for a few weeks, I just haven't had time to say anything yet).

Leaving Friends
And then there is Kyle, yet another of the talented developers I've been lucky to work with. He's all set for the UK to see what mysteries await. Good luck dude, make sure you stay in touch.

The Pub Without Beer

Well, not quite. But the situation was very very close.

A pub without a working toilet. That's right, there I was, happy after having a few beers with my friday Surf 'n Turf, thinking how I really shouldn't have had so many, and desperately needing to relieve before getting into a car for the ride back to work. Unfortunately when I got to the gents, there was a very nice sign informing patrons of the "outside water disruptions" and how the facilities were closed to the patronage.....

Anyway, it got me thinking more about systems, and how, despite their continual uptime and reliability, a single outside factor can easily take down a system. Yet with a little better planning, system up time can still be maintained (yes, a water tank may have solved this problem)...

Time for a Change

Wow, it's been 4 months since I last blogged. Quite a bit has happened in that time which I hope to get up here in the next week or two.

Probably the biggest new is that in just two weeks time I'm heading for greener pastures. See, I've been in my current job for a little over 5 years (on contract), doing a range of work including development, builds, maintenance etc etc. I recently accepted a new job offer with yet another government department here in Canberra as a Technical Team Lead/Senior Developer. It's back doing the sort of work I enjoy, using new technology.

I'll try and keep you all up to date with how things go, but needless to say I'm fairly excited about the near future.

A pet hate of mine

I know a few people who will strongly disagree with me on this, but it's something that I absolutely hate seeing in computer systems.. Its Nullable Booleans...... Booleans represent two states, true, false.. They do not represent "Unknown" or anything else you might possibly find. If you need a third state, use something else.. an enumeration or something that carries the meaning of the "extra" state with it.

It's about time that ....

we can now report idiot drivers... Lucky I'm clean...

I'm going to make a habit of entering all motorist into this site that annoy me.. Starting with the 4x4 that made it impossible for me to overtake other cars all the way back from Batemens Bay on the weekend...

My new Toy

I finally did it. I went and got myself a new toy. I've turned of my old i-Mate PDA2k, and with it cleared up alot of room on my belt.. The JasJam is just awsome. It's small, faster and better looking.. I'm loving it.

It took me a whole 10 minutes to try out my first 3G video call.. what can I say, I'm a geek..

I've been tagged

Wow, I actually thought I might manage to duck this one, but Rory managed to hit me up. I guess it's time to air my dirty laundry.

1. I played AFL for the Gungahlin Jets, this year is going to be my 15th year playing.
2. I don't have any "Qualifications", as I left CIT to start working and never went back to finish.
3. I've been married now for 3 years to my wife Kama-Jay, though I've been together we've been together now for nearly 10 years. We have two little girls together aged 7 and 2.
4. I'm absolutely terrible at golf, though I love to play. I've decided that I really need to play a lot more and get some lessons.. If anybody wants a game, let me know..
5. And the biggest secret I've been hiding..... I play World of Warcraft...

As for tagging other people.. I think everybody I know has already been tagged.. So I'm going to take the easy way out and not tag anybody back.. ;)

I'm back, a valuable lesson or a timely reminder

It's been a while since I last updated my blog, mainly because I made a decision to take a bit of time off. Well, that time is over, and I am going to do my best to keep this site a little more up to date.

The first thing I decided to post was a timely reminder to everybody to make sure your work is backed up every day.. Why, simple.. I came into work this morning, and guess what... My computer was turned off. Pressing the power button resulted in a wonderful buzzing sound and a few flashing lights.

Luckily for me, a bit of poking, prodding, removing and re-inserting bits into the computer seemed to have fixed the problem for now. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before something else goes.. So for me, it's time to make sure I shelf my work every night before I go home.. No exceptions..

It's a sad day...

I just read about about this on www.news.com.au. Steve Irwin the Crocodile man passed away today in a freak accident.. It's a very very sad day...

A Big Welcome

It's true, readify are not the only place in canberra that is trying to hire all the local bloggers.. Looks like Rory is coming to join Paul, John and Me

Welcome Rory...

A small gripe...

Not that you'll find many gripes coming from me, but here goes anyway..

Regular expressions. Or, more to the point, the fact that Visual Studio .Net has different syntax in the Find/Replace than the .Net Framework... C'mon... The tool that we use to write .Net code should use the same regular expression parser/engine as found in System.Text.RegularExpressions...

Anyway, that's my small gripe.. Maybe it will be fixed one day...

It's that time

For anybody who knows me, you'd know that I am an big Saints Fan. Probably not as much as Frank, but I still love them. In fact, I just love AFL in general. It's one of the few sports I actually follow and even play..

Tonight, as anybody in NSW and Queensland would know, It's State of Origin Game 1. It's one of the few games of Rugby League that I actually watch each year.

All I have to say is Go the Maroons!!!!

Another year of poor coverage

Living in a Canberra sure has some problems. One of the biggest problems is the AFL coverage. Channel 9 have the rights to the AFL with foxtel picking up the remainder of the games. The problem is that Channel 9 also have the rights to the Rugby League, which is always shown in preference to the AFL.
Tonight, the Saints take on Westcoast in the first game of the season. Unfortunately, channel 9 have decided to hold off the coverage until midnight so they can show the footy show..

No problems, I have foxtel.. I can just watch it there.. Nope.. it's not being shown until 11:30pm.
Turns out, Fox Footy is showing the game from 9:30 in NSW, QLD, SA, WA, yet ACT misses out...
Anyway, that's the end of my rant.. I can't wait until next year to see how much better the Channel 7/10 consortium do with their coverage...

ODP.Net Beta Released

Great news, oracle have just released a beta version of ODP.Net (oracle data provider for .Net) for .Net 2.0.

This release is awesome for the following reasons:

• Support for the Provider based Factories
• Connection String Builder
• Data Source Enumeration
• Schema Discovery
• VS2005 integration and support for debugging stored procedures

Best of all, ODP.Net should now work out of the box with Enterprise Library 2.0 without the need for writing provider factories and wrappers around the old Version..
Here are the links:
What's New
Download

Community Launch, and What I've been doing

Last night saw the Community Launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 come to Canberra. As expected it was a pretty big event, even when you take away the Microsoft, Readify and .NET Solutions guys, there were still heaps of people there.

If you want a list of people who attended, just check out Geoff's blog, as usual he has done an awesome roundup.

During the course of the night, I was asked by Darren what I've been playing with, to which I answered "Visual Studio 2005".. After all, isn't everybody.. However, on the way home, It dawned on my that I have actually been doing a lot more than that.

With Visual Studio 2005, several other community tools have been released (or are near release). These are some of the other things I have been playing with.

First, there is the new Composite UI Application Block, an awesome framework for building a Windows Forms based UI.

Secondly I have been playing with the tech previews for Enterprise Library 2.0. In particular, the data access components and Oracle's Oracle provider for .net. The problem with this is that Oracle have not actually released a version of their provider that supports the new changes in ADO.NET 2.0. As a result, I have had to create my own data provider that wraps around oracle own provider. It's been a fairly interesting process, and has given me a much better understanding of the changes from 1.1 to 2.0

Stay tuned for more information on all of these wonderful topics.

Speculation

Eveybody knows that GotDotNet's workspaces were supposed to be Microsoft's attempt to provide a community based site for collaborative development. This failed for a number of reasons, including performance, reliability and usability.

Many projects that started out using gotdotnet, very quickly moved to source forge.

In a vain attempt to make the site more successful, the GotDotNet team created a Source control plugin for visual studio. While this worked, the underlying engine was still to slow and unreliable.

Now, today several MVPs have mentioned that the GotDotNet team has something new and exciting up their sleeves, yet are unable to spill the beans. This leaves me with only one option, and that is to take a guess at what is going on...

Simply put, my guess (and wish) is that GotDotNet's workspaces are going to be converted into a pretty web based front end for Team Systems...

This makes plenty of sense. Microsoft have spent huge amounts of money already creating a collaborative development environment in Team Systems, and maintaining another environment that has proven itself to be lacking would be stupid...

In addition, modifying the Team Systems plugin for Visual Studio to work with the new GotDotNet team systems would be trivial.

Something like this would blow sourceforge out of the water...

Tip #102 - DesignMode only works after a Component is sited

I could almost kick myself... the designer has been busted for months, and I never twigged to this.. I guess it was just easier to code my forms by hand...

The reason for this is simple, someone I used to work with decided all our controls needed to have consistent fonts and colours, without having to change the system settings (Gotta love UI standards). To achieve this, the customisation code as put inside control constructors. This broke all the designers.. I figured it would be an easy fix, just wrap all the customisation code in a check for DesignMode. After this fix didn't work, I just decided I didn't really need the designer anyway.

It turns out, the problem is that the DesignMode property on the Component class is simply a wrapper around the site.DesignMode property. Without the site set, it will always return false. Obviously, a control is not sited until AFTER it's been constructed...

Moving all of the code into the a different location, and suddenly we have the designer back.. yay...

Keyboards need to change...

I've been using keyboards now for over 20 years, yet there is one key on the keyboard that I never use (Not deliberately anyway..). It's the key that other people always use, right before I get onto the computer. It's the key that can cause you to lock your account. It's the key that causes people to SHOUT in chatrooms..

That key is the "Caps Lock" key...

Seriously people..

How often do you use it?
I know occasionally I bump it.. Then I have to press it again to turn it off.

I know my daughter likes it, but she's only 6 and just loves the effects...

I think the world would surely be a happier place if only this horrid key was removed...

*Don't get me started on the Break/Scroll Lock.... (Yes I've used them, but not for a long time...)

Cost of Slashdot

While browsing over slashdot this morning, I stumbled across a new study claiming that Microsoft's monopoly costs an estimated $10 billion per year.

This got me thinking.. How much does slashdot cost the industry, world wide per year..

So, I decided to just run a few quick figures (most of which are well under real figures..)

3 Million pages served per day (from the FAQ), and assuming it takes an average of 10 minutes to read each of those pages (including the linked pages on other sites and comments). Straight off, that accounts for 3,000,000 pages * (10 minute * 365 days per year) / 60 Hours * $50 an hour (a very low rate)... This equates to $9.12 Billion in lost productivity...

In addition to this, add in a similar amount for TheRegister and you have more than made up for the same so called cost of of Microsoft's Monopoly...

*Yes, I am aware that this study is floored, as I used Win XP and MS Calc for doing the sums.
**Yes, I am also aware that this is not a real loss to industry, as most of the /. people don't actually have jobs...