Brokenwire.NET :: Stuff to read

OT: Terrarium 2 released in the wild

2008-07-16T16:24:19Z

Copyright Remus Rusanu 2008. Visit the original article at http://rusanu.com/2008/07/16/ot-terrarium-2-released-in-the-wild/

Those who played with the original Terrarium project back in .Net 1.1 now have a chance to revisit this fun project. The Terrarium2 for .Net 2.0 was released on codeplex, including the project sources.
If you never had a chance to see the Terrarium, check it out. Terrarium allows you to create creatures with behavior you program in .Net and set them up into a virtual peer-to-peer world of Terrarium instances. You can track your creature in the wild, how does it do against other creatures. A nice incentive to learn some basic AI stuff and keep your programming skills sharp in a fun virtual fight-to-the-death competition with other programmers.
Read more on the Windows SDK team blog

Learning Opportunity - .NET Terrarium is back!

2008-07-16T19:12:36Z

Bil Simser has just done the .NET Community a huge solid. Bil has dug up and re-released Terrarium to CodePlex wtih the intent to update it to use new language features and new usability features like ClickOnce.

If you're newish to the .NET Community (<3-5 years?) you might not have heard of Terrarium. There was a time when it was the tool for getting newbies excited about learning .NET. I showed dozens of high-school and college students how to program using Terrarium. Back at my last company one of our engineers did brown bag lunches on good bug design and ran a Terrarium Server internally.

Terrarium hasn't been even looked at by the Microsoft SDK team in two years, as live happens, you know. Bil hunted them down, did a bunch of paperwork and it's back. You can check out the source or download the release.

You can run it alone, just a world in a box, or you can hook it up to a server and that's where it gets interesting, as your bugs all live in a connected world.

Your animals have Idle (event-based) loops that you can react to, and who amongst us hasn't wanted to write these lines of code at least once?

// Reproduce as often as possible 
if (CanReproduce)
  BeginReproduction(null);

Now you have the chance.

A great lunchtime project is to get a bunch of the nerds from your company in a room, teach them Terrarium and have a battle!

Personally, I'm a lover, not a fighter, so I run away when attacked.

private void MyAnimal_Attacked(object sender, AttackedEventArgs e)
{
   if (e.Attacker.IsAlive)
   {
       AnimalState TheAttacker = e.Attacker;

       BeginDefending(TheAttacker); //defend against the attacker 
       WriteTrace("Run away to some random point");

       int X = OrganismRandom.Next(0, WorldWidth - 1);
       int Y = OrganismRandom.Next(0, WorldHeight - 1);

       BeginMoving(new MovementVector(new Point(X, Y), 10));
   }
}

Go check out the release of Terrarium and download the app, SDK and server. There will be more to come on Bil's Blog, I'm sure. He'll also be running a public Terrarium Server. It's exciting to see this blast from the past. Now I think it's time for me to visit a local High School Computer Science class again some lunchtime...

One of the things I think will be interesting to see, is if folks come up with better patterns for managing state within these animals. Many Terrarium animals end up with Idle loops that look like Arrow Code.

if
   if
     if
       if
         do something
       endif
     endif
   endif
 endif

This isn't nice to look at, and it would promote bad habits if it was the first kind of code someone new to programming ever saw.

The world has changed since this was released in 2002. The race is on and now I ask:

Who will write the first aesthetically pleasing (from a code perspective) Terrarium Animal?
The first F# Terrarium animal?
The first Ruby (DLR) Terrarium animal?
Boo? Nemerle? IronPython?

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I've got this running on my XP machine and my XP VMs but because of missing DirectX 6/7 DLLs I can't get it running under Vista. Possible workaround in the comments below. It'll likely be faster to just recompile it. I'll talk to Bil and see what's up.

Related Links

Five Year Old Tutorial on how to Write An Animal for Terrarium.

Long Paths in .NET, Part 3 of 3 Redux [Kim Hamilton]

2008-07-07T23:40:00Z

My original part 3 blog caused confusion, mostly because it didn’t tie together loose ends and explain that an immediate .NET “solution” is at best partial. To minimize confusion and answer questions in the comments, I decided to do a complete overhaul and link to the original (here).

Win32 file-naming conventions include the MAX_PATH (260 character) restriction. A subset of Win32 APIs allow you to work around the MAX_PATH restriction by adding the \\?\ prefix.

Solutions based on the \\?\ prefix

Recall that these are the problems with the \\?\ prefix:

Other apps may not support this prefix, and may not be able to use these files
Not all Win32 APIs allow this prefix, meaning that the file will not necessarily work with other .NET APIs

#2 isn’t obvious to many people so let’s focus on that.

.NET dependence on Win32

.NET relies heavily on Win32 and isn’t always able to provide clean workarounds to Win32 restrictions. If we introduce a concept that has partial Win32 support, we either:

Open up a new set of potential failures, or
Add kludges on top of existing functions to make things work

An example of (a) is: you move a file to a location enabled with the \\?\ prefix, and then pass that path to another .NET API, which results in a call to a Win32 API that doesn’t support \\?\. (e.g. LoadLibrary). This sequence of operations would fail.

An example of (b) is: we try to make things work for Win32 functions that don’t support \\?\. This would be a major undertaking of rebuilding Win32 functionality or re-building a file system in the .NET layer (for example, we associate with shorter paths that can be accessed). Either approach is extremely risky and error prone, and we don’t see this as an option at the moment.

.NET solutions based on \\?\, given Win32 restrictions

Currently, .NET doesn’t allow you to use the \\?\ prefix at all. Let’s consider how .NET might enable it:

Supported by default: .NET adds the \\?\ prefix behind the scenes
1. Because of limited support of the \\?\ prefix, this will at times force you into awkward coding practices, like having to explicitly check size to make sure the file names are supported by your other apps or other functions.
2. Also, this would be a maintenance burden going forward if Win32 provides a solution that isn’t based around \\?\
Supported on an opt-in basis: callers have to opt in, such as by adding the \\?\ prefix
1. This is just like if we had never blocked out the option from Win32
2. Because this turns off canonicalization, this would be associated with full trust demand, which seems reasonable for applications that want to use long paths
3. Could add convenience API such as Path.ToLongPath(file), which would add the \\?\ prefix for you, before you pass to System.IO APIs.

Proposed “Solution” (Best attempt for now)

We won’t be able to provide seamless long path support throughout .NET until something is done on the Win32 side to broaden support of long paths throughout their APIs.

As a mitigation to at least provide parity with Win32, we propose to allow use of the \\?\ prefix (described in #2 above) to avoid the MAX_PATH limitation. The caller must explicitly use this prefix, at best aided with a helper API as follows:

String longPathEnabledName = Path.ToLongPath(@"C:\veryLongPath...\veryLongName.txt");
FileStream fs = new FileStream(longPathEnabledName);

This enables use of long paths throughout the System.IO namespace. Support of long path files outside of System.IO will be limited by support of underlying Win32 APIs.

This is not a real solution, but this provides core file (reading, writing, etc) functionality for long path files, which is compelling for certain types of apps. Such apps are best described as closed-system, file reading/writing-focused apps.

Ideal Solution

Some possibilities include:

A Win32 solution, supported throughout Win32 APIs for full parity
Going forward, less dependence on Strings as paths. This was touched on in my comments to long paths part 1 and is a very large discussion, for some later time.

Navigation

Home & Office : Nintendo Wall Graphics

2008-06-30T13:35:55Z

Shared by thijs
Totally awesome! I want this in my room!

Cover your walls in all things Mario, from Donkey Kong to New Super Mario Brothers! Nintendo Restickable Decals are here!

Super high-quality vinyl re-stickable wall stickers cover your room in the Nintendo world of your choice. Choose from Donkey-Kong, Super Mario Brothers, or New Super Mario! Live the dream.

Price: $74.99

#11422 - Watch water spiral down the drain with this...

2008-06-22T21:57:29Z

Watch water spiral down the drain with this Ammonite sink from HighTech. Washing your face has never been more mesmerizing.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

Are Windows Vista icons facing the wrong way?

2008-06-12T12:35:41Z

I know what you’re thinking, “has it really come down to this”.

No doubts you’ve all seen the “Computer” icon in Windows Vista. Some of you might have even clicked on it and few of you probably have a shortcut on your desktop. But has it ever occurred to you it’s facing the wrong direction - away from you? At least one guy did, and this is just one of the minor details under scrutiny at the Windows UX Taskforce that is particularly fascinating, to me at least.

The problem is, by default, Windows displays icons from left to right. Assuming the user sits in the middle of the monitor, the icons should in fact face right towards you and not the edge of the monitor. The only icon in Vista off the top of my head which does this correctly are the “folders” icon which open up towards the right. This actually conflicts with the official user experience guidelines suggesting the perspective of icons face left.

If this isn’t weird enough, the Windows XP’s icons and even conceptual Vista icons designed by Iconfactory faced the right (pun) way. For some unknown reason, Microsoft designers decided to flip them. FYI: Mac OSX icons face directly at you - probably the best solution.

Of course I understand that this is not a make-or-break issue and probably won’t be addressed in Windows 7 - just flipping the icons won’t actually work since the lighting and symbols on the icons will be different - but this raises an interesting discussion around the “psychology” of design. Could this explain why so many people are turned off by Vista? On the same note, facing left also implies “looking back” as opposed to right - “looking forward”. You get the drift.

In spite of the serious discussion at hand, this comment by “Turge” had me giggling inside. He writes, “My computer is to the right of me, so the icon is facing the right way. Please don’t change this otherwise I’ll have to move my PC.” Can’t argue with that.

Update: Ged from Iconfactory confirms the icons are facing “the wrong way”.

Star Wars music played by a floppy drive

2008-06-09T18:00:52Z

Jason @ Hackszine writes...

I can't find any documentation for this, nor can I help posting it. I assume it's a hardware hack that manually controls the floppy drive's stepper motor, but it'd make my day if this was done in software using standard I/O requests. Either way, the 3.5 inch FDD finally serves an important function again.

Official Sysinternals utilities now available via open dir

2008-05-30T07:38:45Z

Shared by thijs
If you haven't used the Sysinterals utilities yet, this is your big opportunity! Your life won't be the same afterwards.

The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team is doing a test that provides fast access to all the famous Sysinternal utilities. No more searching in the MS Download Center, instant-access!

The address is: http://live.sysinternals.com/

Hope this helps,

Official Sysinternals utilities now available via open dir

2008-05-29T20:37:39Z

The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team is doing a test that provides fast access to all the famous Sysinternal utilities. No more searching in the MS Download Center, instant-access!

The address is: http://live.sysinternals.com/

Hope this helps,

Community Call to Action: NOT Northwind

2008-05-30T07:37:30Z

Shared by thijs
Sounds like a plan!

I'm just sick of Northwind. Sick to death of the Northwind Database. You know, this is the Products, Categories, Suppliers, yada yada yada sample database that you've been seeing in Microsoft demos since the beginning of time. (FYI, the beginning of time was about 1997. ;) )

Why do we use it? Because it's there. Because it's easy, it exists, and it takes two seconds to install. It's full of good sample data that has international characters. It has a few views and a few sprocs and it's wholly harmless.

Now, some folks don't like Microsoft's (often) focus on "Database Driven Development," and I'm basically Switzerland at this point. Consider me neutral because I've done it both ways, both Domain Driven and Database Driven. With an ORM and without. I'm not 100% convinced either way and I like to have choice.

Plus, when I'm showing some technology that is talking to a Database or to POCO (Plain Ol' CLR Objects) I still need good sample data to pull from. Thus, the Northwind Virus continues.

And I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns.

There are others I could use, like AdventureWorks and its variants and specifically the AdventureWorksLT example is pretty lightweight, but still it doesn't quite turn me on.

I suspect, though, that if we (the community) took a few weeks, did some Skype conference calls, assigned some tasks, brainstormed and did it, we could come up with NotNorthwind. The Lazy Web, the Web of Clay Shirkey, .NET Flash Mobs included, could create a sample database, (we can argue about whether to start in the middle or in the db in the first meeting) as well as some good examples of things like NHibernate, LINQ to SQL or Whatever,

Requirements

Complex enough to be called Real World but simple enough that someone could "get it" in 5-10 minutes
In a familiar Domain Space that makes sense to folks all over the world
Has a decent amount of sample data with strings that are more than just [a-z|A-Z|0-9]

Deliverable(s)

Have a single .SQL file that one can run and immediately get a working database
Sample Code for any of a number of Database access patterns, ORMs, whatever. This might require a few subtle versions.

I'm making http://www.codeplex.com/notnorthwind and I want:

A Project Manager (probably best if it's not me)
Modelers, Sample Code Writers
Sample Data Creators
Documentation Person
Release Manager

Who's with me? Leave a comment with your CodePlex Username, Skype Username, your TimeZone offset, and your level of interest and let's do a Skype call to kick this off and be rid of Northwind. Also, if you think this is a stupid idea, why?

Oh, by the way, if you're at TechEd US this next week, be sure to say Hi if you see me, and let's talk about this project, because most of my demos at TechEd 2008 are <gulp> Northwindian in their heritage.

Community Call to Action: NOT Northwind

2008-05-30T01:16:38Z

Plus, when I'm showing some technology that is talking to a Database or to POCO (Plain Ol' CLR Objects) I still need good sample data to pull from. Thus, the Northwind Virus continues.

And I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns.

There are others I could use, like AdventureWorks and its variants and specifically the AdventureWorksLT example is pretty lightweight, but still it doesn't quite turn me on.

Requirements

Complex enough to be called Real World but simple enough that someone could "get it" in 5-10 minutes
In a familiar Domain Space that makes sense to folks all over the world
Has a decent amount of sample data with strings that are more than just [a-z|A-Z|0-9]

Deliverable(s)

Have a single .SQL file that one can run and immediately get a working database
Sample Code for any of a number of Database access patterns, ORMs, whatever. This might require a few subtle versions.

I'm making http://www.codeplex.com/notnorthwind and I want:

A Project Manager (probably best if it's not me)
Modelers, Sample Code Writers
Sample Data Creators
Documentation Person
Release Manager

I'm sorry I put a dent in your car...

2008-05-25T15:02:00Z

Filed under: Etc., Driving, Lifestyle, Humor

Don't you just hate it when you're idling around in the parking garage and there aren't any empty spaces? How do you feel when you spot somebody with a nice car who's purposely taken two spaces so that nobody can park next to their car? Yeah, pretty infuriating. Looks like somebody decided to do something about it, if the letter above is for real. In case you can't read it, here's what it says:

Dear person,

I'm sorry I put a dent in your car. I didn't want to, but I did when I tried to park next to you. I am not leaving my information because you chose to use two spaces and I just wanted to park in one. The scratches are because I used a towel that had sand on it to try to clean the dent/paint off. Beaches are fun.

Please look your car over for the dent and scratches and each time you see them, remember not to park in two spaces.

Sorry!!!

NOTE: We at Autoblog do not condone the denting of cars on purpose. Yes, beaches are fun.

[Source: Carscoop]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Microsoft Announces Source Code Analysis for C#

2008-05-23T17:24:09Z

URL : http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis/R... Interestingly, Microsoft has released a new tool that they've used for years internally to analyze code in their code base. Its been informally called "StyleCop" and differs from FxCop...( read more )...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 Auditing

2008-05-22T07:01:00Z

Once a year you get that email or knock on the door from the auditor. It didn’t used to be this way, but Enron and other scandals have changed the way we track our user’s actions. I still wake up in cold sweats with memories of the audits I used to have to do yearly. Previously, in order to get rudimentary SQL Server logging it took writing complicated triggers that fire when certain actions are performed. Even then there were significant limitations to the data that you could collect. You couldn’t write a trigger against a select event. SQL Server 2008 changes all of this with the introduction of SQL Server Audit.

Who’s it for? DBA’s and IT Pros who need to audit activity on SQL Servers.

When does it ship? Auditing is part of SQL Server 2008 and will ship as part of the SQL Server 2008 product.

What does it do? Improves compliance and security by allowing you to customize audit activity on your SQL Server Data. SQL Server 2008 provides the tools and processes you need to effectively enable, store and view audit data stored on SQL Server 2008.

What are the components of SQL Audit? There are several components that you create/configure that makes up a single package that audits a server or database actions. These include:

· SQL Server Audit: This is the object that collects server or database audit actions and groups of actions to monitor. When you create an audit you choose where the output of the audit results are stored as well as the maximum file size. You can have multiple audits per SQL Server instance

· Server Audit Specification: This objects belongs to the Audit you created above. You can create one server audit specification per SQL Server per audit. This specification collects many server-level action groups raised by the Extended Events feature.

· Audit Action Groups: Audit Action Groups are predefined groups of actions exposed by the Database Engine. An example here would be the SERVER_ROLE_MEMBER_CHANGE_GROUP which will raise an audit event whenever a login is added or removed from a fixed server role.

· Database Audit Specification: This object like the Server Audit Specification belongs to a SQL Server Audit. You can have one database audit specification per database, per audit. You can add either audit action groups or audit events to a database audit specification.

· Audit Events: Audit Events are specific database actions that can be audited by the SQL Server. A good example of an audit action is the ability to capture and audit when a SELECT statement is run against a specific table in a database.

· Target: The results of an audit are sent to a target. The target can be a file, the Windows Security Event log, or the Windows Application event log.

What is the process for creating an audit? The basics of creating and using an audit includes:

· Create the audit and define the location of the audit data.

· Create a server audit specification or a database audit specification, map it to the audit created above. Enable the audit specification (these are created disabled by default).

· Enable the audit (also created disabled by default)

· Read the audit events using the Windows Event View, the log file Viewer in SQL Management Studio, or the FN_READ_ADUIT_FILE TSQL function.

Anything I need to be aware of that could cause problems?

· When you create an audit, you have the ability to shutdown a server if a particular audit fails. If this occurs the MSG_AUDIT_FORCED_SHUTDOWN event is written to the log. If you need to bypass an audit-induced shutdown, you can start SQL Server in Single User mode using the –m flag.

· There are also considerations that you need to be aware of when attaching a database with an Audit already defined. If you attach a database that has an existing audit specification and specifies a GUID that does not exist on the server, no audit events will be recorded. To correct this, you can alter the audit specification and point it to an existing audit or use the CREATE SERVER AUDIT WITH GUID command to create a new audit with the GUID from the other server.

· If you use database mirroring and have a database audit specification defined you must do the following:

The mirror server must have an audit with the SAME GUID to enable the audit. Use the CREATE SERVER AUDIT WITH GUID command.
The mirror server service account must have appropriate permissions to the location where you are writing the audit information.
If you are writing events to the Windows Event log, the security policy on the mirror server must allow for service account access to the security or event log.

Get started

SQL Server Books Online (CTP 6 Version)

Sharepoint database exporter

2008-05-22T09:54:07Z

If you ever want to restore documents from a Sharepoint database backup, this is a good tool:

http://blog.dreamdevil.com/index.php/2007/03/13/sharepoint_2003_database_exporter/

Thanks to Leon :)

Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market

2008-05-21T13:21:50Z

If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore's insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into Early Adopters, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards then points out that there is a large chasm to cross when it comes to becoming popular beyond an initial set of early adopters. There is a good review of his ideas in Eric Sink's blog post entitled Act Your Age which is excerpted below

The people in your market segment are divided into four groups:

Early Adopters are risk takers who actually like to try new things.

Pragmatists might be willing to use new technology, if it's the only way to get their problem solved.

Conservatives dislike new technology and try to avoid it.

Laggards pride themselves on the fact that they are the last to try anything new.

This drawing reflects the fact that there is no smooth or logical transition between the Early Adopters and the Pragmatists. In between the Early Adopters and the Pragmatists there is a chasm. To successfully sell your product to the Pragmatists, you must "cross the chasm".

The knowledge that the needs of early adopters and those of the majority of your potential user base differ significantly is extremely important when building and marketing any technology product. A lot of companies have ended up either building the wrong product or focusing their product too narrowly because they listened too intently to their initial customer base without realizing that they were talking to early adopters.

The fact is that early adopters have different problems and needs from regular users. This is especially true when you compare the demographics of the Silicon Valley early adopter crowd which "Web 2.0" startups often try to court with the typical users of social software on the Web. In the few years I've been working on building Web applications, I've seen a number of technology trends and products that have been heralded as the next big thing by technology pundits which actually never broke into the mainstream because they don't solve the problems of regular Internet users. Here are some examples

Blog Search: A few years ago, blog search engines were all the rage. You had people like Marc Cuban talking up IceRocket and Robert Scoble harranguing Web search companies to build dedicated blog search engines. Since then the products in that space have either given up the ghost (e.g. PubSub, Feedster), turned out to be irrelevant (e.g. Technorati, IceRocket) or were sidelined (e.g. Google Blog Search, Yahoo! Blog Search). The problem with this product category is that except for journalists, marketers and ego surfing A-list bloggers there aren't many people who need a specialized feature set around searching blogs.
Social bookmarking: Although del.icio.us popularized a number of "Web 2.0" trends such as tagging, REST APIs and adding social features to a previously individual task, it has never really taken off as a mainstream product. According to the former VC behind the service it seems to have peaked at 2 million unique visitors last year and is now seeing about half that number of unique users. Compare that to Yahoo! bookmarks which was seeing 20 million active users a year and a half ago.
RSS Readers: I've lost track of all of the this is the year RSS goes mainstream articles I've read over the past few years. Although RSS has turned out to be a key technology which powers a number of interesting functionality behind the scenes (e.g. podcasting) actually subscribing and reading news feeds in an RSS reader has not become a mainstream activity of Web users. When you think about it, it is kind of obvious. The problem an RSS reader solves is "I read so many blogs and news sites on daily basis, I need a tool to help me keep them all straight". How many people who aren't enthusiastic early adopters (i) have this problem and (ii) think they need a tool to deal with it?

These are just the first three that came to mind. I'm sure readers can come up with more examples of their own. This isn't to say that all hyped "Web 2.0" sites haven't lived up to their promise. Flickr is an example of an early adopter hyped site that showed up sprinkled with "Web 2.0" goodness that has become a major part of the daily lives of tens of millions of people across the Web.

When you look at the list of top 50 sites in the U.S. by unique visitors it is interesting to note what common theme unites the recent "Web 2.0" entrants into that list. There are the social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook which harness the natural need of young people to express their individuality yet be part of social cliques. Then there are the sites which provide lots of flexible options that enable people to share their media with their friends, family or the general public such as Flickr and YouTube. Both sites also have figured out how to harness the work of the few to entertain and benefit the many as have Wikipedia and Digg as well. Then there are sites like Fling and AdultFriendFinder which seem to now get more traffic than the personal sites you see advertised on TV for obvious reasons.

However the one overriding theme is that all of these recent entrants is that they solve problems that everyone [or at least a large section of the populace] has. Everyone likes to communicate with their social circle. Everyone likes watching funny videos and looking at couple pics. Everyone wants to find information about topics they interested in or find out what's going on around them. Everybody wants to get laid.

If you are a Web 2.0 company in today's Web you really need to ask yourselves, "Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?"

Now Playing: Three 6 Mafia - I'd Rather (feat. DJ Unk)

It’s Software - And I Helped!

2008-05-21T07:56:57Z

Software is not Shake & Bake…

Projects are continually plagued with poor choices due to something I have just now coined - Shake and Bake Syndrome.

Every single individual involved in a project sincerely cares about the best possible outcome; however as a result of caring - we pollute the purity of designs and implementations by adding a small amount of our personal opinions to the project.

Here are a few common examples of this in action:

Feature lists driven by a committee of people
DBAs enforcing their application database schema
Non-UI developers making UI
Customers modifying professional designs
New feature creep labeled as bugs by QA personal
Developers assuming they understand the domain

So in short, here is what happens - everyone wants to help, everyone throws in their 1 big idea, the project becomes a mashup of disjoint ideas.

Seriously, what would a Frank Lloyd Wright house look like if he gave into the “design by committee” mentality? I guarantee that it would have not had the same artistic beauty.

Since we could (and have) debate whether software is a science or art, the question comes to mind - are the only pure pieces of software art those done by a single person? Or, is the single developer always doomed to imperfection since we can never master everything?

Regardless, I highly value my teammates because I know that they compliment me in my weaknesses; however, I am growing ever-so-more tired of the non-stakeholders adding in their 2 cents.

It’s time to make some Scrum chicken Shake & Bake…and no, you can’t help.

[Advertisement] - Atlassian provides zero-friction bug tracking and continuous integration solutions for software development teams. Visit Atlassian for free 30 day product trials.

Undo, redo, predo, preundo

2008-05-19T06:51:57Z

Undo and redo are nice, but what i'd like to see is: Predo.

Undo provides a way to reverse what you've just done.

Redo is a way to unreverse what you've just undone.

Predo will be a way to do what you've not yet done.

And preundo would be a way to avoid doing what you've not yet done.

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope 2.1.8.1

2008-05-20T06:55:32Z

A virtual telescope software that enables you to explore the universe. [License: Freeware| Requires: Win 2K/03/XP/Vista | Size: 20.2 MB]

Handheld NES Console

2008-04-28T18:58:17Z

Nothing like an oldie - but a goodie - being your handheld gaming platform of choice.

If you are at all like me you have NES cartridges stuffed in a shoe box somewhere - wouldn’t it be fun to dust them off and use them again? Yea, sure you can downoad ROMs to an emulator - but where is the nostalgia in that?

For the uber retro nerd FC Mobile made a portable system for you. FC Mobile’s has a 2.4 inch LCD color screen (You can use an included AV adapter cable to hook it up to a TV). Powered by 3 AA batteries, you can game for hours.

Brokenwire.NET :: Stuff to read

OT: Terrarium 2 released in the wild

Learning Opportunity - .NET Terrarium is back!

Long Paths in .NET, Part 3 of 3 Redux [Kim Hamilton]

Solutions based on the \\?\ prefix

.NET dependence on Win32

.NET solutions based on \\?\, given Win32 restrictions

Other Solutions: Softening Impact

Proposed “Solution” (Best attempt for now)

Ideal Solution

Navigation

Home & Office : Nintendo Wall Graphics

#11422 - Watch water spiral down the drain with this...

Are Windows Vista icons facing the wrong way?

Star Wars music played by a floppy drive

Official Sysinternals utilities now available via open dir

Official Sysinternals utilities now available via open dir

Community Call to Action: NOT Northwind

Requirements

Deliverable(s)

Community Call to Action: NOT Northwind

Requirements

Deliverable(s)

I'm sorry I put a dent in your car...

Microsoft Announces Source Code Analysis for C#

SQL Server 2008 Auditing

Sharepoint database exporter

Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market

It’s Software - And I Helped!

Undo, redo, predo, preundo

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope 2.1.8.1

Handheld NES Console