Happy Birthday to Dave Winer

Happy Birthday Dave! Thanks for all the bytes.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Second (at least) Adaptation

Since Rory asked for my opinion I thought I would chime in with a quick review of the film. Nicola and I went out to see it last night and I have to say I really enjoyed it – it was knee slapping funny – and I loved the new bits.

I’m lucky enough to have read the book(s) and seen the BBC adaptation to a TV series (in fact Nicola (Scottish) has it as part of her video collection). There were a couple of things that really did it for me.

1. The Vogons. Its as if they took the picture in my head and ran it through a carbon life-form printer. The last scene with the Vogons is a complete pisser. Actually – I think I ran into a Vogon today – he didn’t try and read me poetry but that piece of paper he fetched off the printer was scarey enough for me.
2. The casting as Rory mentioned was inspirational – Trillian was much more likable than the actor from the BBC series – she was smodlering hot.
3. There was no BBC effects department in site, or if they were they have improved their act drastically. Actually thats not true – if you have seen the BBC series there were a few cameos thrown in there just for you.
4. Having lived in Melbourne – the Tram scene.
5. Marvin – a lot of people don’t like him, but he’s pretty close to what my original vision of him was like. Once again – the funal scene with he Vogons is a classic.

You should really go and see this movie, but its not the book, and its not the BBC series either – its something else. And I would love to see them do another one – there is obviously scope to have a lot of fun plot wise – especially if you assume that they don’t have to be consistent with the story line of the books.

Unified Theory of Canberra Queuing

When we moved from Melbourne to Canberra we were prepared for things like less traffic, easier parking and even less queuing. When it comes to traffic and parking I think our expectations were met but you wouldn’t believe what queuing is like in Canberra.

You can’t really attribute it to sheer population size – Canberra just isn’t that big. No – the truth is much more bizzare.

Unified Theory of Canberra Queuing

The “queue effect” in Canberra is primarily contributed to by a strongly held belief system held by all those who have lived in Canberra for an extended period of time. These beliefs are three fold.

1. You aren’t allowed on the streets before 8am on weekdays, or 10am on weekends, otherwise the boogy man will get you.
2. Public holidays are a sign of apocalypse, so you had better stock up before and after.
3. Minimum staffing levels at peak times is the path to righteousness.

It is extremely dangerous to travel in Canberra on the weekends before 10am. No one likes to talk about it, but it must be true, why else would they remain tucked up in their beds until that time. I can understand some people wanting to sleep in – but if a population does it en masse then there is definately something spooky going on – bwwhaaaahhaha!

When it is a public holiday everyone obviously stays at home and prays to the gods to spare them, but before and after you need to get down to the shops and buy sixteen loaves of breed and enough canned soup to last you at least twenty years.

Milk doesn’t keep that long – but buy lots of it anyway so you can use it for trade in the short term trade, and eventually a tool to mark out your territory.

Naturally you need to pay in suffering for all the food that you have purchased so it is appropriate to stand in queue for twenty minutes while the one open check-out in the store processes each customer. Just because this happens consistently every week – even when there isn’t a public holiday is no reason to change staffing levels.

Welcome to Canberra – now take a ticket and get in line.

Qantas – the business carrier?

I’m heading to Sydney tonight to finish up a class on Thursday and Friday. Chris had to fly back to Melbourne for a much more important client engagement. While I have a spare moment I thought I might catch up on some blogging and e-mail.

I’m actually sitting on the floor in the Qantas terminal there there are only two double power points as far as I can see, when I arrived someone was sitting in the seats close enough to those points to use them.

What I would love to see at the Canberra terminal is a change in seating arrangements. For the same amount of room Qantas could set up several rows of work spaces where business travellers could plug in their laptops and get some work done – if they were really forward thinking they might even provide wired network access as a component of the cost of the ticket.

If I look at the Virgin Blue terminal less than two hundred metres away, they have desks that people can sit at with power sockets (although no phone points).

Unfortunately I’m not a member of Qantas Club and the wireless signal is too weak out here in the cattle yards to get a reliable connection. All this implies that Internet connectivity is a luxury item when in fact its not.

Anyway – the afternoon rush should be over soon, so at least I’ll be sitting comfortably.

Stop Press: Dr. Neil and Dave Glover just walked past on their way to their flight. Its a small world.

Outlook vNext: I want CTRL-Q to work on folders.

I’ve got a lot of feeds to get through each night to keep on top of things that are happening in the .NET work. When I am short on time I tend to mark-as-read some of the non-technology feeds that I subscribe to to get rid of the noise.

To make that a quick process I would like to be able to run down through the list of folders that NewsGator generates in Outlook and if I don’t spot anything I am interested in just press CTRL-Q and mark the entire folder (and sub-folders as read).

The frustraiting thing is that at the moment when you select a folder the focus is left on the folder level, but a message in the folder is selected, so pressing CTRL-Q just affects that message, so you can’t even press CTRL-A followed by CTRL-Q without first tabbing to the right UI element first.

Why background compilation can be a bad idea.

Darren told me about Geoff’s issue with VB.NET over lunch today. After reading the post for myself I can’t help but have a bit of a chuckle – especially because he’s trying to blame a blatant VB.NET compiler bug on the C# compiler.

I’m not sure what the real reasons are the C# team didn’t implement background compilation, but I suspect that they may have known that its a remarkably tricky thing to do and if they cocked it up they could easily drop their users in it at critical phases of the project.

VB.NET obviously wasn’t designed for serious work, so they decided to slap it in and hope for the best () knowing that their legion of zealots would blame C#. So lets set the record straight on this one.

C# doesn’t do background compilation, although it does support intellisense intra-project without needing to recompile. This works really well. When the code is compiled it can offer up type information for other projects to consume – this also works well.

However – the VB.NET has a bug where it bombs out reading this type information in specific circumstances which Geoff and Paul Vick have already mentioned. To me this isn’t just a bug its a design flaw. The design flaw isn’t that it breaks, the design flaw is that the background compiler in VB.NET is believed when you hit CTRL-SHIFT-B to order a compile.

When I hit CTRL-SHIFT-B in C# you had better give me CSC.EXE baby otherwise there are going to be words – nasty words. Thats not to say that the C# compiler isn’t perfect, in VS.NET 2002 it had a pretty serious memory leak that anyone that had large solution files would have run in to, and from time to time assemblies and their PDB files can get out of sync and you need to do a full rebuild.

I think the reason this now all works in VS2005 is that the underlying build system is MSBuild and it actually runs VBC.EXE to compile code, and project references are also fed into the build system just like source files.