Unlike Om, Scoble, Kevin McDigg and the rest of the techno-pundits with bigger, more heavily-trafficked blogs than this one, we've got real work to do…real man's work. We'll have some articles posted tonight. Stay tuned!
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A couple of people I know actually fell for this site, msfirefox.com, which purports to be a site announcing that Microsoft has purchased Firefox and is releasing it as Microsoft Firefox 2007…
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That Slippery Wii Remote
I've got my hands full with a PS2, XBox 360, a handful of software projects and a life, so the Wii is not likely to be part of my hi-tech entertainment altar in the near future. There's another factor: aside from good looks, a quick wit and a bon vivant approach to life, I have also inherited this from my father: sweaty palms.
Given that the Wii's control — the Wiimote — is a motion-sensitive thing that you're encouraged to wield and movelike a sword, a fishing rod or gun, depending on the game, it comes with a strap that users are encouraged to wear in order to prevent it from accidentally being sent flying across the room. Ed Burnette points to a YouTube video demonstrating what happens when a sweaty-handed player loses his grip:
Nintendo has issued a safety bulletin that explains the proper use of the Wiimote's strap, complete with these rather airline-safety-card-like diagrams:
Included in the safety bulletin is this bit of sage advice:
Hold the Wii Remote firmly
and do not let go.
“Damn,” I can hear some Wii owners saying, “Now they tell me!”
Burnette suggests that Wii oweners might want to get their paws on Wiimote protective sleeves:
or perhaps the skid-proof glove:
Meanwhile, the jokers at the Penny Arcade webcomic suggest that it's some Wii users' lifestyle choices that are ruining their gaming experiences…
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OpenCola Lives On in Swarmcast
I'm sure we've mentioned it before, but in case you didn't know, both George and I worked at OpenCola. George was a biz dev guy, and I was both an user interface developer as well as the developer relations guy. George worked out of New York, while I started off in Toronto, moved to San Francisco to work with co-founder Cory Doctorow and then went back to Toronto after the San Fran office closed.
Globe and Mail technology writer Matthew Ingram recently posted an entry titled Toronto's OpenCola Lives On in Swarmcast. Swarmcast is a “swarming” technology created by Minneapolis-based developer and former OpenColan Justin Chapweske that does peer-to-peer swarm-based file serving in a manner that's conceptually similar to BitTorrent.
In the article, Ingram writes:
So why is BitTorrent a relatively well-known name and Swarmcast is not? Because the two took different approaches to commercializing their software. Bram Cohen chose the “open source” route and released the code for his software so that anyone could use or distribute it (so long as they didn’t charge money for it or claim it as their own). It quickly became the technology of choice for downloading everything from cracked software and illegally copied movies to pornography, although it was also used for distributing large files such as the various flavours of the Linux operating system. And that in turn got the attention of content owners.
Swarmcast, meanwhile, decided to focus on working behind the scenes with companies that would have an interest in distributing large amounts of content over the Internet — including distributing digital films to movie theatres. The company also helps power MLB.com, the major-league baseball service, which distributes huge quantities of video and audio to baseball fans. Not as sexy as doing deals with Hollywood movie studios, but not bad either.
It's nice to see that Justin and company are getting some deals, and it's also nice to see them getting some recognition as well.
Here's a message in the browser tabs that takes advantages of “favicons” (you know, those icons for sites that show up in the address bar)…
Click the image to see the full message.
(I wish I'd come up with the line I used in the title, but some guy at Reddit came up with it first.)
The actual headline at Dr. Dobb's Portal reads Developers Embrace Java, Drop Visual Basic, but the title of this entry sums up my opinion on the matter. But I'll go with the news first and then editorialize.
The recently-released results of an Evans Data Corporation of 430 developers indicate that:
- Use of pre-.NET Visual Basic is down 35% since the spring
- Use of Visual Basic .NET is down 26%
This news shouldn't be too surprising. The last pre-.NET version of Visual Basic, version 6.0 was released in 1998, back during my VB contract development days. The support window for it must be coming to a close, and my guess is that only a few die-hards are using it for new application development rather than maintenance (I myself wrote my last new VB application in 2001 and my last VB maintenance work in 2003).
The development landscape was different back during those VB6 days. A fast home connection meant one of those new 56K modems, a new CD-ROM store seemed to be opening every week and the browser war had only recently turned in Microsoft's favor. The predictions were that the web was just a phase we were passing through; the future was in fat clients, which could provide a rich experience that web apps couldn't. VB6's design made only a few concessions to the web: there was an experimental feature called “HTML forms”, in which you could create VB application forms using HTML instead of VB's form builder (I'm not sure why), and there were countless demo apps showing how easy it was to embed IE into your apps. It certainly wasn't made for the development of web applications. My guess is that aside from a few die-hards — if there are FoxPro die-hards, there must exist VB6 ones — most VB6 use is in the realm of maintenance, not new app development.
VB.NET is a different case: there really isn't much that separates it from C#; it uses the same libraries and for the most part C# in Basic clothing. Given that the difference between VB.NET and C# is so slight, VB's verbosity, the similarity of syntax between Java and C# and that the “VB stigma” meant that a C# programmer would get paid more than a VB programmer, it's not surprising to see the drop in VB.NET use either.
The survey reports that these languages have the top spots:
- Java: 45%
- C/C++: 40%
- C#: 32%
As for the title of this entry, I have to admit that Java development doesn't excite me terribly. Writing Java applications requires a lot of mise en scene with libraries and supporting objects to accomplish the simplest of tasks — why do I have to declare a class just to write a “Hello World” application? Why does there have to be a 294-page book on using arrays? Why are some of Java's brightest lights abandoning ship for things like Ruby?
You can keep your grass clippings and tree bark. I'll take my steak and caesar salad in the form of PHP, Python and Ruby instead.
Says John Battelle: "Now, clearly this is sourced by folks who were Miller lieutenants, but they say Falco's unexpected appointment means one thing: AOL is going to be stripped down and sold off within the next year."