Posts by Gilgamesh 35 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Sep 2007
... why the suits love Excel so much and fail to grasp the simple concept that a database is for storing data and a spreadsheet is for working out the VAT on my invoice.
Although the last Excel addict I worked for asked me if I'd ever "written a database in Cold Fusion". Imagine my shame when I admitted I hadn't.
why is everyone so obsessed with Javascript performance? When do you ever sit there in front of your browser thinking "hmmm, this script is really taking a long time to add a table row and apply a CSS style" ?
You don't. No one does. Chasing JS performance is a waste of time, for the vast majority of users it is completely irrelevant.
on his visit to Manchester 50 years ago. This is an email she sent me last week (yes, my mum can use a computer) ...
"I was young - really young at the time of Gagarin`s visit to Manchester. I was at A.E.I. (later G.E.C.) when he came. It was VERY emotional. It was the height of the Cold War. All here were mighty suspicious of Russia and it`s evil intentions. And then - here comes this incredibly brave handsome man - forever smiling - to see us. He was so open and genuinely friendly. He was greeted with all the adulation he deserved... It was very moving. Up to seeing him in the flesh, we believed in the Cold War. When we saw him in the flesh, and after he had gone; we were left with the lasting and deep question of `what Cold War? WHAT is it all about? This man is no Cold War....`. From there it went on as you know, and suspicion started to drop away. But it was Yuri Gargarin`s visit that was the beginning of the end of total hostilities. Very moving indeed... He inspired us and we just loved him.... When I found out he had been killed I was (and still am) very sad indeed. I wonder whether they got rid of him..... He certainly did not fit Russia`s big plan at the time."
HTML5 will never, NEVER be as "feature rich" as Flash or Silverlight. So we're now stuck with developing in Flash with all the baggage that comes with. Isn't it time there was a real open-source cross-browser rich media standard? And wouldn't Silverlight have been a good candidate for exactly this?
I played along, caller asked me to do start - run - then type "prefetch" and press enter. Apparently this displays "a list of corrupted files downloaded from the internet". So not the Windows prefetch cache then. I kept them on the phone about 15 minutes by playing dumb, just wanted to run up their phone bill. Eventually I just said I knew they were scamming me and they hung up. Good fun trolling them for a while though.
awwww hell, I wanted him to live forever
Every time I pick up a Gibson LP it amazes me to think that those instruments have been in pretty much continuous production, virtually unchanged since 1954. I can't think of any other piece of design that has endured as long as that and it's very sad to say goodbye to the last great pioneer of music technology.
Well done Les, you got it absolutely right first time.
SilverLight is beautiful, delightful to use, works from ANY webserver and offers a range of services, functionality and client/server integration that Flash can only dream of. So why is it going to fail? Because MS are leaking what should be Alpha versions onto the net and promoting it (like the original AJAX extensions) in a way that suggests it's a developer's weekend hobby project that the marketing department have suddenly gained an interest in.
So instead of proper databinding, version 1 has Flashy (note capitalisaton) video processing and filters. Instead of datagrids we get arty-farty 3D image galleries. Instead of a usable presentation layer for server-side code we get silly pointy-clicky-drag-round-the-screen-ooh-it-looks-like-we're-in-Torchwood navigation that no one really needs.
Make it run on Windows Mobile, release some FREE tools for C# SilverLight development, give us a WYSIWYG XAML editor, let me create Silverlight assemblies in VS2005, stop releasing half-arsed betas and promote SilverLight as a serious competitor to Flash and it could (and should) find a very good share of the market. As things stand, it'll be dead within 18 months. And deservedly so. Because it sucks. Big time.
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