* Posts by Jax 1

15 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2009

Apple's draconian developer docs revealed

Jax 1

and this is

the precise reason why I have never and will never develop for Apple products.

IPhone SDK docs were the same.

I became a developer so I would have some control over my career and life and my successes could be down to talent and determination. Signing up to something like this would be like going back to school.

"Shhhh the adults are talking. Oh and your application "talks back", so we banned it. Fuckity bye!"

Apple turns the flamethrower on Android

Jax 1
Unhappy

OH MY GOD

I've just realised that almost every single bit of software i've ever written infringes on these patents. I'm screwed! :O

Visual Studio 2010 - chunky but has a great personality

Jax 1

RE: .NET is technically incapable of hosting all the different kinds of COM components

I call bullshit. You can interact with all sorts of COM stuff using .NET. Sure there are possibly edge cases I am unaware of and it is not advised (for example) to use managed code + COM to add an extension to FileExplorer for example but i'm not convinced about "technically incapable".

Microsoft re-org hints at Windows and Mobile merge

Jax 1

Interesting post

Interesting post from anonymous coward. If it is true then it bodes well for WinMob. The platform at present isn't in the best of shape.

If it was able to call upon the code and killer apps that exist in the "non-mobile" world then it would gain a huge boost.

As it developer it really irks me that there are a number of items that I can't port to WinMo such as those that rely on emitting MSIL at run-time. If MS just FINISH their conversion of .NET onto mobile then the platform would be full of win.

Google open-source boss comes clean on Android

Jax 1

is / was this Chu chap a developer?

Anything that increases entropy (the number of potentially chaotic states in a given system) is BAD BAD BAD. Because my brain is small and I cannot consider all of the possibilities. Fragmentation increases those possibilities and therefore increases the number of scenarios I don't consider.

Some of these will be bugs.

Therefore my code will have more perceived bugs due to fragmentation. Do I care about bugs? HELL YES, I want them squished.

Ten years of .NET - Did Microsoft deliver?

Jax 1
Thumb Up

Wow @ some of these comments

RE: The article:

"It took Microsoft a further eight years to come up with the idea of a client profile"

They introduced this after 3.5 which added fatties such as WCF, WPF ontop the existing framework. .NET 2.00 is still a pretty small redist. IMO they didn't really need to use client profiles before this.

I've been using it since about 2002 and love it. The amount of thought that has gone into it is amazing and it is beautifully designed. In the 8 years I have been using it I have only encountered 1 bug which was a teeny UI issue on Vista.

In terms of productivity boosting it is excellent, I don't know about these other coders that seem to favour scouring .h files and reading potentially inaccurate documentation. I guess that might be fun but I'd rather just add an assembly and check out the metadata for the docs. Hell, I can even Reflector the assembly and read the actual code instead.

The number of tools, APIs and whatnot is comprehensive. .NET covers a lot of stuff and in most cases you can remain totally in the managed world. Sure it's technically bloat, but if that bloat ensures that my string is...... er.. well a string and I don't have to worry about memory allocations (0xC0000005 anyone? Ain't never seen that caused by .NET) then i'm happy to have that bloat.

To state (as one brave soul did) that you can't create a "proper" application in .NET is an utter, utter nonsense. I've created and worked on numerous apps of numerous size with .NET and any performance issues have been due to shit code, not .NET.

While I agree that there might be more "inept" developers in managed environments than unmanaged ones if you're _really_ competant you'll develop good code and you'll also be able to recognise that a managed environment is logical abstraction and progression to build ontop of a native stack.

I know its nice to talk computer (bits, bytes, pointers) but I prefer to talk in human terms (numbers, strings and references as an abstract concept instead of the absolute pointer). The two are also not mutally exclusive so my knowledge of the former is not lost by commonly using the latter.

.NET Compact Framework sucks tho. Well....mebbe that's too harsh but it's disappointingly sparse in comparison to FF 2.0.

Brown launches 'Zip it, Block it, Flag it' net code for children

Jax 1

OR

We could teach them about spam, fraud and phishing. Maybe even some general security principles?

That'd be a better use of this bluster.

Windows 7's dirty secrets revealed

Jax 1

"we don't really understand these dependancies"

Why is everyone so very shocked by this statement? I don't fully understand the entirity of the C# code base we have here (I know the majority of it) and people call me the systems architect.

Our code base is just an app that runs on WinCE, I would imagine that Windows itself is much, much, much more complex than this.

It would probably be a hell of a mindfuck to place that entire model into your head. Any automated diagram you produce would be insanely hard to read as well. Have you people developed large and complex software? It's hard you know, _really_ hard.

The problem exponentually grows and Windows is huge. So i'm really not surpised. I heard when building Vista each developer was about 6 branches away from the trunk more or less at a minimum. It would take about 6 months for your changes to hit the trunk.

Linux/Unix doesn't have economic pressures, Windows histrorically has. Therefore there are a number of WTFs in the Windows code base. This is what happens when you need to ship by a deadline and on a budget.

T-Mobile coughs to data theft

Jax 1

I disagree

with the gist of your conclusion. I think it is okay for ICO to overplay this. You can have the right conclusion using the wrong reasoning, it's not exactly healthy but then again our society isn't very good at being consistent or sensible. I would cite the smoking ban as a good example of this (I argue the health risks were overblown, but it is out of order that non-smokers just had to tolerate smoking).

Selling personal data is a serious problem and happens all over the place. You can easily ruin someone's day (or days) using their contact information and an auto-dialer. I used to work as a bottom rung teletard salesman and from that experience I know a hell of a lot of shady deals go on with customer data. I called people who insisted they had only given the details of their new number to either a high street bank or a well-known television subscription service. In some cases these people had only had their new number for a week! How did my company end up with these details?

People working in industries that handle customer data are selling the data on and I think it is pretty widespread.

Newspaper story commenter to lose mask for teasing politico's son

Jax 1

Has anyone considered....

what if they're both actually minors? As the comment was anonymous its a possibility. Going to court over what would otherwise be technically a playground argument would be somewhat ridiculous.

Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision

Jax 1

I need a title. This is a title, isn't it nice?

The world isn't "moving on" it is standing still. This is sensationalist reporting. There are many applications of desktop machines, many. Almost all are still relevant. There are a huge number of things that I can't do on mobile now and to be frank there isn't a great deal of progress since I got my first smart device OVER 10 YEARS AGO.

Mobile is going to have to wait so very, very long until it starts "replacing" desktops and thereby threaten the premise of making profit out of releasing solid operating systems.

Windows 7 - the Reg reader verdict

Jax 1

Windows 7 is actually alright!

I've been running it for a month or so now (got it early via MSDN) and I must say it is good!

Quicker boot times (although this is mainly my new and awesome SSD), better support than XP for Usb devices by FAR (I can swap em out a lot and it just automagically handles it). It feels like it handles games better ALT+TAB is much nicer.

Yesterday I plugged in a Mobile Device for the first time, it automatically installed Mobile Device Centre and connected to the device for me. Now that's cool. :)

IT contractors aghast as FSA evicts self-cert mortgages

Jax 1

I can not has title?

The issue is that if you are newly self-employed you wont have 3 years of accounts and thus have sufficient proof to get a mortgage.

To be fair to the banks though I think they should expect at least 3 years of accounts before lending large sums of money to the individual. The workaround is just wait for 3 years.

Microsoft craves iPhone developers for Windows Mobile

Jax 1
Flame

I dev a lot of WinCE

And to be frank in terms of consumer apps I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. All UI options seriously suck unless you re-write the UI from scratch. I'm looking gleefully at stuff like Android for making fun apps.

For business apps, hell yea, it's FTW cause business like to buy WinMobile devices and don't care about the UI so much. It's stable and its worth the pain. I'll still use it for business but if MS think there is any chance its going to get me produce my "fun" spare time apps on the platform of pain that is CE then they are completely off their rocker.

And if they're reading then please, please, please put more effort into .NET CF. Port Reflection.Emit, sort out the UI and stop pissing around giving us LINQ (which is just syntactic sugar) as opposed to giving us something that enables us to do NEW things without the time consuming process of writing C++ / C and the P/Invoke code.

Lamson - email app coding without the palm sweat

Jax 1

@The Zed Shaw Flame

Wow awesome to see someone such as Tom Lane provide such a critique, except wait.. you're not Tom Lane, you're not even a Zed Shaw. Wait who the fuck is Chris Thomas Alpha? On what basis do you have the right to knock people for "not doing anything" when I you haven't "done anything". Not that it should matter anyway, review Lamson based on Lamson not on personalities or past victories/defeats.

If you really can't be bothered to do your research Zed Shaw made Mongrel, a webserver that a whole bunch of people use. He writes funny stuff that gets high votes on Hacker News (as articles on interest). I think he had been appointed CTO at Bear Stearns prior to it imploding (so it ain't like this guy doesn't have talent, ability and connectections).

Rails is a Ghetto was more an attack on the people in the rails community than the tech (aside from his tangent in regards to Ruby's threading model). Why do people interpret that post as just an attack on the tech?