Pickabar Blog

Two days ago I woke up early and built myself a Longhorn Virtual PC. Unfortunately, the OS was practically unusable. It took 10-20 seconds just to paint the start menu. Well, it turns out I installed the wrong ISO. I used the CHK, or debug, build. Yesterday I built a new virtual PC using the FRE build and it works like a champ. Still not a racehorse by any stretch of the imagination (it is a dev preview after all), but definitely usable.

This morning I wrote my first Longhorn application, a simple exe that displays a windows with the text “Hello World”. It’s was written in straight C# though, as I had some problem getting my XAML version’s project file to work with MSBUILD. I’ll try to knock out something a little more impressive on the flight home.

Ok, don’t forget Longhorn, I’m just kidding. At the same time, I think the overall greatness that is Longhorn (and Avalon, and WinFS) has kind of drowned out some of the cool stuff available in the Whidbey release of the .Net Framework. My favorite (for the moment) is something small but exceedingly obvious.

If you’ve written C# code, you’ve probably had to do something like this quite a few times:

 function isNumberic() { 	try 	{ 		int.Parse(myValue); 		return true; 	} 	catch(FormatException fex) 	{ 		return false; 	} }

That’s because the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the framework don’t support any other method for determining whether a string can be interpreted as an integer or any of the other base types that support parse.

Well, Whidbey introduces the TryParse method which accomplishes the same thing the isNumeric function I wrote earlier in the post does, but without using Exceptions. That means big performance gains, because Exceptions are pretty expensive. Beyond that, exceptions are intended to be used for *ahem* exceptional cases, not for running tests.

Once again MS shows that it’s really listening to the feedback that they get from the community.

Ok, let me stop typing so I can pay attention to this session.

Pickabar has landed in the heart of the west side…or at least downtown Los Angeles. I left NY from La Guardia Airport yesterday at 1:29, had a two hour stopover in PDC has officially begun!

For the last year or so I’ve been getting progessively more scared of flying. On the way back from the big convention in NO, I nearly had a panic attack. For some reason, that didn’t happen this time. I slept through most of the first leg of the flight, and read a bunch of hip hop, rock and video game magazines on the second leg from Nashville to Los Angeles. I’m not sure what made me start having a fear of flying, but the magazines seem to have done the trick of getting me over it.

I’m staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown LA. It’s a pretty impressive hotel, with fish shaped waterfountains and glass elevators. Unfortunately, my window faces the inside of the hotel, and is only about ten feet away from one of the elevators. I discovered this as I was laying down on the bed relaxing after the trip…I made eye contact with a lady on the elevator, and almost felt rude for not waving. I’m going to have to rememer to keep those curtains shut.

I’d originally planned on going out last night, but the travel and time difference had me unable to escape the cushy bed. Oh well, for once in my life I woke up early and without my usual wakeup call from Sarah.

This morning I showed up at the convention center ready for some pre-conference sessions. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the registration materials closely enough and didn’t realize that there was a separate registration (and fee) necessary to attend these sessions, so no dice. I guess I’ll go kick around LA for a while.

I’m going to be at the convention for the rest of the week, so expect nothing but rampling trip posts for the week readers.

So any updates during the next week will probably revolve around my experiences at PDC and (hopefully) all of the cool technology I’ll get to play with. I’m already worrying about turbulence, but a few shots of Jameson should clear that up.

I’m off…

I’m a big fan of video games, and so I was well on the hype bandwagon before the XBOX was even launched. I pre-ordered mine from Amazon, and called them daily when they somehow lost my console in transit. I’ve been playing XBOX almost exclusively since the day it finally arrived, and I’ve had tons of fun with games like Halo, Splinter Cell and Kotor. In fact, my eyes hurt when I go back to playing Playstation games (anti-aliasing is your friend). The XBox is my primary game console, as well as my primary DVD player.

Around January, my ‘box started having a ton of dirty disk errors even with brand new games. After a week of having the errors with increasing frequency, I decided to call customer service. It turned out that there was a known issue with some batches of the launch ‘boxes, and they gave me instructions for getting a free repair even though my warranty had expired. They promised to have the new box back to me in 7-14 days, and it was back in about seven. Well, back figuratively, they sent me a new box. It was annoying to have to pack it and ship it (ok, annoying for Sarah), but no big whoop.

Unfortunately, my second ‘box gave up the ghost on Friday. I turned it on to play a few games of NBA Street Vol. 2 and it started making a weird clicking noise. After a few minutes the tray button started blinking red and a message came on the screen advising me to contact customer service. I rebooted the machine a few times and finally it managed to boot into the game. A few hours later I decided to play again, and the error message came back.

I (ok, Sarah) shipped the Xbox to customer service this morning. It’s $99 for the repair, since my warranty period has ended, on top of the $62 it cost me for shipping. This is a big opportunity for Sony to get back in my good graces as I’ve had the PS2 since it’s launch and it’s never even hiccuped. I’m on my second XBox, and I’ve had tons of game disks that had to be buffed to a polish in order to work. I’m annoyed. I can’t imagine I’m alone in my experience, which really makes me worry for the future of the console. It’s great to have a built in hard drive, but not if the things keep breaking down.

I’m very annoyed.

I’ve had my old Motorola phone for about two years now. When I first got it, it was pretty cutting edge and I got a lot of compliments about it. As things go in the world of gadgets, it’s now a dinosaur and I’ve actually gotten comments from fellow gadget freaks who were surprised I hadn’t upgraded.

I’ve been thinking about getting a new phone for the last few months, but the small amount of fiscal wisdom I still have kept telling me not to waste money. Well, for the last month or so my old phone has refused to charge or hold onto a charge. I replaced the charger thinking a loose connection might be the culprit, but I still had trouble getting the old timer to charge. I could have tried buying a new battery, but the charge problems were just enough to silence that savings minded thought.

So, anyway, yesterday I swung by Verizon Wireless and bought a new LG VX6000. I’ve only had it for a day, but I’m pretty happy with it so far. The UI is pretty simple to use, and the physical layout and size are great. The new phone is also much lighter than my old model, which rocks.

The VX6000 is a camera phone, but the pictures aren’t really anything to write home about. Still, it will be great to be able to post photos of friends and strangers caught in embarrassing positions. Don’t worry, I won’t be contributing to Mobile Asses or anything.

The coolest feature of the new phone is the ring tones. I stumbled (okay, googled) onto a post on Howard Forums that explains how to use your voice as a ringtone. Yes! One step closer to my dream of a talking computer a la Star Trek! I’m going to snip the post here so I don’t lose the instructions.

Here’s the contents of the original post:

Posted by: asvedin

You can use your voice as a ringtone.
menu-tools(8)-voice memo(3)-New(left soft key)-{record your about to be new ringtone-example”will you hurry and answer the phone, someone is trying to call you” or have your frind record his name as their ringtone}

go into camera menu(1)-send pix msg(3)-put anything in the address slot(you will not actually connect anywhere), go down to sound, push OK and menu pops up pick VOICE MEMO, select the voice memo that you want as ringtone,hit the send button, then hit the end button right away. Go back into camera menu, into pix outbox(5)-right soft key(options)-save sound(5)- name the sound what ever your heart desires,you can now go into “my media(7)” and into music where it will be located.

For those Outlook users who don’t read Scobleizer, the link of the day for Pickabar is Kase’s Blog. I’ve already added the registry key for viewing mime headers as per and I’m geeked.

Excuse the pun, it’s Sunday. I should be reading through some design documents for work, but instead I’m web surfing…what I won’t do for you the reader!

Joel On Software has a really accessible post on text encoding. Must read, even for experienced developers. Unicode, ANSI, little endian…you’ll be the life of any party after a quick read through.

Infinite Matrix asked Science Fiction writers for their responses to the california election.

[via Boing Boing Blog]

“Just how large is 87 billion dollars exactly? It’s this large, about the size of three costco warehouses by the looks of it. “

– Metafilter