On a side note, I’ve loving this blog thing. I used to have to wade through tons of noise on mailing lists and newsgroup or meet up with my DevelopMentor colleagues at some conference to get this kind of nugget. Now, because blog software is so cheap and easy and my friends are hopelessly wordy, I can listen to the signal only and spend the rest of the day with my family.
At Demo, Robert finds Akimbo, which marries a Personal Video Recorder to the video content currently being produced for the Internet. For those Internet programs that haven’t already done so, I assume that they’ll be adding commercials, but right now, this is what cable used to be before they started charging me a monthly rate to watch ads. I don’t know anything about pricing and I’d like to be able to try it out on my PC first w/o any extra hardware, but Akimbo seems like the next logical step of turning any TV into a view on a/v content, whether it’s live or cached, broadcast or downloaded.
The final step, I think, is to be able to consume any of my cached a/v from any PC/TV in my house, whether the a/v is cached manually by ripping a CD or DVD or whether it’s cached automatically via a hunk of PVR software running on a server. Can I do that today w/o spending thousands of dollars? Is the XBox Media Center Extender the answer?
As I’ve always suspected, authors are posting their own reviews on Amazon. It’s that anon thing — gets you ever time. Of course, they justify their actions because anonymous folks get to say bad things about their books and they need to defend themselves (the other side of the anon coin).
For the record (although how can you really trust a statement like this?), I never post reviews on my own books and I always put my name on any review or feedback I give of any kind. I do shamelessly ask for reviews when I get emails about my book, but at least I’m open about it. : )
As a computer boy and a producer of words in a row (and a frustrated novelist), I found Cory Doctorow’s thoughts on eBooks specifically and copyright in general to be very interesting. Don't know that I agree, but what fun is it to only consume content with which you agree? That's why I always listen to Rush when I can. : )
Nathan Dunlap and Jonathan Russ work together as designer and coder to build splitting bars in Avalon:
“Boy was I happy when he got back to me with a really simple solution that I have found is really easy to reuse in a lot of scenarios. I love experiences that really show me that the designer/developer split is going to be really graceful. It’s pretty cool when the design can start with me mocking up something and handing it off to the developer who can then build logic into it. It’s even better when the developer logic isn’t so intertwined with my styles and layout that I can hardly touch it without breaking something. This way I get to use my design skills at the prototype stages and early skeletal stages, and I also get to get my hands dirty in the real code at the fit and finish stages. All you designers who have spent hours refining your designs only to have your designs mangled when they get implemented in real code… your day is coming.”
BTW, if it seems like a list a lot of community Avalon pieces on my site, it’s because there’s a lot of community activity in Avalon. If you’re doing WinFS or Indigo work and I’m not seeing it, please let me know!
Developer building tools always want to know how to make an app that works well as both a console and a GUI. Junfeng describes two interesting techniques, one used by VS.NET and one used by ildasm. I've done the VS.NET technique myself before and it works well, although the details can get a bit hairly. I haven't yet built an app where twiddling the bits with editbin is necessary, but hey, whatever makes you happy. : )
