Wednesday, July 23, 2003

When I visit Redmond, I share an office with Andy Oakley, the PM for GotDotNet Workspaces. Workspaces was recently released from beta to v1.0 and when that happened, Andy sent around feedback from users.

Of course, folks love it in general (even some hard-to-please MS internals), but I was surprised to see to some folks were using private Workspaces for their team’s main source code base. I shouldn’t have been surprised; this makes a lot of sense. Private workspaces provide a protected space for file sharing, discussion, bug tracking and source code control. The last time I set up a commercial software development team, I needed weeks to get all of this picked out, installed and working and I needed an IT guy to keep it running and backed up. I remember hearing about a 3rd party that was going to bundle all of this together for a fee, but never got around to it. With Workspaces, MS already provides the whole team development environment, including VS.NET integration and a web interface, and it’s free! Plus, with a private workspace, only folks on your team get access.

IMO, the only big piece that was missing from Workspaces was a way to pull down all of the source onto a build machine for regular automatic builds. For commercial work, this is key. So, Andy, tired of my whining, built a command line tool for pulling down all source from a GDN Workspace (and put it up in it’s own GDN Workspace). Personally, I’d be slightly happier if it took arguments from the command line instead of a .config file, but that’s easily added from the Genghis CommandLineParser class for those that are interested. Enjoy!

Here. The one where I really, really try to love BuyMusic.com.

If this is spam, I fail to see what they're selling, but I was amused anyway: "I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Since nobody here seems to be able to get me what I need (safely here to me), I will have to build a simple time travel circut to get where I need myself. I am going to need an easy to follow picture diagram for a simple time travel circut, which can be built out of (readily available) parts here in 2003. Please email me any schematics you have. I will pay good money for anything you send me I can use Or if you have the rechargeable AMD dimensional warp generator wrist watch unit available, and are 100% certain you have a (secure) means of delivering it to me please also reply. Send a separate email to me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com." I admit to sending an email with my regrets (what time travel-related plans I possess are incomplete), but expressed my willingness to accept "good money." : )

Here. It was completely vapid and intellectually void, but I stayed up 'til 2:30a last night reading it while various alpha bits installed on my laptop. Nice mental floss.

Here. The one where I get to see where BillG taped his anti-trust testimony.

I *really* want to own my digital songs, so I’ve been dying for a real site to purchase them one at a time, instead of buying entire albums I don’t want or ripping the songs off of the albums I do own. Towards that end, I was excited about BuyMusic.com and immediately spend $4.95 on five Avril songs. Overall, it was not a happy experience.

What I love about BuyMusic.com is the site:

• The web site is very usable and full-featured, making finding, listening to and ordering artists, songs and albums easy
• The price is right: $.99/song and $9.49/album
• I really wanted to immediately find the web service so that I could write a program to go through my wife’s bootleg mp3s and purchase them

Unfortunately, I hate BuyMusic.com because of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) experience:

• On one machine, I could listen to all of the songs, but only after a “DRM upgrade” (whatever that means)
• On another machine, I had to do systems administration to play a song (DRM doesn’t like it when you’re a guest and an administrator in the same account). This is fine for me, because I can chase the error to the web page and do the systems administration on my account, but what about normal people? Then I had to do another DRM upgrade. *Then* I had to log in with my user name and password on *every* song! That means I have to roam around to every machine in my house that might possibly want to listen to the music, because only I know the email/password for the songs I buy. What a PITA!
• I’m allowed three machines? Why? I can take my CDs to any machine in the house and my cars. I want to own this music for life and I *know* I’ll have more than 3 machines before the end of it. I tried it on four machines and it didn’t turn me away, which is nice, but how long will that last?
• How are these WMA files going to work with my mp3 player? Even if the format works, will the DRM get in the way?
• What about if I download a bunch of songs on my way out the door? If I’m on an airplane, I can’t jack into the Internet to obtain the license and there was no “pre-license” batch mode that I could find to save me from obtaining the licenses one at a time

The whole experience made me want to cry. The site was so great, but the playback was *so* hard. Why do I have to be treated like a child? I’m dying to pay for the music I want, but I don’t want to be penalized for it. I really wanted to find the inevitable hacking tool to strip the DRM off of the music I downloaded so that I could use it more freely, but what’s the point of that? This kind of hacking would break the license agreement and is no better than downloading mp3s (although the the latter is a hell of a lot more convenient).

Here. Don has a nice write-up of delegates vs. interfaces as points of extensibility. Bottom line: delegates are more flexible than interfaces.

Here. "If you haven’t heard of kbAlertz, it’s a website I setup to email me (and other subscribers) when Microsoft publishes new KB articles for their technologies. I’ve finally gotten around to exposing the Kbs as a RSS feed. Basically, pick the technology you want to subscribe to, and I’ll expose the latest 10 Microsoft Knowledge base articles as a RSS feed."