Posted by Miguel Moreno on 12th August, 2008
We all know that you can ask for directions to the same destination multiple times and get different answers each time. They will all lead you to your destination; however, some direction may get you there faster, some have a more scenic panorama, some with clear instructions and others are difficult to follow. The exact same is true for software development; each developer will write code their own way and have a reason as to why some function was written a certain way. However, with software, a key requirement is that we often don't want the elegance, the scenic nor the "pretty" code, but simply the code that executes...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 11th August, 2008
Visual Studio Service Pack 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 have been released today. The downloads are available here: [list style=”check”] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe) Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso) Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 [/list] “The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 includes a lot of improvements and especially TONS (literally tons) of performance improvements for WPF applications, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Data Services Framework and much more.” PLEASE NOTE: If developing Silverlight apps with Visual Studio, please note that after installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 you must update the Silverlight Tools (more info and...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 26th July, 2008
If you use GMail, you expect to be using a highly robust, efficient and secure application. You also expect that your password is encrypted and transmitted via https when you log in. These are all true statements…however, in regards to encryption, that is as far as it goes. In other words, when you send or receive email, the data is transmitted using plain http protocol, thus in clear text and relatively easily “sniffed”, especially when on a wireless connection. You used to be able to “hack” GMail and just add an -s to the http and make your connection secure when sending and receiving mail, however, that required a...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 19th May, 2008
Over the years I have used both Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMWare. As to which one I prefer and is better, that is a whole other post. In this post I wanted to write about increasing the size of a virtual hard drive of a VMWare machine. When creating a new machine you are asked to define the size of your drive and when you choose 16Gb, you think you’ll never use that much anyways, until, after a while, you realize you do need more. In that case, there are no options to increase the size of your C: drive. Ofcourse, you could always add a new drive (D...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 24th April, 2008
It is no secret that I am not an admirer of the Adobe product line. "Bloated" is the first word that comes to mind… I know that Adobe does a couple products that are quite complex (Photoshop) and those we expect to be large in size, but, there is no reason for a simple rendering tool like the Adobe Reader to be so large, gobble up so much memory and take an eternity to fully launch. As an alternative, I use Foxit PDF reader and have used it for several years. I would recommend this one blindly as it is lightning fast, very light and does its job very...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 26th March, 2008
Distracted from what I was doing, I stumbled upon this excellent and inspiring clip. Truly one clip we should all watch every single day, first thing in the morning… I mean that. We go about our daily lives not realizing how we are wasting our youth; that precious substance of which we have less of, every day that goes by…. that and other magnificent advice. From the Wikipedia article: “Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen Speech are the common names of an essay actually called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997. The most...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 18th March, 2008
You just have to wonder that with today’s technology and vast knowledge that we’d have robots in place everywhere, exactly as we were promised 30 years ago. Most attempts at designing and developing robots that emulate human or animal like movements have been, well, let’s say, not so human or animal like… Until I saw Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog: incredibly beautiful and creepy at the same time. The project is funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), you know the same folks that brought you the Internet… Make sure to check out 0:37…the immediate response is simply incredible and behaves so realistically that I think I even felt a bit sorry for the steel...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 5th March, 2008
Finally Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 has been released. This is a big release with lots of new features, as Scott Guthrie mentions: “Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser.” Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby)." Of course I will be posting some new experiments very soon. Get the download, documentation, SDK and tools via...
Posted by Miguel Moreno on 14th February, 2008
I was thinking about ways of cutting unnecesary spending last night and thought that I tend to waste a few dollars on so many things that doesn’t seem so much at the time, but when it is all added up….well, it adds up. A cup of coffee in the morning, a snack bar in between, sometimes a pastry at midmorning, then lunch and maybe another coffee in the afternoon. A couple of dollars at the time X a few times a day X twenty workdays = a lot of $$$. Think about it, even if it is just lunch at $8 per day for a to go salad or...
