I do not blog on political issues, but this one is kind of different.
Couple of weeks ago I received a letter from my ISP provider (Rogers Cable), stating that days of unlimited downloads are over. More or less. Rogers capped the monthly transfer depending on your subscription plan, which in my case means maximum 95 GB / month for sum of upload and download.
They started to monitor the traffic in December and will start charging for the transfer exceeding the cap in June.
Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well).
I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather unevenly divided between Java (about 70 %), Web-ish technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, some Ruby) and OS-X (Objective C) which I am trying to squeeze in and get finally started. But Microsoft is such important platform that one must pay attention what is going on.
Guess what are three most useful tools without which no proper Ottawa household can exist ? Snow shovel, snow pusher and car window ice scratcher. If the number was 4, the next would be snowblower. Up to yesterday, our family was in safe position being equipped with several shovels, four or five scratchers and one pusher.
Then disaster stroke: my son broke the pusher while moving away few cube meters of snow we removed from the roof. In case you do not understand - removing snow from roof is another favorite winter leisure time activity in Ottawa: almost everybody is doing it. Not that it would be so much fun, but because of the dreadful consequences - avoid it and you may end up like this guy.
Microsoft Press is handing out 3 books:
- Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo
- Introducing ASP.NET Ajax by Dino Esposito
- Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney
Silverlinght 1.0 is probably a bit outdated (with 1.1/2.0 close), but the others should be good, judging by the authors. Dino Esposito wrote couple of very good books on ASP.NET and .NET.
See this blog for more details and download links.
If the world of physical objects would governed with the same rules as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does impose on all things digital, scissors would be illegal and you could end up in jail for manufacturing, and maybe even owning or using them. Crazy ? Well, see this presentation and judge for yourself.
This "law" is currently impacting our friends south of the border only, but it is very real that it will soon become a law in Canada as well.
As long as you are using OS-X, this is something worthy looking at: the MuPromo is running the annual bundle offer with (currently) 8 applications, worth $534 for the mentioned $49.99. The sale is on for 4 more days. The way how it works is that at certain marks, additional applications will be added to the bundle (for the same price) and will be made available to everybody who purchased the bundle. Including me :-). Currently, the sales are at > 1600, the next app will be added at 2400 (pretty sure it will happen) and the last one at 5000 (fairly likely).
Today is a special day for this blog as two bit boundaries were crossed. This is post number 256, which means that I have used all 8 bit numbers for numbering and jumped into nine bit space. The byte is not enough any more - vive la 0x100.
Another boundary crossed today is number of hits as tracked by Wordpress (which does not count my visits). In this case the number reached and crossed was 0x8000 or 32768 decimal, which brings us to upper half of the 16 bit address space. From today, full 16 bit counter must be used - and it must be even "unsigned short int" :-).
On previous weekend I had great opportunity to spend a lot of time listening to books and podcasts. The opportunity was long drive to Quebec City and back, plus the two days spent walking around with camera, taking pictures, enjoying the differences in style and architecture and listening to Seth Godin's book - Small is the new big.
There is nothing in this book that would actually require to drive almost 500 km one way - you can comfortably get the same benefit out of it without moving out from your favorite sofa, walking around your neighborhood or on a treadmill (hi Joel). The real reason being in the capitol of La Belle Province was Skate Canada - Grand Prix competion in figure skating. And while my wife was watching Jeff Buttle, Joannie Rochette and many others - which is her favorite leisure time activity, I was walking, taking pictures and listening - which is mine.
With my new Macbook Pro on the way from China, I have started the big consolidation of hardware and software platforms. The goal is to improve the change management of software development environments, increase mobility and increase stability of the environments.
The way how I am going to do that is moving all "fragile" environments to virtual machines. My most fragile environment is Windows XP (I am still resisting Vista). What I mean "fragile" is well known "software rot" of the developers machine, caused by frequent installs and uninstalls (or upgrades) of components, tools, etc. After some time (which varies by the kind and frequency of installs), the machine becomes more and more sluggish, registry bloated and occurrence of weird things more frequent - up to the point that developer decides to blow off the Windows install and start from scratch.
I have to confess, I did it :-). But no, I did NOT do it right away after Friday 6PM when Leopard became publically available. I managed to wait for whole 5 hours... partly because I was not sure whether the 6PM is local time or Cupertino time - and partly because the Apple store was stubbornly saying that my MBPro would ship with Tiger. At about 10:30 there was a "sticker" saying that all new Macs will be shipped with Leopard ... and after that, you have to agree I had no choice ....