Saving the Universe from Boskone and Bugs
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I find that (a) I don’t tend to write very many technical entries on this blog (which offends some readers), and (b) I feel constrained about posting on possibly-controversial topics, like politics or religion. Not that my thoughts are *that* controversial – and Microsoft has never explicitly prohibited me from saying anything I want – but warranted or not, I can’t help but feel a certain implicit responsibility when posting to an msdn.com site. Therefore, I’m starting a new blog at http://galactic-patrol.blogspot.com. It will be mostly the same stuff that I have on this blog; probably more of my personal opinions on things. Don’t expect to see anything that is likely to get me fired. <grin> However, once the current rev of Indigo leaves NDA-land, you can expect to see some posts about it.
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Reason #193 why I like working for Microsoft: I’m leaving work today, and as usual I take the elevator down to the lowest level of the underground parking (there are four underground levels). I get off the elevator and there, in the elevator entry room I see three of my team mates. One is on drums; one is on guitar; and the last is on bass guitar. They’re standing there in the sub-sub-basement, practicing their music. Now *that* is a garage band!
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You so often hear about crappy service from credit card and financial services companies; it was a delight to read this very positive report by Chris Sells on BankOne’s actions in response to credit card fraud on one of his accounts: “Apparently somebody got a hold of the number and started making charges with it today. A $19 charge was approved, but the $331 charge swung the BankOne AI software into action and the charge was declined. They called right away to confirm the activity and when I didn't recognize it, they credited me the $19, canceled the card, put a new one in the mail, sent all three major credit card agencies a notice so that my credit rating wouldn't be affected and put an affidavit in the mail so that I could swear that the $19 charge wasn't mine. All of this defense against identity theft cost me 5 minutes on the phone, a few days wait while I receive my new card, a signature and $0. Amazing.”
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I read here that Rory is coming to work at Microsoft. Outstanding! I have to admit that when I do my daily blog reading, I often skip over Rory’s, perhaps just admiring the titles, but leaving them unread on my to-do list – because I’m saving them up for a special time when I can really sit down and savor his bits of humor and wisdom. Skimming just won’t do when it comes to Rory’s posts; oh, no! Welcome!
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I was reading a post about Visual Studio refactoring support in the next version, and I noticed that it described the process of refactoring the order of parameters for a function as something like this: 1. click on a function name 2. select refactor->reorder parameters from the menu 3. adjust the ordering on a dialog that pops up 4. click OK to apply the changes everywhere This seems unnecessarily cumbersome to me. The same post talks about the existence of “smart tags” in the UI. You should be able to grab the smart tag for a particular parameter, and just drag that parameter into a different position in the list. This should do the full refactoring, including fixing up all the calls to that function. You should be able to grab the smart tag and “throw it away” too – just like you can do to column headers in Outlook. That would do a “remove parameter” refactoring.
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Despite my skepticism about head-mounted displays, I remain enthusiastic about the possibilities of ‘augmented reality’ – it is just too cool for words! Here you see a research project that lets folks run around a (real not virtual) college campus, and shoot at monsters from the game ‘Quake’ that are superimposed on their vision. The game knows about the real geometry of the campus, so it can present or hide the monsters appropriately. There are so many interesting directions this technology could go – games, information about real-world objects and events, even replacing a real object with a different representation of it. In theory, for example, you could make everyone you meet look like a dinosaur. (Not sure why you’d want to, but hey – different strokes for different folks!)
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I noticed a post recently that commented on TiVo’s upcoming support for larger hard drives. This reminded me of another idea I had – TiVo should support additional external hard drives. After all, when I see something like La Cie’s new 1.6 TB external hard drive, the gadget freak in me immediately wants to order one. Unfortunately, I can’t quite rationalize it to myself – my little 60GB laptop drive seems to be doing a fine job of holding all my digital pictures, why do I really need 1.6TB? If TiVo allowed me to plug that drive in, however, I would be much more motivated to buy that honkin’ big drive! Heck, TiVo and La Cie should do some kind of cross-branding promotional thingie – they could make bank!
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