Scott Hanselman

UPDATE: In record time, Sarah from Ugobe included feedback in the comments below. Just be clear, I was reticent to do a review at all, because I know how much work goes into things like this, especially for a small startup that pours their hearts into a product like this. It just turns out that it wasn't for me, and I had high, perhaps unreasonable expectations that weren't met. That said, please do read Sarah from Ugobe's thoughts in the comments below.

I've always wanted a little robot, maybe a dog or something that would wander around the house and be charming, but wouldn't require, ahem, care and feeding. I have enough trouble keeping myself and my family fed, the last thing I need is an actual animal to keep alive. I'm not a dog or cat person, sue me. ;)

Anyway, the Sony Aibo was a good idea, but it was (and is) too expensive (unless you, Dear Reader, want to loan/sell me your Aibo?) for my tastes.

This Christmas I got myself the family a Pleo baby dinosaur using blog money, although the WAF on this one was at a new low. Seriously. But, I persevered.

Again, as with the iPhone, the Wife was correct.

What a profoundly disappointing toy. To be clear, it is a toy and an expensive one at that. Fortunately The Sharper Image has a good return policy.

The Bad

• It's slow. It doesn't wander around the house. If you leave it alone for more than 10 minutes it "falls asleep." Basically you need to actively touch it for it to stay awake.
• Horrendous battery life. It has a pack of what looks like 4 AA batteries lashed together that fits inside it's stomach. However, you get only one pack, you have to remove it to charge and you're lucky to get an hour out of it. Any idea that this thing would wander around the house for a half-day are dashed at this point.
• It's noisy. I don't mean it's noisy with cute dinosaur noises, I mean it's noisy with gear gnashing sounds. This destroys any sense of realism, for me. The wife commented also.
• It's less-than-clever and slow in the head. You have to poke at it for 10-15 seconds, it seems, before it reacts with tricks and such
• Within a few minutes (maybe 10) of petting it, the paint started to flake off. The website says this "makes your Pleo personal" but I think it just shows that painted rubber is a sub-optimal fake skin.
• Still no word on when a Developer SDK is coming out. Perhaps expectations of a company are high given blogs and what not, but when a company has no visible blog and is slow with the updates (cough: Mozy) then folks quickly lose confidence, IMHO.

The Good

• It's got an SD slot and tiny USB, so upgrades are supposed to be easy, unfortunately according to their site even now as we approach the February after Christmas there is still no upgrade to their OS. Why should I care? Because apparently the current Pleo LifeOS has a bug where the Pleo doesn't adapt or grow correctly.
• It's fairly sturdy and nice to look at if it's not moving. So, as a piece of sculpture, sure. As soon as it moves, the illusion is over.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if it were faster, quieter, more interesting, but even my 2 year old grew tired and frustrated with it as it didn't "engage" or seem to notice he was there as he tried to feed it the plastic leaf it comes with. As soon as it failed to connect with him, that was the end of Pleo. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I had high hopes and was very bummed by this whole thing and won't make this mistake again.

If you can borrow or rent or observe one first, I'd really recommend caution with this robot.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My ninety-eighth podcast is up. In this episode, Scott sits down with his Dad and talks about growing up as a geek, raising geeks, and the sacrifices families make to help their geek children succeed.

(BTW: Grandma is cool and Grandpa was also!)

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show
• ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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As a new Microsoft employee, I like the new-found pragmatism at the Microsoft Developer Devision, typified by projects like the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions and MVC. Certainly we all know MVC as a concept is nothing new, but it is new as a philosophy for the ASP.NET team (IMHO).

Remember that ASP.NET WebForms render using a Control Hierarchy which is fundamental to the whole gestalt of what we think of as ASP.NET. You put an <asp:label> inside an ASPX page and as soon as you mark it 'runat="server"' you've added it to the Control Hierarchy. Any string literals around your control also become part of that hierarchy of objects. The PreRender event is an opportunity for you to affect that tree of controls before the Render event fires and they turn into Angle Brackets (usually HTML). ASP.NET represented a swinging of the needle, as it were, from the Classic ASP way of doing things to an artificial event model that gave us state where there was no state. It added layers and production value and it sounded good, and still sounds good to lots of people.

However, this leaves a gap in the music. Sometimes I just want to control the stream myself. I want the system to step aside and let me get down to it. Not all the way aside, but certainly out of my general field of view. MVC Frameworks with View engines like ASP.NET MVC and Monorail's many template options and the Django template language and HAML...

(Note to self, write HAML view factory for ASP.NET MVC. UPDATE: Crap! The brilliant Andrew Peters made NHAML this last month and added it to MVC Contrib. New Note to self, crush Andrew Peters for being too awesome.)

…provide a fresh clean new sound to the same old angle-bracket-based music of the past. Clean, simple, lightweight.

Is it MVC that makes this possible? Partially, but we mustn't forget the huge influence of sites like http://www.csszengarden.com and the minimalist markup aesthetic promoted by CSS folks and standards wonks changed the way we think about markup and what can be accomplished with a few H1s and a UL/LI or three.

In a recent MVC design meeting someone said something like "we'll need a Repeater control" and a powerful and very technical boss-type said:

"We've got a repeater control, it's called a foreach loop."

Zing! That's so cool. Get out of my way and let me make some angle-brackets. Again, not for everyone, but for enough people that matters. Open Source projects like MVCContrib and hopefully a bunch of 3rd party component vendor types will drink in that simplicity and the power of statements like that and create helper methods and controls that we want, need and can use, and not just <mvc:TooBigDataGrid/>.

This is a not just a different tune, but a whole different band playing all new music. Not everyone will like the music, and that's why the world has more than one band. This is a Good Thing.

I like to think of ASP.NET MVC as the raw, acoustic version of the more heavily produced and multi-layered ASP.NET WebForms we use today.

I hope the pure intent and zen-like simplicity of a nice clean MVC design stays that way. Sometimes I want to listen to Kanye West, but sometimes I want to listen to John Legend. Or, insert your own musical analogy here. Either way, it's ASP.NET Unplugged as far as I'm concerned.

Related Posts

• ScottGu MVC Presentation and ScottHa Screencast from ALT.NET Conference
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - plus MVC How-To Screencast
• DevConnections - The ASP.NET MVC Framework
• DevConnections and PNPSummit MVC Demos Source Code
• Hanselminutes Podcast 55 - MonoRail as Alternative ASP.NET

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm getting ready to setup an HTC Excalibur and I wanted to post my list of favorite sites to visit with my Mobile Browser and a list of the apps I really need to install to make my Windows Mobile Smartphone complete.

• Amazon Mobile - http://m.amazon.com - A basic, but very usable site, focused on search, that lets folks who've setup their Amazon account ahead of time purchase directly from the phone. Nice if you have Amazon Prime Free Shipping.
• BBC PDA - http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/pda or http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile - BBC has a mobile site and a PDA site, but the PDA site looks best on Smartphones or Blackberries. The best of the BBC on my phone. The mobile site would look good on an old black-and-white WAP Nokia.
• CNN Mobile - http://m.cnn.com - Same here, mobile CNN, some pics, I use this site a lot.
• Engadget Mobile - http://m.engadget.com - My favorite tech and gadget blog, now with mobiley goodness. I wish I could see comments though.
• Hanselman.com - http://www.hanselman.com - Ha! See what I did right there? Back in the day, we taught dasBlog about mobile devices and if you hit hanselman.com from a Blackberry or Windows Mobile browser (and a number of other tiny browsers), we'll detect it and give you a mobile experience. Yay!
• Facebook - http://m.facebook.com - In terms of pure functionality, I'd say that Facebook's mobile site is, hands-down, the most functional. It feels like you can most everything you'd ever want to using only Tiny HTML. This site and this company continue to impress, probably because it's running entirely on Red Bull and 20-year-olds.
• Flight Stats - http://mobile.flightstats.com - This fine site has saved my tuckus a number of times while traveling. Their Airport Chatter section is interesting also.
• Google - http://www.google.com/xhtml - The Tiny XHTML version of Google includes location specific searches and personalization with News, Weather, Movies, etc.
• +1-800-GOOG-411 (+1-800-4664-411) - If you're able to call this number, either domestically or internationally, it's worth a try because it's amazing. Much better than the "1-800-Tell-Me stuff back in the day, but still of the same vein. I use this a LOT.
• Microsoft Live - http://wls.live.com or http://m.live.com - If you hit wls you'll get your browser detected and possible prompted to download a nice applet for your phone. If you hit m.live.com you'll get tiny Windows Live Search.
• Gmail - http://m.gmail.com - If you hit gmail with your phone you should get detected and sent over to the mobile version. If not, you can hit m.gmail.com or https://mail.google.com/mail/x/ where the x is magic. If you're running Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD) you can hack that URL also.
• Joystiq - http://m.joystiq.com - Tiny Gaming Site. Interestingly, while they use (I think) the same back end as Engadget, sometimes the fonts are all wonky.
• Mobile MSN - http://m.msn.com - A decent mobile portal and good jumping off point. The mobile stocks are particularly good.
• MSNBC - http://www.msnbc.msn.com - It's astonishingly LAME that you can't get to this site from http://m.msnbc.com but perhaps they'll read this and make that DNS change, because this is a really good tiny news site.
• Alarm.com - https://www.alarm.com/pda - I use Alarm.com to manage my security systems at the house and our rentals from my phone. If you've got a service available over the web, you really ought to have a minimal mobile website so kudos to them for having one.
• Twitter - http://m.twitter.com - Does exactly what it says it does...mobile twitter, although I'd like to be able to see Direct Replies in the interface.
• Wapedia (Mobile Wikipedia) - http://wapedia.mobi/en - Very useful for winning arguments with the wife self-edification, it's the mobile Wikipedia.

I think it's funny that folks thought that the ".mobi" top level domain extension was a good idea and that the internet just changed "www.foo.com" to "m.foo.com" and saved the registration fee. Plus, I don't have to tap out the "obi" which saves me, like minutes.

What are your must-have mobile websites, Dear Reader?

Related Posts:

• Forcing Google Apps for your Domain (GAFYD) into Mobile Mode on your iPhone
• Making the ASP.NET Mobile Controls render RTL languages
• Upgrading my Blackberry's Software and getting the Hotkeys to work
• Making DasBlog work on Mobile Devices
• How to show multiple columns in an ASP.NET Mobile ObjectList
• NewsBreak RSS Feed Reader and Podcasts on PocketPCs
• Writing FaceBook Applications with .NET - Interview with Mel Sampat, author of OutSync
• iPhone - Everything that could go wrong did
• Bug Migrating Web.config with a browserCaps section to IIS7
• Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth Headset Review and Audio Sample
• The Bat Belt Effect - Geeks, Dorks and Diabetics

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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If you're new to this, each week I post some snippets of particularly interesting (read: beautiful, ugly, clever, obscene) source and the project it came from. This started from a belief that reading source is as important (or more so) as writing it. We read computer books to become better programmers, but unless you're reading books like Programming Pearls, you ought to peruse some Open Source projects for inspiration.

And so, Dear Reader, I present to you the thirteenth in a infinite number of posts of "The Weekly Source Code." Here's some source I was reading this week. I wanted to see what a Fibonacci number generator looked like in a number of different languages.

Remember (from Wikipedia) that the Fibonacci sequence looks like this:

...after two starting values, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The first Fibonacci numbers also denoted as F_n, for n = 0, 1, … , are:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, ...

Here's a few implementations I thought contrasted nicely. There's also a great writeup on Fibonacci related things on Dustin Campbell's blog.

F#

• Here's a basic Fibonacci function in F#.
  

  let rec fib n = if n < 2 then 1 else fib (n-2) + fib(n-1)

• Or, if you want input and output as an F# console application:
  

  let fib_number = int_of_string (System.Environment.GetCommandLineArgs().GetValue(1).ToString());;
  let rec fib n = if n < 2 then 1 else fib (n-2) + fib(n-1);;
  Printf.printf "\nThe Fibonacci value of %u is: %u\n" fib_number (fib fib_number);;
  exit 0;;

Ruby

• Here it is in Ruby, from RubyTips.org:
  

  x1,x2 = 0,1; 0.upto(size){puts x1; x1 += x2; x1,x2 = x2,x1}

• But that's really hard to read and kind of smooshed onto one line. A more typical console app would look like this:
  

  class FibonacciGenerator   
    def printFibo(size)   
      x1,x2 = 0, 1   
      0.upto(size){puts x1;x1+=x2; x1,x2= x2,x1} # note the swap for the next iteration   
    end  
    f = FibonacciGenerator.new  
    f.printFibo(10) # print first 10 fibo numbers   
  end  

C#

• There's many ways to do this in C#, so let's start with a basic C# 2.0 implementation.
  

  static int Fibonacci (int x)
  {
     if (x <= 1)
        return 1;
     return Fibonacci (x-1) + Fibonacci (x-2);
  }	

• Now, here's a great way using C# 3.0 (actually, .NET 3.5 and System.Func from the new System.Core:
  

  Func<INT , int> fib = null;
  fib = n => n > 1 ? fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) : n;

Scala

• Lots of folks are excited about Scala, and many are calling it "the latest programmer's shiny object." It's interesting not just for its syntax, but it's full interoperability with Java.  Here's a recursive Fibonacci in Scala.
  

  def fib( n: Int): Int = n match {
      case 0 => 0
      case 1 => 1
      case _ => fib( n -1) + fib( n-2)
    }

Erlang

• Here's Fibonacci in Erlang, and you can find many other implementations at LiteratePrograms.org, a great site for reading source!
  

  fibo(0) -> 0 ;
  fibo(1) -> 1 ;
  fibo(N) when N > 0 -> fibo(N-1) + fibo(N-2) .

Which is your favorite? I like the C# 3.0 one and the F# ones. Also the Ruby double variable swap is pretty cool. They just feel right, although a close runner-up is the LOLCode implementation of Fibonacci from a few weeks back.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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