Scott Hanselman

My eighty-first podcast is up. I didn't totally love the last show. It was good, but not great. I wanted to cover a few other things, but you know, you get to talking and then 20 minutes has gone by. Some listeners agreed, so, I was sitting in the hotel room on the Sunday night before I started my New Employee Orientation (NEO) at Microsoft, sick to my stomach and scared out of my gourd, and figured I'd record a solo show, with a prepped outline beforehand, and fill in the gaps in Show 80. Here it is, I hope it doesn't suck.

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Links from the Show

• 64-bit Patching Policy (sgs)
• Patchguard (sgt)
• 32bitness and 64bitness (sgu)

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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I'm thinking I'm going to take the iPhone back. I want to like it, I really do, but there's just so many things that don't fit into my life's workflow. For example, I just couldn't get the contacts and calendar to sync with Outlook for the life of me so I ended up going Outlook->Plaxo->Google Calendar->Spanning Sync->iCal->iPhone. Rube Goldberg would be proud. It's ridiculous. If it only had Exchange support...it'd be perfect. Anyway, I'm 85% going to take it back next week and pay the $40 restocking fee.

While I've been trying to get it to work I've also been totally hating the Gmail support. How can they possibly call POP3 support for Gmail support for Gmail?

The whole POINT of Gmail is that it's a view on this massive amount of email. POP3 support for Gmail apply filters (how could it?) and oddly, your own sent items come back at you as new inbox items. It's untenable if I want to keep a tidy mailbox. If Google added IMAP support, again, the problem would largely go away.

The Gmail Web Interface is yummy and wonderful in a real browser. It's utterly unusable and craptastic in the iPhone browser. The screen is too small.

Side bar: iGmail is a great compromise that Apple should take note of. It's a little Rails app that will give you an iPhone-looking interface that's really a web-proxied-face over Gmail. However, I haven't figured out how to make it point to my Google Apps Hosted Domain (where mail.hanselman.com is hosted) as GAFYD (Google Apps For Your Domain) is a fork of Gmail...it's not the same code.

So, since the Gmail Web Interface isn't usable and the POP3 solution isn't usable, what could be? Welll, Google Apps have a "mobile mode" that it'll switch into automatically when it detects a mobile device like a Windows Mobile Device or smaller phone. However, it doesn't see the iPhone this way and gives the desktop experience.

Turns out you can add /x at the end of a Gmail URL to force mobile mode like:

https://mail.google.com/mail/x/

It's great if you're on a slow link in Africa. However, for hosted GAFYD sites the URL is different and less obvious. Also, the Gmail browser sniffer on the server side appears to really want to prevent you from "hurting yourself" and will stay in standard mode anyway.

However, try this

http://mail.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.com/x/?btmpl=mobile

The trick appears to be the "?btmpl=mobile" and it works great on an iPhone, but also in IE7.

In Google Calendar for your Domain you'd add /m to the URL:

http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/YOURDOMAIN.com/m

Both of these, in my opinion, make Google Apps for your Domain more usable on the iPhone until Google decides to detect the iPhone as a mobile device and not only make the experience better but also conserve a lot of bandwidth and make for a snappier experience.

I'm still taking the iPhone back though. Actually, I think this is the my first truly failed technology purchase in recent memory. I should have paid more attention to the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) numbers. ;)

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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In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer, I now present the fifth in an infinite number of a weekly series called "The Weekly Source Code." Here's some source I'm reading this week that I enjoyed.

• NGenerics - "A class library providing generic data structures and algorithms not implemented in the standard .NET framework." I love it when someone adds something computer-science-like that they feel "ought" to have been in the framework. This is cool code because it's not only adding new data structures, but also extending existing ones. They've added an IVisitor interface to add the Visitor pattern to create the VisitableHashTable amongst others.
• iGmail, a Gmail interface for the iPhone in Ruby - What a find. This is a simple iPhone-friendly AJAX gateway that gives you Gmail-style email (a view, not pull via the uber-lame Gmail support the iPhone currently has) implemented as a Rails app. Best to host it yourself and take the pressure off his system. Check the source out via subversion. Brilliant.
• jQuery - Well, not really. I've been trying to get my small mind around this crazy amazing JavaScript library for a while. I read it like I read Rainbow Six. Er, like the way I've been starting and re-starting, and jumping in the middle. I mean, the book is 897 pages and there's a crapload going on. JQuery isn't that long, but there's a LOT going on and you need to keep track of it. Maybe I'll finish someday. At least I know it's awesome.
• The iPhone Unlock Source - I personally don't care, but I found it interesting to see the out of the box thinking that a community will invoke when a company "locks" something. Reminds me of the Oracle "Unbreakable" fiasco. As Quentin Tarantino says, "He who is most likely to make declarative statements is most likely to be called a fool in retrospect."
• Arduino - This isn't really like source to read, as it's a whole programming language and hardware platform. I'm thinking of building a robot, so I'm brainstorming different platforms I could use to move the arm, the camera, etc. It is actively developed and loved...more importantly it's a whole parallel universe that I know NOTHING about. When trying to become a better developer, I think that visiting parallel universes can only help one's perspective.

Feel free to send me links to cool source that you find hasn't been given a good read.

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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The string of unscripted DNRs (I hope you don't mind) by Carl and I continued. Last week during lunch, Carl and  I recorded an episode of "DotNetRocks TV" where I continue to try and convince Carl that Windows Powershell is a goodness. This is  Episode 82 of DNRTV. 

If you're not using Powershell yet, why not? I hope this show helps to convince you of its usefulness, or at least give you an idea of why I love it so much.

Be aware if you download the ZIP that it's about 200megs. The show is in two parts, so there's an advertisement in the middle of the show...after that advert, Part 2 will automatically start. I encourage you to check it out the ad, first because it's telerik and they sincerely rock, and second because our sponsors pay for the massive bandwidth bills for the direct downloads.

If you like DNRTV, and want to subscribe to the DNRTV Feed, consider using the RSS Downloader features of µTorrent ("microtorrent").

I hope you enjoy the 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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Last year in January I randomly declared 2006 the year of Video Chat. Skype so totally nailed audio chat that I just assumed video was next. Here we are, over 18 months later and as far as I'm concerned it's still not working well.

As far as I can tell, the problem is three things:

• drivers
• add-on (crap)-warelets
• firewalls.

Probably in that order.

Drivers

I went to Office Despot and picked up a Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 for the wife's machine since I had an NX-6000 before.

Side note: If you seriously hunt around Office Depot you can find some sweet deals. The cam was marked $59.99, but rung up as $39.99 and also had a $10 rebate. Half price baby baby!

The software that comes with these cameras is egregiously bad pretty rough. When I picked up my NX-6000, the LifeCam software was 1.0 or 1.1 and worked fine. It was simple. I ask little of my video camera.

There's a Windows Service called MSCAMSVC (Waaa? A Windows Service installed for a Web Camera? That is an odd architectural choice, IMHO. Some kind of strange singleton decision made there, it would seem.) and when the camera is accessed another process called "lifetray.exe" pops up. Unfortunately it also often pops up with this C++ Assertion on Line 864 of NX6000CameraImpl.cpp. When I try to uninstall it I'm told it's from an "Unknown Publisher." Hm. That's odd.

Cutesy Webcam Applets

Now the software is on LifeCam 1.3 and I upgraded. (No, not my Vista 64 machine, a random 32-bit laptop.) The software has all sorts of questionable options like overlaid pictures of swimming fish. Webcam Program Managers - Is that really something that the public wants? I just want it to appear in the list of cameras when I launch Skype or Live Messenger. That's all.

Where's the Drivers Only installation option? Is there someway I can get this camera to work without installing the cartoon characters and Out of Process COM Servers?

(I wonder if I'll be able to look at line 864 when I work for Microsoft?)

Often I get all black, or all white or all gray video being captured from this camera. I don't know if the program is Skype or the camera or drivers or a little bit of all of them.

I haven't any experience with any Logitech Cameras after the original QuickCam, but I may have to talk this NX-6000 back to the store and get a Logitech. Any recommendations?

At any rate, I plugged and unplugged and plugged and unplugged and eventually got it to work (see picture above).

Firewalls

For the life of me, I can't get Windows Live Call (I think that's the name for a video/audio/chat session in Messenger. It's unclear how that's different from "send a webcam.") to work over any reasonable firewall. However, I can get Skype to work pretty well, but the resolution and frame-rate is blocky at best. (Again, see the full screen chat above.)

Skype is the closest I've seen on Windows to getting Video Chat right. However, both Live Messenger and Skype seem to be limited to 640x480 at low framerate, possible due to the codecs but more likely do to the NAT and/or relaying of traffic at low bit rates.

If someone gets this right on Windows, it'll be very cool. Then I can build ScottAnywhere.

Just for fun, go Google for "Full Screen Video Chat made easy." I just did in desperation. ;)

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.

About   Newsletter

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