Scott Hanselman

Apple.com has taken mind-boggling severity of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and updated their corporate homepage to drive drive to donation sites.

It's a definite statement when a company chooses to remove products from their home page.

• You can donate via Amazon.com which just takes a moment if you have your credit card saved with your account. Amazon has also updated A9.com.
• Google has a Tsunami Relief site up. I hope Greg and my idea reaches there.
• Nothing from Microsoft yet...I wonder when Microsoft.com will do the same? 
• EBay/PayPal has a Tsunami forum up, but PayPal hasn't change their home page to allow direct donations yet. That's a little disappointing.

The power of the Net with this disaster will be realized if it's made fantastically easy to donate money to legitimate charities.

Here's some photos that show you the before, recoil and push foward of the tsunami in Sri Lanka. There is an excellent PDF analysis here.

Typical Shot (2004-Jan)

Ocean pulls back 400 meters...(2004-Dec-26)

Tsunami arrives...(2004-Dec-26)

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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Greg Hughes and I were talking about this idea. The power of blogging isn't citizen journalism, it's the power to start a movement.

Nick Bradbury is donating his profits to the Red Cross. Kudos Nick. Let's ALL take our passive Google Adsense Revenue for the year and donate it directly to earthquake relief. Mine so far is US$-omittedduetogooglepolicy- since I started ads in June. I'm sure hundreds of thousands, even millions could be raised quickly in this manner.

To that end, let's pressure Google into allowing us to automatically donate our revenue from their side! Spread the word and trackback this link.

To me, spreading an idea like this is the power of blogging, more than citizen journalism.

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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Certainly Suzanne Cook is the definitive source for details on Assembly.Load and Binding Contexts, a black art tantamount to voodoo that few people understand. Patrick and I have been hip-deep in it lately, and have discovered/uncovered/madecleartoourselves how some of this voodoo works. Here's a (annotated) writeup from Patrick that was sent out internally. Another great resource is Mike Gunderloy's article on Binding Policy in .NET.

• Assemblies will only EVER be loaded from the GAC based on a full bind (name, version, and public key token).  A partial bind with name and public key token only WON’T load from the GAC. 
• If you reference an assembly with VS.NET you're asking for a full bind. If you say Assembly.Load("foo") you're asking for a partial bind.
• However, the way this usually works is…
• You do a partial bind on assembly name, or name and public key token with Assembly.Load
• Fusion (the code name for the Assembly Loader/Binder) starts walking the probing path looking for an assembly that matches the partial bind.
• Counter Intuititive: If it finds one while probing (the first one) it will then attempt to use the strong name of the one it found to do a full bind against the GAC.
• If it’s in the GAC, that’s the one that gets loaded.
• Any of that loaded assemblies will try to load from the GAC first without going to the probing path, since the embedded references constitute a full bind.
• If they aren’t found in the GAC, then it will start probing.
• It’ll grab the first one it finds in the probing path.  If the versions don’t match, Fusion fails.  If they do match, Fusion loads that one.
• So, if you specify a partial name, and the file is in the GAC, but not the probing path, the load fails, since there’s no way to do a full bind.  

All this is mostly an issue for plugins that we load dynamically.  It shouldn’t be an issue for compile-time dependencies, since they use full binds.  One way to make sure you get what you expect is to specify a full bind in your config files via an Assembly Qualified Name (QN) like:  "Foo.Bar, Version=2.0.205.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=59388ae2d2746794" and doing something like this:

  100 public static object CreateInstance(string assemblyandtype)
  101 {
  102     Type type = Type.GetType(assemblyandtype);
  103     object instance = null;
  104     instance = type.InvokeMember(String.Empty,BindingFlags.CreateInstance, null, null, null);
  105     return instance;
  106 }

Thanks to Patrick for the writeup!

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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This is a technical blog, so note that I don't do this all the time so forgive me ahead of time if you don't like my rants.

I'm looking at the home page of CNN.com.  There are currently over 22,000 brown people dead, and apparently this white guy. I feel for his family, but I feel more for the countless hundreds of thousands of displaced and suffering others.

I am tired of the American Media (last night it was ABC News) who spend 5 minutes on a massive natural disasters, and then gloss over it when we are told "and no Americans were injured." Notice the text of this CNN blurb - 22,000 dead and 27 Western People, which details the counts of British, French and Italians.

This is unspeakably ethnocentric and it makes me a little ill.  I'm not trying to be P.C. here, but these are humans, and whether it was a hundred Somali Fisherman, or this guy from Illinois, I expect more from a leading news organization. This is like a home-town newspaper concerned about its native son away on mission.

We must never forget that tommorow isn't promised to us. One day there will be an earthquake off the coast of Oregon. No doubt that will get media coverage.

God help us all, but thanks for the time I've had.

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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Travis has rev'ed CR_Documentor to 1.1.0.1220 including these new features:

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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