Scott Hanselman

Wow, brilliance in engineering, and in marketing.  Allow me to gush if you haven't heard.

The AirPort Express - reasons it's freakin' brilliant:

• Noone saw it coming.  Surprise is everything.  Don't show me a product.  Lie and say it doesn't exist.  Tease me, baby, tease me.
• It's a wireless/wired network bridge. Holy crap, I can take it to a hotel and make their crap wired network a wireless one.  Or I can make an instant wireless network in a conference room with one wired connection.  That's hot.
• THE BIG ONE: It makes MY MUSIC "just an audio source."  I can plug it into the wall and to my receiver, and think of all my music (upstairs on the 250gig drive) as just being there.  I'll move my iPod dock BACK upstairs where it belongs and
• It supports features lesser companies would have punted on.  Optical?  Flippin' optical output.
• It supports making your USB printer available wirelessly.  Just a nice little bonus, if you had any doubts.
• It's all ONE PIECE.  This is where the brilliance in engineering comes in.  It's not a box with a dongle and a transformer.  It's all one unit, and the whole thing is smaller than your average wall wart. 

This is a Leatherman Tool for the geek, and it fits it your hand. 

P.S. Microsoft seriously needs to rethink their Media strategy.  I literally GUFFAWED out loud as I was starting to install Windows Media 10, and I noticed that it supported a dozen MP3 players, and NOT my iPod!  Sorry, didn't install it. 

P.P.S. You notice how you can't find ANYTHING in the Windows Media Player menus?  Like, you literally need to click EVERY TAB to find (or not find) the option you need?  But, I've never open the iTunes preferences.  Never needed to.  Hm.  Good design, anyone?

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 feeling very international this Monday, so here' s a collection of things for you to read.  It's a reminder <gasp> that there are a lot of people out there who don't speak English every day (or ever) and it's responsbility of the English-dominated Web to respect that.  Even if you don't even write code to be internationalized, you have a karmic obligation to be aware of these things.

• Be aware of the differences between the ISO-8859-1 and windows-1252 character sets. [Sam Ruby]
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• Read Tim's excellent article On the Goodness of Unicode - (I stole this glyph from Tim's site)
• Know what is allowed in an XML document as a character, versus what's appropriate as an entity.

And for folks in my world:

• Overview/Quickstart of Internationalizing ASP.NET
• Globalization & Localization Best Practices for Windows 2000 Compliant Software
• The Best Localization Directory - Dozens of great links and software
• Microsoft Global Development Portal
• Authoring HTML for Middle-Eastern Content
• Bidirectional Layout in the HTML 4.0 Spec 
• Microsoft Localization (Globalization) Toolkit - For Developing Localized ASP.NET Applications (Database Driven)

And in the vein of 'Whaaaaaa?' check out:

• The Microsoft Application Translator: "This new solution, called Microsoft Application Translator (MAT) enables applications to offer on-the-fly localization with no code change and limited investment in localization." Here's their FAQ.

Update: Here's a crucial update. ;) Don't forget that Japanese Emoticons are different than English ones!

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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Apparently I'm going to bump into Linus at the Murray Street Safeway soon...I wonder if anyone is going to say, "Can you sign my Minux book?"

Inventor of Linux is Portland-bound

BEAVERTON, ORE. - Linus Torvalds, the Finnish-born inventor of the Linux computer operating system, is Portland-bound.

The Oregonian reported Thursday that Torvalds is moving to Portland from California to oversee the Open Source Development Labs in Beaverton

"Quite frankly," he told the newspaper via e-mail, "We want to be somewhere calmer and saner. Silicon Valley is a bit crazy."

Torvalds says he and his family will make the move after his children finish school next week.

"The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I'm told there are implants available) by moving during the summer," he wrote.

Torvalds is often credited with transforming free operating system software from idea to reality.

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 really out of control.  (This photo is UNDOCTORED and from today.)

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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Via Gordon, I see that Tim Bray pointed to Jeff Dillon's points on cross platform .NET.  Jim Blizzard chimed in as well.

I like Gordon's brief and complete summary:

The point? If you care about cross platform .NET, there are details you need to pay attention to, and you really shouldn't do dumb things like use the registry. As for "the cost of not being able to do native system programming in pure Java" we already know that pure .NET is a myth, too. [The 80/20 Solution]

With due respect, I'm not getting a few of Jeff's views:

The Java API writers have always been very careful not to introduce an API which does not make sense on all platforms.  This makes Java extremely portable at the cost of not being able to do native system programming in pure Java. [Jeff Dillon]

Which sounds just like the Least Common Denominator point I've made before.  However, while the Java API writers may try to support the LCD, the Java Application Server vendors explicitly promote vendor lock-in by introducing APIS that are App Server specific.  As Jeff wisely points out, there is a cost.  I say it's too high for most.

Microsoft is very open about their goals - Vendor lock-in is a good thing.  Exploit the platform.  Jeff says:

With .NET, Microsoft went ahead and wrote all kinds of APIs for accessing the registry, accessing COM objects, changing NTFS file permissions, and other very windows specific tasks. In my mind, this immediately eliminates .NET or Mono from ever being a purely system independent platform. [Jeff Dillon]

No, it really just eliminates the possibility of using a COM API on another platform.  This will lead to the rise of ".NET Code - Pure Enough for Mono" , and that suits me just fine.

If Microsoft were to truly virtualize the machine, they would have marginalized their investment in the Windows platform. [Me]

I'm not trying to promote bad feelings.  I worked at Nike getting Java over RMI on Solarious to talk to DB2 on a Mainframe - I love all religions, remember:

Scott's Rule of Programming 0x303b: Don't Player-Hate, Integrate.

I'm just trying to remind folks that, by definition, write once, run anywhere, means writing to Least Common Denominator APIS (or introducing "if (!IsMacIE)" code - You may have seen that before on a Write Once technology called HTML/ECMAScript?)

The only difference is that Mono has seen fit to raise the level of the Least Common Denominator API to a reasonable level.  That, combined with common sense like there's no Registry on Linux means that apps like dasBlog can happily be ported to Mono.

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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