Mason Lyngby

Google's announcement of Google Gears is getting a lot of attention around the blogosphere today.  I don't need to rehash what the technology delivers.  You can get Scott Hanselman's take on it here and follow the links on his post for more information.

However, I was reading a post by Lazycoder that calls into question whether having online apps go offline is all that cool or useful:

See, taking a web application offline isn’t as neat as it sounds. Why would I want to work with my document using Google docs offline when I could just edit it using MS Word and upload it later? Why would I want to use Google Reader offline when I have NetNewsWire or RSS Bandit? If I’m going to work with data offline, I sure don’t want to use a browser interface. I want something that’s snappier, richer, and mo’ better. I want a desktop application.

I wanted to leave feedback on his blog, but comments were disabled, so here is my forum. 

I can see that point of view, but for my personal situation, having web apps available offline would be very useful. 

Let's consider Google reader first, since I have a stronger use there.  I use reader because I find myself at multiple computers each day,so I don't want to be tethered to a single machine just to be able to view my news feeds.  However, since I use my laptop frequently and since I occasionally find myself in places with no Internet access, the offline capabilities of reader would be handy.

Same goes for Writely docs/spreadsheets.  Granted, I have used Writely only for simple tasks and it has a long way to go to catch up to MS Office.  However, most of the things I do with docs/spreadsheets are simple tasks, so I find Writely handles almost everything I need to do.  And, if I can access them offline without having to buy a license for office and get plugins, perfect!

Since I am online 99% of the time I am at a computer (including my laptop), I find myself using desktop solutions a lot less than I used to.  If a web app gets the job done and now can be available the 1% of the time I am without Internet access, it is yet a more compelling reason to use them over their desktop counterparts.

As far as desktop apps having a snappier, richer interface, that gap is narrowing.  I find Google Reader's interface to be superb.  The keyboard shortcuts allow me to navigate quickly and the Ajax functions built in gives it a nice feel.  Once Adobe Flex and MS Silverlight get more exposure and more developers become familiar with their capabilities, that gap could close even further.

On the Today Show this morning, Bill Gates demoed a "new" technology called Micorosoft Surface.  This technology consists of a table with a computer and cameras + sensors embedded within that allow for a unique user interface.  This makes it possible to draw pictures with your fingers and arrange photos with your hands.  OK, cool, but this is not new.  In face, it looks like a complete rip-off Jeff Han'ss multi-touch displays.

Next, follow this link and watch the video (I don't have a direct link to the video clip) from this morning's Today show featuring Bill Gates and Microsoft Surface. 

It drives me nuts that NBC makes the comparison to Minority Report.  If NBC would have Goggled "Minority Report Interface", they would see embedded Youtube video above as the first result.

OK, Microsoft has a few original ideas here.  Setting the digital camera on the table and having the photos appear in the computer (WIFI only), that's cool.  The credit card being read by the computer, simply by placing it on the table, that's cool.  I have no use for it in a home environment, but it's cool.  But the guts of Microsoft Surface appear to be a complete rip-off.  Please let me know in the comments if Microsoft did work with Jeff Han on this.  As far as my Googgling can tell, it is a rip-off.

Links:

• Microsoft Surface Homepage
• Jeff Han's Home Page
• Today Show Article/Video
  

While listening to the latest Hanselminutes today, I was startled a bit by a relevation by Martin Fowler that Thoughtworks, his company is seeing a steep decline in .NET related projects requested by their clients. The podcast is here, with a discussion on it on Scott Hanselman's blog here.

I posed the question to Scott on his blog, wondering his take on it:

What's your take on Martin Fowler and .NET declining in thoughtworks projects? Is this an indication .NET is going to decline overall? I have a real hard time seeing it.

Scott replied with:

That one surprised me. Since they are only 800 people, it's just a very small statistic, so I don't know how valid it is. It might mean they are doing fewer large enterprise jobs. It's VERY hard to hire a good .NET person right now, which could mean they are all working, or there's fewer of them. Either way, it's something worth digging into.

Then, Martin Fowler replied with:

I don't know what to make of it either. I don't think we're a statistically valid sample, but it's a data point nonetheless. It surprised me too when I heard.

TW seems to be a very progressive company that hires TOP talent. Martin Fowler is evidence of that, as well as some other TW employee blogs I've seen. By nature, they propbably get clients seeking the latest technology. .NET isn't that new anymore. Even with the new pieces of technology coming out under the .NET umbrella, the technology has had a while to bake now. However, that doesn't correspond with Martin's comment in the podcast about Java holding steady, while .NET has seen a decline. Martin and Thoughtworks has thrown a lot of support behind Ruby and Ruby on Rails in the last year. Check out RubyWorks, being launched by TW in July 2007. Is TW steering customers away from .NET by offering such programs or is it just a response to customer demand. Seems like a little of both to me. Rubyworks is probably the response, Martin Fowler attending RailsConf 2 years in a row and writing about Ruby is probably doing the steering.

This topic also gets to the heart of some other discussions about whether Microsoft's power and influcence is waning despite a smattering of new technology releases (VS Oracas, Silverlight).

• Scott Hanselman asks whether Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks.
• Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror comments about people Giving up on Microsoft for other technologies.
• Paul Graham decries that Microsoft is Dead.

I have a hard time seeing Msft declining significantly because so much of corporate america is already bought into their technology and doesn't want to change just because Alpha Geeks don't find it interesting anymore. Corporate managers are the ones who decide when a technology dies and I don't think too many of them are feeling like Msft has lost its influence at the moment.

I don't think Msft is losing its influence rather than its competitors have become more emboldened. Msft's cage has rattled by Google, that much is clear. Msft is losing the battle in the search market, that is also clear. But Msft is a long way from losing the battle in the developer market.

I don't get a lot of traffic at this blog yet, but if anyone happens to read this, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Well, I had my spinal fusion surgery about 8 days ago now and I am learning to live with my brace.  The brace's function is to support my spine at all times and prevent me from bending in a way that would hurt me as I recover.  I need to wear this for 3 months post surgery.  

Putting it on
There are 2 ways, first I place the brace over me while lying on my back (the brace opens in the back) and roll left to tuck the right edge under my back.  Then  I roll all the way onto my right and hook the straps together to tighten it by reaching as far as I can with my left hand.  The second way is to sit up on the edge of the bed, put the brace over my front and reach behind and pull the straps together.  The second is a little easier, but also feels a bit like cheating.  But, my doc said both methods are ok.

Comfort
As you can imagine, it is not the most comfortable thing in the world to wear, but it isn't too bad either.  It is custom fitted to my body.  I bought a set of tall size t-shirts that cover my butt so the brace won't contact bear skin (and incisions, ouch).  One downside to having the surgery done in May, is that the warmer days cause quite a bit of sweat while wearing this thing.  I'm not looking forward to the dog days of summer for this reason.

I even have to wear it in the shower, so the doc was not joking about wearing it at all times.  It is kind of a pain to live with, but seems like a small price to pay for fixing a serious problem I was having.

Recently at work, I ran into a problem where a page appeared to be hanging the whole asp.net process.  Being a person with very little patience, I ran the handy dandy iisreset after about 1 minute.  As it turns out, it wasn't actually hanging, it merely was taking 3-5 minutes to load a page!  So, I dropped into debug mode and hit the pause button on the debugger.  Behold, the Regex object was the culprit.

We have a complex web app that parses the links of each page and appends certain querystring variables.  The page that was bombing out appeared to have some characters that was throwing the regex object off. 

I put my detective hat on and went Googling.  An excellent post here by Scott Hanselman lead me to a clue.  It appears Scott's application didn't like the absense of a missing bracket in his regex.  However, my problem seemed a little more difficult to diagnose.  My string to parse was an entire page worth of HTML!  I looked through the code and found that it is supposed to strip off viewstate first.  Makes sense, why match on that stuff.  A co-worker sent the html output through the HTML Tidy app at the W3c.  Well, that was no help since our HTML had a LOT of issues.  We obviously don't run strict mode within our pages.

Another co-worker suggested I save the output of the page and put it in a sandbox.  I wrote a local winforms app that took the source of the page, opened the contents in a string reader and applied the regex expression on each line of text.  It immediately shot my processors to 50% each.  It hit pause to find that the culprit was VIEWSTATE.  What??? I thought that was stripped out!  The web app uses a proprietary framework used by all of our software for common tasks.  In this case, it uses a class written originally in 1.1 to format the links.  In the step where it strips out the viewstate, it was matching on this regex pattern: 

Dim rgxViewState As New Regex("<input type=""hidden"" name=""__VIEWSTATE"" value=""[\w\+/\s=]+""")

As it turns out, ASP.NET 2.0 adds an extra Dim rgxViewState As New  id=""__VIEWSTATE"" to the hidden viewstate field.  Thus, viewstate was not stripped out.  Something about the viewstate on this particular page was causing the viewstate to puke.  I added the id=""__VIEWSTATE"" to the pattern and that solved the problem. 

Just passing along a thank you to spine-health for great customer service.  I lost my login information and had no option except to send an email to the administrator.  I rarely do this, because I feel my email will go into the Internet abyss.  You know, it will land in someone's bit bucket and never be touched again.  But, not 5 minutes after sending my email, i got a response and resolved the problem.  Thanks!