shawnbass.com - Random Things blog

Introducing O3D: Google introduces new standard for 3D applications within the browser

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:07:01 GMT

Just stumbled upon this today. Initially I though this was an extension of the April Fools day joke about Chrome automatically rendering web pages in 3D, but it seems legit. Checkout the full blog entry here.

There's a pretty sick video demo shown in the blog entry. Check it out.

When's the last time you did a good spelunking?

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:31:24 GMT

Ok, so it sounds like it would be something digusting or obscene, but it's not.

I'm currently in the middle of troubleshooting some MSI / MSP installation issues on a Citrix server and I've come across a very common MSI info message that always makes me chuckle. Here it is:

MSI (s) (04:30) [11:09:24:439]: Found shell folder by spelunking through the registry.

According to Wikipedia, spelunking is the recreational activity of exploring caves. While exploring caves has nothing to do with traversing registry hives/keys, it does remind me that even those developers at Microsoft (that everyone loves to hate) have a sense of humor.

Best...error...dialog...ever!

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:34:48 GMT

I was playing catch up on a blog entries I had been meaning to get to over the last few weeks and I stumbled across this blog entry from Aaron Parker where he describes a ridiculous Oracle Forms error dialog that simply tells the user the please acknowledge the message by clicking Ok. There's no cancel dialog, there's no information passed to the user, just a stupid dialog box with no meaning. I lol'd for some period of time before remembering my own encounter with a really dumb dialog box recently. Here it is in all of it's condescending glory:

I mean what exactly did the software developer think was going to happen when a user saw this message? Don't all untrained users have the ability to damage an application (as in ANY application)? Heck, I've seen trained users that seem to possess this elite skill. I guess they were hoping that a true boob would see this message and say "Oh jeez I didn't know I could DAMAGE the system, I better click No until I go through proper training". Congrats software developer, you've just caused me to lose untold numbers of brain cells. UGH!

Lutz Roeder's Reflector being taken over by Red Gate Software

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:32:18 GMT

IMHO, Reflector is probably the single most important .NET software development tool next to Visual Studio itself. Don't believe me? See Scott Hanselman's "The Big 10 Life and Work-Changing Utilities" list from 2007. I use it constantly when trying to decompile someone's existing .NET code to fix a bug or rewrite it, etc.

So today I got an email in my inbox today from Lutz Roeder mentioning that he was ceasing development and that the tool was being taken over by Red Gate Software. Before I make any comments, I'd like to first express my gratitude to Lutz for 8 long years of development on a tool that he shared with everyone for free. The tool has been indispensible to me over the years.

Now on to my thoughts:

First I think that something like Reflector might be best served by being opened up to the open source community rather than existing within the realm of a commercial entity. That being said, Red Gate software has already agreed to continue making a community edition of Reflector (and plugins) available for free from it's website. While I always question the motivation of a commercial entity behind free versions of software, I also have a lot of respect for Red Gate software as they make some really cool tools. My personal hopes are that they do continue development of Reflector and continue to increase the features in the community version that they make available for free. I just hope they don't require people to purchase in order to get new features.

Click here to read an interview with Lutz and James Moore (Red Gate) about the new ownership of Reflector.

Again, a million thank you's to Lutz for all the years of hard work on this indispensible tool.

Microsoft makes $44.6 billion dollar merger bid with Yahoo

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:30:23 GMT

According to Microsoft's Press Pass website, Microsoft has extended another offer to Yahoo for a corporate merger. From the sums of money involved, it would seem that Google is a bigger threat to Microsoft than VMWare is. The question is, would this truly position Microsoft in better territory to fight Google? I'm not so certain of that, but they would definitely get a higher chunk of the advertising revenue that's out there.

My Macbook Pro keyboard WILL live to see another day thanks to a Software Update

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:21:14 GMT

If you've been following my blog you'd know that I'm a recent Mac ~~convert~~ trial (can't call it a convert when I have 15 other Windows PCs in the house). Anyway, when I bought my Mac it came with OSX 10.4 on it, but there was a 10.5 Leopard disc that was shipped in the box as a free upgrade. Well, you can't go sticking a free software upgrade in the box and let it sneak by me without immediately installing it. So I've been using Leopard since I first got the MacBook Pro. Generally I've had a lot of success with it, aside from a minor nuance with the wireless that never seems to work unless I reboot my wireless router (seems to be Mac related though since other Windows systems are able to use the wireless router during this time). The inexcusable problem though has been a frequently occuring loss of keyboard functionality that varies from 30 to 60 seconds. During this time, the touchpad continues to work but no keyboard keys register (including the function keys). For a while I considered that maybe my inept ability with Mac left me in some weird function key toggled mode, or I had a stuck key or something like that. Or even that my usage of VMware Fusion was somehow leaving my keyboard in a VM-controlled state or some such nonsense. However, a quick Google search tells a different story. TONS of Mac users are experiencing the issue since their upgrade to Leopard. Anyway, I finally spent a few cycles today investigating this issue and I found out that Apple has released a patch for this two days ago. You must have upgraded to 10.5.1 in order to use the patch. I've applied it and so far (crossed fingers) I haven't had any keyboard loss.

shawnbass.com RSS feed is moving! Please update your feed readers...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:46:38 GMT

I'm moving my existing RSS feed as I'm changing modules out that supplies my RSS feed. To prevent this kind of thing from happening again, I've setup a 301 permanent redirect of http://www.shawnbass.com/rss.aspx which will permanently link to my RSS feed no matter where I decide to relocate it in the future. For now, it will move to FeedBurner, but the above link is what you should point your readers to.

I feel dirty...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:34:41 GMT

So my Toshiba laptop started acting up this past week while I was teaching a class in Orlando. I didn't want to risk the laptop locking up on me while in class, so I went out one evening and picked up a new laptop. I'm writing this blog entry from the new laptop. Here's a quick photo of it:

Now do you understand why I feel dirty? I can't even begin to tell you how much crow I'm gonna have to eat when my sister-in-law (longtime Mac bigot) finds out that I bought one. It'll be never ending "I told you so"'s

Where's that Microsoft 'insert team name here' team blog?

shawn@shawnbass.com — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 05:08:15 GMT

Microsoft has definitely embraced blogging as a means of providing feedback to their partners and customers alike. It's often difficult to know whether or not a particular team within Microsoft has an official blog or not. Brandon LeBlanc over at The Windows Experience Blog has created a list of the known official Microsoft team blogs. Check out the list here.

Skywing on "Never wake a PC without user intervention"

shawn@shawnbass.com — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:43:54 GMT

Skywing's debugging/reverse engineering blog is one of many RSS feeds that I ~~keep~~ try to keep current on. He posted an entry a few days ago titled "Never, ever, EVER wake a computer from suspend without user consent" regarding a situation where the Windows Update service woke his PC from standby at 3:00am on a Patch Tuesday. While waking a PC to apply patches isn't a horrible situation, it definitely becomes one when your laptop is zipped up inside a backpack or laptop carrying case. I personally have had this happen to me only once, but it wasn't related to Windows Updates. It was related to a failed standby that I didn't notice for an hour or two (when I finally pulled it out of the bag, the laptop was ready for egg frying). Anyway, the fact is this is a legitimate issue that should be handled by the operating system. The most surprising part of the article for me was the comments that some people left. It seems that some posters believe that this is all Skywing's fault and if he had disabled Windows Updates, or changed the way he was suspending, etc. then this wouldn't have happened. Guys, you're missing the point! The point is that the operating system should be intelligent enough to not wake on it's own to apply patches as the laptop could be in an area that it shouldn't be powered on (i.e. airplane taking off). Bottom line: Windows Update needs to not wake a PC to apply updates without receiving user confirmation, or at a minimum it should force the system back into the same power state that it resumed from after the updates are complete.