Entries for Tommy Carlier

Wanted: private community site solution [Wanted: private community site solution]

Tommy Carlier — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:15:21 GMT

Our company was asked for a solution for a (private) medical community site, where users (doctors) can upload videos and discuss them. Are there niners that have experience with this kind of sites (a kind of private Channel 9)?

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Barrelfish Operating System [Barrelfish Operating System]

Tommy Carlier — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:21:15 GMT

Cool new research OS from Microsoft Research: Barrelfish. Source code available under BSD-like license.

Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research, Cambridge. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

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Serious vulnerability found in SVN [Serious vulnerability found in SVN]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:09:52 GMT

SVN Strikes Back: A Serious Vulnerability Found

A few months ago, Anton Isaykin in collaboration with the company 2comrades found a huge vulnerability that is quite typical of big projects (we do not name names here). To test it, they obtained the file structures and even the source code of about 3320 Russian websites and some major English-language websites. Serious vulnerabilities like this aren't supposed to exist nowadays. Every serious or visible exploit is found and fixed quickly. But here we will show you something simple and ordinary yet very dangerous.

Ouch. Anyone using SVN on their web server better check if they're vulnerable.

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LINQ is not the solution to everything [LINQ is not the solution to everything]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:50:45 GMT

On the web, I often see people using LINQ in situations where it's totally unnecessary, often not performing very well and/or less readable than the non-LINQ version. Give people a hammer, and everything starts looking like a nail. It's not a sin to sometimes use a loop or an if-statement, you know.

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The Problem with Design and Implementation [The Problem with Design and Implementation]

Tommy Carlier — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:14:17 GMT

I just read a very good article on OSNews that talks about the problem with design and implementation in software development. Basically, the author claims that writing source code is also a form of design, and not just implementation. Compilers perform the implementation, developers perform the low-level design (= writing code) and the source code is a design specification for the compiler to implement.

Try explaining that to a business person. :-P

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9-9-9 [9-9-9]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:19:49 GMT

Today seems like a special day for Channel 9. Happy 9-9-9, Niners.

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This is why URL shortening services are a very bad idea [This is why URL shortening services are a very bad idea]

Tommy Carlier — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:06:34 GMT

I know I'm repeating myself, but today I read something that really demonstrates why URL shortening services are a very bad idea: What if one of the services shuts down? tr.im:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

What does this mean? That all the links that were shortified via this service will no longer work. The world wide web (that relies on hyperlinked pages) gets damaged.

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Apple censors a dictionary [Apple censors a dictionary]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:14:30 GMT

Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple

I don't know what kind of crackheads review submissions to the iPhone AppStore, but you just don't censor a dictionary. How does this make sense?

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Apollo 11 source code released [Apollo 11 source code released]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:02:20 GMT

Just found this on the Google Code Blog: “Apollo 11 mission's 40th Anniversary: One large step for open source code…”

To commemorate this event, the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project.

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Robin Hood Showdown [Robin Hood Showdown]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:08:11 GMT

I just played Robin Hood Showdown on the BBC website and really liked it. It's a cool 3D game that uses the Unity Player plug-in. The thing that put a smile on my face was the British comments while playing. I haven't seen the BBC series of Robin Hood yet, but it looks cool.

Specialmoves explains that they “used C# to create an interactive walking, shooting ‘Robin Hood’.”

I didn't know this and had to look it up, but apparently Mono is used as the scripting system inside the Unity engine.

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OneNote in every Office 2010 version [OneNote in every Office 2010 version]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:25:36 GMT

I just read on Greg Duncan's blog that OneNote 2010 will be included in every SKU of Office 2010.

How many Niners are actually using OneNote?

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Impressed by Silverlight 3 smooth streaming [Impressed by Silverlight 3 smooth streaming]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:37:25 GMT

While watching a video on Backstage with Office 2010, I was very impressed with the quality and smoothness of Silverlight 3 smooth streaming. If you have a good connection, you can get very sharp fullscreen HD video. Way to go, Silverlight.

EDIT: while I'm talking about Silverlight: the above site is entirely in Silverlight. There is of course a downside (no text selection, copy/paste), but the site looks and feels very slick.

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Funny Silverlight 3 + Expression 3 video [Funny Silverlight 3 + Expression 3 video]

Tommy Carlier — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:17:35 GMT

For the Coffeehouse-only people who don't watch the videos: Tina just posted a funny video with Dan and Nic showing how SL3 and EXPR3 can make the “relationship” between designers and developers better. Hillarious.

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Steven Sinofsky promoted to president [Steven Sinofsky promoted to president]

Tommy Carlier — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:32:05 GMT

Microsoft has promoted Steven Sinofsky to president.

Office 2007 turned out to be successful, and Windows 7 seems to be going in the right direction, receiving a lot of positive reactions, so this promotion seems entirely deserved. Let's see what positive influence he could have “up the ladder”.

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Google (Chrome) OS [Google (Chrome) OS]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:35:56 GMT

Google just announced they are working on an OS, based on Google Chrome.

It will be open source, lightweight, initially targeted at netbooks, and run on both x86 and ARM.

A lot of people saw this coming, I had my doubts initially, but when they launched Chrome I felt the possibility of a full-fledged OS was getting closer. What do other 9ers think about this?

Since it's based on a Linux kernel, maybe 2010 will be the year of the Linux desktop! :-P

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Belgian TV channel uses Surface for news [Belgian TV channel uses Surface for news]

Tommy Carlier — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:41:53 GMT

I first saw it during the European and regional elections a few weeks ago and noticed it again yesterday: the news crew of the Flemish TV channel VTM uses a Surface computer to display information. Yesterday, they used it to show what will be on the covers of the newspapers today (drag around, zoom in and out), but during the elections they used a custom application to visualize the progress of the elections per party. Check it out:
See this video on MSN Soapbox

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TechDays Belgium 2009 session recordings online [TechDays Belgium 2009 session recordings online]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:09:01 GMT

Local developer evangelist Katrien De Graeve announced yesterday that all the recorded TechDays 2009 sessions are now online. You can watch the sessions on the TechDays 2009 site.

I personally liked the following sessions:

Code Contracts, Pex, CHESS, 3 tools for 1 talk (Peli de Halleux)
LINQ in breadth - Querying everything everywhere (Bart De Smet)
The Daily Scrum (Stephen Forte) (really fun session)
ASP.NET MVC for Smart People (Scott Galloway)
Putting authentication in its place: claim-based identity, services and Geneva (Vittorio Bertocci)

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Slow videos [Slow videos]

Tommy Carlier — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:33:02 GMT

The last couple of days, the videos have been very slow to watch. I used to watch the high quality versions, but now even the regular versions are very slow and constantly have to buffer. Have you guys changed something server-side, or might it be a problem with my ISP?

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Why aren't there more WinForms talks? [Why aren't there more WinForms talks?]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:35:51 GMT

For the “Coffeehouse only, no videos for me”-people: an interesting discussion has started on the 10 minute “Hanselminutes on 9” video “Why aren't there more WinForms talks”. It's mainly about WinForms versus WPF, about the possible reasons why there are no more WinForms talks during conferences, but it also covers the meaning of productivity.

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Opera Unite [Opera Unite]

Tommy Carlier — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:35:18 GMT

Opera Unite reinvents the Web.

Opera just published a press release where they unveiled “Opera Unite” which will allow users to turn their client machine into a server for easy sharing of files, photos and videos between devices (or with the public), for hosting websites from your local machine, for chatting, …

This seems to have elements from Mesh, IM and other related technologies. Apparently, web services on your devices can get URLs which allows them to be accessed from the web. An example: a photo-sharing service running on your notebook gets the URL http://notebook.your-username.operaunite.com/photo_sharing/

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C9 Team Updates [C9 Team Updates]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:19:28 GMT

For all the people who only visit the Coffeehouse: the C9 team started posting about what they're working on, what we can expect and what they have recently added.

The most recent post shows some editor enhancements they're working on (insert code, spell checking), more share-options (Twitter, DotNetShoutout, MSDN bookmarking service) and the C9 URL-shortener.

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Stack Overflow Creative Commons Data Dump [Stack Overflow Creative Commons Data Dump]

Tommy Carlier — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:20:37 GMT

The “Stack Overflow” guys released a data dump of SO under a Creative Commons license via BitTorrent. According to their blog, they will release a new data dump monthly. This is very cool. People have already started data mining and analyzing it.

I think more sites should do this. And I like the fact that they're smart enough to distribute it via BitTorrent.

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LOL? ROFL? [LOL? ROFL?]

Tommy Carlier — Fri, 08 May 2009 05:53:26 GMT

Does anyone else think the term LOL is used too much, even though most people using it aren't actually laughing out loud? How many people laugh out loud when they're behind their PC? If I see something very funny, I laugh quietly, somewhat snickering. But never out loud. And who has ever performed "Rolling on the floor, laughing"? That only happens in cartoons, right? How would you do that?

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An honest scammer [An honest scammer]

Tommy Carlier — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 05:54:59 GMT

My god, I thought this was pretty funny: an honest scammer :-D

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WorldWide Telescope: Silverlight version [WorldWide Telescope: Silverlight version]

Tommy Carlier — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:17:54 GMT

Microsoft Research launched a preview of the WorldWide Telescope Web Client, a Silverlight version of the WorldWide Telescope. I was excited to try it, but unfortunately it closes my browser soon after loading :-(

Did anyone else try it? Does it work on your machine? How's the experience?

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