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I work at Pelco. The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Pelco nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

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Thursday, August 28, 2008

Movie line of the week - [7:31 AM]

And.... ACTION!Are you ready? Let's get started then!

Po-tay-toes! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew...

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

I couldn't agree more - [8:09 AM]

Jason Bock: "The thing about having a public .NET API using underscores is it doesn't fit the recommended coding style. If you're in Eiffel, that's actually what you do - in fact, you use upper-case and underscores (e.g. GET_CUSTOMER). But it .NET, public APIs should be Pascal-cased with no underscores - e.g. GetCustomer." - It's kind of strange how cultures form around coding style. You have the *NIX hacker that tend to use lower case and underscores and heaven forbid K&R style bracing, ick, the most disgusting coding style EVER! I find it hard to believe the IronPython and IronRuby teams use the K&R style, but they both started life outside of Microsoft, so they have that open source feel.

I'm with Jason on this, I do prefer Pascal cased public methods, and since there is a standard they should follow it, even if they don't like it.

Consistency is important.

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

iPhone Tetris clone? - [8:55 AM]

Apple Gazette: "If there is a legitimate trademark infringement claim it needs to be settled in a court of law. If the creator of 'Tris' isn’t interested in doing that, then I’m not sure I see a problem with it being removed. I understand that argument that 'he’s a college student, he can’t afford a lawyer' - and I get that, but that’s the system that we have. I would imagine from his point of view its just not worth the hassle - and I would have to agree with that if I was in his situation." - Maybe someone can give this kid some legal advice, or for heavens sake hire him!

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Apple in security? - [8:50 AM]

9 to 5 Mac: "Here's an unusual one that's crossed our desk this morning - Apple's getting into the crowded Big Brother CCTV market, and will appear with leading security vendor, videoNEXT (love the Next in that name) at a special event next month." - Apple should be talking to Pelco. Yes, I know, shameless self promotion. Who knows, maybe they are, I'm just a grunt worker and wouldn't be privy to such a wonderful conversation. It would be very cool and it would be my hearts desire to work on a Mac version of our viewing client.

A guy can dream can't he?

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The little guy - [7:24 AM]

MSNBC: "One of the highest-rated Xbox 360 games of all times isn't some shooting game from some fancy-pants company that makes games by dipping programming code in giant vats filled with hundred dollar bills. And it’s not some action game that tap dances across your TV screen showing off its high-def graphics like some supermodel showing off her expensive new dress." - Maybe, just maybe, this little gem of a game can get my wife to stop playing Call of Duty for a while? Yeah, right! But seriously, this game is something us "old-timers" can appreciate. It reminds me of original Nintendo games, or old arcade games, and for $15.00 it's definitely worth a look.

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Friday, August 22, 2008

Movie line of the week answer - [8:24 AM]

We have a winner, yippee!

Our big winner is MLOTW long timer Mr. James Robertson. Congratulations James!

The correct answer was...

See you next week.

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Interesting Sinofsky comment - [11:13 AM]

Engineering Windows 7: "In fact as I type this I received sequential emails one saying “[N]obody cares about touch screen nonsense” and the other saying “[Win7 needs] more advanced/robust ‘touch’ features”. When you just get unstructured and unsolicited input you see these opposites quite a bit. I’m sure folks are noticing this on the blog comments as well." - The real hidden nugget in that comment? If memory serves, Sinofsky hated the tablet from day one and since he ran the Office unit he didn't care to add great table support to the Office apps. Visio could've been the premier application for the tablet but it wasn't allowed to be. That's ok, business decisions and all, but now Apple has entered the market. Touch is in, and Apple will perfect it, while Microsoft allows it to possibly die on the vine.

Strange, isn't it? It's not always the leader into the market that wins, it's the guy that can bring it home in the hearts and minds of users.

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Call from Apple? - [10:31 AM]

This is a bit strange. I'm sitting here minding my own business, when out of the blue, I get a call from Apple Computer?

They were calling to follow-up on a computer purchase I'd started, but hadn't completed. That's interesting, I'm ok with that, I want to set that 24-inch beauty on my desktop! I just need to pull the trigger!

Maybe today will be the right day to do so, maybe not?

I really need to go back to my study of Cocoa. I have a great book on the subject sitting on the nightstand next to my bed, but I haven't picked it up since I was on vacation back in early June.

Too bad it wasn't an offer to work on iPhone apps, who could resist that? Smile, life is good!

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Palm, you'd better respond soon - [10:17 AM]

Palm has a new phone, the Treo Pro, running Windows Mobile? Are you kidding? When are we going to see something with the new form factor, iPhone like, running a reloaded user interface? Why not use the fine Palm OS with a new shell? Yeah, yeah, I know, easier said than done, but very necessary if you want to compete with iPhone. There are already a few clones on the market, get with it or you'll be buried guys. I like Palm, it has a special place in my heart, I used a Handspring Visor for years and loved it. Spruce up the existing Palm OS, virtualize the keyboard, or come up with something revolutionary and give us a big display.

Then again... maybe they're after BlackBerry, and this form factor is where it's at? At least the Palm has a touch interface.

Here are the Treo Pro specs.

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Movie line of the week - [9:49 AM]

Cut, cut, cut!Good morning all, ready for a movie line?

Here it is!

Snake Plissken... I've heard of you.

[strikes man with a tire iron, knocking him unconscious] I heard you were dead!

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

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Yeah, right - [8:27 AM]

CNet | The Open Road: "Columnist John Dvorak thinks that Adobe Systems has a Microsoft problem and that Linux provides a clear solution:" - This has already been done for Adobe, it's called Mac OS X. Now, the one cool thing about this idea is simple. If Adobe developed their own Linux OS we'd finally get a real end-user version of Linux. Do they need it, no, would it make for interesting choice, yes.

If they did it I'd toss out KDE and Gnome, and start from scratch, freshly grown shell from the ground up. Keep the kernel and all the nifty hidden stuff. Add real developer tools, Xcode is a tremendous IDE that makes use of the open source toolchain, gcc and gdb.

Linux doesn't have to be for the hacker only. I work with a few guys, hi Tony and Stuart, that make Linux sing, but 99% of the population don't care to hop into BASH and type arcane commands to get what they want. They want to point and click.

With the proper focus, and a world class company like Adobe, they could make it happen. Problem is, it doesn't really make sense for Adobe. They're all about their applications running across OS'es and making money, not creating the OS.

It would sure be fun to work on! But, it doesn't really make sense.

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iPhone design tool? - [7:34 AM]

teehan+lax: "Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets." - If you're a Visio user and you need a UI design tool for the iPhone I'd encourage Chris Roth, Mr. Visio Guy himself, to get to work.

Chris, you could blow this out of the water. Then we need to figure out how to generate the Interface Builder .xib file, and associated handlers. That would be a fun project.

Just having the template for building UI's would be wonderful.

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