Me and MasterChief

My visit to MicroSoft was interesting.

Ajax

Two things: Microsoft recently came out with an update to their Ajax Toolkit, and I was told today that my Digital Tool Factory application is the sort of thing that Microsoft likes to spotlight as a case study. Happy day.

The high score that will last one thousand years!

From Zen Pundit

Thursday link roundup

• Ala. Officials Probe 'Monster Pig' Saga

  State wildlife officials said Wednesday they want to know how the huge hog dubbed "Monster Pig" got into a fenced hunting preserve where it was chased down and shot to death by an 11-year-old boy.
  ...
  weighed 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet, 4 inches from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.
  ...
  Jamison was hunting with his father and the guides on May 3 when he killed the giant pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

• Are you a good liar?
• Microsoft Surface
• Popular Mechanics how to videos
  

A retort I didn't say

While I was in Borders today I overheard someone say "I wish they'd just get what they have right instead of coming out with something new". I think she was talking about Microsoft Vista. I thought, "That's what they're doing, they're just adding a new skin and saying it's new." The the "fixed" features create other problems because that's just the way technology works.

The ever amazing Vista

For some reason Outlook quit working on my new Vista install. Basically it would gray out and then present with me an offer to go to Microsoft to fix the problem. I actually do that and lo and behold, it gives me a registry fix that actually works. Amazing. I think that's the first time that has happened.

Freaking Vista

For some reason after the upgrade my local box would not respond to localhost. After several hours of searching, I finally see this article. Who knew write permissions on a log file could be so important?

And now of course, it doesn't work anymore. Sigh.

Growl

I've been stuck trying to upgrade Office 2007 for the past 10 hours now. For some reason the Groove files are un-deletable. The Microsoft general knowledge base article on uninstalling Office is here.

Ajax.net nugget of wisdom

Here's something I've just spend 90 minutes discovering - if you use inline code containing a Request.Querystring that screws up the Microsoft Ajax.net code causing it to do a full postback.

Ajax is a seductive swamp

Specifically the Ajax.net toolkit. It would seem that one can't retrofit an existing site, though who knows why.

Quick Wednsday rapid fire

• Free Fusion Razors
• Folk Alley seems cool
• Photoshop Tutorials
• Microsoft launches an html editor called Expressions. I'm quite curious.
• Republican uses animals, mariachi band to critique border security
• Google goes solar
  
• Crunching the Numbers on Hydrogen
  

Robots!

Sweet!

Microsoft Unveils Robotics Studio

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms.
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched a technology preview of Robotics Studio, a Windows-based development environment for creating robotic applications.

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms, the company said. Early partners include the LEGO Group.

"We've reached out to a broad range of leading robotics companies and academics early on in the development process and are thrilled with the positive response from the community," Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group, said in a statement.

The Microsoft site is located here.

On the other hand, some people are concerned with Robot Sex.

Now this is interesting

Apple adopting Windows?

I will laugh and laugh and laugh if true.

More Blech

I'm working my first 100 hour plus week in quite some time.

On the other hand Amazon is set to ship Visual Studio before the end of the year (tomorrow actually) which is a pleasant surprise.

Just ordered

Visual Studio 2005. Full scouting report in around 3 weeks or so.

Quick thoughts on Google

While having dinner with Pastras tongiht, I remarked that Google was brilliant because they never did anything hard. That is not to say that the creation of that company did not involve anything difficult, but rather that they use technology in a proper way and never in a way that just barely works.

What is the word for that?

A new word I just learned from the surprisingly difficult to use Volokh site is "Parade of Horribles" which I've never heard before.