Dave Mancuso dot Com

I haven’t read his column in a while, but he’s writing about RB here.

He makes an excellent point about DLL versioning too–it makes my Windows boxes eally unstable over time. And then when I have to eventually (and inevitably) reinstall Windows, MS is often nasty about activating it for use. If you’re going to make me jump through hoops to use your software, don’t make it so that I have to rebuild it from scratch so often.

At any rate, tangential mini-rant aside, there’s nothing like REALbasic anywhere, really.

One interesting quote from the article about RB’s steep learning curve:

“Pet peeve: While many people think a steep learning curve means something is difficult to learn, what the term actually means is that the rate of learning is quick, which ought to mean that it is easier, not harder, to learn. Steep is good. Tell a friend.”

Yep, RB rules. It’s one of my top three resolutions to keep using it this year for several projects.

[Update–Corrected the capitalization of REALbasic. I habitually and incorrectly capitalize the name of the language because I’ve seen other versions of BASIC that do that. I’ve apparently yet to break my conditioning. –Dave]

You have no idea how relieved I am to get this email from Joe, my brother. He was vacationing in Burma where the tsunamis hit. From the “JM wire” news service:

“Thank you to those who were asking if I am alive. The last travel plan I sent out had me on a ship headed north up the coast of Myanmar in the Andaman Sea on Christmas day. My alternate plan was to kick back in Phuket. Luckily entropy prevailed and I did neither.

Happy New Year,
Joe”

Apparently the guy who was director of technology for Harrisburg was apparently ordered to return kickback stuff.

“Federal District Judge Christopher Conner ordered Weaver in October to forfeit about $1.9 million, plus two Chevrolet Trailblazers, a Chevrolet station wagon, a boat and several properties.”

Wow. How come I don’t get any kickback money? I mean, I’d have to refuse it, but if no one even offers me any then I must not be doing a good enough job…

My little shavers below had a great time, I hope you and yours did as well!

Gary Share is Microsoft’s director of product management for Windows.

Gary Share is the spokesperson for Internet Explorer in relation to the Firefox browser, which in a few months since its 1.0 unveiling has taken the world by storm, topping 10 million downloads and reducing IE’s market share below 90% and counting for the first time since, well, ever since it got there.

Gary says some funny things about Firefox and IE in this New York Times article (free reg required). He’s certainly arguing for the company product, IE.

But he doesn’t use IE himself.

From the article:
“Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. “Tabs are what hooked me,” he told me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each one and tax the computer’s memory. Firefox has tabs. Other browsers do, too. But fundamental design decisions for Internet Explorer prevent the addition of this and other desiderata without a thorough update of Windows, which will not be complete until 2006 at the earliest.”

At least that’s what the AP says….

At least until we can figure out a way to export/import my site archives over to Tangelo…

I’ve been trapped in a stream of consciousness!

-A State of Transition-

(or should it be “Up I Give”–just joking, please)
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001702.html

Well, maybe you won’t “see” it, but under the hood changes are cool anyway.