One of the fears is that the days of PC is considered over. That we there will be a massive shift towards a reduction of the interface. Some have pointed out that the start screen on Windows 8: It’s Almost Not Terrible. Gartner sums it up in a word: Bad for desktops (however he also says that it’s very fine on touch device). This all sounds very odd. However, the negativity mostly centered around how to use the start screen on a desktop might not be such a big deal. Hanselman among others assures that you [...]

Coffeescript has been heralded as a way to avoid some of the nastiness of javascript. Now Anders Hejlsberg introduces a new addition to the story: Typescript. I read this from a pal that linked to a blog post. The geist of the post is a slight positive note, but the author notes that intellisense is missing for editors other than visual studio. If the license is good (it’s in Apache license), the language additions are relevant, there might be people that get some of it to work in another editor.

I had some trouble where a simple parser would take a bit of time. Turns out that there were many ways of improving this performance. I rewrote it to use the xml reader instead to be able to do these improvements. Some funky bugs got squished. The reader is a bit low level compared to niceties such as Nokogiri (in hindsight, maybe I should have been using). By using this class I could avoid some funkyness of XmlDocument having to cope with wierd xml at the expense of having less appealing code: LogEntryPar[...]

Imagine the user experience of a gaming console. It’s very focused on a selected few tasks: starting games, playing movies… An ipad is conceptually a similar device. You can surf, run certain applications, watch movies, listen to music. The user interface is simple. Most users have no need for the fuss.To imagine an operating system where you focus on what normal users want to do, you start looking in the windows 8 direction. The start screen reminds of the Xbox.I got skeptical and confused when I tried wi[...]

So, Im using Process Monitor to hunt down some permission or anti virus problems in windows. I notice  a query to a registry key “Image File Execution Options”. I get curious. Turns out that you can turn on a debugger when starting a program. Someone used it to control a virus outbreak, but it could be handy for other things as well.