Hello to everyone and a belated Happy New Year. The recently concluded Macworld has created fire in the news industry. Everyone is talking about the iPhone and Steve Jobs's stellar keynote performance. I simple couldn't resist the urge to blog about it and here goes my two cents.
Things have not been the same for Apple since the success of iPod. It sees better opportunities in new territories compared to the PC market. This year's Macworld keynote by Steve Jobs was a clear indication of that, where not a single technology on Mac was presented. In the next 3 to 4 years, I suspect Apple to get rid of the Mac hardware business and open up the Mac OSX operating systems to PC vendors like Dell and HP. That is a pretty bold statement, but before that can happen, existing businesses like Apple TV and iPhone need to turn into cashcows. The iPod / iTunes businesses have already proven to be a cashcow. Many have tried to repeat the Apple success story in the music business, but none have come even close. In the next two years I see Apple coming out with many high and low end cellphones that would be bought by people like crazy. Once the iPhone business is established Apple will try to get it's media center business steady, which will take atleast 3 years starting from the day it is released. The success of these businesses will result in Mac not being as profitable for Apple as it used to be, which would result in Apple axing it.
I think the porting of OSX to the Intel platform was the most brilliant move by Apple. It gives Apple the oppurtunity to open it's operating system to PC makers any time it wants. The biggest hurdle though is getting the device drivers ready, which is not an easy task. One of the major reasons for Linux's failure to be accepted mainstream is device drivers. What Apple will ultimately do will depend on a lot of factors, but the company surely has some very strong cards that it is holding very close to it's chest leaving us only to speculate.
This was complete negligence on my part. In the past any time I added new features I used to test it in both IE and Firefox. This time around I completely forgot to do so. Thanks to Lilly for pointing this out. I am happy to tell you that my site now works on Firefox as well. I think I need to create a checklist to avoid such messups in the future. Let me know of any other problems you come across.
Thanks and Enjoy!
I visited the local Best Buy store to check out the new PS3 and Zune. I was completely blown away by the quality output of the PS3 all HD quality. The 360 looks old technology in front of it. It may be that Sony has installed it's best in those demo consoles, but that's what marketing is all about. The games on 360 look pale. The console business is a multi-year business. Given this fact I think that even thought the PS3 is a year late compared to the 360, it has plenty of time to catch up. My gut feeling is that it will win this time around also until Microsoft does some magic. Time will tell.
As for the Zune, don't even get me started. The look and feel is so bad that it looks worse than a prototype. I can't believe this is the same team that designed the 360. There is no way that people would buy this piece of crap. I don't care that it has WiFi or some cool feature that the iPod doesn't. First impression is what matters, you should get attracted towards the product the moment you see it. iPod vs Zune, there is no comparison.
I have a new look and feel for the website. All the code behind the scene is the same. the only thing that is different is the skin. I have used the Glue Ideas theme and applied to the site. Some of the other sites that use the same theme are DunanMackenzie.net and AdamKinney.com. Note however that the only thing I have used is the outer skin, the content layout and color combinations are my own.
I have been working on this for the past two evenings and it was a breeze. I wanted to use ASP.NET 2.0 theming before going live, but I was so excited to show this to you that I just decided to release it. The next big thing for me is to get the business logic and data access layer changed. There is nothing wrong with those layers, just that I want to redesign them using the MVC pattern.
I have added a couple of features to the blog. You would now see the previous and next links on both top and bottom parts of the page. Also when you click on an archive month, you would see a label "Archies for month year". This new label would make it easier to understand whether the paging is enabled for all entries or only for that month.
I have been really drawn towards subversion (svn) for the past couple of days and have been reading documentation on it like crazy. There are two ways in which you can install subversion, one with Berkley DB (BDB) and the other with Fast Secure File System (FSFS). From all the reading I have done I figured that FSFS is a better option than BDB. The problem is that most blogs and forums I have read talk about svn 1.3, whereas with 1.4 they have made some big changes. In any case I will stick with FSFS until I hear otherwise.
The two big questions I had coming from a VSS background was how do we add new users to the source control system. I could not find an answer anywhere on the Internet, so I assumed that the default was windows authentication. The other question I had was how svn handled versioning. I found answers to both questions in a free book on subversion. The versioning answer is a bit long so I would suggest you read chapter 4 in the book. I didn't like the authentication answer but you can read it in chapter 6 of the book. Basically there is a file named svnserve.conf in the conf folder of your repository in this file you can set the password-db attribute to the name of the file that holds usernames and passwords. The content of the file is clear text so anyone that has access to the server can see your password. I also came across another material that shows how to enable windows authentication, but all that is through Apache, so IIS users are out of luck.
On a different note, I am really getting pissed at not being able to add new tags on the fly when I am writing blog entries. When I designed and implemented the blogging engine, I left that ability to phase II which never came (sounds familiar eh!). Anyways, I will fix it in the coming days, that will give me the oppurtunity to play with Atlas a little more heh!
Bookmarks for future reference
Continuous Integration writeup
Continuous Integration Server
Subversion popular open source version control software
Perforce fairly popular paid version control software
On my routine article search on Test Driven Development TDD, I came across Jeremy D. Miller's blog. I found this article of his to be a good list of todo items for any one starting on a new project. A couple of other good articles of his are here and here.
I have been relying on regular expressions a lot lately and there is one tool without which the job would have been very difficult. The tool is The Regulator. It is simply an awesome tool. You enter the input string and then start writing your regular expression, as you do it, you can keep testing the expression to see whether it works / tweak it. Once satisfied you can copy the expression into your code and be sure for it to work.
Well the maker of The Regulator has come out with a new even simpler tool. It's named
Regulazy. As the name suggests, you don't have to write the regular expression anymore, just highlight the information that you want to be part of the regular expression, right mouse and click one of the options and the tool writes the expression for you. That simple.
Enjoy!
