A big Thank-You to Robert Scoble for the link… two hundred hits over the weekend. Wow.

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Woohoo! SpaceShipOne flew - and landed! They are now preparing for another flight that, if successful, would mean they win the X Prize. Great news for all of us who believe that there’s more to our future than quarrelling over dwindling resources on one increasingly overcrowded planet.

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I have some unused Gmail invitations, write to me if you need one.

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The (afaik) undocumented Amigos page on Slashdot lists recent journal entries from all your Friends. Great, now all I need is an RSS feed for this.

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Right or wrong, Joel scored a slam dunk with his ditty on the API Wars. I disagree with a couple of the points there (and the article does take care to note that it is overgeneralizing) but one of his points rings true: Microsoft lost a whole generation of developers. However, it is not clear that soldiering on with the Raymond Chen approach¹, with its 80s era design, would have solved anything. MS web devs were already fleeing to Java and PHP because cranky old ASP (even ASP 3) wasn’t cutting it any more. Worse, beginner web devs were moving to PHP and Java in droves because of (a) free dev tools (Weblogic+JBuilder is a free download for individual users, and you now have Eclipse) and (b) much better community support at php.net and the then-Java-only serverside.com. C# and VB.net were huge reductions in barrier to entry for MS development. If anything, the only quibble I’d have is: why isn’t VS.Net 2003 a free download for home use yet? The Framework SDK is not good enough when you’re competing with a Weblogic Workshop (based IIRC on Borland JBuilder) download from BEA².

Joel spends a lot of time talking about backward compatibility across Win32 and .Net. I’m not sure why, because the gulf between them is huge, and, to my mind, necessary. Win16 was a huge shift from processor-centric DOS programming to C-based Windows programming. Win16 morphed (reasonably) gracefully into Win32, but it’s important to realize that managed code (whether Java or .NET) is yet another paradigm shift. Thinking about managed code as “just another set of libraries” is to miss the point.

From a traditional Comp.Sc. viewpoint, what Microsoft calls “managed code” consists of a set of orthogonal features, mainly

1. bytecode for a stack-based virtual machine
2. automatic memory management
3. a “sandbox” execution environment and a standard security model
4. importantly, a large, standard set of libraries to program against

It is possible to have each without the other. The language D, for instance, includes garbage collection but not bytecode generation or a sandbox. Pascal has offered bytecode for ages but not automatic memory management and so on. Smalltalk had almost all of it except a standard security model. Java put all these together for the first time, and was incredibly popular with developers. .NET added some new twists, and when the dust settled, the .NET environment was more than a set of Win32-callable DLLs.

On Robert McLaws’ LonghornBlogs site, a poster asks:

.NET 1.1 is not completely backwards compatible with .NET 1.0 == true
Is it or is it not? It is not.

The correct answer is, it does not matter. If you believe it does, then you do not understand .NET SxS. Of course, Microsoft has made massive screwups with SxS, but that does not take the feature away. Of course, given that Joel depends on a download model to run his business, I can sympathize with his fury over adding 20MB to his runtimes. But look at it this way — how many FogBugz customers are on dialup? CityDesk is a slightly bigger problem, though. Note to Microsoft: where are the AOL-style disks with the .NET Framework (plus Windows+IE patches)? Longhorn is years away, you guys gotta keep us happy until then!

Finally, there were those who rejected Joel’s central Web-uber-alles thesis, notably Olivier Travers:

And is the final frontier of HCI to have keyboard shortcuts that work, or can we expect a little more from those ever more powerful computers? What a startling lack of ambition [...]

I would probably point to Joel’s older Five Worlds article and point out that Joel was mainly talking about forms-oriented apps. Nobody’s quite ready to cede Photoshop to the web yet :-). Although after watching Joel’s follow-up posts, I have this to say: the day Design-By-Committee makes a platform with a better user interface, pigs will fly. Opera and Mozilla can’t even iron out their ECMAScript and CSSx differences yet — and I’m supposed to trust these guys with my forms, too, now?

¹Full Disclosure: I actively read and enjoy Raymond Chen’s weblog, and can actually remember a time when we needed hPrevInst arguments. I also happen to think a lot of today’s kids are spoilt on PHP and C# and Java (Do I sound like a curmudgeon before I’m even 30?), but that’s a topic for another rant.

²MSDNAA has been plastering campuses with free VS.Net CDs, at least in India, but I wonder how many converts from the LUGs they’ve got.

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Folk bothered by Firefox’s slow (1-line) up/down-arrow scrolling can install Cosmic Cat’s SuperScroll extension and set directional scrolling to an IE-like 4 lines.

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Yahoo Messenger 6 is now bloatware, piggyback-ware (it installs several Yahoo tie-ins, like Yahoo Internet Mail and Yahoo Autocomplete even when these are unchecked in Messenger Installer Options) and vampire-ware (refuses to die: removing Yahoo Internet Mail was an ordeal because it did not respond to UnRegisterServer during uninstallation — I had to waste 5 minutes driving regedit stakes through its heart). You’ve been warned, stay away. Until Yahoo cleans up its installer act, version 5.6 should work quite well.

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Life imitates art: Native American Wireless ISP launches. Coming soon: Liberation Spectrum.

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I saw The Day after Tomorrow over the weekend, largely because it’s been ages since I saw a good ol’ fashioned break-things-up disaster movie. This one had great eye candy, lots of great steadycam shots, a few good moments but overall very little impact. This is to be expected since climate change is very hard to boil down into simplistic cause and effect models: for example, while Day after Tomorrow largely deals with the North Atlantic Drift (which we know fluctuates), it fails to take into account other ocean currents, and aperiodic disruptive factors in those currents, such as El Niño.

(Mild spoiler ahead) Day after Tomorrow opens on the Larsen B shelf in Antarctica, where a massive sheet of ice splits away in the opening minutes of the film. Interestingly, in March 2002, about 500 billion tonnes of ice did break away from this shelf in a matter of weeks. While worrisome, the most reassuring result of this collapse is that it merely underlined (again) how little we — Earth-firsters and SUV drivers alike — know the complex web that makes up the climate of this planet.

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Microsoft has Rational’s developer toolset firmly in its sights with its updated Whidbey roadmap. Modeling, code analysis, testing and test management — and even source control.

Yes, good ol’ Visual SourceSafe is getting its guts ripped out and will be replaced by something codenamed Hatteras (aka Visual SourceSafe 2005) that I’m sure will finally be a real source control system offering from MS (too bad it’ll only work well for Windows developers).

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