Inside The dotNET

Gah Lag!@

2006-04-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't been posting for awhile. Its been busy the last few months. Microsoft has been pushing for an earlier release of Vista, and let me tell you, it totally sucks. Rush rush rush, hack hack hack, code code code.

So, I applied for a job at that little buisness over at one infinite loop about two months ago. I think they sell fruit or something. Seeing as I know Objective C well, I was wondering if I could get a job to hack on OSX, which is a far saner operating system

Didn't get the job. T3h suck.

So, my dish blew off my roof. I went without TV for a few days, and I decided to take this as an opertunity to switch to DISH Network from DirectTV. DirectTV sucks ass: overpriced, not a great selection of channels, and DISH Network looks like a much better deal. Not only that, but DISH has a slew of high definition channels, free Starz for the first 3 months, and I got $100 back just for switching to DISH.

So yeah, life seems pretty decent now, even though we're probably going to end up pushing Vista back another year or so. Vista will probably be released when my daughter graduates from college.
_{Technorati: Apple, DirectTV, DISH Network, Life, Microsoft}

KTHML? Bah!

2005-11-20T06:30:00.000-08:00

Patrick over at Ad Astra Per Aspera says:

Well, I've fixed all the long standing bugs with the template and the various themes, I think. I fixed that really nasty KHTML rendering bug, too.

Who cares about KTHML. KDE's Konqueror and OSX's Safari are based on this engine, and its total shit.

Both browsers fail to render tons of sites, and as Patrick said himself, KTHML couldn't even render his own blog. Why anyone would use KHTML over Firefox is beyond me. And hell, there isn't even a KTHML browser for Windows, only OSX and any platform that KDE runs on. Screw that shit.

When I do the custom theme for my blog, its going to work on MSIE and Firefox only, I'll make sure it fails to work on KHTML. Infact, I'll make sure it doesn't work on Opera either. Who the hell ever heard of paying for a browser? At least we at Microsoft gave our's away free.

NeXT Sucks

2005-11-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't updated recently, I've been dead tired after work. A lot of people have been emailing me to update my progress on making a libFoundation for Vista, so I might as well.

So far, we're still using the ugly ugly NeXT theme, and I wish GNUstep would just get a new theme because I'm tired of looking at it. Seriously, the original Windows 95 look wasn't this fucking ugly; infact, nothing was this ugly until Windows XP came out with the Fisher Price theme. (lil Billy's First Computer?)
I fixed the bug we introduced with IC that it opened multiple window inspectors, an errant copy+paste caused it.
We've removed the false FSF copyright from all the source files and replaced it with a proper Microsoft one; I wish the FSF would quit trying to copyright files AND use a license that effectively puts them in the public domain.
We can compile ObjC via the Visual Studio UI now.
We use the native window decorations now, no more ugly NeXT-themed stuff

I'll take a screenshot later, the build of Vista I'm using BSODs everytime I try to take a screenshot.

Xbox fans doing another line?

2005-11-11T17:09:00.000-08:00

Fragglerock has published a guide to waiting in line at Best Buy for a 360 for all those out there who haven't taken my advise. Don't buy an Xbox 360, it will only end in tears and frustration.

500kb should be enough for anyone!

2005-11-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

This URL has been making the rounds at Microsoft, someone found pictures of an old 500kb hard drive from 1975. It's amazing how fast technology changes; 6 years later the first IBM PC (model 5150) came with an optional (but almost everyone bought one anyhow) 180kb 5-1/4" disk drive; it took just 3 of those disks to exceeded the capacity of that hard drive, and you didn't need to wear a bunny suit to use them, either.

CNet News: Microsoft rejects Visual Studio delay request

2005-11-06T11:50:00.000-08:00

I use Visual Studio 2005 almost everyday (at least, when I'm not using the good ol' combination of GCC and Vim), and I can see why someone would want to ask for a delay so my fellow developers can squash all the bugs. Visual Studio is always buggy on release, and gets finished usually after the second or third service pack; but from what I've seen with 2005, you're lucky it will be nearly bug free after the fourth or fifth.

I'm not sure why Microsoft even bothers with Visual Studio, we should just scrap it and rewrite it from the ground up. We could use Intel's compiler or GCC, and then rebuild the IDE so that it actually works right, is intuitive, and isn't cluttered to hell and back. But, hey, this is what happens when you have 8 or 9 versions of a product with un-checked feature creep.

Update, Nov 7th 11:40 am: Microsoft has released the Express Edition of Visual Studio 2005.

Tiger Woods 360 And Quake 4

2005-11-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

Tiger Woods:
I've been waiting for the Xbox 360 release on the 22nd, and I've been seeing some games in advance; working for Microsoft is pretty much a 24/7 horror show. Tiger Woods 360 is one of the games I've seen so far, and let me tell you, it makes great use of shaders to make realistic looking grass. Oh, and get this...

You can hit people in the crowd with golf balls. Suddenly, this game looks a lot more promising than it did before. Where's Jack Thompson when you need him? Other than that little tidbit, its no different than any other golf game made in the last decade. Boring, accurate physics, and top of the line simulations of grass movement.

Quake 4:
Plays pretty much like it did on the PC, but with the lack of mouselook, it is very difficult to control, and anyone not used to playing FPS on a console will pretty much hate this game. In addition to this, the graphics look a bit worse than on my 6800GT SLI system, but that's nothing new, top of the line PC hardware always beats top of the line console hardware; the Xbox 360 is roughly as powerful as a high end system manufactured two or three years ago.

Only major problem I've seen with Quake 4 (and this is with a pre-release beta that has been floating around the office for about two weeks), is that you can crash the 360 doing various stuff; hopefully you won't see this in the shipping version, id Software usually isn't that sloppy.

That said, unless Bill comes down and personally gives me an Xbox 360, I'm not getting one opening day, and probably never will. However, the Revolution is looking pretty interesting..

Bill Gates does a 360

2005-11-03T00:06:00.000-08:00

Well, I've heard from internal rumours that Bill Gates, the supreme commander himself, is going to show up at Best Buy to promote the Xbox 360 release...

Wow, you mean, we'll actually let people BUY them? I wonder where they pie guy is, we can have him nail Gates for every customer our idiotic "sold out" policy turns away.

Why do we bother?

2005-11-02T19:08:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like we're pushing into the release cycle of the Xbox 360, and all I can ask is, why are we bothering? Our marketing department obviously figured out what the rest of the planet knows - there's no reason to buy an Xbox, nor will there be any reason to buy an Xbox 360. So, what do we get? Artificial Scarcity. Great job, guys.

You know what this says? It says "Hey, the 360 is crap, stick with Sony." After all, Sony just shipped Shadow of the Colossus, and already had their critically acclaimed God of War earlier this year? What does the Xbox have? That's right, not a goddamn thing.

The 360 will be more of the same mediocrity. Oh, but we'll have HALO! That'll make it ALL better. Or maybe Soul Calibur 3. I'll be sure to remember them when I'm playing the new Katamari Damacy game on my PlayStation 3, and enjoying actual innovative titles, instead of more inept PC rehashes and crappy, "Mature OMG!" games that the Xbox is reknowned for.

I can see the slogan now: Xbox 360: We still suck more than the PS2, God help us with the PS3 ships. Or maybe, Xbox 360: Exclusives? That's another name for "PC port", right?

Oh, and before I forget - the PS3 is going to provide 99% backwards compatibility out of the box. For the Xbox 360? You're going to need to buy an UPGRADE DISC should you ever want to play your old library. And if the title for that legacy game doesn't have "Halo" in it, well, do you *really* think you're going to matter that much? Remember, Halo's the only franchise worth talking about on the Xbox.

But, hey, if you really, truly want one, more power to you. I'm sure you'll have a load of fun playing DirectX shaders. They're what make games better, after all. None of that fancy-schmancy gameplay stuff, after all, it's the graphics that makes games worth playing.

On the bright side, once you've played all the original titles for the 360 in, oh, 12 minutes, you can sell the controller to the Australian Aborigines. They always need more boomerangs.

Avalon Interface Constructor: Powered by Gorm 1.0!

2005-10-31T23:32:00.000-08:00

I've finally decided to blog about the internal goings-on inside the Big M. I, and my colleagues, head up a large project to take free and open source software and make it work for us. Our lawyers have pretty much assured us that the GNU Public License (and other related viral licenses) are invalid due to them giving too many rights to the users; and by giving the code away, they are making the code public domain and giving up their copyright... or something like that. INAL, but thats pretty much the gist of it.

We are split up into different teams, each working on intergrating code from different projects into pre-existing Microsoft products. One team is taking code from the Apache web server, and putting it in IIS to increase stability and speed; another team is taking code written by Netscape/Mozilla and intergrating it into MSIE7 and Outlook 2008; and yet another team (headed by me) is using GNUstep, the premeire desktop environment, and the crowning achievement of the Free Software Foundation's work to rip off other people (mainly NextSTEP, who ripped off Apple, who ripped off us to begin with.)

Project Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform Apple (or, simply, STFU Apple) is the official name of the GNUstep intergration project. Right now, we're using Gorm 1.0 (which came out a few days ago) , an application like Apple's Interface Builder, but vastly improved and easier to use. For those that don't know what these applications are like, imagine being able to build an application using a simple yet powerful GUI tool, allowing you to take widgets and UI constructs from a set of palettes... but not generate any code doing this.

Gorm blows Interface Builder out of the water, and also does the same to the internally designed Avalon UI Builder. The AvalonUI tool was based on the one for Visual Studio 8 (which never came to pass), and generates code instead of lays out the UI at runtime. Having to compile everytime you hack the UI layout sucks. It also destroys anything Gnome or KDE brings to the fight.

We had originally thought using one of Gnome or KDE's tools, because Gnome and KDE are very popular... however, internally, almost everything Gnome and KDE sucks. Gnome uses this weird C API styling that makes zero sense to anyone, and KDE uses C++ that may be worse than some of the stuff Microsoft has written. (Yes, we've written some pretty bad stuff before, just to get the product out the door).

So, yes, this also means many of us (including my entire team, my boss, and her boss, and tons of people all over the company) are pushing for a shift from C++ to Objective-C. We already have a beta version of Visual Studio that can compile ObjC (using code taken from GCC).

Oh, and I forgot to mention, that screenshot is of the new Avalon Interface Constructor, only bugs at the moment are the multiple Window Inspector windows, and the fact that GNUstep applications do not show up on the taskbar.