Craig's Blog

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Book update

Quick update on some books I've listened to --

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Very cool book. Of course we all know about Steve Job's narcissism. I find people like that fascinating. I'd hate to be around them but it is fun to read about them from a safe distance. The author did a great job tracing the history of Steve's movie company Pixar Studios. I've always wondered about Pixar since they were the first ones to really use computer graphics in movie making. Steve is in his 40s now and not aging gracefully, at least from the author's point of view. He's always prayed at the altar of youth. His youthful 21 year old face on Time magazine's cover was his high point in that regard. Some of the book was covered also in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I thought Noah Wyle (from ER) did a great job as Jobs. Ha a pun! I downloaded the movie Triumph of the Nerds from bit torrent recently. It's a documentary on the history of the rise of the PC and the people involved with it. It's on my tivo computer to be watched. Along with a million other shows. That little issue is for another blog. While I'm on computer movies another really cool movie is Revolution OS, all about the rise of Linux operating system and the open source movement. Well done documentary that gives the viewer a peek behind all the noise.

Neuromancer - William Gibson - I decided not to listen to this one after I heard the first chapter. Gibson uses colorful words and imagery to describe the settings. I know he's sort of a hack writer but he does a good job describing his world of the future. I miss too much listening to the audio book so I'm going to put it on my to read list and take my time with it.

The Discoverers - I own this book and it's been on my reading list for years now. It's been lauded as one of the greatest history books. So I have to give it a try. I'm about 25% of the way through it and it's a little dry, written like a classroom history books, facts regurgitated. So far I've learn nothing new but I'm going forward with it.

Rain out

Visual Basic for Linux?

I saw this on slashdot today. I didn't bother reading the comments, I'm sure the geeks had a field day claiming one or all of the following:

• Why do you need a visual IDE when you can do everything using command line scripts, VIM or Emacs
• You can do more with Java, Mono, Python or other such uber geek language with a cobbled together IDE
• Why does Linux have to follow everything Microsoft does. boo!!

Anyway here's the link if anyone has play time on their hands and don't mind being subservient to Basic language constructs. My personal favorite linux IDE/language would probably be Mono using the MonoDevelop IDE. MonoDevelop is a close cousin of the very cool open source C# IDE called SharpDevelop.

http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

Happy programming!

ASP.NET Starter Kits

I just wanted to pass along a cool freebie for those out there who are wanting/trying to learn ASP.NET and want to pick up some cool techniques. Microsoft has created a whole set of starter kits located at http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/downloads/kits/default.aspx also there's a quick review of them on MSDN -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/08/StarterKits/default.aspx

I espcially like the Community kit which is portal web site. This one is fully functional too if you want a free portal. I've been researching how it uses the IHttpModule class to intercept http requests before it gets to the asp.net handler. One of the things that rocks is you can hook into the authentication event handler and perform you're own authentication/authorization. Very cool. The kit dynamically builds each page from a web control and overlays skins. That's kind of neat but I'm not much for skins but I do like the “master page” approach. I plan to hybrid some of it into my own web site. I know that ASP.NET 2.0 will have incorporate master pages as part of the framework. I've been waiting awhile for it to get out of beta. I think I'll just plow ahead with this approach though.

Another kit that I plan on looking at is the Reports kit. They do a lot of fancy stuff with GDI+ and displaying data via data grids, lists and repeaters. Typical parent-child relationships and such. Something I've been investigating in my new media wishlist component I'm trying to add to my website.

Neandertal souls?

So I've been reading this book Hominids by Robert Sawyer. As usual he's put together a good story. About a parallel universe in which the Neandertals became the dominant Homo species instead of us. So one them gets transported over to our universe with a wave of the scifi author's magic wand and so ensues the story. The part I just read about was the Neandertal's discovering religion since his universe had no concept of religion. So my question is this -- If we all agree that all life evolved from self-organizing molecules, who was the first human to have a soul? Did the Neandertals (in our universe) have souls? If so why did god allow them to go extinct? So I guess we need to agree on what a soul is. My guess it is something only human beings have apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. So maybe it has something to do with self-awareness, foresight, enlarged cerebral cortex? Or maybe it has a lot to do with our godspot, our ability to perceive a god? I don't see too many dolphins going off to church or praying to the almighty oil tanker. So are souls another made up fairy tale that most religions like to espouse? So what if you were the first caveman to have a soul. You end up in heaven with god and ... well nobody else is there ... yet. Dang all of these clouds and angels, what am I going to do to pass the time? I'd rather be in hell, at least there I'd have something to do..haha. Which reminds me of a joke. Bill Gates dies, goes to heaven and god gives him a choice Heaven or Hell. Even better he says heck you can have a 30 day trial version of each. So Bill checks out Heaven first, seems to be nice and comfortable and well ..a bit boring. So he checks out Hell. Wall to wall babes, a sunny beach, women's sand volleyball, tropical drinks. Great he says, I choose Hell. So god says okay, and sends him to Hell, where he ends up being tortured endlessly by devils and the whole works. So god checks in on the fallen angel and Bill screams “hey this isn't what you showed me!”. God replies “oh hi Bill, sorry but that was the beta version”. Waw waw waaaaaaaw!!!