One of my christmas presents was a Xbox Live starter kit which includes a headset, three demos and 12 months subscription.
All I can say is that Microsoft have put a lot of thought into the whole ‘live’ experience. Everything from registration to finding and playing a game is slick and painless.
See you online!
Since getting my ADSL, I’ve been using Windows XP as my primary OS. I spent a few hours this morning trying to get my SpeedTouch USB (also known as ‘the frog’) to work under Linux.
No joy.
None.
Whatsoever.
It appears that the Speedtouch package available in universe somewhat ironically requires an internet connection to retrieve. D’oh!
I also tried the Speedtouch Suite but I’m getting errors from modprobe, and I’m not sure how to resolve them.
Why don’t these things Just Work™?
Before I hear cries of “Hardware Modem” this is a standard piece of hardware that a) has been around for awhile now and b) is distributed by most ISPs.
I will be upgrading to a separate gateway, but for now my primary OS is once again XP (albeit running FOSS software).
Today was the day!
My lowly ISDN connection has been replaced with 1MB ADSL.
/me is (very) happy.
Merry Christmas one and all!
Before you think I’m sad (or sadder than you already thought I was) I queued this post up on Christmas Eve.
Honest.
Roll on Wednesday and my ADSL!
Without conscious decision, I’ve started reading eBooks (again) on my Palm Vx. Recently I’ve gotten through:
And I’ve got a bunch more queued up.
Part of the reason I find myself liking eBooks now is the same as Rory:
If I get caught in line for too long somewhere, I can read a few lines of Shakespeare or go over another T.S. Eliot[sic] poem, trying to figure out what in the hell it is that he’s trying to say behind all the words that he so expertly put down.
Ok, not quite that intellectual, but because I have the book(s) in my pocket, I find myself reading more often. eBooks are a convenient format.
Watched Catch Me If You Can last night. It’s an entertaining adaption of the book about and by Frank Abagnale. As usual this left me thirsting for more, so off a googling I went.
First stop Wikipedia, then his official site, then the book itself. Then the realisation I was currently reading Tom Sawyer on my handheld, so why not this as well? A quick browse of various eBook retailers, and I landed at the door of eReader.com.
I’ve been aware of, and used, this service since its original incarnation as Peanut Press (later Palm Digital Media and now eReader) but it’s been a while since I last visited.
Hmm, lots of interesting books. They do wishlists – cool. Let’s set one up. Now let’s link to it like I do my Amazon one.
Ah.
It would appear that:
So unless I’ve missed something completely obvious, it’s a personal shopping list that is, in the words of Sir Edmund Blackadder:
like a broken pencil…pointless
Aside from the pointless wishlist, I’ve found eReader to be a fairly complete and easy to use service, and their range of books have greatly increased since their early days. I look forward to reading more eBooks, and I may have to try out some of the other retailers as well.
Via Aq.
create your personalized map of europe
create your own personalized map of the USA
Hmm… Need to do more travelling…
1 I’m cheating a bit with Switzerland as I simply landed at Geneva and drove to France.
I’m a procrastinator. Whilst reading The Procrastinator’s Handbook a few years ago (the only eBook I’ve paid money for IIRC) I discovered the main reason I procrastinate – I’m a perfectionist. Quite simply I put off jobs because I want to do a good job.
Sounds daft, but it isn’t. I don’t like half-hearted attempts or botched results (which make me an extremely bad DIY’er because I never start jobs, much to my wife’s lament), so I put off doing the job until I’m sure I can do it the best that I can.
This brings us onto the topic for this post – documentation. Loved by users, depised by documentors. I often struggle to write documentation because:
Once I get going I’m fine, but it’s that first step that trips me up repeatedly.
Why are there not any guides out there that say “write these documents like this”? I’m talking everything here, from architecture documents to developer guides to user guides to release notes.
This is a biggy. I want to be able to create all my documentation with as few tools as possible, and preferably support different formats/outputs.
I've tried various solutions - Microsoft Word/OOo Writer with PDF output, HTML, POD, Docbook, HTMLHELP, plain text. All work on one level or another, but there's no consistancy.Docbook seems to be best of the bunch as it removes the emphasis on presentation that MS Word puts there, it allows multiple destination formats from a single source, and it plays nicely with SCM. It’s just so damn hard to use. Yet another syntax to learn (which is too close to HTML – it’s just asking for problems) and a problematic toolchain on non-UNIX platforms.
I want a documentation solution that provides something like the editing flexibility (and simple markup) of a Wiki, with the presentation control and output formats of Docbook. Anybody know of one?
The author of Coder to Developer – Mike Gunderloy – is releasing a new book:
Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer which promises to be:
A unique resource designed to help you and other experienced developers build GUIs for your programs that are simple to learn, easy to use, and painless to maintain, even though youâ??re not user interface experts. Inside, the focus is on the essentials of Windows and web GUI design: simple ideas that require modest programming effort but provide enormous payoffs in terms of user success and satisfaction.
Sounds interesting…
No idea if it will have the same .NET slant as the previous one (which Mike has told me will be addressed in a revised edition which extends the scope of the book to cover PHP/Perl/Python”>LAMP and Java development), which I felt limited its audience. This was a shame as I felt many people could learn from it.
Following on from my entry Don’t underestimate the value of a good debugger,,,
I’m not really following your conclusion here. Are you saying that your Mono development environment isn’t as good as Visual Studio (because it’s absent a debugger), which is what the article appears to imply for 90% of it? Or do you mean that IDEs aren’t necessary and your Mono development environment is as good as an “all-in-one” IDE like VS (as the last paragraph seems to suggest)?
Both.
My current Mono development environment is inferior to Visual Studio .NET because it’s missing an integrated debugger, but an IDE does not a coder make.
To me it’s an evolution of my programming skills. I learnt Delphi1 and Perl2 via an IDE. I started learning .NET via the SDK, but only really got to grips with it when I started using the IDE. Now I’m using Mono, I find I no longer need the IDE – I regarded it as essential, but now it’s just nice to have.
1 Not that you have much choice with Delphi – you have to buy the IDE to get the compiler, so you may as well use it.
2 Via ActiveState Komodo – and excellent multi-language IDE based on Mozilla. I relied on it for the integrated debugger whilst learning, but I have weaned myself off it now.