Jeff Makes Software

Wow, time flies, and it's almost here. I'm assuming that attendance is not sold out with all of the hotel and registration discounts, but I'm really looking forward to it. The quality of sessions was off the charts solid last year.

I'm really impressed with the new laptop (and for what it costs, I suppose one should). I was just shy of using my old one, the first Intel-based 15" MacBook Pro, for three straight years, but as we speak, the old one is getting a fresh install so Diana can use it. Even at three, it's still a lot easier to use than her newer Vista Dell.

The thing that impressed me immediately is how solid it is. I've picked up and twisted the 13" and 15" models in the store, but I guess I still felt that the 17" just "had" to feel less solid. But it doesn't at all, it feels exactly the same. I give Apple a lot of credit for going to this machined solid block of aluminum. It makes a huge difference.

Also impressive was the migration app that pulls all of your junk over the wire from your old comprooder. It apparently is even smart enough to set the ethernet port to cross-over. Nice. It took a little over an hour to move the 50 gigs worth of junk, and when it was done, everything (mostly) worked as it did before. My browsing history and bookmarks were all there, all of the apps I installed, etc. Even keyboard preferences made it over (important for Visual Studio users, of course). It was even smart enough not to copy over older versions of iPhoto and such. The only pain was the serial numbers, having to re-enter them for the pro apps, and having to deactivate CS3 before activating it on the new one.

No heat issues at all. Fans idle silently at 2000 rpm, and there are no hot spots. Screen is beautiful, and I'm not getting all of the criticism toward the glossy screens. Four-finger swiping to activate Expose is sweet. Parallels screams giving it 2 of the 4 gigs to work with. Keyboard is a huge improvement. The size for the 17" isn't nearly as troublesome as I worried it might be.

The battery, man, I don't even know what to make of that. I'm running in the better performance mode, using the better video processor, screen at full brightness, keyboard lights on, and it looks like it'll easily do five hours on a single charge. My guess is that you can easily get six or seven if you back off. I know Apple says eight, but honestly, I was hoping for five or more, and that seems easily achievable.

I suppose I'll post more after I use it, but at this point I'm not honestly expecting much to be different than what I've experienced for the last three years. Yeah, I know these things aren't cheap, but considering the time I spend on it, it seems to me that it's worth the expense to buy something I like better.

In my current gig, I was surprised to find when I started that there were front-end and back-end developers. The front-side guys are mostly HTML, CSS and Javascript (actually, mostly jQuery) folks, while the back-end folks do all of the wiring up and heavy lifting on the server type stuff. Most of the places I've worked had developers touching everything, and if anyone was generating HTML, it was designers.

It certainly isn't the first time, and some how I doubt it'll be the last. The official ASP.NET site, where I was headed to read more on MVC, is down. And it's not just down, it's down with the generic error page. You know, the one with the notes about how to set your web.config.

As I posted earlier today, CoasterBuzz has now been around for nine years. That's a fourth of my life! In that time I've been married and divorced, owned three cars, had eight jobs, wrote a book and God knows what else. It's a long time.

I'm not sure I get the point of Mozilla wanting to push an open source video standard (see Ars story). They're pusing for an open platform for video. So why exactly does everything have to be "vendor-neutral, standards-based?" I don't care that Flash is from Adobe. If it works, and everyone has it, what difference does it make? And hey, with Silverlight making some inroads, it keeps Adobe even more honest and working to innovate. Everybody wins.

Ars Technica launched a redesign today. I seem to recall that they were on ASP.NET before in some custom made CMS. Now they're on Movable Type.

I mentioned previously that I was working on a multi-file upload control for Silverlight. Yes, it has been done, but it's a good practical thing to get your head around. I feel like I've managed to get to a good place with it in terms of the "hard" parts (that is, getting to know Silverlight). I haven't fleshed out the back end part as much yet.