Shawn Wildermuth has moved Genghis to CodePlex because GotDotNet Workspaces is going away. I actually really like CodePlex, but not the state those pesky contractors left the Genghis bits in, so we'll be following up with another release in early July to bring sanity back. Thanks, Shawn!

After raving about Microsoft Surface, I get a personal invitation from Robert Levy, a PM on the Surface SDK team to come take a look.  Robert’s job is to make sure it’s possible for the partners that want to put a Surface into their hotels, stores and theme parks to build apps to help sell whatever they’re selling.

There’re currently no plans to enable just normal humans to program it, unfortunately, or even to sell the things except to corp partners. This is too bad, ’cuz I definitely want one for my family room. Man, talk about a conversation starter!

The demo apps were very cool. Of course, there were the apps that are shown on the surface web site and they really work. The ones that I thought were best were when you used physical devices to control what happens on the surface, e.g. turning a knob you drop onto the surface to adjust settings, putting a camera on the surface to get the pictures, putting a credit card on the surface to pay for your drinks, etc. Of course, just using your fingers to paint or drag stuff around was fun, too.

I can definitely see these things attracting a crowd at the zoo or the local phone store. It’s a thing.

I was really loving my T-Mobile Wing with WM6, Pocket Office, external micro-SD slot, slamming keyboard, beautiful ClearType display, one-handed usage (even though it is a PocketPC, I almost never needed to pull out the stylus), blue tooth (very high quality!), wi-fi, Edge and a slamming keyboard! (yes — it was that slamming.).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep it. After four days of the battery going dead after 12 short hours of my normal usage, e.g. email, texting, surfing, etc, it was dead. I turned off wi-fi, blue tooth and DirectPush to no avail. The T-Mobile Wing is just too cool for the battery and T-Mobile didn’t have a bigger one to give me.

So it’s back to my i-mate smartflip (hurray for data sync!). I was *so* loving that slamming keyboard…

I love the idea of the new Palm Foleo, i.e. my life fits on my cell phone in my pocket and my "laptop" is just a bigger display and full-sized keyboard. Of course, this presupposes the storage capacity to store my life on my cell phone (like I do currently on my laptop), which we're a ways from. Unfortunately, this means that the Foleo is likely ahead of its time and will therefore suffer, but it's another step down a good road (remember the "brick" computer that could plug into any keyboard/mouse?).

Your programmer personality type is:

DHSB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

When you make a call to LoadWithPartialName in .NET 2.0, you get the standard compiler error that you’re using an obsolete function:

foo.cs(5,24): warning CS0618:
  'System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadWithPartialName(string)' is obsolete:
  'This method has been deprecated. Please use Assembly.Load() instead.
  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=14202 '

The problem is, unlike more obsolete function warnings, there’s no good way I know of to reform the arguments from the obsolete function to the recommended replacement, i.e. Assembly.Load doesn’t work if you give it a partial assembly name. Because of this, instead of code filled with Assembly.Load calls, I see this all over the place in production .NET 2.0 code:

#pragma warning disable 618
Assembly.LoadWithPartialName("foo");
#pragma warning restore 618

Maybe in .NET 3.5, we can get a helper function that wraps the #pragmas for us… : )

I always knew that the scientists would optimize away sending the matter when all they need is to send the state:

“A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space. The scientists did it by exploiting the “spooky” and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another.” [ed: emphasis mine]

Sure. And what do they do with the matter at the original end? Do they leave it alive work another job, but only pay one set of taxes? I don’t think so…

I sent the boys to the Microsoft Surface web site last night while I was in another room. I don't believe I've ever heard that many "wows" and "cools" and "I want its!" out of the two of them. And after getting my butt out of my chair, I have to agree -- I want one.