Archive for March, 2009

PopupManager.createPopupWindow

Monday, March 30th, 2009

If you’re wondering how to pass parameters into a Flex popup window, as documented here or here, or how to set the initObj parameter.. it’s deprecated. I was trying to figure out how to create a popup window and pass a parameter into it, and really I still don’t think I have, but the new […]

Tech Spending and the Recession

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Calculated Risk has a post on Q1 GDP, predicting it will be ugly. He uses an analogy to demonstrate how companies that make enabling technologies like computers and software will be in for tough times. Imagine ACME widget company with a steadily growing sales volume (say 5% per year). In the first half of 2008 […]

Silverlight and Pluggable Codecs

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Flash has been doing video on the web for years now, and doing an awesome job at it. The Flash Player has a number of built-in codecs, and all the Flash video on the web plays in the latest Flash player, no hassles. And HD videos look great. Microsoft, on the other hand, has their […]

The Octomom Decoy

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

I keep seeing stories about this: Suleman — already a single mother with six young children — gave birth to the octuplets through in-vitro fertilization, fueling controversy. News of her collecting public assistance for some of her children also outraged many taxpayers. It seems like there’s always some nonsense story in the media that people […]

Facebook Petitions

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

There’s a constant rumour on Facebook that the site is going to start charging users to use the site. And every time this rumour pops up, there are a bunch of groups started with names like “If Facebook becomes a paysite – I’m gone!”. This group currently has 425,868 members. That’s 425,868 people who don’t […]

boost::excessive_syntax

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

Apologies to the majority of people who have no idea what this is about. class YourBrain { public:       YourBrain();       virtual ~YourBrain();         YourBrain* Get()       {             return this;       }         static YourBrain* Create()       {             return new YourBrain();       } };   class YourBrainDerived : public YourBrain { […]

Xbox 360 Hard Drive Missing Space

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

My Xbox 360 came with a 20gb hard drive, but it seems to have shrunk over time. Yes, I know the drive really only ever had about 13 gig of usable space, thanks to Microsoft taking up the rest of it for who-knows-what. But it’s worse than that. The Memory page of the dashboard shows […]

CIRA Survey

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

CIRA is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. They just sent me a survey asking me for my opinions about them. Some of the questions on the survey were a bit strange. It sounds like they consider part of their mandate to be promoting the “.ca” registry. If you look at their site, it says in […]

Revenue Recognition

Monday, March 16th, 2009

You know what sucks? Revenue Recognition rules, and their application on software products. Here’s how it works. You spend $1000 making an app, and you sell it for $10. You sell it to 200 people, yielding revenue of $2000. What most companies do is declare that revenue, so it shows up on their balance sheet […]

Windows 7 Performance

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Here’s some great news: Benchmarks of Windows 7 show that it’s not only faster than Vista, but faster than Windows XP.