2014 Predictions

These are my 2014 predictions.


I have two.


1.


After Apple's success, the tech media are trying to second guess what is the next big thing; MP3 players, Smart Phones, Tablets.... what next?   Smart TVs?  I don't thing so.  Smart Watches?  I don't think so either.  Google Glass? A gimmick that will have a niche market. 


The next big thing will be the Oculus Rift.  The day this is released is the day society starts to change forever. It is the day people stop going out to restaurants. It is the day attendance at live sporting events drops off. Its the day people stop going to the shops. Its the day people no longer go to the movies.  Real life will not be able to compete.


It will be Strange Days, meets Brainstorm, meets Minority Report.


And don't thing that it will be simply playing Battlefield or Halo or Mind Craft while wearing an Oculus Rift. It will mean new genre of games specifically designed for the Oculus Experience. Imagine "Get Even" on the Oculus Rift.  People are going to be suffering from mental trauma.

Oculus Rift is slated for release this year.  I am guessing they will be aiming for Christmas.  It will not start to impact society until 2015/16.


It will then lead to 3D cameras for our computers, 3D Skype, and 3D fully immersive user interfaces for all aspects of computing.


It makes Google Glass look pretty boring in comparison.




2.


There is a chance that the e-Cat will change the world's energy balance forever.  2014 will be it make or break year.  Read all about it here


I have been for a long time interested in pseudo science, not because I am a nutter but because I enjoy watching these people follow the pseudo science play book; a recluse scientist (or inventor), ridiculed by their peers, toils for decades on a new machine/formula/invention to solve energy/space time travel/teleportation/engine efficiency/etc and how the government is trying to supress/kill/destroy their work and their invention will be complete with only another $10M of funding.   http://moller.com/dev/  http://www.angellabsllc.com/  or anything found at http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page 


Indeed, Pons and Fleischmann (the cold fusion researchers from 20 years ago) to a large extent inadvertently followed much of this script even though they were eminent in their fields and part of academia.


Andrea Rossi, the inventor of the e-Cat, to a large extent also follows this script and could be readily dismissed.  However there are also significant differences.  There are no conspiracy.  The 'machine' is under going third party trials, there are serious backers, and from what he writes there a team of experts supporting the development.


Also he is not suggesting that it is a nuclear reaction as such; not in your high school physics sense of fusion or fission. Rather it is something else.


Follow E-Cat World for developments.

Sinofsky gonsky

I attended TechEd 2012 Australia recently.

I was interested in what the Windows booth had to say about their new product (Windows 8) and when should business plan on upgrading to it.
They seemed to be taking a very strange position.

They said anyone still on Windows Vista should plan an upgrade path to Windows 7 and anyone one on Windows 7 should remain on Windows 7.  Windows 8 was not even mentioned. 
WTF

WTF

WTF

Is this a company trying to sell software?  Are they trying to make money?  Do they feel they need to come up with a "throw away" version of Windows just so they can skip a number?

I understand that the consumer story is very different and they need to catch up there.  But it appears that the entire business story is dead and buried even at birth.

Having Sinofsky gonsky is a great thing in my book. 

A product like Windows that doesn't have a compelling business story is a wasted opportunity to make few lazy billion.

Windows 8 and Business Users

A business user using Windows 8 is faced each day at log in with Weather, Finance, News, Travel, etc tiles.

Seriously!?!?

They then click on the Desktop title and do their job.

It is like having to go via the souvenir shop when exiting a theme park - but in reverse.

There have always been various edition of Windows; Home, Professional, Ultimate, etc.

There should be a "Business" edition.  The "Start screen" can still be present but it boots to a Desktop with a Start menu.  The Start screen can be buried in a menu deep under Accessories.

How to "fix" Windows 8 Metro problem

I have been using Windows 8 preview builds for several months.

Metro does not work on a PC.   I have tried.  I will keep trying.  I just want my Start button back.  I understand why Metro is important in order to regain the table/phone market but it seems to be coming at the expense of the PC market.

Just a suggestion that will solve this problem; the Metro screen should be the default UI for Windows 8 but it should feature a little tick box down the bottom; "[x] Show at start up"    Problem fixed.

Pocket PC and Windows 8 - a lesson not learnt

In the days of the Pocket PC, Microsoft used the familiar desktop metaphor for the design of the user interface and plonked a "Start" button on the bottom left hand corner that you had to click with the stylus.    They proclaimed that having a familiar UI experience between the Pocket PC and the Desktop was a winning formula for mobile UIs.

Then came the iPhone and the world realised that the UI for a mobile device was much better served by a different metaphor.

Microsoft took this on board and Windows Phone 7.x introduced Metro.

The pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction.

The thinking is now if it works on the mobile device it must also work on the PC. Therefore Windows 8 must have Metro too. 

Umm... this logic did not work the first time.  I fear it is not going to work now.  I hope I am wrong.

Temp directories

Sometimes you just need a temp directory to store stuff in. Pre-Vista this was easy; System.IO.Path.GetTempPath() however, like the documentation says, this is the System's temporary directory, not yours so it does not work so well in Vista.

I do not know what the BEST solution is but this seems to work well:

System.Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.InternetCache)

..and there a slim chance that any non-deleted temp file will occasionally get cleaned up too.

 

 

 

 

When is an Administrator not an Administrator

I am attempting to get a little in house command line maintenance utility working tonight on a new Vista 64 machine.

The program appeared to be having some problems accessing a temp directory; more on that later. So I opened up VS 2008. Not really knowing what type of debugging I would be doing to solve the problem, I chose to run it as an Administrator.

The program needs to access a network drive in order to copy over some backup files. The program was returning false on Folder.Exists() call!?!?!

A bit of searching later I discover that under Vista and VS when it is run as an Administrator any network drives are automatically disconnected. The trick is to either 'activate' the network drives by simply navigating to one by attempting to open a file or the like.

Fortunately if you exit VS and run it again as an Administrator it will remember the connection. I have not tested it after a reboot though.

Interesting, if you run VS not as an Administrator then you do not have the problem.

Very annoying.

The problem with KPIs

The Silverlight team proudly proclaim that the installation experience of Silverlight should be very simply and very short; 20 secs from the download to installation complete.

Hrmm.... on my laptop, after 2 min I lost interest. Fortunately after I returned from putting the kids to bed it was finished.

I checked out some of the examples on the community gallery site; It really makes you aware of how immature the technology is at the moment.

Having said that I am really excited about Silverlight. In time it should be great.

 

Frustrations upgrading from VS2003 to VS2008

I have just upgraded one of my major projects from VS2003(!) ASP.NET to VS2008 Web Application Project. It went relatively well. One must remember to right click on the project and select 'Convert to Web Application' otherwise the designer.cs files are not created for the web pages.

When it was released it was throwing the following:

The type 'tcpIQ.Web.WebSite.LineSpeedMeter.Api.Soap.V401111.LsmSoapApi' is ambiguous: it could come from assembly 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\100c9fe3\aa17ce8c\App_Code.d11yv5mk.DLL' or from assembly 'C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\tcpiq.com\wwwroot\bin\TcpIQ.com.DLL'. Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.

There are lots of chatter about this exception and it appears that it can occur for a number of different reasons. In my case it was because in the conversion from 2003 to 2008 an 'App_Code' directory was created and some classes were placed in there. Files in this directory are dynamically compiled at run time and the DLLs are stored in the Temporary ASP.NET folder as opposed to the bin folder. Needless to say this trips up ASP.NET since it can see two different assemblies for the same class. The solution was to simply migrate the classes back out of the APP_Code folder and place them somewhere more suitable, recompile, re-release, recycle and it worked!

 

Vista x64 - "the disk is write-protected"!?

I am the proud owner of a new Vista x64 8GB machine.

After a reboot this morning SQL Server had declared that all of my databases were suspect. After a bit of scratching around I discovered that my D:\ (RAID 10) where all of my data lives had become read only. This was not a permissions problem as it was working before the reboot. I rebooted and it was still the same.

After a bit of googling and reading between the lines I rebooted, pulled the power, went for a coffee, read the paper, powered it back up and it started working again.

For the record you may see ""the disk is write-protected" or "the media is write protected". Also, Vista SP1 has just gone to RTM so it is not installed but otherwise the computer is fully patched.

 

Internationalization support in Orcas Beta 1

I have been doing a lot of Internationalization work in ASP.NET2 lately (in fact I am doing a presentation at QMSDNUG in May) and have in general been really impressed by the level of support VS and .Net 2 has for it. However you do not have to dig down too much to see the deficiencies as well. Fortunately for the most part if you are not happy with it then you can write your own custom resource provider (this is not fun – I have done it – be warned – but if you are really keen check out what Rick Strahl has been doing).

So with the release of Orcas Beta 1 I was keen to get in and see what new support there is. After the 5.5GB download I am sad to announce that the support for internationalisation does not appear to be very high on their list of priorities. Indeed, doing a Generate Local Resources actually fails in beta 1 with the message…

Start creating resource content and adding 'meta' attributes to server controls and directives.

A resource writer could not be found.Finished creating resource content and adding 'meta' attributes.

The Help makes no mention of anything "Whats new" to do with Internationalization.

Maybe this will change with the next beta.

This is a bit disappointing. I was really looking forward to getting in, having a play and blogging about my experiences.