I finally had to throw the shiny white excuse for a mouse into the drawer and pull out a trusty VX Nano. The Apple mouse suffers from the form over function malady: it is apparently too damaging to the aesthetic to actually have separate left and right buttons. Instead the mouse intuits which you want by how far to the left or right you press your fingers. Unfortunately, it didn’t work too well and I kept getting left-clicks when I wanted right. That, and the fact that at the highest sensitivity I still needed way too much desk space to maneuver across the screen led to its replacement.

I remember reading an article by Bruce Tognazzini (AKA “Tog”) many years ago about how extensive research at Apple indicated that using the mouse is faster than using shortcut keys on the keyboard. This always seemed wrong to me, but after using a Mac somewhat regularly for the past few weeks, I think I’m beginning to understand.

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My son turns 14 this month, but we still have bedtime stories. Currently, the bedtime story is Simon Singh’s The Code Book. While reading the description of the Vigenére cipher, I started to think about how I’d code up an implementation, and that led to my first webOS application. Cipher Suite is a small collection of classic ciphers, and is currently in the Palm beta feed. Hopefully a few people will give it a try and let me know if it sets their phone on fire or drowns some kittens or anything. Having gotten it that far, I thought I’d share a little bit about how the app was developed.
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I recently spent some time building an install package for a web application using WiX. There are some nice IIS extensions for WiX to help with that, but they’re missing the ability to set some advanced properties, like an Application Pool’s “Enable 32 Bit Applications” property.
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The National Security Agency (NSA) has a video about their polygraph testing, which was critiqued by AntiPolygraph.org, and recently reported about on Slashdot. In 1991, while still a college student, I applied for a summer internship with the NSA, so I got to take one of these tests myself. The official results were “inconclusive”, but I think they suspected that I was secretly gay.

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The Windows MessageBox is really convenient to use. A single line of code gets you a dialog box with a caption, a message, an icon and a set of available buttons that cover a lot of possible input scenarios. Unfortunately, the text on the buttons is supplied by the system, so if you’re building an application that is intended to be localized, you invariably end up with something that looks like a bug.

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I kept getting a message from Visual Studio 2008 when opening a solution saying:

This solution contains a web site at ‘http://localhost/Services’. There is already a web site at this location on this computer. Do you wish to use this existing location for your web site (existing files will be overwritten)?

It looks like the (one?) cause is a corrupt solution file.

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Despite the fact that I earn a living with technology, and that even many of my leisure hours are spent in front of a computer, I’m feeling especially consumed by technology lately. By “consumed” I mean more of the “waste or burn away” sense.

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Maybe I’ve just imagined this — created my own straw man to take down — but I’ve sometimes sensed some disparagement of user interface programming. “It’s just UI,” the architect will say. “It’s not like it’s a hard or interesting part of the system.” As I’ve done more and more UI development lately, I’ve had to consider if this is the direction I want my career to go.
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So shortly after crowing about how cheaply I was getting cell phone service, I’ve sailed headlong into the rocks of an $80 a month smart phone plan. In spite of all the Android buzz of late, I went with the Palm Pre.

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