YuviSense: Codin Kid

When Sriram pinged me a few minutes ago saying that Silverlight gets the miniCLR that I predicted, I just had to say “Screw limits, no problems if I get overcharged, lemme justwatch this thing“.

Am watching Scott speak right now. Said that we’ll get a beta today. Yay!

I’ll be playing with it ASAP. So should you.

Update: Netflix demo. Built in 3 weeks. Integrates IM. Wow!

Update: Silverlight Beta goes live.  Comes with a  Go-Live licence, which in softie terms means that the borg thinks that this is good enough to use in a production environment. Also, there’s a Silverlight Alpha 1.1, which has the miniCLR. Alpha 1.1? Where did CTP go? C’mon people, can’t we agree on a single standard?

Update: 4 Gigabytes of free storage for Video, for everyone! For free? And no, it’s just the raw video: Write your own Silverlight widget for that. Kewl!

Update: EXACT SAME CLR? Kewl! Performance beats JS. LINQ support! An UI framework. And, access HTML DOM from any .NET Language!

Update: Installation Experiance: WOW!

Update: Chess Demo: Wow! And, Javascript vs .NET: Kewl!

Update: I saw it work! .NET on a Mac! Wow! And, with Full VS Debugging! Wow!

Update: Don’t I sound like an overcrazed kid who was just accidentally locked into a candy shop?

Update: IronRuby shipping, opensource! On top of new DLR, Dynamic Language Runtime, running on top of CLR. Man, this rocks!

All are parodied in this excellent comic by Adam Nathan. Oh, and Hugh as well.

He could make be nice competition for Hugh and Rory.

I was surprised to see a Microsoft sponsored page on Sourceforge about deploying Open Source Software on Windows Platforms. Ya know, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Co. I was quite surprised at seeing this one. Also stuff that Microsoft does for Open Source, like the Open Source Software Lab at HQ, and ofcourse the Express editions.

Oh, and if you do need PHP, Apache and MySQL on your Windows machine for testing purposes, I highly reccomend XAMPP. Beware of the Python Addon though: It doesn’t work, and is acknowledged.

Mix ‘07 Hosted on Zooomr

This image pretty much sums up Mix ‘07 for me. I can’t be there live, but I’l follow along nonetheless, even if it involves fighting with dad to stay up late in the night and sleep through the day.

Oh, and thanks to Kamla Bhatt for writing about me on Global Voices. If you’ve been reading this blog from BACK THEN when it was on blogger, you might remember that Kamla interviewed my cousin Sudar for her podcast. I’m glad she did it. One of the major causes for where I am today, and not just because I could point to it when my relatives and friends ask me “What is the use of all this stuff?”.

All I could say is, “Thanks!”

And oh, I really damn hope that they somehow manage to sneak in even a little bit of the CLR into Silverlight, and that there are express editions of the Expression Suite. And if you haven’t heard of it, check out the CTP releases of Visual Studio Orcas Express Editions, as well as the FREELY DOWNLOADABLE version of Longhorn Server Beta3, with IIS7 preinstalled. AND, it’s just 1.6 Gigs, which is about half the size of Vista. Kewl.

Don’t ask me how, don’t ask me why. I gave my camera to my friend Rathan as we were commuting from school back home. It was pretty late, somewhere around 8 PM. Rathan knew nothing, absolutely nothing about cameras. He hasn’t used one.

But anyway, I gave him the camera, set the exposure compensation to +2, and let him shoot. Everything here was shot by him, except the first abstract one, which I shot with a very long exposure time of 15 seconds. Need I say that he’s a damn good artist with the pencil and the tongue?

I did the naming though. Rationale? I used my guts. Got a different caption or think I’m nuts? Put it up in the comments here, or out there on Zooomr. Enjoy!

And, just to show you, here’s an intentionally contrived picture of Rathan:

Lion King Rathan Hosted on Zooomr

Here are some of the intentionally obscure pictures that he shot:

Green Skull Hosted on Zooomr

Microsoft Hosted on Zooomr

Linux on the Desktop Hosted on Zooomr

Web 2.0 Hosted on Zooomr

Desktop Operating Systems Hosted on Zooomr

Web Services and Open APIs Hosted on Zooomr

Broadband Hosted on Zooomr

The Echo Chamber Hosted on Zooomr

The Echo Chamber #2 Hosted on Zooomr

The Desktop Hosted on Zooomr

AJAX Hosted on Zooomr

I should be posting more of my photos up on Zooomr, but I’m waiting for Mark III which is supposed to hit along with Mix on May 1st for that.

And also, I’m working on a cool project, which I hope to make public pretty soon. Not on the scale of Silverlight or WPF, but cool on my scale of things.

Grab it here, or read the release announcement here.

They’re calling it a Refresh. Why can’t we standardise on Service Pack or Refresh or Release or something similar?

This was one of my first supermacros, and I’m damn proud of this one, even if it looks like a bunch of bananas

Gone Bananas! Hosted on Zooomr

Now that I look at it, I can see several glaring ten feet holes in it, but hey, I was just 6 days old with my camera, so I was stunned by what I got. This was one of those shots which stun you when you take them, like a clever hack that astonishes you with how it turns out to be.

My health’s getting better, and am exercising my right arm a bit, bowling in the 10 feet by 3 feet semi-open space in my house. Was able to bowl just 4 overs yesterday before having to spend a good half an hour in bed, but hey that’s an improvement over how I was a week ago, not even able to walk properly.

And, incase you are wondering(I hope you are(I am, afterall, a kid(am I?))), I bowl medium pace with a good action with quite a good bit of accuracy and some clever variants. The only reason I don’t play much is that I can’t do a full run up without running out of breath after two balls, and I run out of breath even with a very short run up after an over or two. So, hoping to slowly improve myself to a physical condition good enough that I can bowl 10 overs straight without breaking a sweat, and have a right arm good enough to catch anything that flies past. Note that I am not a good player, thogh that doesn’t stop me from playing when I can, because I like the sport and is quite a good physical exercise…

And, if you don’t know what sport I am talking about, it’s called Cricket, and rocks multicolored socks

Hope to return to full time blogging and coding pretty soon…

Scoble once said that Points and Achievements rock.

I agree.

Robert Burke agrees as well. What’s more, he wants a “Points” system for Codeplex. Contributed a patch to Flickr.NET? You’ve just earned yourself 24 points! Reported a bug in RSS Bandit? You’ve just got 11 points!

The Codeplex team is very open to feedback. So open that there is actually a page where you can vote on which features you want, and the most voted on features make it to the next release.

So, help the cause! Go here, register yourself, and vote for this rockin awesome feature.

Vote for a Points system for Codeplex here, support Robert Burke!

WPF/E is Silverlight now.

But, if any of us developers had any brains, we should’ve atleast guessed the Silver part of it a long time ago.

The main Javascript file to be included for WPF/E to work was named aghost.js

aghost.js

It seems very obvious now, doesn’t it? According to my eight standard chemistry textbook as well as Wikipedia, Ag is Argentum in Latin, meaning Silver.

So,

aghost.js = silverhost.js

Well, atleast someone at the Silverlight team knew latin or remembered their chemistry lessons…

P.S. I didn’t discover this. This guy revealed it.

I feel a storm brewing. I wish I were at Mix ‘07 to have a look at it first hand.

Some of you would’ve heard of this thing called as “WPF/E”, short form for WPF Everywhere, which is supposed to be a Flash competitor. The “/E” naming convention infected the blue monster for a bit, producing SQL/E and WPF/E, but was thankfully wiped out before it did damage on a scale as large as the .NET naming convention.

And today, Soma, the head of the Dev division at Microsoft, posted saying that WPF/E’s “official” name is Silverlight.

Read that again. Silverlight.

Silverlight

And, that wasn’t no stinkin code name. It is the production name!

When I read that post, I got a feeling for which I have no name, but felt similar to the feeling I had when I saw this video.

Friggin cool. Cool enough that it made me forgo Windows Live Writer, my hurting right arm and a dad nagging me about a haircut to post about the name.

Now, if I don’t find this naming news all over Techmeme by this evening, I’m goanna boycott it…

Afterthought: Would someone please gimme something similar to a beta of Longhorn Server so that I can do something about IIS7 other than drooling over the screenshots and feature descriptions? Thank you!

I was trying to write a rather long post explaining my week-long online absence which involved around 40 needles, a hospital, and boatloads of fear.

But, with an almost unusable right arm, I figured it’d be far less painful for me to write a short post saying that I was in a hospital bed for 6 days for a fever that has not yet been identified, treated with an injection so painful I’d rather write a web-browser in Java, and “released” day before yesterday night.

However, I am still not able to use my right hand, because of the IV needle that was pierced there for quite some time. My coding induced CTS-like wrist pain compounds the problem. Sick.

As soon as my hand and the various other crashing subsystems of my body become stable, I’ll be back, with lots of stuff that I thought up while yet another painful injection was being injected into my already aching body.