What's a MSPX?

A FAQ from my ASP.NET classes: what is a .mspx file? The answer is here.

FireFox Extensions

I switched to FireFox a couple of months ago, but never looked too closely at extensions until now. After trawling through them this week, I say hooray for:

Sage, an RSS/Atom aggregator.
GoogleBar, of course.
Web Developer Toolbar.
Image Zoom.
AdBlock (get your filters here, and the web will seem a whole lot less shouty).
FlashBlock, which replaces all Flash with a "play" button, and instantly stifles all annoying Flash popups.
IEView, for when you find sites that insist on Internet Explorer.
BugMeNot, for sites that insist on registration

Now on to themes and search plugins...

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Edward Tufte's essay about the ineffectiveness of Powerpoint, delivered as a Powerpoint presentation. An effective PowerPoint presentation.

It even manages a pointer to the Gettysburg PowerPoint, but not to the much funnier PowerPoint Anthology of Literature.

We all scream for...

Yuck. I'm still not sure if this is genuine or not, but it makes this look delicious.

Things I Didn't Know I Didn't Know

How to Fold a Shirt.

Slap a penguin for fun and profit

Yeti Pentathlon

The Ancient Mysteries of Zone 4

ThisisLondon: "A quarter of people thought Richmond-on-Thames was part of the Amazon..."

(edit: original has expired, a copy is here)

Reading Zen in the Rocks

Today's Guardian pointed out this page about Japanese gardens. Oh well, there goes most of this afternoon...

How to Write Unmaintainable Code

Great article that did the rounds a few years ago. I'm just happy because I can still read the code in these snippets, so I can't have been completely Microsoft-ised just yet:

"LISP is a dream language for the writer of unmaintainable code. Consider these baffling fragments:

(lambda (*<8-]= *<8-[= ) (or *<8-]= *<8-[= ))

(defun :-] (<) (= < 2))

(defun !(!)(if(and(funcall(lambda(!)(if(and '(< 0)(< ! 2))1 nil))(1+ !))
(not(null '(lambda(!)(if(< 1 !)t nil)))))1(* !(!(1- !)))))

"

Why I love .NET

Reasons to be cheerful, parts one and two.

Back from the dead

Why no blogs for the last week? Well, I'm an idiot. I applied Windows XP SP2, and my computer blue-screened constantly on startup. On the blue screen, it said "check your BIOS", and I thought well, why not? So I flashed a new BIOS image and, of course, it all failed horribly and my computer turned into a doorstop. So much for the ASUS "crashproof" BIOS (if this happens, it's supposed to detect there's a problem, and re-flash the chip with a working backup image).

Anyway, I'm back again, thanks to the good offices of these folks, who do nothing other than flash new BIOS chips. And I've got a sparkly new install of XP SP2. Well, I say "sparkly", but I seem to be at Cruft Force 3 already.

Skyscrapers

Tall Buildings in Flash, from MOMA.

BizTalk Debugging for Lunatics

I've just spent entirely too long trawling the web for useful BizTalk 2004 resources - there are loads, most of them linked from Scott Woodgate's blog so I won't repeat them. Well, except maybe for some of the fabulous downloads he's linked to.

Mostly, I was looking for practical hints, particularly for debugging. Debugging in BTS is a particular nuisance because of the effort of stopping everything, unbinding all the ports, undeploying, rebuilding, redeploying, rebinding, restarting and so on. Using NAnt to do this is a splendid idea.

As for working out what's going on inside, it had never occurred to me that I could attach to BTSNTSvc.exe to debug a pipeline, nor that I could use Debug.Write from inside an orchestration.

Popping up a MessageBox from inside an orchestration hadn't occurred to me either, but that's because it's an insane idea. Why stop at MessageBoxes? Why not stick a sound card in your e-business server and have it go "ker-ching" every time it takes an order? It's what P/Invoke was made for! (insert manic giggling here)

OK, I think I need to lie down now.

Sales Technique

My Volvo 340 is 15 years old and fit only for scrap, so it's off to a car showroom in Streatham, where we've booked a test drive in a brand sparkly new Mazda. When we get there, it turns out that the car is being customized for another buyer. The air conditioning doesn't work, because the electrical system is being changed around, so we have the window open. The seat controls haven't been attached yet, but by poking at the bare connections we manage to adjust the seat so I can drive. There's no seatbelt attachment on the driver's side, so I use the one on the passenger side. The bloody thing isn't even clean, for heaven's sake. None of this was mentioned when I booked the test drive, the day before.

We drive very gingerly around Streatham for a few minutes. The salesman makes no attempt to tell me anything, or ask me anything. We leave.

I don't get this at all. Even if I'd wanted a secondhand car, this would have put me off, but for a new car it's just ridiculous. Don't salesmen work on commission?

Grrr.