You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, 5:34 PM
Tim records Don's and Chris's love...
Here. These are pictures from a video wedding toast we did for a pair of fans (both the husband and the wife!). Tim Ewald is the camera man and I'm sure he's wincing as much as Don Box and I are during this kiss...
Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, 3:54 PM
Why Thursday at PDC will suck less
Here. This year's PDC will turn the traditionally most boring day into potentially the most interesting. Jeremy Mazner's posted the list of panels we're having that day as well as a place for folks to seed the MCs of the panels with questions they'd like to have asked of the panelists. Should be fun!
Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, 9:44 AM in The Spout
Nice WinForms Reviews in the Blogesphere
Here. I've noticed that lots of folks have nice things to say about "Windows Forms Programming in C#". I thank you and my publisher thanks you. If you do post a review, you'll likely get an email from me asking you to post it on Amazon.com. That's because Amazon has noticed that it's the number of reviews of a product that determines whether something sells better than it's competitors, not the rating of the reviews (although feel free to say nice things... : ). I'm posting this here to a) warn you that a review on my book is likely to get you an email from me and b) because Scott Galloway's Contact form is busted ("You must enter a search term"), so I needed *some* way to ask him to post his review on Amazon. Thanks!
Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
What Is An RSS Feed?
As a deadline nears and I spend an increasing amount of time avoiding the work I should be doing, I find a finance geek acquaintance of mine asking what an RSS feed is after I implored him to add one to his web site. This is a 20-year old that's owned stock since he was 11, read 12,000 company reports in 2002, earned 155% on his money is the last 11 months and recently been given his own $35M mutual fund to manage (becoming the youngest ever mutual fund manager). If this guy doesn't know what an RSS feed is, then I'm guessing at least some of my readers don't know either (yes, I'm talking to you, Mom). When he asked me what an RSS feed was, this is what I told him:
An RSS feed is a thing of pure beauty. If you've ever been to a web site with an orange XML or RSS button, clicking it will yield a page that looks something like this:
<channel><title>Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet</title><link>http://www.sellsbrothers.com/</link><description>Thoughts that Chris Sells has about whatever interests him that day</description><dc:language>en-us</dc:language><dc:rights>Copyright 2002-2003, Chris Sells</dc:rights><dc:creator>csells@sellsbrothers.com</dc:creator><item><title>The Wedding Toast</title><dc:date>2003-10-10T04:17:02Z</dc:date><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/topic866</guid><link>http://weblogs.asp.net/yosit/posts/31385.aspx</link><dc:creator>Chris Sells</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=866</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/commentRss.aspx?ixTopic=866</wfw:commentRss><wfw:comment>http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/commentApi.aspx?ixTopic=866</wfw:comment><description>Don and I send out a video of a toast to a newly married couple. We get back their reactions via video. Not as nice as real-time, but I don't get overseas much, so still very cool. You gotta love the Internet!</description></item>
...</channel>
While RSS is fairly unreadable for normal humans, computers eat it up. For example, if you read the RSS feed from my site on a regular basis, whenever I make a new post, you'll see a new entry in the RSS feed. RSS feeds aren't useful for you, but when fed to an "RSS reader" program, you can keep up to date on literally hundreds of web sites without having to browse to them manually. The RSS reader will check each RSS feed to which you subscribe, letting you know when something new on a web site has happened and showing you what it is, giving you the option to follow up or ignore the new thing. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, letting me keep up on a bunch of things:
- My friends' writings
- Global and financial news
- People talking about topics of interest to me, like my favorite technologies or my latest book
- My favorite comics strips (I need my daily Dilbert!)
- The latest product and articles releases from Microsoft
- Practically anything else I care about on a regular basis
I keep up on all of this without ever visiting the web sites themselves them 'til something of interest catches my eye.
There are a bunch of RSS readers in the world, but my favorite is SharpReader. If you install this program and start it up, SR will check all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to on a regular basis in the background while you work, notifying you of something new by changing it's icon from blue to yellow. If you decide to install SharpReader, your next stop should be NewsIsFree.com, where you'll find all kinds of RSS feeds in any number of categories. After subscribing to a few of those, you'll want to stop by Tapestry, where you can find RSS feeds for tons of daily comic strips. If you want to get fancy, you can go to GoogleAlert, where you can subscribe to searches so that whenever Google finds something new on your search topic, your RSS reader will let you know.
If you find the ability to track hundreds of web sites without surfing to each of them manually, RSS is for you. If you find my instructions intimidating, ask a computer friend to help you out (I'll be home for Christmas, Mom).
Wednesday, Oct 8, 2003, 4:42 PM in Money
Watching the 'digital hand'
Here. Gurley sums up nicely the tendency of the IT industry to eat other industries and itself, leading to nice things for consumers, but not industries.
Wednesday, Oct 8, 2003, 2:54 PM
testing
Here. testing, please ignore
Wednesday, Oct 8, 2003, 11:16 AM
XmlSerializer as XPath
Here. Craig lays out a subtle but important different between thinking about XML as serialized types and thinking about XML that can be serialized to/from types. Nicely said, Craig.
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2003, 11:22 PM
"Davis concedes, Schwarzenegger wins"
Here. In the "truth is stranger than fiction," category, Arnie does it. As I hail from the first state with a professional wrestler as it's governor, I think Cali got off easy. : )
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2003, 9:38 PM in .NET
More on Generics in the CLR
Here. Jason Clark digs further into C# generics, including the niftiness of constraints and why they're so important (nicely told, Jason!).
Monday, Oct 6, 2003, 2:38 PM
If you're going to the PDC, register soon
Here. It seems likely that unlike most conferences since the bubble burst, the PDC will sell out. If you want to go, register soon.
Sunday, Oct 5, 2003, 11:35 PM
Dave Barry Takes the Fight to the Telemarketers
Here. I'm guessing that the American Teleservices Association doesn't even realize how two-faced it's being when they get upset at unwelcome calls. Oh well. : )
Saturday, Oct 4, 2003, 8:29 AM
Roy, of 'Siegfried and Roy', attacked by tiger
Here. I can hear mothers around the world saying to their children, "See? I *told* you not to play with tigers!"
Friday, Oct 3, 2003, 9:33 PM
The fruits of your success
Here. "The fruits of your success will be in direct ration to the honesty and sincerity of your own effort in keeping your own records, doing your own thinking and reaching your own conclusions." Jesse Livermore wrote these words in "How to Trade in Stocks," but they apply widely, I think.
Friday, Oct 3, 2003, 7:31 PM
My 9-Year Old Has A Cell Phone
Here. The one where my 9-year-old has a cell phone and I'm glad (but my wife is not : ).
Friday, Oct 3, 2003, 12:47 PM
Stealing Anyone's IP is Low
Here. Earlier this week, some low-life stole the source code for the soon to be released Half-Life 2 and then posted it. Now, I'm a huge Half-Life fan (I've played all the installments of Half-Life twice) and so I've been anxiously looking forward to HF2. But even if I hated HF, I'd still feel the same. If folks steal and redistribute IP of any kind, whether it's words, code, art, music, videos, etc, nobody will be able to afford to produce it anymore! And it's not like music or video, where the RIAA and theaters have done their level best to shear us at ever opportunity; s/w is affordable and convenient to consume! I'm all for "try before you buy," but "steal and redistribute" just means that we won't get new media to consume in the future. There's no excuse for this kind of behavior. DISCLAIMER: I'm an employee of Microsoft, Corp. but the opinions expressed on this web site are my own and in no way reflect the opinions of my employer.