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.
Monday, Jun 4, 2007, 5:25 PM in Fun
A really bad optimization
I always knew that the scientists would optimize away sending the matter when all they need is to send the state:
"A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space. The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another." [ed: emphasis mine]
Sure. And what do they do with the matter at the original end? Do they leave it alive work another job, but only pay one set of taxes? I don't think so...
Wednesday, May 30, 2007, 8:33 AM in Fun
Microsoft Surface
I sent the boys to the Microsoft Surface web site last night while I was in another room. I don't believe I've ever heard that many "wows" and "cools" and "I want its!" out of the two of them. And after getting my butt out of my chair, I have to agree -- I want one.
Monday, May 28, 2007, 12:08 PM in The Spout
Why do we pick on journalism majors, so?
Here's another one:
For example, if we had had a background in journalism, we might have used one-based indexing instead of zero-based indexing to...
That Ian didn't like, but it still makes me smile (and if you're not a smiling author, why be an author at all?!?).
Monday, May 28, 2007, 12:05 PM in The Spout
Sometimes I crack myself up
I forgot until the copy edit review process that I'd dropped this gem into a footnote:
On August 4th, 1997, the world’s oldest person so far, Jeanne Louise Calment, died at age 122, having taken up fencing at age 85 and out-lived the holder of her reverse-mortgage. Although I firmly believe that Ms. Calment is showing us the way to a richer, longer life, it’ll be a while yet before we need the full range supported by the Int32 class (2,147,483,647 years young).
This is what happens when you write into the wee hours of the morning... : )
Saturday, May 19, 2007, 2:18 PM
Heard in the halls at RailsConf 2007
I was passing a young, blue-haired photographer-ess who said the following to a gentleman she wanted to smile for a picture:
“Just think about Martin Fowler dry-humping my leg.”
I find I like the Ruby crowd : )
Friday, May 11, 2007, 12:02 PM
Dogfood -- it ain't just for dogs
Am I the only one that find it ironic that an online paper on the merits of a new way to format text for online reading doesn't use the technique it advocates?
Thursday, May 10, 2007, 9:04 AM
Get your PDC Code Camp On!
The *free* Portland Code Camp is just around the corner on May 19th and 20th at the Vancouver WSU campus. Personally, I'm looking forward to the Chris Bilson talk on adding PowerShell support to your app, George Clingerman on 2D graphics in XNA (maybe it's time to port Wahoo!?) and Stuart Celarier on NDepend. Register today!
Sunday, May 6, 2007, 12:58 PM in .NET
Lutz's Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Samples
Lutz has ported some of his .NET code to use the Silverlight 1.1 alpha, which includes the mini-CLR (or whatever we're calling it these days : ). Enjoy.
Sunday, Apr 29, 2007, 9:03 AM in The Spout
On becoming an empty nester...
I submitted the final manuscript for Programming WPF, 2nd edition, by Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells to O'Reilly and Associates this morning for publication. Of course, there's stuff still to do (today we hit step 8 of 18), but this represents a major milestone in the life of any book.
I have mixed feelings when I finish a book. The last few have been especially intense, as I have a real day job on a Microsoft product-team-to-be, so it's just been evenings and weekends. With this much work to do, you have to focus hard and the work becomes a part of you. This means that giving it up is also hard. My boys are just now becoming teenagers, so it'll be a while yet before they leave home, but I imagine I'll feel the same kind of melancholy I feel now -- happy to see something you've put so much of your life into make its own way into the world, but hard to have the cord cut.
On average, I've been an author, co-author or a "with" on 12 books over the last 12 years. At one time, I had open contracts on four separate books. This book represents my last planned book. I'm now truly an empty nester.
So, what's next for me in this new phase of my life? Well, I've already started some stuff. A couple of weeks ago, I started a little gooey shell for monad (I call it "gonad" : ). And last Friday, I started private piano lessons (a blast!). I'd like to pick up my other hobbies again, too, but for the life of me, I can't remember what my other hobbies used to be...
Sunday, Apr 29, 2007, 8:08 AM in The Spout
Glyn Griffiths: Ian's Dad and Damn Fine Reviewer
This was an email I sent to Glyn Griffiths, the final external reviewer on the WPF 2ed book before we submitted the final manuscript for copy edit and publication (and which has been posted here with his permission):
Mr. Griffiths, in chapter 7, you had a couple of comments about what happened in the 1ed of the book vs. what we've got now in the 2ed of the book. The first such comment was:
"The first edition of the book had '…selected by going backward and forward…' which I think is better. [ed: as compared to 'selected back and forward']
"This is one of several instances I've found of improved wording in the first edition that seems to have been lost in this one. Is this because work on the second edition was started using a text base that was earlier than the final version of the first edition?”
To answer your question, the post-copy-edited version of the 1ed is in Framemaker. Apparently, ORA does have a process for getting Word documents out of Framemaker for just this reason, but I didn't know that, so we started with our pre-copy-edited 1ed Word documents when we started the 2ed. Since so much of the 2ed prose is different than the 1ed, this doesn't concern me overmuch, but it's worth avoiding for the 3ed.
And now here's my question: how the hell do you know what was in the 1ed at this level of detail? Have you memorized it so that you can do a diff in your head? Do you have it open in front of you so you can compare? I can't imagine what powers you possess to be able to make comment such as these, but I'm happy to have you use them for good and not evil.
P.S. With your kind permission, I'd like to post your comment on my blog so that others may have a greater understanding of where Ian gets his monster intellect.
Friday, Apr 27, 2007, 6:28 PM in Fun
Shooting the Sh*t with Scott (part 1 of 2)
Scott came over to my house and we made up a topic ("Software: The Last Fifteen Years and the Next Fifteen Years" in two parts), but it's really just an excuse to talk to each other and have a good ol' time. Have a listen.
P.S. Sorry about coughing they weren't able to edit out. Alergies...
Monday, Apr 16, 2007, 4:50 PM in .NET
WPF/E == Silverlight
If you haven't already heard about Microsoft's new high fidelity, cross-platform application development platform, you just haven't been paying attention. Silverlight is the new name for WPF/E (although it's still XAML-based) and does some *amazing* things.
And, if you can wait just a little while longer, you can read about Silverlight in Programming WPF (available now in Rough Cut format and for pre-order from Amazon) in an appendix by my friend and yours, Shawn Wildermuth. Shawn's been doing a ton of Silverlight work lately, including doing a bunch of Silverlight presentations for Microsoft, so he knows of what he speaks.
Monday, Apr 16, 2007, 11:21 AM in The Spout
My Foreword To ChrisAn's "Essential WPF"
Now that Chris Anderson's most excellent Essential Windows Presentation Foundation has transitioned to the physical world, I thought I'd share my foreword:
Thank God there weren't more people like Chris Anderson when I was making my living outside of Microsoft.
I work at Microsoft now (two doors down from Chris, in fact), but not all that long ago, I was an instructor at a Windows developer training company. My brethren and I were led by a deep-thinking PhD candidate that applied the same rigor he applied to a scholarly pursuit that had to stand up to the "crush or be crushed" mentality of academia. We learned how to think clearly as a defense mechanism and to communicate clearly as a survival technique. If we didn't do it to his exacting standards, he'd sweep us aside and redo our work before our eyes (we learned to call it "swooping" and you worked hard to avoid the phenomenon).
In a similar fashion, we learned to ignore the tutorial and reference materials produced by our vendor of choice, because it was clear that however clearly they may or may not be thinking inside their hallowed walls, it was certain that they weren't up to communicating it with the rest of us. Arguably, our whole job for close to a decade was "swooping" Microsoft itself, redoing their materials in the form of short course, conference talks, magazine articles and books. We called it the "Microsoft Continuing Employment Act," treating it like a pork barrel entitlement program that kept us in the style to which we had grown accustomed.
In fact, we made a nice living traveling the country saying things like, "remember to call Release," "avoid round-trips" and "ignore aggregation" because these were clear guidelines that distilled for developers what Microsoft couldn't manage to say for itself. That's not to say that there weren't clear thinkers inside of Microsoft (Tony Williams and Crispin Goswell being two of my very favorites), but the gap between the beginner and the reader of such advanced writings was largely unfilled in those days.
With this book, that gravy train has run right off the track. Chris Anderson was one of the chief architects of the next-generation GUI stack, the Windows Presentation Framework, which is the subject of the book you're now holding in your hands. You'd have thought that the very nature of the architecture job, that is, to make sure that the issues deep, deep inside were solved properly so that others could come along and build the trappings that made it into plain sight, would disqualify him from leading the developer from "go" to "whoa," but that's not the case. Chris's insight allow him to shine a light from the internals of WPF to those standing at the entrance, guiding you through the concepts that form the foundation of his creation (and the creation of more than 300 other people, too, let's not forget).
As the author of a competing book from another publisher, I can't say that this is the only book you'll ever need on WPF (or they'd have me in front of a firing squad), but I can say this with certainty: it belongs on your shelf within an easy reach. I know that's where my copy will be.
Saturday, Apr 14, 2007, 1:09 PM in The Spout
Best WPF Resources?
I’d like to provide a list of the best WPF resources, including real-world apps, free web resources, SDK docs, samples, blogs, etc. If you’ve got something that belongs on that list, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks!
Wednesday, Apr 11, 2007, 9:47 PM in Tools
Show Me The Templates!
Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes.
Enjoy.