DCOM to .NET Phase Transistion
Looks like William and I have had the same thoughts over the weeknend about clearing out books. I decide to tackle the final bastillion of chaos in my house and sort my home office and especially my bookshelves. Since writing my book on System.Xml v2, Addison Wesley decided that I needed a copy of everything that they had published recently on .NET which meant that I had been inundated with new books. So I drew the line and said “No more COM in my life!”. Out went ATL Internals, ATL Developer's Guide, Designing and Using ActiveX Controls, Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex, Visual C++ 4 How-To: The Definitive Mfc Problem Solver and a dozen other books on MFC, DCOM and C++ programming. Each one had fond memories of CCI, IDL and <T> . Luckily each time my wife snatched it from my hand and threw it into the bin. I hestitated over Essential COM and decided to confine this to the “old classics” box in the attic, which means that you can look back and reminisce when you go to get the Christmas decorations down once a year. Here is was somewhat out of place being amongst Maths for Engineers, The Design of Digital Signal Processing Systems and other electronics engineering books. At least it is only a few boxes away from the ZX Spectrum and QL for computing comfort. This obviously happens every 10 years as that is when most of my power engineering, design of microwave circuits and analogue circuits books re-entered the carbon cycle and left my brain. Now I feel refreshed and free. I no longer have pretend to remember ATL and COM as the knowledge has gone from my house. In 10 years time when we are all designing and programming against WinFS version 5.0 I will then be able to throw my .NET books away.
Smart Watch Version 2
Much to my relief my smart watch turned up in the mail yesterday. No, I did not get so excited that I needed a second to wear on my other arm; the first one just broke. It was kind of bizarre. I took it off to play soccer, put it in my kit bag and when I returned it was totally dead. My only conclusion was that it was near some packets of hot hands (which consist of a very fine iron powder that reacts with oxygen to create heat) and due to some strange induction loop it fried itself. Looks like Fossil should have done some more realistic field testing and that others are having similar issues. The return letter from Fossil was very polite saying that we have no idea what happen to your watch, so here is a new one to have a go with and that you have 90 days for it to self destruct for us to have to repair it again. So now I can return to my gadget dependent life, know lots of useless news trivia and thrust it happily under Dare's nose whilst reminding him that he has only few days left before the battery dies on his iPod.
Comments
Anonymous
February 19, 2004
Ahh - surely not throwing out Mr Bunny's Guide to ActiveX - or is it now you've forgotten so much COM that you don't understand the jokes anymore ;-)Anonymous
February 20, 2004
I still have a fantastically ratty looking Addison Wesley Guide to 6502 Programming dating back to 1984 or so... and another on "Lisp for the BBC Micro" from around the same time.
Still, my favorite piece of... er... "computing history" is an original Apple Lisa brochure from 1983 or so... back when a 5MB hard disk was really "cooking with gas".Anonymous
February 24, 2004
The comment has been removedAnonymous
June 02, 2004
What do I do with this book I found entitled "Programming Windows 3" by Charles Petzold? :-)Anonymous
June 26, 2004
Still, my favorite piece of... er... "computing history" is an original Apple Lisa brochure from 1983 or so... back when a 5MB hard disk was really "cooking with gas".Anonymous
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