Ah, there’s movement on the PDC website. Good, I was suspecting that’d postpone it again, but it didn’t seem that likely with Windows 7 on the way. But now it’s final: there’s going to be a PDC this year.
I’m keen on going, but I had to think twice when I saw the prices: $2395 for registration only. Wow, that’s a lot. I can’t remember paying that much for PDC05, to honest. But then I thought: I need to do some dollar2euro conversions. And yes, that price seems more reasonable:
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That seems better. Given that I’d like to be staying in the Fig, which is priced at $159 and that food in the US isn’t that expensive, the cost of spending a week at the PDC in LA seems fair.
But then, getting there. 3 years ago I flew to LA with British Airways, and it cost me around 600 euros. Checking that same itinerary right now brings the price to 1500 euros. So I’d be spending the same amount of money on getting there as for the conference itself.
I’ll have to check if spending over 4500 euro is worth going to the PDC. At the moment, there’s not that much interesting stuff (for my “core” business) to justify that amount. On the other hand, it’s great fun and a great boost to start developing new stuff – granted that I’ll find the time after the PDC.
I’ll wait a bit more and let it sink in for a bit. I have until August 15th to make up my mind (supposed that I want to make use of the early bird savings). But I’d really love to go: it was fun in 2005, and it’ll be fun now too.
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What Jeff Atwood posted today is pretty much completely true. Amongst other things, I develop websites using PHP. And I frequently have to check the documentation to see how a function is called (because there’s no consistency indeed). But more: even if I know what it’s called (or I’m pretty sure of it), I still have to check how the order of the parameters is. Because there’s usually no consistency there, either.
Luckily there’s syntax highlighting in e so that I know I’ve got the correct function name:
versus:
(notice the coloring of functionexists vs function_exists).
I think I’d probably have the same problems in C# if Visual Studio didn’t have intellisense. Not so much with the language itself, but with the Framework associated with it. So what Jeff says is not only valid for PHP, but for all languages+frameworks these days: there’s so much functionality that it’s hard to get anything done without having to resort to some kind of documentation system (beit Intellisense, help files or the web). The days of (productively) developing something in just a plain text editor are over. And that is PHP’s problem: most of the PHP scripts are created using a simple editor. Why? Because the good tools come at a certain price (e.g. Zend Studio, or Visual Studio). And like Jeff says: most of the PHP scripts are written by basement-locked script kiddies, who can’t (or won’t) afford such an editor.
Visual Studio (and thus VB and/or C#) has a free express edition, which makes it the best choice to develop any .Net code in (unless you want/need the more expensive versions of Visual Studio). While those tools are probably available in one form or another for PHP too, the problem is migitated for Visual Studio because downloading Visual Studio is the preferred starting point to start .Net development. In fact, it’s harder to start developing without Visual Studio.
So there: it’s not only about (framework) inconsistencies, but also about toolset visibility and availability. A good (and readily available) toolset can migitate a lot of the deficiencies of the language/framework used.
It’s been a forthnight since Mollom released their API, and I’ve been working some spare moments on a library wrapper for that API. Given that here are wrappers for Drupal, PHP, Ruby, Java and Python, I figured that a .Net version was missing too. Also, I can use this for a future project, so it’s not a complete waste of (free) time.
Anyway.
NMollom, a wrapper for the Mollom API. Building the library wasn’t really hard, as the API exposes a set of XmlRpc calls you can use to talk with Mollom. Using a free XmlRpc library for .Net, a proof of concept lib was quickly built. The challenge was however to conceive something that abstracted the details of the API away (mainly the session management) but still keeping the use of the library easy but also versatile. I still like perl’s TIMTOWTDI, so you still have a number of options to work with the API.
The objects that the main API class returns are mostly serializable, so they can be stored in ViewState, or Session, or even Application. Or to a file. This is necessary since we’re dealing with a stateless architecture (the web). Basically, the session_id the various Mollom calls return is kept private inside the objects since you don’t really need to know it’s actual value. Keeping it for reference (for future calls) is the most important thing. That said: you can still read the value if you really want it. 
But this is just a wrapper around the Mollom API, and you still need to do quite some work behind the screens to get it working. So the next step is some ASP.Net controls that do the dirty work for you. Using the current wrapper library, of course.
All of this is open sourced under a MIT license. If you want to help or codevelop this, feel free to contact me and I’ll give you access to the repository. Or you can send me a patchfile. Whatever suits you best.
I don’t know if if you know Skitch, but it’s a tool to share images from your desktop with people online. It’s sort of a fancy screenshot tool with the ability to post to the web (there’s more to it, but that’s all that matters for now). Pretty handy, but the problem is that it’s Mac only.
I use a similar tool on my Vista installation: WindowClippings by Kenny Kerr. Basically a fancy screenshot maker, but it’s a lot better than the standard tools in Vista, so I use it quite a lot. The best part is: it supports addins.
And so I decided to create a “Send To Skitch” addin for WindowClippings. Skitch has a maildrop function: send a mail with an image to a specific skitch.com mail address and it appears in your skitch stream. It’s currently the only way for non-Mac users to have the Skitch experience. But combine the Skitch maildrop functionality with the SendTo addin function of WindowClippings and we’ve got magic:
You have to provide some settings, of course: first of all the email address of the skitch maildrop (you can lookup this up in the maildrop section of your skitch settings) and secondly the hostname of the smtpserver to use to send the mail. There’s no way to find this out automatically easily, and it works for me for now, so I’ll leave it at that. I might create a webservice that sends the mail for me, so that I don’t have to bother with the smtp server, but that’s maybe something for a next version. You can set both settings in the “Add-In Settings” of the Skitch addin. There’s no checking if these are actually correct, so when you’re not getting uploads in your skitch stream, the values you provided might be wrong. 
Anyway, you can download the DLL here. Place it in the same folder as WindowClippings.exe, choose “Register Addin” in the Addins tab, select the SendToSkitchAddIn.dll. The Addin should now appear. It’ll say: inactive, because you didn’t provide any email+server combination. Fill those in (using the Add-In settings button) and you’re set.
