Noobs or 4 o clock whiskey

I was helping some friends out at work today, they were struggling to upload a file a data file, so i arrive on the scene in my superman shirt to save the day and i ask "whats the problem guys", one of them replied "I'm trying to upload a file in test mode and i cant understand why the changes are not being implemented on the system" *shrug*

So the question is, have these fellows had too much whiskey Or are they just noobs.

I'd say the latter.

Plato.

Today was a sad day.

I've been reading some Plato lately, hence the quote at the top so im going to share a little of Plato's symposium with you, here it goes:

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

If you enjoy plato you can get a whole bunch of his work at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html.

Vista 32bit... just dont go there.

Right... so i install the 32bit version of Vista - only reason i went 32bit is because of driver panic - the earlier versions just had such incomplete driver support i it was impossible to get everything to work properly. So im running in 32bit. Before i get to how it performs i'll give you a bit of background on the specs of my machine:

Core 2 Duo E6700
2 gig Kingston extra low latency ram
2xRaptors in Raid 0
7800GTX

I get a rating of 5.5 on the Vista benchmark application - which means in theory i should be able to do anything i want in Vista.

Right so explain this to me someone at MS... why in the hell does my machine completely stop at 34000 handles - you simply cannot open or click on anything, the machine comes to a grinding halt.. you cant close applications, you cant open new ones you cannot do a f*cking thing.

A real cheese off - i'm going to try out 64bit this week apparently that sorts out the handles issue, will post again when i have some clear results.

One thing i can say is - my PC has been up for about 4 weeks straight... so stability wise it seems good.

Go Mono....with a focus on ASP.NET

My first blog post, and i'm dedicating it to mono :)

About a week ago i started playing around with Mono (www.go-mono.com) the .NET cross platform implementation of the microsoft framework. I'm going to start with what i dont like (hopefully someone at mono will read this and make some fixes!) - Before i start i have to admit my unix/linux skills are not something to be proud of and are probably the source of some initial pitfalls but anyhow here goes:

• App_Code and Web Integration - its a work in progress some mono releases work better than others - the point here is that for many mono is a php replacement and .NET 2.0 having been out for almost a year now its time to step up the focus on this mono ASP.NET development - if mono worked as smoothly as .NET on windows and integrated cleanly with Visual Studio IDE i think php would find itself in a bit of hot water. The scary thing is, it has taken so long to get 2.0 working a 2.0+ framework and Vista should be released pretty soon...where is that going to leave us?
• My second gripe, there is very little help on document errors, i have struggled to find solutions to common problems which results in me bombing the mailing list and people responding with exactly the same solution - we need an www.ASP.net type forum where the developers actively take part in helping people - i know of www.gotmono.com but its just not what it should be. There are about 5000 posts in total and its been runing for easily 12 months now! I co-run a gaming server with a userbase of about 500 people and we have 35000 posts.*yuk*
• Debugging is just yukky at the moment in comparison to the windows .NET.

So now that i have finished moaning here is the good news:

• Mono when it works it works really well - when it breaks you could be stumped for hours!
• Many things you expect not to work... work unbelievably well and once you start thinking in the mono way of things you can pretty much fix anything. You want to code in mono you have to think mono - e.g. unix is pedantic about directory and filename capitalisation windows is lazy and doesnt care so you have to be careful.
• I recently started converting a .NET website into mono and its been relatively easy, i was suprised how little i had to change, and when i mean little its often a "~/" to a "/" or something along those lines - in terms of the actual classes even less had to be changed.

So the final question is would i develop in mono now... definitly, all you need right now is a little patience and perseverance.