Escaping the Adobe AIR sandbox

By tim, on January 22nd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Adobe’s Mike Chambers has an article and sample code for calling native operating system APIs from AIR applications, which use the Flash runtime outside the browser.

I took a look at the native side of the code, which is written in C# and compiled smoothly in Visual Studio 2008. The concept is simple. Instead

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Van Morrison fan site under attack by Web Sheriff

By tim, on January 21st, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

A popular Van Morrison fan site has received a letter demanding that the site be closed. Here’s an extract from a post by the site’s founder.

This site began as a personal hobby about 12 years ago, an expression of my own enthusiasm for Mr. Morrison’s music, which I hoped to share with other

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Free book on LINQ

By tim, on January 21st, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Free Microsoft Press book for download here. The book looks decent at first glance, though the download process was unpleasant.

Via Ronan Geraghty.

Technorati tags: linq, microsoft press

Changing the motherboard or storage controller underneath Windows XP and Vista

By tim, on January 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Can you change your motherboard without reinstalling your operating system? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. Last week I decided it was time to upgrade the desktop PC on which I do much of my work. The old motherboard was nearly three years old – an Intel 915PBL, which I purchased in order to

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Sun gets a database manager, but Oracle owns its InnoDB engine

By tim, on January 17th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Sun now has a database manager. It’s been a long time coming. Oracle has … Oracle, IBM has DB2, Microsoft has SQL Server; it’s been obvious for years that Sun had a gap to fill. Now Sun has MySQL.

This is interesting to me as I was a relatively early user of the product.

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How to debug into .NET Framework source code

By tim, on January 17th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Shawn Burke has posted the steps needed to step through the .NET Framework source when debugging your application.

Good news for a couple of reasons. The first is the most obvious: if you are getting surprising or perplexing behaviour, you now have a better chance of working out why.

Second, and perhaps more

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My Mac day: Jobs of the print variety

By tim, on January 16th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

While Steve Jobs was extolling the merits of thin laptops (I prefer small to thin, but tastes differ), I was in the depths of /var/log fixing a print issue with a friend’s Mac Mini and her LexMark printer.

It was almost the same issue as described here by Ted Landau, though I got there

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Burton Group slams ODF, praises OOXML

By tim, on January 14th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Fighting talk from Burton Group on ODF vs OOXML:

ODF is insufficient for complex real-world enterprise requirements, and it is indirectly controlled by Sun Microsystems, despite also being an ISO standard. It’s possible that IBM, Novell, and other vendors may be able to put ODF on a more customer-oriented trajectory in the future and

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Does Google rot your brain?

By tim, on January 14th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

According to Prof Brabazon (via Danny Sullivan) it does:

She said: “I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to

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Great anecdote in the Economist about the decline of the CD

By tim, on January 13th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

The Economist has a report on change in the music industry, which kicks off with this anecdote:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them

…continue reading Great anecdote in the Economist about the decline of the CD

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