I've begun to dread every time I see a blog entry in my aggregator with "XAML" in the title. It usually means I am either going to read a lot of inane fanboy gushing about the latest and greatest from Microsoft or some FUD from some contingent that either misunderstands the technology or has an axe to grind with Microsoft. So much so, I've been contemplating adding a "hide entry if contains keyword" feature to RSS Bandit so I never have to read another post about XAML. Anyway, back to the point of my post.

Diego Doval has an entry entitled XAML and... Swing which contained a number of opinions that completely perplexed me. I'll go over each one in turn.

XAML will be Windows-only, so in that sense the comparison is stretched. But this is a matter of practice, in theory an XML-based language could be made portable (when there's a will there's a way). XAML was compared a lot to Mozilla's XUL, and rightly so, but I think there are some parallels between it and Swing as well.

In theory, every language targetted at a computer is portable to other platforms. However if I wrap XML tags around  C++ code that uses Win32 API calls, how portable is that in practice? As for parallels between XAML and Swing, I thought this was extremely obvious. XAML is the XML-ized way to write what one could consider to be the next generation WinForms (managed APIs for interacting with Windows GUI components)  applications. In fact, someone has already implemented XAML for WinForms, called Xamlon. Considering that Swing (Java APIs for interacting with operating system  GUI components) is analogous to Winforms it isn't a leap to see a parallel to XAML and Swing.

One big difference that XAML will have, for sure, is that it will have a nice UI designer, something that Swing still lacks. On the other hand, I think that whatever code an automated designer generates will be horribly bloated. And who will be able to write XAML by hand?

One of the chief points of XAML being an XML-based markup language is so that peple can actually author it. My personal opinion is that this is more of a bad thing than a good thing, I prefer using GUI tools to design a user interface than dicking around with markup files. I've always disliked technologies like CSS and ASP.NET, moving GUI programming in that direction seems to me like a step backwards but based on the enthusiasm about XAML showed by various people in the developer community it seems I am a Luddite.

The main thing I want to point out about the Diego's statements so far are that they are FUD, no designer has been demoed for XAML let alone one that generates bloated code. This is all just negative speculation but let's go on...

And: the problem of "bytecode protection" in Java comes back with XAML, but with a vengeance. How will the code be protected? Obfuscation of XML code? Really? How would it be validated then? And why hasn't anyone talked about this.

XAML is compiled to IL. XAML obsfucation questions are IL obfuscation questions. If you're gung ho about protecting your "valuable IP" with IL obsfucation technologies then grab a copy of Dotfuscator or Spices.NET.

On a related note, Robert says this regarding XAML:

[...] you will see some business build two sites: one in HTML and one in XAML. Why? Because they'll be able to offer their customers experiences that are impossible to deliver in HTML.

Come on, Robert, these days, when everyone's resources are stretched to the limit, when CIOs want to squeeze every possible drop of code from their people, when everyone works 60-hour weeks as a matter of common practice, are you seriously saying that companies will have two teams to develop a single website? Is this Microsoft's selling point? "Here, just retrain all of your people, and double the size and expense of your development team, and you'll be fine."

I tend to agree with Diego here. Having a XAML-based website on the Internet will most likely be cost ineffective for quite a while. On the other hand, it is quite likely that using XAML on the intranet will not be. Corproate intranets are all about  homogenous environements which is why you tend to see more Java applets, IE-specific pages and ActiveX controls used within intranets than on the global World Wide Web. If I was a member of the Longhorn evangelization team or any other of the public faces of Longhorn or Avalon I wouldn't focus much on XAML on the World Wide Web but that's just my opinion.

That leaves two possibilities: 1) XAML will be niche and never really used a lot (think ActiveX, or, hey, even Java Applets!) or 2) XAML will kill HTML. 

Talk about completely missing the point. XAML is primarily for writing Windows client applications, y'know like RSS Bandit or SharpReader, not for delivering stuff on the Web. I don't think anyone at Microsoft is silly enough to think that XAML will replace HTML. The idea is completely laughable.

It is always amazing seeing how stupid and arrogant people tend to think Microsoft is.

Halley Suitt writes

Employers are about to lose a lot of "loyal" employees who have been sticking around through the bad economy, but are more than ready to jump ship as the job market snaps back.

Business Week wrote about this in October, but I think it's coming on even stronger now. BW suggests employers are in for a rude awakening:

I get the same feeling while walking the hallways of the B0rg cube. I suspect that if this becomes a problem in the near future the B0rg will try to adapt as it always has.

"Clairol haircolor transformed me from a college graduate to a successful financial advisor. Clairol gives my hair the shine I need to brighten my face and my spirit, which pumps up my confidence. I'm energized! Today I manage millions — next year I'll manage tens of millions! People trust me. That's inspiring!"

"My blonde hair had gone gray — I felt depressed. I went blonde one day for a big party and it was quite a hit! I felt GREAT! I started a diet, lost 72 lbs., began belly dance lessons to keep the weight off and still color my beautiful long blonde hair!"

It's quite impressive what a catalyst for self improvement a simple change like dying your hair can be. There were a number of similar testimonials submitted by the New Year New You! Contest Winners. Read them, be inspired, dye your hair.

Doc Searles wrote

Britt Blaser is a techblogger who will never be a warblogger because he's been there, done that, and collected a lot more than a t-shirt: namely, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, including one for the legendary Fire Flight at Katum.

His latest post is Voice of Experience:

This post will make the most sense for those who have witnessed war and are not freaked out by the cold calculus of accepting death as a constant and the loss of buddies as gut-stirring but as inevitable as taxes. Most of the rest of the world has been forced to experience war first hand. Perhaps that's why the rest of the world is unimpressed with this administration's gung-ho attitude, so typical of raw recruits and so uncharacteristic of adults who've peered into the abyss and lived to describe it..

I hate to diss fellow bloggers, but the warbloggers seem to have a paucity of combat experience. We would never entertain the views of programmers who've never hacked code, or historians who've never read history. Why would we listen carefully to warbloggers who've never watched tracers arcing toward their position?

Every warrior knows that perfect safety is a fool's paradise. The premise of the current war on terror is that we can entertain our way out of the terrorist threat. It's entertainment to feel an illusory omnipotence that will hunt down every evil-doer and infidel­a kind of adolescent road rage, really. The old heads in your squadron know to protect such greenhorns from their enthusiasms, at least until they learn or die. "There are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots."

The more I think about it the more I tend to feel that GW Bush's reelection is in the bag. Posts like the one linked above from Britt Blaser cement this feeling. I deeply suspect that, from the perspective of the average "man on the street" in the US who felt rage at the events of September 11^th 2003, the US government has delivered in spades; retribution has been wreaked across two continents with minimal losses to US forces, the message has clearly been sent that if you screw with the US you get burned, and there have been no significant terror attacks on US soil despite several threats from terrorist organizations. This opinion is based on the general sentiments I get from reading open forums were people from diverse backgrounds discuss current affairs such as the Yahoo! Message Boards.

The position of this mythical "man on the street" is very difficut to assail even with well written posts such as that by Britt Blaser. No matter how much one disagrees with the decisions the current US adminsitration has made as part of its "War on Terror" it is hard to argue with the fact that so far it has seemed relatively successful in the ways that are immediately noticeable. The various counter arguments to this position I have seen online usually sound like Britt Blaser's, they tend to argue that the current course of action is wrong but do not provide alternatives or they claim that there will be negative consequences for the current course of actions but none of the consequences are immediate.  These arguments don't hold up well compared to the aforementioned successes of the "War on Terror". If people feel safer, regardless of whether they are actually safer or not then it is hard to convince them otherwise especially when there isn't any concrete way to justify that position one way or the other.  

From the BBC

Red-faced officials at General Motors in Canada have been forced to think of a new name for their latest model after discovering it was a slang word for masturbation.

GM officials said they had been unaware that LaCrosse was a term for self-gratification among teenagers in French-speaking Quebec.

The article describes a copuple of similar issues with product names as they cross the language barrier. The most amusing story was the poor reception of the Ford Pinto in Brazil which was attributed to the fact that in Brazilian Portuguese slang, pinto means "small penis".

The reviews are right, this game is the shit. It's been a while since I've actually said "Wow" out loud several times while playing a video game. A truly excellent game.

I recently wrote about LiveJournal's cookie-based authentication mechanism which makes it difficult for RSS aggregators to read "protected" LiveJournal feeds since the aggregator would have to "reuse steal cookies from your browser instead of using well defined HTTP authentication mechanisms".

My blog post and subsequent email to the LiveJournal development team resulted in the following response and discussion by the LiveJournal developer community as well as the following [excerpted] email response from Brad Fitzpatrick

We don't intend for aggregators to support our authentication system, and
we don't want it to be any sort of standard.  The fact that it works is
just an accident, really:  every page on our site is dynamic, and every
page knows who the remote user is, so when the RSS page queries the
recent entries for that user, the code which provides that is security
aware, and so doesn't provide things which it shouldn't.

Please tell people not to support our auth.  We don't want them to go
through that ugly hassle, and it might even change.  We don't consider it
a stable or supported interface at all.

Our intent is support HTTP Digest Auth in the future (but NOT basic auth)
specifically for RSS/Atom feed pages. 

I guess that clears things up. I'd like to thank the LiveJournal folks for promptly responding to my questions and clarifying the situation. Nice.

Chicken Little: In San Francisco, you never know what you're going to find when you knock on a car window -- but nothing prepared the cops for what they found the night of Nov. 3 down by Aquatic Park.

The window came down and there was a guy with a chicken sitting on his lap and a second chicken in a bag on the passenger seat.

"What's with the chickens?" the cop asked.

"I'm going to take them home and eat them,'' the driver replied.

"Lift up the chicken,'' the cop said.

The driver did -- and the next thing you know, the driver was in cuffs and the chickens were on their way to the humane society -- where (we kid you not) the hens were given a sexual battery exam by a vet the cops called in.

All we can say is, it's going to make for some very interesting testimony on the witness stand.

"But the killer will be the other evidence,'' a law enforcement source said. "A 15-ounce jar of Vaseline... with three feathers in it.''

[via Jamie Zawinski]

The Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines has a section on consistency which reads in part

Consistency

Consistency in the interface allows people to transfer their knowledge and skills from one application to any other... Ask yourself the following questions when thinking about consistency in your product.

Is your product consistent:

• Within itself?
  
• With earlier versions of your product?
  
• With Mac OS standards? For example, does your application use the reserved and recommended keyboard equivalents? (See “Keyboard Shortcuts”.)
  
• In its use of metaphors?
  
• With people’s expectations?.

Recently Torsten's been changing the user interface components used by RSS Bandit from the DotNetMagic library to the Tim Dawson's Windows Forms controls due to the fact that the former is no longer free as in beer. Given that we are changing the look and feel of the widgets Torsten thought this would also be a good time to rearrange some of the menu options and remove some of the toolbar buttons. I tend to disagree. User interface consistency between versions of an application is very important especially when you consider it messes with the muscle memoryof users of older versions of the application.

Torsten has posted screenshots of the new RSS Bandit UI and is asking for feedback. His questions are phrased differently than I'd ask. I'd ask if users want the user interface to be consistent with old versions of RSS Bandit or not? I'd also ask if users prefer that we keep the old DotNetMagic user interface or move to Tim Dawson's UI components?  

If you use RSS Bandit I'd appreciate your comments.

Robert Scoble writes

Lionel, in my comments: "the problem is that it's "common wisdom" that Microsoft has more than $40 billion in the bank, so your point doesn't *sound* true. "how can they talk about resource constraints with that kind of safe deposit""

This is a common misunderstanding. First of all. That cash isn't just given out willy nilly. It's NOT our money! It belongs to our investors. They want to see it spent properly. Translation: don't let Scoble spend it on whatever he wants!

In 1999, Fool.com published an article called 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management . One of the entries is entitled "Shrimps vs. Weenies" and is quoted below

7. "Shrimp vs. Weenies"

Even with its billions upon billions in cash, Microsoft is as frugal as Ebeneezer Scrooge. It's a company that buys canned weenies for food, not shrimp. Until last year, even Bill Gates and his second-in-command Steve Ballmer flew coach. (For scheduling reasons, the company purchased its first corporate jet.) Bucking the trend of most large, wealthy corporations, Microsoft remains in start-up mode where tight budgets are the rule. When you sit back and think about it, this frugality is less surprising and even explains how a company can come to accumulate such great hoards of cash.

This is probably the one of the most frustrating things to adjust to as a new hire at Microsoft; resource-strapped teams are the order of the day. There never seem to be enough devs to fix bugs and ship features or when there are there aren't enough testers to ensure that the code is up to snuff so you end up cutting the features anyway. Asking around about this leads to the realization that to many this is The Microsoft Way. I've heard all sorts of justifications for this behavior from the fact that it leads to managers making better hiring decisions since they never have as much headcount as they want so they don't waste it hiring people they aren't 100% sure will be good performers to statements like "it's always been this way". It's hard to argue with this logic given that this practice (and the others listed in the Fool.com article) have lead to one of the most successful companies in the world with more cash on hand than the annual budget of most third world nations.  

However every time we cut some feature because we don't have enough test resources or scrap an idea because we don't have anyone to code it up, I wonder if there's a better way...