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Hurry up July 11th!

Yes I want the new iPhone :) It has been a very long wait for me since I need the Exchange Server support and the speed of 3G I didn’t go and get the original. Plus with something like this I’m not a big fan of 1st gen technology especially when it costs so much.

I am a huge blackberry fan or maybe I should say I used to be a fan. Their operating system software has always been flawless but my recent experience with the curve hasn’t been perfect. The fact that html emails still can’t be read just blows my mind - my calculator can read html … and their decision to move the dial to the center with no option for the old way or both just pissed me off. The center dial option has more potential but I also find I make a lot more mistakes and pick the wrong menu options so it is far from perfect. Since RIM decided for me what I wanted, I’ll just buy something else …

It also looks like developing some applications for the iPhone is going to be fun and I’d like to get some of my ecommerce tools and maybe some dotnetmulticore support into the phone. What is dotnetmulitcore you ask … :) wait and see. I’m trying to get the site up in the next few days but I’ll blog here on the open source aspects of that cool projects.

Here is a teaser

iPhone 3G, Exclusively from AT&T and Apple - - Wireless from AT&T, formerly Cingular_1215130189118

Get into the Mesh

If you’ve been hiding under some kind of rock, stone or generally heavy object you may have missed the tech preview of Live Mesh from Microsoft. A “Cloud” based system which allows you to add many devices to your mesh, synchronizing data between anything that needs your data.

A really neat feature is that a PC (and soon Mac) device in your mash can be remote controlled from any machine with a browser and Internet connection.

I’m using it to sync critical code data from several developer machines so that I can work on the code from anywhere. The sync is the best I’ve seen so far in terms of backing up files. Microsoft give you a generous 5 gigs for free. Hopefully when this goes live we’ll be able to buy some more space.

Files are all transferred using SSL so should be secure (”should”) :) - anyway, nobody can view your mesh unless you give them access to specific folders which is a nice feature for sharing docs with work colleagues.

Here is a web view of a mesh Desktop:

 

LiveMesh_3

 

You can get into the preview by going to http://www.mesh.com/ - invites are going out pretty quickly at the moment. I waited about a day.

Why Vista still Sux

I hate to sound like I’m just jumping on the band wagon with another Vista rant, the Internet already has enough of those :) but this is just one of those damn stupid things that I just can’t let go, simply because every time I try use my camera I get the dreaded driver disk screen.

Once you’ve been using Vista for awhile you’ll find a few gems that’ll make you want to just stick it out but man, after almost 2 years you would think it was better than this.

So here is the low down. I have a Pentax A20 digital camera - nothing unusual there. Ever since I switched to Vista I’ve been able to just plug my camera in via USB and copy off my images, even using Vista’s new image manager. This camera has no drivers - non were ever made since it uses a generic drive. (SD Chip) - Well last week I plug my camera in and whamo … now Vista says it needs drivers for a device that has NO freaking drivers. No way around it, no fix, no drivers to download - Vista just lost the freaking plot and now I have to take out the SD chip each time I want my pics….

Bravo MS bravo …

Mafooku Mobile Released!

Could this be any easier!? - Take a picture of the item you’re selling with your phone, surf straight to http://www.mafooku.com/mobile/ and post your item directly to our system, picture too! The mobile site is super simple so that it works on all mobile devices. It also remembers your basic information so that future posting is very easy.

If you need help using any of these new features recently released, send us a note at

http://support.mafooku.com/

Mafooku now on Facebook

We have released our Mafooku application on Facebook. Adding this application to your profile will let you view the top 10 directly from the facebook system as well as post products which appear to all your friends. All posted products as usual get sent to our main site as well as the Twitter system for those that follow us there.

To add the application just search under applications for Mafooku!

Duck-typing is great! but also bad.

I haven’t yet posted my work on PHP so this is a little out of context however since it applies to many popular languages I’m just going to go ahead and post :)

Here is a brief description of what duck typing is - basically slang but a very nice feature of various programming languages. I personally like it and I suspect most others do simply because it saves key strokes, after almost 10 years of c# programming you get very tired of double declarations.

So I have recently been doing a lot of work with PHP and discovered a disadvantage of duck typing. Although the compiler and runtime environment may know what type a variable is, you as a programmer might not! This might not seem like a big problem if you wrote the entire program but if you’re working with someone elses code or writing plugins/modules for existing systems, you’ll find this kinda hard. If you see a variable called $params being passed into a function you could “guess” it is an array but it might be some custom class.

I use a nice PHP IDE (phpEd) and real debugger so I can get the information quickly if I want but still, it raised yet another issue in trying to understand what code is trying to do.

-c

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