Somebody cut the phone line wire at my home so I’m going to be out of Internet at home for the next couple of weeks (New Year holidays are long here and there is no chance to get the line repaired soon). I feel pretty uncomfortable about it because I’ve been “always on” for the last few years. Let’s see if that will have any positive effects — I’m sure there must be some.

Finally here are some e-cards I received from colleagues / partners today:

This one is from FortRoss — the Russian Software Developers association. The footprints leading through the FortRoss logo to the frozen forest and the title “See you next year”… Hmm, what did they mean? I assume this is the allegory to the well known Ivan Susanin story.

This one is from Russian Association of Bodybuilding — looks just scary to me, especially Ded Moroz’s (the guy whom you in US call Santa) girlfriend.

Happy New Year, everybody! Thanks for reading this nonsense.

Hurray! The product we have been developing for one of our customers successfully passed Microsoft’s “Certified for Windows Vista” logo testing (in fact we already have two applications passed it by this time). Since the product itself doesn’t require deep interaction with the system, we expected that preparing it for the submission would be a piece of cake but it wasn’t that simple. Actually it wasn’t simple at all. It took 3 weeks and two working weekends to put it together and submit for testing with confidence.

We started by getting Vista iso from MSDN downloads and installing it under VMWare Server. We used VMWare to have “physical” (as opposed to Remote Desktop) access to that system from different workplaces. That was the simple part yet we found that it won’t install from iso directly but rather needs to be burned on real DVD (the iso is 2.5 Gb) and installed from there. It is reported that the reason is VMWare’s bug causing problems handling large iso images. Anyways, we get it installed and working (oh by the way it’s still working exactly on the same processor, which fed this web-page to you — both Linux, running this webserver and our test Windows Vista are running under VMWare on the same physical server — isn’t it amazing?)
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I like free software.

I like it because of its great value and you can take it and use it immediately whenever you need it. I like it also because I can afford it by definition and the choice is simple –- if it works I use it if doesn’t then I don’t –- no price tag should be taken into consideration. There is no risk in making this decision and if at any time later I discover the new software, which is better I can abandon the old one without any doubts. Of course often free software is pretty useless but it is not different with commercial software. Ultimately I wish all software to be free.

However there is one problem with it. Metalink is a software development company, which means somebody have to pay for the software we are developing or otherwise we would need free everything else (from food till houses) to survive. I think that it’s safe to assume that in any nearest future food and houses (especially houses) are not going to be free. With this pressing fact in mind I’m getting more liberal to non-free software and I do want to pay for some. I can tell exactly what kind of products I’m willing to pay for.
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A friend of mine sent me this file today asking what could it mean. I immediately recalled that I’ve found and removed exactly the same file from all my computers recently. Of course I know what is it — it’s the log file of MSXML4 update installation delivered over Windows Update service.

The real question is however why in the world Microsoft doesn’t care about leaving this garbage on hard drives of millions Windows users.

Since Google Analytics tells me that the previous post on parsing http query string with regular expressions on C# is pretty popular here is more web developer stuff. Consider you need to implement password protected file download — that is to make some file(s) available to registered users only or say to those only who visited your site. It’s pretty easy to do and all you need is to put your file off folder accessible from the web and wrap download into the script, which would perform authorization first and then feed the file from local file system to user’s webbrowser. While the task is trivial enough to do it yourself, making it nice requires certain efforts or you can get the solution from here.
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Paul Graham in his article provides an interesting insight of what makes Silicon Valley and how to produce another one. Since St Petersburg is often referred as Russian Silicon Valley I tried to run Paul’s checklist against our beautiful city, which resulted in writing this post.

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Microsoft’s User Experience team did an excellent job putting together Vista User Experience Guidelines. It’s very good, detailed and actually has broader application than just Vista. I wish every software developer / designer read it and at least tried as hard as possible to adhere to rules and suggestions presented there.

Here are some of my favorite’s rules from the guidelines:

“Don’t spend time rebuilding standard UI components; use that time instead to innovate in meaningful ways based on your core competencies and understanding of your customer needs.”

It makes sense although the reality is that over the next five years Windows XP and older systems will still represent significant market share so most developers won’t be comfortable abandoning skins just because on Vista standard controls look good enough.
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