Adam Caudill

Happy 20th birthday Visual Basic!

Today I saw a post on Facebook by a friend of mine, Anthony Green, about writing his first blog post as a Microsoft employee (he has a personal blog as well, unfortunately he’s not written anything since 2008) – when I saw the title, I couldn’t believe it was 20 years already – seems just yesterday that I wrote about its 15th birthday:

Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!

My, what a journey it’s been. Almost fifteen years ago I randomly bought a copy of “Visual Basic 5: Deluxe Learning Edition” – I was just 15 at the time and wanted a new hobby, and writing software seemed like it would be fun. In those early days, I had no idea what career I would choose, and really didn’t intend for software development to become the dominant force in my life – I just wanted a better, more productive way to spend my time during the summer.

VB6: Not so open source

Earlier today, a rather surprising tweet hit, being retweeted at least 80 times, including by a few rather influential people in the .NET world:

Microsoft announces to mvps at #msteched that VB6 will be released as open source on codeplex end of june! w00t

— Roy Osherove (@RoyOsherove) May 19, 2011

Needless to say, that’s not an announcement that anybody was expecting, but given the talk going on at the time – and the high-profile people talking about it, there wasn’t much reason to doubt. Announcing a product that has been dead for years is going open source would certainly be a strategy shift for Microsoft, but does it make any sense? Kevin Dente of Herding Code fame certainly thought that Microsoft had better things to release:

Errors on ‘gem install mysql2’

On my fresh Ubuntu 11.04 box running Ruby 1.9.2 instead of the standard Ruby 1.8, I ran into some undocumented errors while installing the mysql2 gem. Here’s what I was seeing:

$ gem install mysql2
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing mysql2:
  ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 extconf.rb
          <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require':
          no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
  from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require'
  from extconf.rb:2:in `<main>'

Gem files will remain installed in
  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql2-0.3.2 for inspection.
Results logged to
  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql2-0.3.2/ext/mysql2/gem_make.out

This obviously isn’t all that helpful, nor did I find anything all that useful on Google – thankfully the issue is easy to solve. All that’s needed is to ensure that the following packages are installed:

Facebook Scams

As a tip for all my Facebook friends, despite the promises you see spreading wildly across Facebook, you can’t see who’s looking at your profile. If you ever see anything like this, it’s a scam – pure and simple:

If you ever see a page like this, or one that asks you to paste a script into your address bar as this one does, please immediately report the page. If you see any of your friends ’like’ a page like this or send messages linking to something like this, please warn them – they have likely handed their account over to a scammer or other bottom-dwelling script-kiddy.

Microsoft & Skype: PR Failure?

While looking at the reactions to Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, I found one tweet that really stood out:

How you know you have a PR problem: As soon as you buy popular service X, their userbase starts posting alternatives #skype #Microsoft

— Ted Han (@knowtheory) May 11, 2011

While many users are busy joking about names (personally my money is on “Microsoft Live Skype” – my only hope is that there isn’t an “Ultimate Edition” or “Unicorn Edition” tacked to the end of the name) Microsoft has a significant problem, and I really hope they are looking at public reaction. Users are concerned; what will Microsoft do to the brand, and how will the brand and service change – users need to be reassured that what they love about the service won’t go away.

You can’t fix stupid…

For those outside of the IT field, developers are looked at as miracle workers – through us, business leaders think anything is possible (and they often see no reason why we can’t work our latest miracle by the next morning). In reality though, we do work miracles; we save companies vast amounts of money every year through increased worker efficiency and automation, we enable new lines of business that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and reduce energy costs because we keep the office lights turned off. Well, that’s more or less how they see us.

Hosting Change

I’m in the process of migrating my sites from a Dreamhost VPS, to fully managed hosting by Gray Hills Software. In my tests so far, the loading time has been cut in half with this switch. Pages load faster, the server is better configured (new software, and more options), and seeing as they have both Windows and Linux servers, I can use one provider with whatever technology suits me and my projects.

TED: Stuxnet: a preview of future wars

Ralph Langner recently spoke at TED about his team’s findings on Stuxnet; it’s a clear (and somewhat scary) insight into the wars of the future. Instead of sending fighters and bombers to take out Iran’s nuclear program, as was done in 1981 to eliminate Iraq’s program, a carefully crafted virus slowly and methodologically damaged or destroyed vital equipment.

How long until this is used as a standard part of ‘softening’ a target by taking out key infrastructure (flight systems, power plants, telephone & internet, etc.) before the bombs start to fly?

…and thanks for the fish (Twitter v. Developers)

On March 11, 2011, Twitter said goodbye to some of its most loyal and passionate users.

In a message on their Development Talk group entitled “consistency and ecosystem opportunities” – they make their position clear: we no longer need you. To demonstrate this, let me point out a couple quotes that deserve attention:

Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc.), and send tweets.

Read more…