A Helping Hand

SD Best Practices 2007 is right around the corner. Well, around the corner if you happen to live on Gloucester, Newbury, or Hereford Streets in Boston. And don't forget: In addition to the lineup of Best Practices tracks -- Build and Deploy, C++, Design and Architecture, and Web Services/SOA, among others -- you can also attend the .NET Roadshow for the latest in .NET Framework 3.5 stuff. Hope to see you there.

A reader has asked for my help, and in a fashion that you ought be used to by now, I'm passing the buck and asking for your help. This reader really needs an IBM Selectric APL ball/element. We've tried eBay, but so far no luck. If you can offer a suggestion as to where and how to track one down, please let me know and I'll pass on the information.

Reader Richard Rosenheim took me to task -- and rightly so -- for my "Internet Radio" contribution to Wednesday's newsletter. He found my presentation confusing, which it was. My only defense is that I find the whole topic confusing -- and I said as much at the time. As I whimped out to Richard, you don't know who to believe. For instance, ASCAP says there are 6.4 million Internet radio listeners. Rep. Jay Islee says there are 70 million. That's quite a spread. Richard zeroed in on the per song royalty rate, and the confusing mess it is. Is it a 1200-percent increase? Is it 300 percent? Hey, I get confused balancing my checkbook -- and you expect me to add or subtract $0.0001192 per song? In any event, I'll try to be less confusing -- or get interested in less confusing topics.

Here's something else you can help me with? What do you think are the top three features that a programmer's web site have to have? Okay, source code, of course -- and lots of it. What kind of search? Tutorials? But what do you think makes a programmer's site special? Drop me a note at jerickson@ddj.com. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts on this topic.

Recall how I was taken to the woodshed by a couple of readers when I said that Microsoft's Silverlight was a cross-platform plug-in? The context was that Silverlight supports both Windows and Macintosh, but not (I guess) Linux. Well, that's all water under the bridge now (or soon will be) with Microsoft's announcement that with the 1.0 release of Silverlight it will cooperate with Novell to provide Linux support. Based on the 1.0 release, we had to go back and make a few changes to the Sparkleball game. These changes are reflected in the development tutorial that accompanies the game. Whew! Saved by the bell.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:11 PM  Permalink