i recently wrote about my birthday binge purchases, one of which included an airport extreme.  in addition to the airport, i acquired a matching (in size so it fit right under it) lacie mini hard drive.  the reason for this (and the initial airport purchase) was i'm trying to consolidate some storage without having to have a running "machine" (OS) anywhere.  the airport touted the ability to plugin an external hard drive and share it with everyone.

well, i'm happy to report that my other birthday purchases are doing me proud.  the airport and lacie, on the other hand, are quite possibly two of the worst pieces of technology that i personally have ever purchased.  i know "your mileage may vary" and i'm not trying to blanket everyone, but for me, it is a complete failure.  which is disappointing because i read the reviews on both products and selected based on particular comments etc.  allow me to vent.

airport extreme:

while beautiful in industrial design, it lacks features i'm used to (and desire).  i should have known not to mess with my ol' trusty linksys solution, but i was lured with the shared drive and 802.11n spec inclusion.  alas, piece of poo.  the sharing of the drive?  yes, but only if it is a mac-formatted one.  i plugged in my existing western digital 320GB drive (which has my files on it) first, and the error log simply stated that it was unable to mount the drive and i must plug it into a computer and "repair" it -- and repair==re-format.  no thanks.  (this is why i bought the lacie which is a bigger capacity as well.)  also, the sharing itself for "mac or pc" is really for mac.  it doesn't use any standard other than its own...bonjour.  so on a windows machine i couldn't map to \\box\share but had to install bonjour for windows and use it that way.  argh.  why wouldn't they just use samba or something?

wireless options...this is probably the thing that bothered me.  first, where is the web-based admin?  nowhere.  i had to install a client on both my mac and win machines to configure it.  while the software is nice looking, it is fischer price features.  seriously, give me the advanced option and allow me to configure from anywhere within the network.  i don't use wep/wpa in my home wireless, but use mac hardware address filtering.  setting up this feature on the airport was not intuitive.  the logging/diagnostics (showing me the connected wireless clients) also only showed me the connected mac addresses?! wtf?!  you made me input the mac address and give it a name, couldn't you show me the name in the connected client list?  argh.

probably the single reason i'm returning it is performance.  yesterday i worked from home.  aside from being a bad idea with a 5 year old, 1 year old, and wife (whom i love so dearly :-)), the interweb was horrible.  my wife even commented something was wrong.  for her to notice something is wrong, means something is wrong.  i "rebooted" the airport a few times (a process that also is not intuitive, you must make a config change to "update" which results in a reboot.  anyhow, my wireless throughput was HORRIBLE (see andrew, i do have caps).  i honestly couldn't believe how slow it was.  as a test i tweaked a few configs but nothing would improve it.  i plugged my linksys back in and all was back to normal/fast.  i still don't know what the problem was, but i could isolate it to the airport.  for that reason alone, i'm ditching it (the other reasons just re-affirm my decision).

lacie hard drive:

again, great industrial design (for mac accessories) and fit perfectly under the airport and tucked away.  the problem?  turn it on.  unless you like the sound of a hair dryer up against your ear all day, this isn't for you.  seriously, with no data on it, nobody accessing it, just plugging it in and turning it on in a well ventilated, cool room, it hummed like a banshee.  i couldn't take it for more than 5 minutes.  my wife, who shares the same home office, looked at me and simply said "absolutely not."  i knew at that moment it had to go back.  i honestly could not believe how loud the thing was...horrible, horrible, horrible.

so i'm back to the apple store today to return.  i suspect they'll charge me a restocking fee which i'll gladly pay to be rid of these piles of garbage.

as always, your mileage may vary.  i consider myself pretty savvy and feel my assessment is accurate for the advanced user, but everyone is entitled to their opinion otherwise.  two big thumbs down on both products...big time.

in part 1 of my baseball example concept, i discussed how i was able to re-use some SVG vector art in XAML.  in that screencast i used an SVG file and a PDF file.  it set the stage for the remaining part of my samples here.  to recap, my goal is to show: using vector files for XAML (done), integrating that XAML and html functionality (here) and then to show a "game play" view of the vector art, extracting just the field information.

in this part 2 of that goal, i set out to recreate a different user experience for the ticket purchase process of the online site for the baseball team.  right now at the dbacks seating/pricing site, they provide a chart and a color match html table.  there is some "zoom" functionality (really it is just image swapping) to get a closer look at the sections.  to me, i wanted to see a simpler implementation -- don't make me think.  when i choose the infield section, clearly show me where that is -- if i can't decipher the colors very well, then i might not understand where the section is.  this is, of course, a very simple sample, but one that can easily demonstrate how easy it is to work with silverlight and html from a DOM perspective.

you see, once the silverlight plugin is loaded, it is a part of the page DOM.  because of this, other elements can dig into it, manipulate XAML, execute storyboards, etc. -- and vice versa...the silverlight plugin can alter html on the same page.  it actually is quite simple, but i've received some questions on it, so i thought i'd whip this quick sample together.  please subscribe to the podcast feed on the left to get the previous screencast and future ones as well.

i hope it helps.  if it doesn't, let me know or let me know how to refine a better sample.  leave a comment in the blogs.

part 3 will be (maybe) the final part of this sample, demonstrating a "game view" using the same imported vector data, real-time data from SQL server, asp.net ajax integration...it's wicked cool and i can't wait to post it!

yeah, me too.  the news of the day is that microsoft's developer group is releasing portions of the .net framework base class libraries (bcl) under the microsoft reference license (ms-rl).  in a nutshell the license enables the viewing of the source code, but no modification.  even so a step in the right direction in my opinion.  while it isn't an open source license, this is a part of microsoft's broader shared source initiatives to aid developers in the understanding of the innerworkings of the .net framework.

we'll also be introducing capabilities in visual studio 2008 to allow .net developers debugging their apps to not only step into their own source code, but also into the .net framework source code using visual studio!  aside from that functionality, anyone who accepts the license agreement will be able to download and view the source code.  the release will include the bcl, windows forms, asp.net, System.Data and WPF.  this includes System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, System.Data, System.Web, System.Windows.Forms, System.Windows.  you may not see silverlight or wcf/workflow or linq (linq is yet to be released anyway) but each library that is considered to be released under this initiative will go through a review process.  additional libraries are planned as time progresses.

you can see a demonstration and more details on scottgu's blog as well as listen to shawn burke discuss it on hanselminutes.  integration with the debug symbols is going to be as simple as:

well, even though i haven't seen them, i'm impressed with the announcement.  maybe i switched too soon, but i still stand by my decision based on my personal needs (car aftermarket oem integration).  regardless, here's what the new zunes will bring...

• 80GB and 4/8GB flash versions
• new Zunes will have new UI and features..."old" Zune users will get those features as well!
• native codecs for h.264 and MPEG-4 -- no need for only WMV
• WiFi sync to host machine
• Podcast support!!
• Zune software is completely re-written apparently and although i haven't seen it i'm hoping it isn't a re-badging of WMP still.
• Zune music store is going to have DRM-free music in MP3 format for over 1 million tunes.

this is a pretty impressive lineup of features.  i think it is way cool that the software on the device is backward compat with original zunes.  to me, that is huge.  it acknowledges early adopters and doesn't leave those feeling like they are "stuck" with a v1 device...that is huge in my opinion.

the other features sound great as well.  i can't wait to see the new software to make a decision on how good it is.

UPDATE/correction: jeff weber authored the farseer engine, bill ported for silverlight...both did good work!  thanks for the clarification!

bill reiss of dr. popper fame (my daughter loves the "bubble game" she calls it), just released the farseer physics engine, which has support for silverlight (1.1) as well.

the engine is an easy to use 2D physics engine for XNA and silverlight platforms.  it contains logic for collision, joints, controllers, etc...everything you would need to start a base casual game at least.

bill put it out on codeplex as an open source project as well released under the Ms-Pl.  check out some of the demos of the functions here.