matt.griffith

I'm in the market for a new digital video camera. After doing some research I decided to buy the Panasonic PV-GS300.

Yesterday Amazon had this camera in stock for $507. BestBuy's web site said it was in stock at my local BestBuy store. When I added the camera to my online cart to check the price I saw that they wanted $527. I decided to pay BestBuy the extra $20 for the convenience of getting it locally.

When I got to BestBuy last night they did indeed have it in stock. But the price was $569. I told the sales clerk that their site listed it at $527. He said that was strange because they usually sell it in the store for the same price as they sell it online. He went to check. When he came back he had a printout of a BestBuy online shopping cart. The price he was quoted online was $569, the same price the store had it listed. When I got home later I checked again and the price was still $527 when I added it to my cart.

This morning I'm ordering the camera from Amazon. Not only am I saving money on the camera, I'm also saving a bunch of money on MiniDV tapes.

From now on when BestBuy says they are hiding the price from me because the manufacturer requires them to I think I'll be a little more skeptical. And before I go to the local store I'll print the price that I was quoted online. If they don't match the online price, I'll buy from someone else.

It wasn't a completely wasted trip though. I did get to see the camera and compare the size of it to other cameras I was looking at. It is a little bigger, but not too much. And the quality is much better than my old camera and the other cameras I was considering.

In this short screencast I show how you can use IronPython and Snoop together to explore the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

IronPython is a wonderful dynamic language with full access to the .NET Framework. Snoop is a great WPF debugging tool. Together they can help you climb the steep WPF learning curve.

A flash version of the screencast is available here.

UPDATE: Rob Relyea points out a way for me to simply my code. Instead of doing:

b.Content = TextBlock()
b.Content.Text = "Hi"

I could do this instead:

b.Content = "Hi"

WPF creates the TextBlock for you automatically when you set the Content property to a string. That does work from IronPython. Thanks Rob.

UPDATE: In the comments to Rob's post above he points out that there is a way to refresh the Snoop visual tree (the treeview on the left side of the window). All you have to do is press F5. Very cool.

If you don't have IronPython installed see: HOWTO Screencast: Install IronPython

If you need to know how to build Snoop without Visual Studio see: HOWTO Screencast: Build Snoop without Visual Studio

Today Jim Hugunin announced the release of IronPython 1.0. Congratulations to Jim and everyone on the IronPython team.

Snoop is a great Windows Presentation Foundation debugging tool.

The Snoop download includes the source code and the Visual Studio project files needed to build it. But if you don't have Visual Studio installed you can use MSBuild to build Snoop. In this screencast I show you how to do just that.

A flash version of the screencast is available here.

Now that the Windows Presentation Foundation APIs have stabalized it is time for me to start seriously playing with it.

Jon Udell recently posted the screencast of a interview he did with Jim Hugunin. In this screencast Jim demonstrates IronPython. Jim & Jon do a great job explaining why you should install IronPython. Dynamic languages are a great way to explore new APIs. And IronPython is a great way to explore .NET APIs. But there weren't any demonstrations of how easy it is to install IronPython; until now.

In this 5 minute screencast I show you how to install and set up IronPython so you can use it to explore WPF.

A Flash version of the screencast is available here.

Jon Udell thinks Microsoft should Open-source WPF/E. I almost always agree with Jon. And when I don't at first I find that I eventually do. Maybe I should outsource my thinking about this industry to Jon. Anyway, I agree with Jon this time too.

Late last year Dare suggested that Microsoft should either disband the IE team or transfer it to the MSN division. I agreed with Dare too - again, this happens a lot.

Now Microsoft Offers To Help Firefox Run On Vista. Here's a silly idea. Microsoft should kill IE and then let the MSN division support development of Mozilla.

I wonder what it would look like if Google, MSN, and Yahoo were all contributing code and patches to Mozilla? Could it work? Would it work better than trying to hammer out specs? After all, isn't the code the spec anyway?

I just watched a version of this talk by Luis von Ahn on Human Computation. I watched it on UWTV, but this one on Google Video is much easier to use online.

This is the sort of thing that will drive real gains artificial intelligence. Get your Humans United Against Robots T-Shirt today ;-)

Seriously though, check out that talk. It is fascinating.

Dare is correct. I misapplied the idea of "Commoditizing Your Complements". I'll blame it on my wishful thinking that there would be an advantage for Google to release GFS & BigTable into the wild.

I do think there is an opportunity for Yahoo! to marginalize the advantage that GFS & BigTable give Google. I don't think it is fair to compare Hadoop to Mozilla. Mozilla was a much more speculative project. There are plenty of companies that have an interest in seeing something like Hadoop succeed. Those same companies have a real interest in helping develop it. I think it would be more accurate to compare Hadoop to Jboss, Linux, and/or Apache.

It is a mistake to think of Yahoo! selling advertising real estate. Maybe that is true for Yahoo! and MSN. But it is not true for Google. Google is building an advertising platform. I think Yahoo! and MSN are trying, much less successfully, to do the same. Right now Google's software gives them huge advantages in the Ad Platform space. But if Yahoo! and MSN can catch up then we're in for another platform war. And frankly I think the coming Ad Platform war will make the browser war look tame.

The thing that scares me the most is what happens to my data if Google starts to lose that war? I recently started using Gmail for all my email. Right now Google makes it possible, but not easy, to get my mail out. But if they start to lose ad revenue to Yahoo!, MSN, or someone else will they try to lock me in to Gmail? The same fears would apply to MSN & Yahoo! if I used their services instead.

Google seems to be re-building Hailstorm. But the trust problem that Microsoft had with Hailstorm wasn't just because they are Microsoft. Google will have the same trust problem. It just might take people longer to catch on.

I won't trust anyone with my data. For something like Hailstorm to work we need a federated storage system that is separate from the services that use the data. WinFS was one attempt to solve part of this problem. Ideally this would be a P2P system similar to GFS & BigTable. But Amazon is showing that something like S3 could work here too.

I wish I had more time to think about and work on this space.

Installing SQLite 3 on Windows is pretty easy, once you figure out what you need to do. But when I started using Ruby on Rails I struggled to figure out what I needed to do. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how you can install SQLite 3 on Windows so you can use it in your Ruby on Rails applications.

A flash version will eventually be available here.