unplug me

While we spent the last decade, trying to get “plugged-in” and online, the future seems to be unplugged and wireless. In the United States we consider ourselves free people so why do we burden ourselves with wires? I’m definitely on the bandwagon as soon as I learned that wireless internet would cause very little loss in speed, I certainly pulled the plug. Now I want everything wireless!!!! It’s like pre 2000, I just accepted wires as part of my life, I even received pleasure in reconnecting all my PC cables as I moved dorm rooms. In the past year I’ve considering forking over the extra dollar for a wireless print server, wireless headphones, even a wireless midi controller. The fact that I’m always tripping over my xbox controller card angers me, and as soon as I can afford it I’ll buy wireless satellite speakers for my home entertainment system. Is there any room for wires in our future? How thin can we currently slice our EM Spectrum to make room for all these technologies? The next decade will certainly be interesting as many questions await.

Design Patterrns

Woohoo! My Design Patterns book finally got here, now I really can cringe as I read page after page of why my designs the past year have been so poor. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates from Javaranch put togehter an "Everything You Need to Know" guide to the most common software design patterns. So far I am overly impressed with Kathy and Bert's approaches of explaining potentially dry material in a new and interesting way. I stil consider myself very new to the field of software development, and for architecture I am a mere infant, but I am easily excited when discovering general theories that can be applied to development. Thanks to Kathy and Bert I am building my "Shared Vocabulary" that I can use to communicate effectively in the field. Like a lot of other beginning programmer's I admit I believed an OO view of the world would solve all problems, but I didn't see the dangers and design traps until I began on larger more involved projects. These Design patterns really help to identify areas where a strictly OO solution is not necessarily the best decision and the less intuitive albeit better designs have been passed down and proven successful by many senior developer across a wide array of projects.

XML Madness

After 10 frustrating hours I'm still struggling to Convert base64 type response data to a binary image file for display. Everything has to work both in ASP and .NET Solutions, so we're trying to wrap our check image dll in a Web Service. We've opted to transport the data via a binary stream so there's no messy clean up of image files after an image is served. The real blocker is how to convert the base64 data to binary and write the binary content to a page. We've found base64 decoding functions in vb, however when we read in the textual data from the xml element, I believe newline and linefeed are being reformatted. oXMLHTTP.responseText appears to "preformat" the text which leads to problems while decoding with our function. oXMLHTTP.responseBody returns only the raw text, however the vb string functions don't seem compatible with the return type. Once again its a run around, and I spend more time guess and checking for solutions than making any real progress. Hopefully oXMLHTTP offers other methods that will return workable data. I plan to explore more tomorrow.

Genesis

VNV was every bit as satisfying as I hoped for. Nation however left a lot to be desired. We got to the club very early almost an hour before the opening duo Coder23. The main area was closed off until about a half hour before 9. As soon as the curtain opened we made our way towards the stage. They played normal club music as the bands finished setting up, and we didn't even notice we were right beside the main speaker until Coder opened. Coder23 is described as tech-house duo from Europe. Although I'm completely new to their music I found their show enjoyable and very remiscent of tracks on the Trance Station on DI. Both DJ's kept the beats steady on their powermac notebooks, while a large screen in front looped eerie computer animations which added to the feel of their sound.

It had to be 11 or after before VNV came on. Ronan, who I alway visualized as a very solemn and dark vocalist could not have been more the opposite. With energy he circled about the stage easily gaining control of the eager crowd. The mainly goth dressed audience responded echoing lyrics of the popular songs. Dancing was suprisingly to a minimum, most likely due to the lack of room near the stage. Mark played the "electro-drums" like a tribesman playing whack a mole. His long limbs stretched out to empasize beats as he stood towering in the center of the stage.

My biggest complaint was that the huge speaker we stood in front ( of course totally our fault, and I wouldn't do this again ) seemed to drown out the the melody on most tracks. The beats even over-powered Ronan's singing and songs that I usually knew all the words I got lost and could barely recognize. It sucks we missed Limelight the night before in New York. If I had known VNV was playing Limelight I would have definitely tried to make it. Dark Trance in a Gothic Cathedral would be a truely divine experience.

Over all I was glad we went. Somehow I manged to guide the car back to Harrisburg and get to sleep by 4am. I even convinced Carol to go to another concert in 2005 after release of the Matter and Form album.