Holy buffalo man! I just returned from a brief vacation in Texas. Above is a shot I captured. Yes, that buffalo had it's head in our rental car! Seconds later, it had it's giant tongue about 2 inches from my head.

Did I encounter this on the road and thought, "why not open the window and see if he'll walk up? That would be fun!" No. It was at the "Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch."

Many of the animals there are happy to walk up to the car to get a small reward (bags of some treat the animals seem to like). One is supposed to drop them on the ground and enjoy the animals close up - but that's hard when the animal shoves it's HEAD in your car!

And this is a humorous sequence -- and no, I didn't change the zoom on the camera at all! I just pointed and kept clicking!

I've never seen a zebra this close before!

Some of the animals liked the game of "feed me" more than others:

Expensive (even with a coupon), but quite a memory, and some very fun shots.

Posted by Aaron at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From  http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/14375072/detail.html

"a late aftershock of an earthquake from 1727"

POSTED: 4:57 am EDT October 19, 2007

UPDATED: 6:37 am EDT October 19, 2007

BOSTON -- For the second time this month an earthquake has hit Massachusetts.

NewsCenter 5 received numerous calls from people in the Groton, Westford and Littleton area. Residents said that they heard what sounded like a loud boom or explosion. Some said that they felt their homes shake.

Video: Quake Rattles Homes

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that an earthquake measuring 2.5 hit the region at about 1:30 a.m. Residents in Westford and Littleton also said that they heard rumblings at about 6:05 a.m.

Earlier this month, a quake measuring 1.8 the Richter scale rattled homes in Amesbury and Merrimac. Officials said that quake was a late aftershock of an earthquake from 1727 in Newburyport.

Will this happen some day:

"Sir, that's a bug from a version of Windows for Workgroups 3.1 in the late 20th century."

"Good golly man! That was 250 years ago!"

Posted by Aaron at 7:42 AM | Permalink

There's a small debate going on right now ... what should the acronym RIA actually represent? There are 2 proposals:

• Rich Internet Application
• Rich Interactive Application

Adobe employees, such as Ryan Stewart, push Rich Internet Application, as that's what it was originally for. But Scott Barnes is declaring that it really should mean Interactive.

Scott's (Microsoft) point:

Internet for me isn't the right word, it's semantically incorrect and out of touch with today's actual "RIA" (Rich Interactive Applications) solutions. Typically, hardware vendors are looking at Rich Interactive Applications with new found respect, and monitoring both Microsoft and Adobe movements in this space.

When you couple hardware vendors along side most internal facing solutions, the word Internet starts to have a confusing message/meaning, as well.... Internet isn't really being used?

Ryan (Adobe) counters:

For some reason nothing gets under my skin more than this whole rich interactive application versus rich Internet application fight (and this bugged me before I joined Adobe). I just think it’s kind of dumb and petty. RIA stands for rich internet application. Everyone calls it that, everyone knows what it means (well as much as anyone can define RIAs) and that’s that.

I agree with Ryan (although it doesn't get under my skin as much). I think Scott is missing the target here. "Internet" may not always be the right word given the delivery may be over the "intranet", but Interactive is hardly an improvement. Interactive is so vague (is it a installed application, a smart-client application -- oh don't get me started on how much I hate that term -- is it a web application with cool DHTML, does it use Flash or Silverlight?). Microsoft Money is a Rich Interactive Application, and for that matter, so is Word 2007.

Rich implies to me fancy -- and the 99% of applications that matter to end users are interactive. Those that aren't interactive are not typically rich (even widgets on the desktop of your favorite operating system are interactive to some degree). How many Rich applications are there that you don't interact with in at least some way?

So, my suggestion would be to Scott since he's a bit frustrated by "Internet" is to drop the "I".

Rich Application.

But then, I think that's missing the whole point of the delivery mechanism being the key to why this acronym exists at all.

And if the whole point of this acronym really is to identify the source of the rich application, then it seems like it should stay. Unfortunately, few acronyms that might identify more precisely the network don't roll off the tongue so well. (Rich Network-Delivered Application?)

Of course, Scott is entitled to call it rich interactive application of course, but Rich Internet Application works just as well for a large percentage of applications that are delivered over the Internet, so that should stay as well. I love overloaded acronyms!

Posted by Aaron at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Maybe I need to loan the local Fed Ex dude a spare GPS:

Unable to locate address, street number? Hello?!

Next delivery now scheduled for Tuesday the 16th. How nice of them.

Posted by Aaron at 8:39 PM | Permalink

From Ryan Stewart, "CNet on Adobe as a Microsoft Killer"...

The key word there is application. We're building a platform with Flex that is meant to compete head on with robust client side applications. You can do so much in the browser now and Flex lets to build applications that are feature-wise generally the same as any other app. The kicker is AIR. We understand the benefits of the desktop and if that's what you need to leverage, we want you to be able to do so. But we're coming at it from a web background, from the browser world. I think that allows us to strike a unique balance between browser and desktop that no one else can do as well.

(emphasis his).

Read one of the blog posts from CNet here that inspired Ryan's post.

Adobe has something very interesting on their hands. Flash, although steeped in a long history of performance problems and an animation background was completely rewritten for Flash 9, which powers the latest Flex platform. ActionScript, once a mockery of developers (and designers) everywhere, is now a robust, object-oriented, developer friendly, and JITed language. I've experimented a little lately with it, and it feels enough like C/C++/Java/C# that I'm easily at home. The latest beta of Flex Builder 3 is quite solid and provides for a very decent editing and debugging experience. It may not be up to the latest of Visual Studio 2008 in some respects, but it's not far away (and they're making rapid improvements in what seem to be a much faster time table than Microsoft).

MXML, the markup language for the UI of Flex, is a sibling (or first cousin) to WPF's XAML representation. I found myself quickly learning it and looking for the similarities (and finding many) between MXML and WPF in features and behaviors (and there are many).

Why might I consider Flex over WPF? Deployment, hardware requirements, platform availability, runtime adoption (Flash), developer experience, and platform maturity. Sure, I know that Silverlight 1.1 will have many of the same features of Flex, yet, if you look at the feature lists, many things will be left on the cutting room floor of Microsoft, for a 'future' version.

Flex also can be ported to the AIR platform -- which really has no equivalent in Silverlight. WPF is similar, but it's tied to a Windows Operating system, and installation on a PC with plenty of horsepower. (AIR being a technology that allows a Flash/Flex application to run stand alone, outside of the browser).

I think there's a bright future for Flex right now. The browser delivered application (with zero install), is the next big thing. Web 2.0 is all about using HTML/DHTML and more Javascript than you'd ever thought possible to make some applications web friendly (enough Javascript to give you heartburn!). The web is ready for something new. Macromedia is said to have introduced the world to "Rich Internet Applications" (RIA) in 2002. I'd suggest though that we're just about there Adobe (and Microsoft).

RIA is no longer in beta, it's RIA 1.0.

RIA 1.0: It's cross platform; cross browser; ditching the woes of HTML and CSS incompatibilities; crushing the browser; extending our experiences; and empowering users with the full gamut of useful applications without the boundaries of HTML/DHTML/AJAX.

Welcome to the future. It will be arriving any day now. :)  I'm looking forward to it. How about you?

Posted by Aaron at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Microsoft has finally seen the light! They announced today that the source code for .NET 3.5 for most of the framework would be available for download. That's awesome! It should make debugging so much easier! The list included WPF and all of the typical base class libraries. (WPF debugging still will be FREAKY though as there's so much there, but it might help in the real tough cases).

Posted by Aaron at 7:19 PM | Permalink