Can a superfast internet connection change your perspective?

Pondering this afternoon about having a superfast internet connection and what it would mean for my everyday experience.   If I had a superfast internet what kinds of things would I do differently.  What are the types of things that I am not doing because it takes a long time?

One of the things, would be to forgo the use of the Google App Engine developer server.  Maybe.  Seems that GAE does not allow me to attach to a running instance.

How about really extending your filesystem to the web?

Perhaps this would be the full realization of ChromeBooks.  Everything really is in the web.

What are the open questions about ChromeBooks?
-how to do Android development?
-how to do any development (web or rich client)?

Visual Studio .suo ==> there be dragons

Fought a weird problem today in Visual Studio 2015 and the Microsoft Git Extension to Visual Studio.

It really seems that the .suo file is involved with keeping state in Visual Studio because after deleting the file from source control, Visual Studio deleted all the source files from the local hard drive.

Here's the path to the .suo:
.vs\\v14\.suo

After checking out an earlier commit id (before the .suo was deleted) made Visual Studio happier.  The merge of the .suo back into the master branch kept complaining about nothing to commit and a

git push --force

was required to get the HEAD of the master branch happy again.

Moral Lesson:
- be careful deleting .suo from source control...

Why did Google enable flash on Chrome?

It always seemed a bit strange to me why Google enabled Flash on Chrome. I guessed it enabled a more streamlined intial install behaviour. Today, I installed Flash on Internet Explorer 9. One of the things that came by default in the install was the Google Toolbar. It occured to me that Google did a deal where they install Flash by default on Chrome and Adobe will install the Google Toolbar by default.

Visual Studio Macro for Opening a stack trace file

I often open a file and go to location from a stack trace. It gives information in the following format:
filename:line 999

Here's the macro that I'm bound to Ctrl-Shift-O (because I don't open projects from shortcuts and it is close to Ctrl-O for opening a file).

======
Sub OpenFileFromStackTrace()
Dim ret As String = InputBox("Input filename and line number (example=> c:\myfile.cs:line 321):", "Open File From Stack Trace")
If (ret = String.Empty) Then
Return
End If

Dim spl3 As String() = ret.Split(New [String]() {":line "}, StringSplitOptions.None)

DTE.ItemOperations.OpenFile(spl3(0))

Dim line As Integer = Integer.Parse(spl3(1))
DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.GotoLine(line, False)
End Sub
================

The case of the mysterious window popping up

At work one day my difference tool stopped working when launched from the source control system. This applies to any large tool that's launching a 3rd party tool.

The source control system did not specify what the command line it was launching. Time for a bit of reverse engineering...

1. Launch the source control tool
2. Run filemon
3. Launch the difference tool

Take a look at what filemon was trying to open. In my case it was a tool called "compare.exe".

Hmm. Why would that fail.

I ran the compare.exe from the command line (cmd.exe) and bingo it came up with the other 3rd party tool (in my case it was ImageMagick's compare.exe). As I don't use ImageMagick too much I just renamed the binary on my system to imcompare.exe and I was in the money again running my difference tool happily.

Writing Readable Code

I liked the following post:Readable code

Bytecode for the Dalvik VM

http://git.source.android.com/?p=platform/dalvik.git;a=blob_plain;f=docs/dalvik-bytecode.html;h=fc3cf0b9b4d03b209dd65b3d107c0512ea24deb2;hb=master