Colin Harrington

This past weekend I spoke at the Twin Cities Code Camp.  It was a Blast.   My Presentation was Microsoft Silverlight and SOA.  Its new technology so resources at this point are few and far between.  Silverlight itself is only a a 2.0 Beta 1 stage.

During the presentation, I highlighted Silverlight’s abilities to consume and invoke web services.  I wanted to show cross-domain services calls where the server is a non-microsoft based application.

I developed a RESTful Server application in Grails on Linux. 

The demo Silverlight application is a Video Podcast Administration Application.  I specifically wanted to show several client side methods of invoking web services.  I didn’t want to focus on any fancy visual effects video transformations etc. 

Here is code for the Grails Server.

Here is the Silverlight Application code.

My Presentation is in a Google Doc.

I had a blast at Code Camp, It sounds like something I’ll probably do again.

I might also put a short video together to show its functionality for Inetium. I’ll be sure to post it here.

Cheers!

I really enjoy using Firefox.  I have recently re-imaged my laptop after a hard drive upgrade.  I use Firefox quite Heavily.  I will frequently have one hundred of tabs open especially when I go through my reading materials for a week. 

I noticed on both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) that my firefox sessions would hang after I crossed a certain threashold.  I have other browsers that I popped open to check to see if it was application or network specific.  Epiphany IE and Safari all worked flawlessly so it had to be specific to Firefox.

my first reaction was to pop open about:config (more) and start poking around the network settings, network.http.max-connections and the like seemed to have no effect.  Alas google remided me of the network.http.pipelining (more)  it basically allows for multiple requests to be executed at once.  This is especially important when using both Gmail and Google Reader and Digg which all utilize ajax calls in the background.

Its been a fun April 1st 2008!  I’ve Rick Rolled (definition) numerous people, and still have a friend believing that my wife and I are pregnant (right after talking about April Fools jokes.)  But my measly measures aren’t fit to stand up to some of the grandiose pranks out there today.

My Favorites have been (So far)

• YouTube’s Mass Rick Roll
  All of the Featured videos on the home page redirect to Rick Astley’s video
• BBC’s Video and story on flying penguins
• Digg’s Random Math symbols,
  I didn’t know it was possible to have an imaginary number of diggs ( I got the "¡" symbol when I dugg the story).  Infinite number of Diggs would probably do a number on any server.
• IGN’s "The Legend of Zelda" movie
  This one took the cake in my book.   Why does this have to be fake?  I want it to be real.  I would go see this movie.  I wrote on Jake Good’s Blog: "Maybe the joke is that it is not an Joke? Haha they got me!! (right?) Either way that is a lot of good work for an April fools gag."

Last year I had my wife up in arms over Goole’s TiSP.  She refused to allow a cable to hang in the toilet.  By the end I was trying to give it away by saying, "its only available today April 1st 2007."  It took a while but she eventually calmed down and laughed about it with me.

Happy April Fools Day!