That papercasting thing I started has turned into a freakin’ monster. Stephen Shankland of News.com (a competitor of my employer, I should note) linked to it two days ago, probably because of this little item:
(Apologies for the headline to anyone who hasn’t watched Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I. It’s good to be the king.)
Microsoft MVPs are revolting. They’re petitioning for redress of sins against VB6. There aren’t tires burning in the streets of Redmond yet, but it’s clear that some very loyal MS developers are truly torqued.
I did a lot of development in VB 4, 5, and 6, once upon a time. A set of applications I wrote in VB once for a couple of customers earned me loads of software maintenance work that got me through some tough financial times. I can understand the source of frustration that VB programmers who have a big installed base feel now that the tool they’ve built their empires with is no longer being supported.
But.
The conversation going on over at my old friend Rich Levin’s blog shows that there’s definitely more than one side to the story. And, in all honesty, I can watch this argument with total neutrality because I’ve moved on to PHP, Python and other dev tools for my programming work. (By the way, VB’rs, PyCON is coming up soon…maybe you should go.) VB.NET is pretty powerful, and VB6 makes me feel all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia, but I like to deploy things on the Web on any platform, and Python and PHP just work. They work on the Mac, which is now my primary Unix desktop. And they work on Windows.
Speaking of Windows, VB’rs, I wonder what Jim Hugunin is up to these days. I know that he went to work for Microsoft on the CLR… looks like he’s giving the keynote at PyCON. I may have to figure out a way to get down to it despite the dicey logistics of my daily life these days.
By now, you’ve probably heard of podcasting. Heck, you may be experimenting with doing your own podcasts. They’re great for certain types of content–and they’re especially good if:
But for those of us who only fall into the first categories, podcasting may carry a little too much of a footprint. If you haven’t mastered GarageBand or some other multitrack editing tool (or don’t own one), creating polished podcasts may be difficult.
For those who want all of the advantages of podcasting without the audio, I’m taking blogging to the next level in inaccessibility and security: Papercasting. Using a paper-based logging device (a notebook) with a Fischer Space Pen, I record up-to-the minute notes on the day’s events. Then I scan the page for the day and upload it–if you don’t have a scanner, a digital camera may do the trick if set for the appropriate image quality and focal point.
Here’s my papercasting plog (paper weblog).
Next, I have to figure out how to do a fax gateway so I can moblog from Kinko’s.
If you want to see a sample plog entry, click below.