Archive for January 4th, 2008

Well, the Iowans did their thing yesterday and now the rest of the run up continues plodding along. That the Democrats came in the order they did isn’t entirely surprising, and those pieces will land where they will over the next several months. But on the Republican side, Huckabee? WTF? Iowa is a largely Lutheran state, what the heck are they thinking in advancing a hellfire and brimstone Baptist towards the oval office.

On the one hand if he did wind up being the Republican candidate it’s partially be a good thing in that someone that legislates from the pulpit as much as he does would bring out the opposition in droves. Now I’m actually not one to get all hand-wringing about prayers at graduation, or christmas programs (either community or school), etc. But the notion of someone who actually comes up with legislation because it says so in the bible is just mortifyingly scary.

After a fashion, it’s even more annoying because I remember from my American Gov’t classes in high school, and we’re going over the various elements of the different platforms (now this was in the mid 80s, I’ll mention), and the Republicans made more sense to me, better free market focus, etc. Nowhere do I ever recall that it said government should be out of the boardroom but in the bedroom (or in the mandating morality). We won’t even get into the whole rant on what the constitution laid out as far as what the federal government could regulate/legislate and then “…everything else not herein expressly mentioned shall be the pervue of the states.”

Anyway, can any of my Red State friends out there (or even local Republicans) give any kind of position where someone as radical as Mr. Huck would be a good idea?

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It’s not an entirely surprising move given that any attempt to make any headroom against Flash/Flex is going to take a near miracle to get some decent level of acceptance. So far my biggest interest in looking at using Microsoft’s new Flash competitor is that the Flex (the development/activescipt side of Flash) development environment blows chunks. It’s ungainly, and quite frankly so much of a bother that the only reason people force their way through dealing with it is that there’s no other option… until now.

Silverlight’s editor embeds very nicely into Visual Studio 2008, thankyouverymuch, and the context completion and overall integration (into source control as well), is already in a beta state far better than Flex could hope to be in the next 2+ years.

 But then that said, Flex has a massive head start, and with AJAX moving along as quickly as it is, the question really could also be put to being – is there a point to all this anyway at this point? With IE8 appearing to actually be W3C complaint for the first time, there stands to be a chance to really be able to build web applications that’ll be cross-browser compatable with far less headache than before.

But then Flex and Silverlight are so danged pretty… Microsoft though still has to get people to actually use the stuff. So what if it’s better than Flex – betamax was better too, and when was the last time you ever saw a Betamax tape, let alone actually watched one.

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