My friend Sondre is dreaming of automating his house. Having his basement filled with racks of servers and having sensors all over the place. He wants voice recognition to help him turn the lights on and off and control his music. His music will follow him from room to room by routing it to that room's set of integrated sound system, and doors will open as he approaches.

That's kinda cool. But really, if I was to spend a lot of money automating my house I'd want it to help me with the stuff I don't mind doing myself. I just don't think its too much hassle opening the door when leaving the room, or turning the lights on. And I actually enjoy putting on music manually. But if I could have my house clean itself, though, that would be another thing alltogether. Now we're talking actual value.

If it would constantly keep the toilets shining and pleasantly fragrant, the floors swept and toys out of harms way, keep stains off my rug, ants out of my kitchen, the waste basket empty, the lawn mowed, the fridge emptied of dated goods, the car washed, my bills paid, my inbox free from spam, and dinner ready on time. Then I'd start doing the mortgage-math.

"Computer! Lights on!", my ass.

"Bjorn, your car is washed now. Would you like it waxed as well?" - That's more like it!

I addended the local .Net Users Group the other day. It was a good session. Mostly for the social aspect as always, but the sessions were also quite interesting.

But there was this one thing that got most of my attention: How many .Net experts does it take to get a projector working? There were two sessions; one mostly about fiddling with scrollbars on a too-low resolution projector, and one which turned out to be a live podcast with no picture at all.

I guess that projector didn't like be used for non-Microsoft stuff, because that last session was about Mono. Luckily he was a good speaker so it turned out interesting anyway.

(Does this say more about people, laptops or projectors? Seems to me this is always a problem. Why can't these things just work?)

Refactoring in Visual Studio 2005 with Web projects is incredibly slow. This helps alot!

I saw this Cheat Sheet for using Windows PowerShell (MSH / Monad) to help people who are used to cmd.exe to easily move to this new syntax.

PowerShell is really great for doing complex tasks with it's object approach to data, but there seems to be somewhat of a learning curve to this syntax. I haven't looked into it, but just from looking at these examples it looks like a confusion of cmdlets and pipes and switches, and this "$_" thingy.

So, dir is now replaced by get-childitem (dir still works though as an alias). That's ok, its a more general naming convention. But what you could do easily in cmd.exe now seems a bit more tricky. Sorting by date was "dir /ad", now it onvolves a pipe and a where statement and this $_ thing, and becomes "get-childitem | where { $_.MshIsContainer }". Quite a handful right there.

It seems a lot more general and powerful, though I'd have to read up on that syntax before I could get anything done with it.

Here's an example from the same page of a dir function that sorts by name with folders on the top:

function dir {
   get-childitem $args -force |
   sort @{e={$_.MshIsContainer}; asc=$false},
        @{e={$_.Name}; asc=$true}
}

Which is the same as "dir /OGn" in cmd.exe

I like the fact that the F1 help in Visual Studio 2005 uses online help so I don't have to install that whole huge library, and it can be updated without me installing it all over again.

But why is it so incredibly slow to open? I press F1, and first it takes a good while for the window to appear, and then it takes what seems like forever to locate the page. And in the meantime there is no indication to whether it has found the correct page, so I might end up getting help on something irrelevant.

It's actually a lot faster to just google whatever I'm looking for, even though I'm still ending up on the same msdn2.microsoft.com site. And that's a shame, because F1 is actually very useful as it can locate the help pages by the context I'm in. But I'm just ending up not using it anymore.

I was on this Parent Preparation Course yesterday. This nurse was showing how the baby would go upside-down and jam his head down the birth canal. Then on his way out he would have his face down, twist his shoulders, get his head out, turn the head to the side and wait for the next contraction before popping all the way out.

I hope junior was paying attention, because we won't get to practice on this before the big day...

It's springtime, and I'm starting to wake up from my winter daze.

But I'm not the only one waking up. So are the ants. And now they are marching into my house looking to steal my stuff. So far I haven't found anything missing, but by what they said on the Discovery channel the little creeps are amazingly strong. Who knows what they'll manage to bring home to their queen.

I'm feeling quite safe about the heavier stuff like my stone coffe table, but the kitchen chairs and microwave might be more at risk. And lets just hope they can't manage to open doors. I don't want them going for my computer.

I'll have to get some poison laid out today.