Could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Adobe details zero-day exploit, affects Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, and Solaris

Lab49’s Charlie Robbins  has a 2 magnitude WPF tip.

Silverlight Vs. Flex

Interesting discussion of Flex vs. Silverlight.  I’m a .Net guy so I’m biased and I prefer to develop in Silverlight.  The environment is more mature.  On the other hand you can’t argue with the 90%+ installed base of Flex support.  This .Net guy came out in favor of Silverlight (surprise, surprise), but concludes that his latest “flex app is the best looking application I’ve ever seen”.  On the other hand I see awesome looking Silverlight apps @Lab all the time.  I was even on a team that made one (the designer is to credit — my UIs are not pretty by nature – but with a designer and Silverlight I was surprised what I could do).  Also, its somewhat disappointing that the best discussion of this fast moving topic is a year old.

More Apple Controversy

Is this guy good or evil (play the video in the link)?  I’m on the fence.  Lock-in is annoying, but being able to profit from innovation is important.  The issue of Apple limiting what apps you can develop with is something of a lock-out.

In any case, a user can just lean back and enjoy the iPad in good health.

Tech Seminar – DSLs:  Implementation options in .Net

I know several Lab49 projects have used domain specific languages and I have an interest in the topic, but unfortunately I was out that day .

New Rx

A new release of Rx was dropped on Friday.  Is it amazing responsiveness or just coincidence that some Lab49ers reported a bug on Tuesday that was fixed in this release?

Cell Phone Explosion

This is the second time I’ve been warned of the phenomenon.

Google Maps – Now in 3D

Get your 3D glasses and go.  You do have 3D glasses, don’t you?

SAP Buys Sybase

Now they have 3 CEP engines and a database with a whopping 3% market share.  But Sybase is still entrenched in financial companies, so there’s that…

It’s more than a single line response too! And the claws are out – meow!

UPDATE: Adobe’s response to Steve’s rant is short & to the point. Nice one Kev!

Strategery Seminar

We heard a great talk from the Lab49 Strategy Practice.  We’ve got a team that can analyze markets and business decisions, perform original research and apply analytical methods.  They can describe it much better than I can too.  They’re mostly MBAs, but unlike George Bush, they speak very clearly.

The Tao of Var

What does the var keyword in JavaScript do?  You can declare a variable just by using it, so what does var do?  Answer below.

The Bull, the Bear, and the Python

I think its cool that contracts may be specified in programming languages.  The SEC proposal is here.  Lab49ers picked apart the language choice, its operational semantics, and non-termination and exclusion thereof.  I just think its cool.

Rush

A gaggle of Lab49ers, including one of our esteemed fearless leaders, caught the Rush documentary the other day.

oh my God—it’s full of stars

Plenty of early adopters around here, so I’ve seen the IPad…. and …  its …

Beautiful

Can You Code a Binary Search?

I can, but I might not get it perfectly right the first time and I don’t have a problem with that…  On the other hand, I might, maybe its just a question of mindset and motivation.  With a computer telling me I’m not perfect 100 times a day, I wouldn’t state anything with certainty.  This guy says that’s no good.  Here’s some reasons I might want to care.

Now Using Code Behind – Horrors

Some third party controls are being unwieldy with MVVM and forcing us to use code behind as the least worst option. Its a 1% problem, so its probably not a new holy war.

Blog Catchup

I’ve been away from the blog for a while and missed quite a bit – here’s some things you may have missed on the Lab49 Blog – I did:

Videos:  Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and MVP Stuart Celarier explore the new languages features in C# 4.0

InfoGraphics are informative?  click here for the answer.

Pomodoro?  I wonder if the Pomodoro Technique has any applicability to programmers.  If the problem is interesting or exciting enough, I’ll usually work until full exhaustion, then after swearing I’ll only work a few more minutes, work several more hours, sometimes I only stop when the router dies.  Thanks, but I’ll pass Ray.

Colors for men and women.

Fed, Frannie and Freddie – As told by Paddy Hirsch.

Silverlight Analytics framework released at Mix.

Var

Var is a scoping keyword and limits a variable to the current function (or closure), so if you don’t use the var keyword, you’re using a global variable, even if you declare it within the function.

Having said all of that, I think the iPad is a real disappointment as a home computer and internet-enabled device. Apple should un-invent it and release something worthwhile a year from now. I predict there will be many who feel similarly disappointed by the iPad, but will still buy it with the hope that support for the iPad today will enable Apple to bring something to market that is not a disappointment. I wish them good luck. Some others will probably get it because, if nothing else, it’s a cool touchscreen-toy.

“I saw Alvin and The Chipmunks this weekend” – and they all laughed.

Some UXers were interested in

this color picker and this musical toy.

IPad

Lots of Lab Buzz around the IPad announcement, though we already knew this. More information about Apple’s design process, direct from Apple here and here. Overhyped? Underwhelming? Overpriced? Beautiful? Must have? Oh Yea.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

“I saw Alvin and The Chipmunks this weekend” – and they all laughed.

Some UXers were interested in

this color picker and this musical toy.

IPad

Lots of Lab Buzz around the IPad announcement, though we already knew this.

More information about Apple’s design process, direct from Apple here and here.

Overhyped? Underwhelming?  Overpriced?  Beautiful?  Must have?  Oh Yea.

]]> http://goldmanalpha.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/week-lab-13010/feed 0 http://blog.lab49.com/archives/4025 http://blog.lab49.com/archives/4025#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:08:40 +0000 pkapner http://blog.lab49.com/?p=4025 When the iPad was announced this week my first thought was, “They’ve come out with a giant iPhone!”  (Okay, so technically it’s more akin to a giant iPod Touch, but as an iPhone user, this is where my mind goes.)  I was skeptical about its potential usefulness.  It’s confined to iPhone-like applications; everything has to come from the App Store.  It won’t run a JDK, and isn’t even as useful to me as a netbook.

I was guilty of thinking inside the box.  The old, stale, PC box.

Thankfully Steve Jobs doesn’t suffer from such confinement.  He’s come up with a device which will, in typical Apple-product style, find uses far beyond what our old machinery was capable of.  In his classic book “Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance,”  Robert Pirsig says that the ancient Greeks, “saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.” If we could turn around now and stare directly into the future, I think we’d see iPads galore in the hands of Wall Streeters, many of whom are extremely busy but need a way to track metrics of all kinds throughout the day.  Applications at present are filled to the brim with alerting capabilities such as email, IM, SMS, and chimes, and these are the best we can do given the current infrastructure; Apple has just handed the users of these apps a whole new way to stay connected.

The iPad offers both wireless and 3G connectivity.  Trading systems are generally locked down tightly, but why couldn’t secure wireless access points be added which would admit an iPad-carrying risk manager to the network?  No longer must (s)he rely on the buzz of a BlackBerry to find out that daily trading limits have been violated.  Now there’s a beautiful 10 inch pad right on the conference table which displays those limits and the proximity to them in real time.

Likewise the trader.  There are so many custom “pads” out there on trading floors already — why not something that’s available off the shelf and that’s far more capable than today’s devices?

Retail trading is another area where the iPad could find a ready-made market.  Many brokerages have written custom iPhone apps or have websites which are designed for easy access from a mobile platform (Fidelity, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Interactive Brokers all come to mind).  The iPad offers the possibility of a rich touchscreen-based GUI which could enhance the experience for active traders enormously.

I’ve touched on but a few of the possibilites. (This is, after all, just a reply to an article and not an article itself.)  I’ve no doubt that Lab49 will be out at the cutting edge of iPad development as it is with many other disruptive technologies.

Let the fun begin!