I bought my wife an iPod Shuffle for her Christmas this year (as part of her new year’s resolution to exercise more – we’ll see how long that lasts!).

Now, I’ve taken a picture of it next to a 20¢ coin, for size comparison:

Maybe it’s just me, but paying $110 (that’s AU $) for something no bigger than a 20 cent coin – I feel like I’m no longer getting my money’s worth. I mean, sure, there was a lot of engineering effort that went into making it so small, and fitting 1GB of songs in there is no mean feat, but I like some meat for my money!

I wonder just how small they can make these things, though. I mean, the real limitation is the buttons – you can only make buttons so small before they’re impossible to press. But then, you could replace the buttons with voice commands and your limitation becomes the connectors – too small and they’ll break too easily. So replace the headphones and USB with Bluetooth, and you’re just left with the battery and recharging the device as your limiting factor. With a device so small though, you could probably go with some kind of kinetic recharger (like you find in watches), assuming it can be made to power a Bluetooth transceiver. Or maybe magnetic induction, but again, there’d only be so small that you can make one of those.

You quickly run into a problem, though. Too small, and the damn thing is too easy to misplace! I reckon even the iPod Shuffle is pushing the limits there. You’ve pretty much got to keep it in its little USB cradle (when not clipped to your shirt or whatever), or you’d never find it!

My site used to look fairly decent on a mobile phone browser, but I’ve now added a custom skin just for mobile phones. You can force the skin by visiting with a skin=mobile query string (note: to switch back, change it to skin=codeka), but I’ve also added some code to detect common phone browsers (it’s actually not that easy to do...)

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now, but I never really got around to it. It’s not like I get visited by lots of people browsing from their phones, but maybe now I will :)

If you look at the mobile version of the page from a desktop browser, it looks pretty ugly, but it looks better on a phone, which has a very limited display resolution (and selection of fonts). Unfortunately, I can’t help you much with posts that have images in them, but most everything else looks alright.

Note that the mobile version of this site is pretty limited. You can’t browse archives, find the RSS feeds (do any RSS readers exist for SmartPhones? I guess there must be some) and so on, but that wasn’t the goal of this skin. It was basically just to help people who find this page on Google on their phones (which I guess is a vanishingly small crowd – but that’s the great thing about spare-time projects, I get to choose the features I work on! :)

Merry Christmas, and happy new year, everyone!

Am I the only one who thinks it’s totally lame that Windows Presentation Foundation (aka WPF) has static definitions for Windows XP themes? That means if you have a custom theme⁺ that WPF (and any custom controls you use) does not explicitly support, then you get the crappy Windows 95 look for your supposedly modern WPF application.

I hope this works properly in Vista, because it’s totally crazy!

The workaround? Well, you can force your WPF app to use the Aero theme if you like, but then your app always looks like Aero, rather than every other app running on your computer (which is arguable just as bad as having your app look like Windows 95). Or you can write some custom code to choose a “close” looking theme for every other theme out there. Of course, this only works with themes that you know about, and givens “approximations.”

For this reason alone, I am seriously considering sticking with WinForms for now (at least until I can figure out if the same story is true on Vista – though I haven’t actually seen any other themes for Vista yet...)

⁺ And if you don’t, why not? There’s some damn good ones available for free now-a-days, such as the Zune theme, or the Royale theme - why was the last one removed from Microsoft’s download pages, I wonder?

The below screenshot is of what I believe is the World’s Most Annoying Dialog:

(Sorry this screen shot is so big - that's how big this dialog is!!)

It’s from the Windows SDK setup, when you click “Cancel” while it’s doing its thing. I decided I didn’t want to wait 5 hours for it to download after all...

Looks rather innocuous, right? Wrong! Here are the features of this dialog that make it the World’s Most Annoying:

1. It stays up for a couple of minutes (who knows what is happening – there is no progress)
2. It is system modal. If I switch to another application, it still stays on top. And finally,
3. It can’t be moved! Try to move it off the screen where it’s less annoying, and it just jumps right back to the middle!

Oh, and to top it all off, once the dialog finished, I got this:

So not only were there dire warnings if I tried to kill the process or otherwise get rid of this annoying dialog, when it finish did finish on its own, it crashed anyway!!

Now here’s a good idea. Why don’t they create a global top-level domain .bank? It would only be available to registered banks, and it’d make building a phishing site much more difficult, because it’s far easier to train your users to only type your bank details into a “.bank” domain.

The problem is that domain registrars are far too lazy to actually do any checks (other than “is this domain already taken”) which means it’s not hard for any Joe to come along and register citibank-signin.com (or whatever – assuming that’s not already taken, of course).

At least a .bank domain can be handled by an entity that actually cares about phishing – like a bank, for example (actually, probably some consortium of banks or something).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help ebay or paypal or whatever, but it’s a step in the right direction, I’m sure.