In writing the IP Address Widget (Zeepe sample), I decided to take the opportunity to look at WMI (looking beyond the initial widget it might enable looking at the IP addressing on any machine). Anyway, what the widget wants to know is a) what are the available IP connections and b) what type are they (ethernet, wireless etc).

The WMI classes Win32_NetworkAdapter and Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration seemed appropriate. The latter has IPEnabled and IPAddress properties so one can determine the active adapaters and their ip address. The former has the property AdapterType, described as Network medium in use, sounds perfect but it has the caveat "This property may not be applicable to all types of network adapters listed within this class".

Oh well, lets move on and hope as usual - a few lines of script later (common, scripting together components just makes so much sense) and we are up and running. And on every machine I've tried it it comes back as Ethernet 802.3 for all adapters, even the wireless ones..... <sigh>. Perhaps the caveat should more accurately be written as "This property may occassioanly be correct for network adapters listed within this class" - has a higher level of warning don't you think.

Presumably this isn't a problem with Windows/WMI per se, but with the driver implementation. Who knows, all one knows is it doesn't do what one wants with any usable level of realiability.

 

Over at the Zeepe samples page a couple of new widgets have appeared.

These are written as web pages, that means html + css + script.

They appear as full blown apps on your desktop - they don't have to appear within some other container (dashboard).

UK industry in 'dramatic' decline.  TUC warns that 750,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since the Labour government came to power. [via BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Once upon a time that would have been a devastating headline for a Government (and once upon time I wouldn't have been wondering how you can warn about something that has already happened....)

dhteumeuleu.com needs no introduction, Gérard Ferrandez' superlative site stuffed full of the very best scripts ever to have graced the www. Go there and learn, my young Padawan.  [via evolve - links]

Needed an introduction to me - well worth a visit if you have some spare time just to play. Internet Explorer only.

"Philip Graf has produced a thorough and insightful review of the BBC's online service," they said.

Yes he has, and it is well worth reading if you are producing content in 'competition' (e.g. education) with the BBC.

"He is generally positive about the distinctiveness of its content and its impact on commercial competitors.  [via BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC websites must redraft remit]

Errrr, well, not quite generally. There is an excellent sequence on impact about how the jury is still out, case unproven either way and in particular that the BBC's expensive defence document by KPMG is of very dubious merit (particularly amusing given the new DGs comment that only the BBC can bridge the digitial divide is that he finds the BBC's contention that it has driven Internet access takeup completely unproven).

Where I really diverge from Graf is his contention that the BBC should provide a search service because otherwise we will all use an American one. What is unclear is whether he is proposing that the BBC 'brand' some other's technology (as they do now - was Google, now Inkotomi); given that the technology will almost certainly be American, what is the point, or is he saying that American search engine databases are skewed (they might be, but he should produce evidence). Or, the BBC should develop their own search engine technology - complete waste of license fee (there might be some mega technology sitting in a University research lab, but if there is they should commercialise it and take over the world - don't need the BBC to do that).

Whatever, the BBC most certainly needs to review its search offering - there are some fairly damaging statements in the report (to summarise, BBC search is biased).

What's really exciting about Dashboard is the way widgets are written. Unlike Konfabulator, where widget layouts are defined using a simple XML dialect, Dashboard widgets are written in HTML and CSS and rendered using Safari's WebKit engine! They're essentially mini-web pages, liberated from the browser. Dave Hyatt of the Safari team has a series of entries (1, 2 and 3) with more details. [via HTML escapes the browser - SitePoint DHTML & CSS Blog]

What's really exciting about Zeepe is the way widgets are written ....... <sigh>

Ian Hixie discusses the state of 'the' WHAT (well worth reading):

... As Joel points out, though, Microsoft's moves after they realised their mistake with IE have been harder to understand. I would have thought the solution most likely to succeed would have been to extend IE in ways that made it into a better application deployment platform. Eventually, this could have turned IE into the OS, either natively (making the next version of Windows basically be IE), or by selling IE with versions for all operating systems. This would have had several advantages: ... [via Hixie's Natural Log]

He muses that "They actually did start down that road. IE6 has support for a technology that Microsoft stopped advertising at the same time as they stopped developing IE, namely HTAs, short for HTML Applications" - but he doesn't say that HTAs are a subset of Zeepe. It is possible that HTAs were derived from Zeepe's pre-cursor (by name) WPM because WPM is referenced by MS in their web applications patent.

And it heartens me greatly to see:

"The problem with the browser today is that applications based in the browser are constrained to nightmarish UI idioms and a severe lack of polish stemming from the fact that the platform was not really developed as a platform, and that no real progress has been made on this path for several years."

We've been trying to make progress, it remains a question as to whether developers really care, or whether users really care. What is clear is that some people need to see iMunch or any of the Zeepe samples to get out of this:

the user experience of any app running in a web browser is crippled [via Daring Fireball]

view. The web browser may be crippled but, IMHO, DHTML is anything but cripppled.

 

Mozilla Foundation press release on a new plug-in architecture, also supported by Macromedia, Apple, Sun, Opera, "...to extend the Netscape Plugin Application Program Interface in a manner that allows greater interactivity with plugins such as Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime and Java, resulting in a richer, more interactive web." [via Scripting News]

Something else to look into, maybe has implications for Neptune.

PayPal goes XML Web Services and releases SDK !.  

Well, I've always liked the PayPal thing. Fast, easy online payment and quite secure (if you know what you're doing).
The PayPal Web Services comprise of 4 informational and transactional API's enabling developers to create e-commerce applications that integrate with the PayPal platform. The cool thing is that they seem to share a common API structure with eBay's Web services offerings. See http://developer.paypal.com

Ok, onto my coding machine, fire up VS.net and start coding the next demo...
Any customer outthere that has Internet access while I demo this thing ?

 [via Microsoft WebBlogs]

Something to look into.

He [DG: Mark Thompson] added: "Creating a fully digital Britain is a public challenge the BBC must help to lead. It is a Britain from which the BBC, and only the BBC, can ensure no-one is excluded."

 [via BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC outlines 'radical' manifesto]

What rubbish. Or is (only) the BBC going to start providing broadband connections to all of us excluded from the digital revolution out here in rural land? Why do they keep having to say only the BBC can do such and such, why do they have to say the BBC will lead - it still doesn't seem to have learnt how to be a team player does it.

So what do the pictures above each of the express products tell you about the product and who you ought to be (or aspire to be) to use it?

There's a bit of noise about that Konfabulator are a bit miffed that Apple 'copied' their idea for some new bits of OSX. Funny, when Konfabulator came out I thought, yeah, yawn, Zeepe can do all that. Perhaps it is time we put together a portfolio of the sorts of things being done in Konfabulator (I thought it was being ported to Windows?), but done in Zeepe (weighing in at a rather slim 650K as opposed to 4.2MB).

RC2 of the platform SDK is now available.  Still in the ISO image format but it is now available for download here [via Windows XP Service Pack 2]

Looks like a Monday morning trip to my nearest 2Mb ADSL link is called for

Async callbacks in server controls. ... I think callbacks have the potential of enabling a whole new genre of smart Web applications. .... [via Nikhil Kothari's Weblog]

Interesting that a bit of MS might be interested in a "whole new genre of smart Web applications" when others are just repeating the mantra "smart client, smart client, smart client".

But. It amazed me that ASP.NET ever made it out the door without this sort of feature. The origins of Webservices/RPC were for this sort of thing and it amazes me people can write articles implying they have moved forward the art when this really is very old hat, core stuff and should have been in ASP.NET 1.0. I was beginning to suspect that is wasn't in 1.0 because of a deliberate attempt to hobble web app development in favour of WinForms - good to see it will appear in ASP.NET 2.0 (the trouble is, we still have a long while to wait).