Awestruck by 2013 Tech!

Google Glass came to us in 2013, and while I'm not overly impressed with Google Glass, I am impressed with Google in general, so let Google Glass be a symbol of the greater Google future! Google seems to be the most impressive tech company of the year behind us. Microsoft seems to be struggling (while still ruling the roost) and I didn't see anything I cared about coming out of the modern day Apple that lingers without Steve Jobs, yet it's Google that impresses. I started really using Google Chrome all the time in lieu of having Internet Explorer as my default this year. The Google Chrome Developer Tools now mean there is no longer a reason to use Firefox and Firebug whatsoever. AngularJS seems the most impressive of the emerging JavaScript frameworks. I suppose a lot of this may be of 2012 or 2011 and not 2013, but it is catching up to me, average Joe, this year. It is sad there is no more Feedburner, but I suppose Google must pick its battles. That scene in the "The Internship" where interns are taking tech support calls of how to use gmail seemed comedic as it was so "disingenuous." Is there really any way to get someone from Google on the phone? I hate how opaque Google is, but if Google wasn't opaque I suppose we'd all know how to game their search engine. We had all of our Google history stolen by Uncle Sam via the Muscular project this year too. It has been a much more interesting year for Google than it has for Microsoft and Apple and that is both something new and something that will likely continue. I wonder if the next CEO of Microsoft will just drop Bing and just admit that Google has won in the search engine space. More of 2013 Tech:

• In the social media space, I fell in love with Vine. I never tried Snapchat, but I did note that the word "selfie" is making the English dictionaries as of this year!
• For the most part I find Marissa Mayer and Yahoo just as overhyped as, say, Danica Patrick and Go Daddy. It seems like a pretty face garners disproportionate attention, but one thing nice I will say about Marissa is that I am impressed that she not only ended working from home at Yahoo, but somewhat made herself the face of that issue nationally thus stirring up a debate. She made the right decision and I'm grateful that we got to talk about it.
• I didn't know who Aaron Swartz was until he took his own life this year, but now that I know, I again want to mention his tragic passing. It is sad. He invented RSS.
• The big news in 2012 America was about our presidential election and the big news in 2014 will likely be, I'm guessing, about a pullout from Afghanistan and our experimentations with legalizing marijuana, but the news in 2013 was actually about tech itself. Edward Snowden and healthcare.gov were the big stories. In Britain they've pushed through a law that goes into effect in the New Year which forces all ISPs to block naughty content unless mature parties explicitly opt-in for it. New Zealand meanwhile has done away with honoring software patents.
• Finally, just yesterday, I learned from Scott Hanselman's online video tutorials for Visual Studio 2013 that there is finally a way to rotate text in HTML via modern CSS tricks. It seems so simple, and yet it has taken us so long to get here. This is really big to me. I'm serious.

In Windows 8 one may drag a not maximized window against the right or left edge of the screen to maximize it to just half of the screen.

This easily allows you to run two apps side by side in two halves of the screen. This is another something I learned from Scott Hanselman's videos on what is new in Visual Studio 2013.

After nineteen years of the World Wide Web, we may now rotate text in HTML.

I just watched the 2nd in a series of Scott-Hanselman-made video clips mentioned here and find myself blown away by the modern CSS tricks to rotate text! If you slap the following in a class...

.hyena {
   width: 200px;
   height: 200px;
   color: #00FF00;
   -moz-transform: rotate(45deg);
   -ms-transform: rotate(45deg);
   -o-transform: rotate(45deg);
   -webkit-transform: rotate(45deg);
   transform: rotate(45deg);
}

 
 

...and then decorate a div tag with it like so:

<div class="hyena">Never laugh at a hyena!</div>

 
 

The result is:

Never laugh at a hyena!

Beginning to watch Scott Hanselman's what's-new-in-VS-2013 videos...

I think this is how I'll try to wake up in the mornings. I watched the first clip today at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SCREENCASTSWhatsNewInVisualStudio2013LearnOverLunch.aspx and am most impressed so far by:

1. built-in Intellisense for Angular
2. you may drag a video flie such as an .mp4 tag from the Solution Explorer into a .cshtml view and an HTML tag for the video will automatically be generated
   <video controls="controls">
      <source src="http://localhost:55655/ASP_NET_1920.mp4" type="video/mp4">
   </video>

Does Entity Framework no longer suck?

A goal of mine for the year ahead is to learn AngularJS, but it's probably also time to find an excuse for an Entity Framework 5 project. I'll need the skill. I see more and more Twitter traffic from NHibernate escapees embracing EF5. If I throw together a dummy project I'll do it the code first way as suggested here and not the old school way suggested here and here. My old framesdirect.com cellmate Jagruthi Mamidi (below at right) and her husband had a housewarming party today and when I compared notes with her regarding her immediate circumstance, well, sure enough, her workplace has shifted away from LINQ to SQL to EF! There is likely much to learn regarding IQueryable pitfalls and how to use IQueryable without opening the door to an anti-pattern.

 
 

Addendum 3/21/2018: Jagruthi Reddy is another name for Jagruthi Mamidi.

It looks like Angular HAS to run at a web server.

If you just try to double-click the index.html in the seed project and "run" it in Windowsland from a browser you see something like:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load file:///C:/whatever/partials/partial1.html. Cross origin requests are only supported for HTTP.

...in the console, but not so if you bring the site up in IIS.

HP Data Protector

...is software for automating backups per this.