playing with Windows 8, 80k steps last week!, cold fusion
Mood: chipper
Posted on 2012-04-23 10:38:00
Tags: windowsphone projects programming
Words: 374

• This weekend I decided to play around with Windows 8 Consumer Preview and look into porting FlightPredictor to it. This was partially because I've seen a lot more articles like this recently about porting from Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 and how it wasn't too hard if you wrote your app well in the first place.
  
  It took me a while to download the .iso and install it on a VMWare machine, and then to get Visual Studio 11 installed and such, but after that creating a project and copying over source files was pretty straightforward. The recommendation I read was to basically throw away the UI code, so I'm working on getting all of my model stuff compiling first.
  
  One of the interesting things I found was the new await and async keywords in C#. At first, the compiler told me to use these in methods that called async functions, which I did for a little while before realizing "hey, I should figure out what these things actually do". Then I tried that and thought that I didn't want any async functions anywhere, so I rewrote things to turn them back into synchronous functions. After reading a bit more, I think I understand what they actually do now, and how I should do stuff (make functions async that are actually asynchronous, and let callers decide how to call them). Reading about the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern helped me get my thoughts clear and realize there are a lot of different easy ways to wait on async functions, which is very cool!


• I hit 80,000 steps last week! This is a new personal best. Yay!


• Last week at work Dr. Robert Duncan from the University of Missouri gave a talk about cold fusion. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), he said that there is definitely some sort of excess heat effect that has been reproduced hundreds of times, but that we can't explain right now. Unfortunately, because of the big announcement in 1989, most physicists think it's junk science and it's hard to get funding to study, which is a shame since there's real science to be done there. Apparently holding a press conference at the first sign of an interesting effect is a bad idea!

3 comments

Comment from djedi:
2012-04-24T16:03:06+00:00
Also holding a press conference in which you claim you did something no one else has ever done, and you have no theoretical explanation, and that it solves the world's energy problems and therefore brings about world peace.

Comment from gregstoll:
2012-04-24T17:52:54+00:00
Yeah - I'm curious how much of that was things they said and how much was the press exaggerating...

Comment from djedi:
2012-04-24T17:57:24+00:00
Well, perhaps true, but still, one doesn't usually hold a press conference after a scientific experiment. Usually you write a paper, it gets reviewed. Other people try to replicate, then they try to explain theoretical reason, etc...

Although in modern times, it does seem like we hold a press conference every time someone discovers something new in their attic.

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