Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

I went through the enlistment process for the US Army. There was a fair bit of paperwork that required guaranteeing a person isn’t gay. I do know that much. When I was at boot camp there were two guys dismissed from the army for having sex in a bathroom who were caught by a drill sergeant. They both had women at home and most of us suspected that it was a ploy just to get out of boot camp. Let’s face it besides the occasional nightly beatings, constant exercise, and coming to grips with being “owned” for the first time in a persons life boot camp makes or breaks a person.

The thing I think is nice is that there IS a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. In a room full of 148 guys we knew the outright gay ones. The sometimes perverted ones who’d stand in the group shower leaning against the wall starring at the constant flow of sausage as it passed by the door. We knew. We all knew. Not saying there weren’t a few that we didn’t know, which there probably was. Every person walking through those Army entrance doors were different. The one thing that was the same at the end of the day was they were all soldiers.

The problem isn’t so much that you’re not allowed to be gay. Nope, not a problem at all with most so long as you’re not a creepy son of a gun and keep it to yourself. The biggest problem is that sodomy is a violation of the army code of conduct. Anyone caught getting even a blow job violated policy. The Army has regulation for everything. Seriously, with sex you’re only allowed to have sex in the missionary position. I had to sit through a class where we actually were told how to have sex, and were instructed that if we deviated from the acceptable position be smart don’t take pictures. They will bring disciplinary actions against you. If you’re gay it’s kind of obvious you’re not going to be having missionary sex. At least I'm not informed enough to know whether that is indeed possible for gays, and honestly don’t feel particularly compelled to Google that.

In my opinion I don’t believe that policy should be repealed or changed in any way. Having a formal policy in place won’t change how people are treated. I understand it will keep those who are ousted from being discharged. I’d ideally just let the person’s service record distinguish whether they were let go in those cases. The thing that bothers me personally is everyone is up in arms about the ‘right to be gay’. I think if you had a room full of naked women walk into a shower to find a naked guy standing there watching them the consensus would be to kick the guy out. Why should that be any different if it happened to be a lesbian standing there instead? It’s still just not right to give that one person a free pass. Not saying there may not be others among them who are gay but they’re not outright displaying it. It’s all about work as a team, act like a team, or get out.

I’m still a little stunned. I started Monday of this week off sans music, which really stinks when you’re writing software. Nothing like some decent music to help keep my mind in the programming rhythm. On Tuesday morning I decided it was time to sign-up for the AT&T iPad 3G cellular plan so I could use Pandora on the iPad like I do at home.

I had the choice between the two plans of course. The first plan being the $15 a month for a maximum of 250MB of data usage, or the double-the-cost unlimited plan sitting at $30 a month. Considering I can change my plan at anytime with no contracts other than the slightly abridged agreement to cancel prior to the auto-renewal by AT&T. I opted for the $30 a month unlimited plan simply because I don’t really trust what would happen if i exceeded that allotted 250MB regardless of what the agreement says. I’ve been burned by changing terms from carriers one too many times T-mob, er, I mean by a certain carrier.

Most of Tuesday I listened to music. I turned it off while I was out to lunch or in meetings, but mostly just had about six hours of music. When I got home I turned off the cellular connection and re-enabled the wifi connection. I kept wifi off at work and cellular off when I'm at home. No sense in double dipping when one or the other is not needed. The same routine happens again on Wednesday with another good six hours of music to get through the day.

Today I needed to change the settings on the iPad to keep it from auto-locking, and I happened to hit the ‘usage’ tab from the general settings area out of curiosity. That happened to show the cellular usage for the lifetime of the iPad. In no more than two and a quarter days I'd used over 270MB of data. Without playing any games, downloading any content from any site, or ANYTHING of the sort other than just using Pandora with occasional iPhone Facebook app I exceeded the 250MB limit. In no more than THREE days of occasional use I used 270MB. Wow. Either AT&T really set the bar low on what it considers nominal usage, or I consume vastly more data than your average user not particularly doing anything useful. I don’t even have email setup on the iPad and I blew through 250MB without trying. 

If anyone else out there is considering the choice between the two plans just save yourself the hassle and just get the unlimited plan. You’ll kick yourself otherwise because 250MB is just a drop of water in the bucket of data to be consumed by the iPad.

I may be a little late to the party on mentioning how much extension methods have made my life easier. Extension methods tend to fill that gap between wanting to add an extra little tweak to an existing class without actually having to implement a customized inherited version. Previously whenever you wanted to use one extra tweak or feature you’d be responsible for making sure to replace all instances of the inherited class with your new version. That gets into supporting the new class when all you wanted to do was change or add one thing to an existing class!

In my case I just really wanted to stop having to check whether a ViewState value was null before trying to unbox the value into whatever value type or class I thought I stored in that key’s value field. In my case I really wanted to add generic typing support to the ViewState property of the page with as little work as possible. That is exactly where Extension methods come to the rescue.

For example normally one would see the following code to access a ViewState property:

 1: private int GetGroupId()

 2: {

 3:  int groupId = -1;

 4:  

 5:  if(ViewState["CurrentGroupId"] != null)

 6:  {

 7:  groupId = (int)ViewState["CurrentGroupId"];

 8:  }

 9:  

 10:  return groupId;

 11: }

Ideally I would like to do the following:

 1: private int GetGroupId()

 2: {

 3:  return ViewState.Get<int>("CurrentGroupId", delegate { return -1; });

 4: }

To do this I’d use a .Net extension method to extend the ViewState property through it’s StateBag class. Below you’ll find the ViewStateHelper class with all the required code to extend the StateBag class, thereby extending the ViewState property, and adding support for generic Get/Set functions. In order to use it just add the namespace where the static class is contained to the “usings” on the code-behind file of the page needing the ViewState extension support.

 1:  public static class ViewStateHelper

 2:  {

 3:  /// <summary>

 4:  /// Returns an object from view state

 5:  /// </summary>

 6:  /// <typeparam name="T">Type of object</typeparam>

 7:  /// <param name="key">View state key of object</param>

 8:  /// <param name="delegateDefault">If view state is empty, a delegate to return a value to put in view state.</param>

 9:  /// <returns></returns>

 10:  public static T Get<T>(this StateBag viewState, string key, DefaultMethod<T> delegateDefault)

 11:  {

 12:  T viewStateValue;

 13: 

 14:  if (viewState != null &&

 15:  viewState[key] != null &&

 16:  viewState[key].GetType() == typeof(T))

 17:  {

 18:  viewStateValue = (T)viewState[key];

 19:  }

 20:  else

 21:  {

 22:  viewStateValue = delegateDefault();

 23:  viewState.Set<T>(key, viewStateValue);

 24:  }

 25:  

 26:  return viewStateValue;

 27:  }

 28:  

 29:  /// <summary>

 30:  /// Put an object in view state

 31:  /// </summary>

 32:  /// <typeparam name="T">Type of object to put in view state</typeparam>

 33:  /// <param name="key">Key of object to put in view state</param>

 34:  /// <param name="value">Object to put in view state</param>

 35:  public static void Set<T>(this StateBag viewState, string key, T value)

 36:  {

 37:  if (value != null)

 38:  viewState[key] = value;

 39:  else

 40:  viewState.Remove(key);

 41:  } 

 42:  }

It’s been a week or so now that I’ve had my iPad 3G. Aside from a few applications installed from the App Store most of the icons I have on my home screen are current event news sites, on-line comics, and technical sites ranging from Endgadget to Slashdot with blog sites sprinkled in. That is where the unexpected benefit comes ins. When viewing a site through Safari on the iPad I can pinch the screen to zoom in. Yah, yah you probably realized this already. The unexpected benefit is that most, if not all, of the sites I view are setup in a two column site layout. Usually with the content on the left taking up two thirds of the screen, and a second column taking up the remaining third on the right that usually contains ads or what not.

That is the benefit when viewing with the iPad. I can pinch the screen, move the viewable area to the left, and then zoom the content to fit the entirety of my screen thereby completely removing the ads from my viewable area. Talk about not realizing how distracting having those dang ads have been over the years. The font ends up a little bit larger because of the zoom, but really nothing absurdly large. It has made reading content absolutely fantastic I just see the content i want to see in my viewable area on the iPad. The content is zoomed for easier reading without worrying about running into too small of a print, and i don’t have to be concerned with annoying advertisements. Just pinch the screen and read. Added with ability to convert my PDF book collection to ePug the iPad has become my central hub of on-line content consumption.

I’m talking mainly in regards to a story about a cross-dressing teen who was told by the school that he could not wear a dress to prom. This is not a new phenomenon where gay, bi, aardvark, or whatever sexual preference individual decides to wear something outside of the bounds of an established dress code. Guys dressing as girls, girls as guys, or somewhere in-between the mix on the lines of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

What gets me is that in every case I've seen crop up on the news each of these individuals who are challenging the time-old dress codes all chant the same dang thing, “everyone should be treated equally.” That astounds me as they are indeed getting treated equal to everyone else bound by the dress code. Every last student attending the prom is bound by the same dress code. They are all treated equally. If you do not abide by the dress-code you do not attend. Simple as that.

If I were to take a job working in a formal business setting where the dress-code of the company is established in the employee manual as what I could and could not wear. Does it make sense for me to put on fishnets, dye my hair green, and go into work wearing a bra thinking I wouldn’t get fired? Better yet would it make any more difference what my sexual preference is? I’d be fired. I would be fired because everyone is treated equally. If i break the dress-code, regardless of sexual preference, I’d get fired. Equally so would be anyone else who decided one morning they wanted to be treated equally by making a statement via wardrobe resulting in the same outcome.

At least in this case Ellen isn’t bringing the individual onto the morning talk show, applauding their individuality, and excusing it as fighting for a ‘cause’. Better yet this person isn’t getting a fat check from Ellen for their courageous statement. At least not yet. What is up with this country? Why on Earth do people think this has anything to do with equality? That’s basically the fit-all excuse to allow an individual to get what they, the individual, want.

Out of the box the iPad was ready to go, short of requiring the device to first be connected to an iTunes ready system, but still it was fully charged. I synced the iPad, registered it, and off I went to add the device to my Mac address allow list on my network. All in all the same exact experience I had with the iPod Touch I bought some months ago.

Speaking of iPod Touch. The new iPad totally dwarfs the iPod. I could probably stack a few of the buggers on the screen of the iPad and not really match the viewable area. Though I admit the iPad looks a bit small to me still. I wish it were a few inches larger, but the bezel is perfectly sized so that my thumb can be solidly placed on the edges at all times without interfering with the touch screen area.

Another first thing to note is as soon as the device connects to the App Store up pops a request to install iBook. I think they’re really trying to push the book store influence on the device, and i went ahead and installed iBook since that was indeed a selling feature to me. As an added bonus classic books are available freely to add to the bookshelf. Win win.

The App Store itself is kind of a disappointment. It has a few bells and whistles like a little carousel of featured apps at the top of the screen, and then a section or two of the available apps below. I’ve not yet found a way to filter the list by free apps versus paid apps as I can with the iPod Touch. I really am on the cheap with the device and would prefer to only look at free items, but they really don’t seem to want you to do that. At least they don’t want you to do that at first glance. I admit i could be totally blind to any option staring me in the face, but I've not found it.

Now for the second selling feature. Netflix on the iPad. I was really excited about the thought of streaming videos on the handheld device. In reality the Netflix application really sucks. It’s functional, but just barely. The main screen really looks like a knock-off of the actual website. The functionality within just gets worse. Trying to page movies sometimes results in a gray floating ‘loading’ message in the middle of the screen forever. When viewing a TV show for example with multiple episodes once you hit the end of the episode it loads back to browsing the main category list, or at least that’s what it did for me. It was honestly so bad I opened the actual webpage in Safari and tried to use it there. That didn’t work out, but like i said the native app is at least somewhat functional. ABC does have a nice application. I don’t like any of the shows they have to offer. Come on Fox! I want to watch Fringe on the iPad already! Site note. I’ve heard AT&T is poo-pooing the use of the ABC app on the 3G network. Totally uber-fail on the second reason I wanted the 3G for.

The real winner in my book, totally unexpected I might add, was the eBay application. Very cool implementation of searching for products along with some daily deals displayed on the main page. AIM on the iPad was also incredibly neat, except for when people send you a link via IM, and you open it only to close out of AIM. That non-multitasking part is really rather annoying I admit.

All in all I think the iPad is pretty sweet. Worth the money? Eh, maybe. I will see how the 3G works out with the Google maps on trips, offering entertainment while fishing, and for checking comics and news at work. I have my home screen loaded with my favorite applications from GoDaddy, Facebook, eBay, and all the short-cuts to the comic websites from Penny Arcade to Ctrl-Alt-Del. The best part of web browsing is the flick to scroll interface. Absolutely love it. I love it on the iPod Touch, and I especially love the iPad’s larger viewable area. Nearly all the webpage's I frequent fit nicely into the screen size offered at a font size still readable.