Will using ASP.NET MVC confuse developers?

There seem to be a few interesting opinions flying around about Microsoft announcing they will finally add MVC to their ASP.NET offering - only 27 years after MVC was first created :)

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, says: "The proposed MVC extensions to ASP.NET bear more than a striking resemblance to the way we implemented things in Rails. That's, of course, flattering to have a giant like Microsoft attempt to copy many of the ideas that we've been championing for years now, but they do appear to be a little late to the party."

Joel Spolsky, author of the popular Joel on Software blog and the man responsible for integrating Visual Basic into Office, adds: "It’s clear that the ASP.NET team is trying to clone some of the popular benefits of Ruby on Rails. I’m disappointed that Microsoft forces you to choose whether your app is MVC or not before you write the first line of code. It’s a very different way of organizing code than traditional ASP.NET, and the way it looks now in the CTP [Community Technology Preview], it’s going to confuse new developers who now have one more decision to make about how to build an ASP.NET site. It does address one of the weaknesses of ASP.NET, which was how to organize large sites."

Oh, and you have to upgrade to IIS 7.0 in order to use ASP.NET MVC.

Digital photo frames contain viruses????

About 4 years ago I stopped using good 'ol film cameras and went fully digital. I've been thinking for a while what to do with the digital photos long term. Technology changes quickly and in the space of a couple of decades my photo collection could be effectively lost to future generations.

Long term the only viable solution is probably to print out the photos onto decent quality photo paper.

Short term I have been considering buying some digital photo frames, loading them up with photos and sending them to family members - until I found out some hackers have managed to load viruses onto photo frames that are sold in large US chain stores.

Geek Parents: Please Don't Dress Your Children Like This

Although it is pretty tempting...

World-wide Outsourcing Pay Rates

Outsourcing marketplace oDesk have been kind enough to put together a Google Maps mashup showing the average pay rates for outsourcing providers in many countries to help you decide if you want to outsource work to Finland ($31 per hour), USA ($23 per hour) or Kyrgyzstan ($11 per hour).

Kerviel is not a computer genius?

An interesting - but purely speculative - article on how Jerome Kerviel, the junior trader being blamed for a recent $7.1 billion Société Générale loss, managed to get away with making large bets. The author has worked in trading environments and some of the "bending" of compliance rules he talks about does have a ring of truth to it.

A few things of note in the article:

• Kerviel was a junior trader, supposed to be doing riskless arbitrage, not making large bets.
• Kerviel worked in the risk management department, so he may have been able to explain away some of his fictious trades as "we're working on the reports right now, the numbers in them are not quite right".
• Being part of the risk management department he might have also had direct access to systems or been told "super user" passwords, allowing him to bypass security.
  

Oh, if you're interested here is Mr Kerviel's resume:



Update: It appears Mr Kerviel was able to commit the fraud with low-tech techniques like using his colleagues' access codes, sending fake emails used to open accounts and disabling warning systems that might have alerted people to what he was doing (probably just by hacking the production spreadsheets). We'll see if he can develop a fool-proof way to prevent others from using similar techniques at his new computer security consultancy job :)