I'm the last person who jumps into the grammar police cruiser to pull people over. After a complete undergraduate degree in English, I'm firmly in the "descriptive" camp rather than the "prescriptive" camp when it comes to grammar, etc. HOWEVER, the trend in blogging has made it blatantly apparant that an awful lot of people have heard words said that they've never read in print.

One such instance is the use of "mute" when they mean "moot". For some reason, I've seen this specific example no less than 4 times today. Another example I saw today is "Intensive purposes" instead of "intents and purposes".

Essentially, it has become a case of people attempting phonetic transcription of phrases they've heard spoken. This would be OK (remember I'm in the camp that's OK with change) if it weren't for variations in dialect and pronounciation, which will actually result in several different spellings for these kinds of words. My main example is one such instance. I, and most other residents in my part of the world have a pretty wide gap in pronounciation between "moot" and "mute" with a distincive "y" sound between the "m" and "u" in the latter. The first time I saw this switch, I really had to think about it and put it into context to figure out what was being said.

I guess what it comes down to is this: if blogs are your only source of reading, you may want to diversify or risk some pretty non-standard spelling (and the kind a spellchecker won't catch) that may unintentionally embaress you in ways you don't expect until this kind of thing settles down.

Along with one of my recent Amazon orders for .NET books, I added a copy of the Superbit edition of "Snatch". After seeing the Superbit Fifth Element in my home theater, I became pretty certain that I'd like to have some high quality video available for watching. And, since this is one of my favorite movies, it became a good candidate. I watched most of it last night and it is just plain razor sharp. It's not exactly an "audio demo" kind of movie, so the sound wasn't nearly as impressive as the video. My regular copy is on lend right now, so I can't do a side by side comparison.

However, it made for an enjoyable presentation of a movie that I always enjoy anyway. Of course it reminded me of just how many "favorite lines" are in that movie and just how few of them should be repeated in polite society.

Having messed with the "Float's mobile agent" application left me itching to get more direct access to my phone via bluetooth. After getting Hyperterminal to communicate with the phone over the BT serial port (including initiating the connection), it looks like it's downhill from here. I'll post much more when I've gone through the 474 page document covering the AT commands it supports. VERY COOL STUFF.

http://lumumba.luc.ac.be/~kverpoorten/stuff/SonyEricsson%20T610%20AT%20Command%20Set.pdf

While I hadn't intended to seek out ice cream on this diet, I accidentally stumbled upon my new favorite ice cream flavor. This stuff is incredible. If you like oatmeal creme pies, this stuff will certainly test your willpower.

Ben and Jerry's Oatmeal Cookie Chunk
(http://www.benandjerrys.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=53)

It struck me this morning as I was gluing Outlook's COM object to PHP code to send an internal email how 2 camps in the scripting end of things (PHP,ASP,WSH, etc.) seem to be completely ignorant (whether intentionally or not) of what the other camp is doing. The folks in the Microsoft camp are busy using VBScript and .NET with WMI, WSH, etc. but are completely unaware that things like easy CD burning, etc. are easily done with open source tools that have been ported (like cdrtools from Cygwin) to Windows. However, the other side (using PHP, Python, Perl, etc. to script Linux machines) is just as ignorant of what's going on on the Microsoft side of things. If I see one more Linux scripting advocate bemoan the lack of cron only to find out they've never even used "AT" or the Windows Scheduler service, I think I'll smack someone.

Personally, I think that a mix between the open source/Linux stuff and the Windows capabilities and addons makes for some seriously powerful tools with which to build quick solutions to problems.

For me, the blend of Javascript or PHP for the UNIX style coding and network/database communication and access to the Windows hooks is a very usable blend. I get to keep the C-style syntax that fits in with the way I think and work and still get to use all of the stuff that's written for VBScript. Once you've ported 5-6 VBScripts to either PHP or Javascript, it's a pretty transparent process really. The biggest thing to watch out for is where VBScript is passing what looks like a variable or constant that you don't see defined anywhere in the sample. This usually means that it's actually some integer that's defined in a "Constants" table somewhere. You can usually get the right number to pass in instead by looking for the constants for that object. Make sure you use the instantiation name for the COM object in Google and you'll usually find it pretty quickly.