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9/14/2005 10:42:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

John Roberts

Since I’ve already mentioned this, I thought that I’d drop in my two cents on the Roberts hearings.

As expected, he’s handling the hearings very well, showing himself to be a calm, temperate judge. It’s obvious that his real interest is the law and the fair exercise of the law. Both Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden pushed him hard (especially Biden. I guess the Presidential campaign has started  ), but he didn’t crack. He kept the discussion to the law and the precedents and successfully avoided talking about topics that he thought might come before him, either as a Supreme Court justice or (if the confirmation should go the other way) as his current “day job” of appellate judge.

Every time I hear Judge Roberts speak, I become more impressed regarding his understanding of the law. At this point, I can’t imagine that anyone could possibly be a better Chief Justice than him. In fact, I suspect that most Democrats will vote to confirm when its presented to the general body for a vote. Of course, I also expect that all Democrats on the committee will vote against, “just because”…

I tell you, Joe’s really going out of his way to lose my vote.

9/14/2005 9:53:08 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics

PDC: Monad

How could two developers take a compelling concept like shell scripting for Windows and turn it into a barely tolerable presentation? Well, these guys did it. They introduced themselves as developers, but they acted all the world like marketing shills. I nearly walked out of the presentation several times.

However, Monad really is compelling stuff. It’s kind of like the Perl for Windows, providing a combination of capabilities and rules for allowing someone to tie just about any technology into the command line and Monad’s scripting engine. I’ll be downloading the (now available) Monad beta and giving it a try. It’s too bad it won’t be shipping with Vista, though the shills were hoping that decision may change. I’d think that was a possibility, now that both are in beta.

9/14/2005 9:45:03 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  PDC 05

PDC: Writing a Dynamic Language Compiler

Back to the PDC: Yesterday I saw a presentation on writing a dynamic language compiler using .NET.

It was very good. They glossed over a lot of the fundamental issues (using code snippers in VS 2005), but gave a good explanation of the features in .NET to support code generation. Especially, the new features added to provide better support for dynamic languages, where code is compiled, executed, and thrown away.

I’ve had a long standing interested in domain specific languages, and so it was interesting to see these guys do their thing in .NET.

Now, if I could just figure out how to do an official evaluation of the session… The PDC site keeps changing…

9/14/2005 9:40:08 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | PDC 05

Bones

Last night was the premiere of Bones on Fox. The show hasn’t gotten the best reviews from the critics, so I was sceptical. However, it turned out to be pretty good. The show deals with a forensic expert who works for the “Jeffersonian Institute” (a fictional version of the Smithsonian) who gets “loaned out” by her boss to work with the FBI on cases. She gets teamed up with an FBI agent, and they form a partnership, of sorts.

The show mixes what’s become traditional “procedural” plot lines (think CSI, the father of them all) with more character-based story lines. I think the network execs are going for something more appealing to “female audiences”. They’ve given the forensic expert a “back story” that includes both of her parents disappearing when she was a teenager.

The “mood scenes” get tedious after a while, but there’s a good vein of humor running through the show. I think it could become a winner for Fox if they can tone down the maudlin stuff. I’ll certainly watch more episodes.

 

As a side note, Supernatural also premiered last night, but I missed the start, so I skipped it in favor of the Roberts hearings on C-Span (mmm! good stuff!). I’ll watch a Replay this weekend and post my thoughts about Supernatural then.

9/14/2005 9:36:07 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

What's working (well)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out those tidbits that are are really working well at the PDC.

First of all, the networking. Between the near-ubiquitous WiFi to the abundant wired connections (along with power!), networking at the PDC raises personal connectedness to a new level. I can’t imagine anyone doing a technical conference in the future without at least some of this capability (you hear this, Software Development?). It’s fantastic.

The Big Room: What a concept. I just took a quick tour of the room. It’s fantastic. There’s a store in there selling books and tons of Microsoft identity swag. Whod’ve thought that you could actually sell swag? It sure makes it easy to pick up those “souvenirs” for the guys who couldn’t make it to the conference. Also, they have “lounges” set up for different topics, seeded with various MS personnel to “guide” the talks. Okay, this is really just Marketing, but it’s good Marketing. They’ve made it easy to do or not do. Then, there’s the guided tutorial room: rows and rows of computers all hooked up and ready to guide folks though the paces. This is really the way to do things. It keeps people involved.

The Game Area. I’d be more impressed with the gaming area if there were a way for me to log into WoW from here. After all, for the MMORPG crowd, that’s gaming today, not this other tournament stuff. I suppose there has to be some room for improvement into the future.

All in all, these are things that should be going on at all tech conferences. This should be what it’s all about.

9/13/2005 11:37:55 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  PDC 05

This is ridiculous

This just in, the sun rose in the east this morning.

The AP wire is reporting that Bush has refused to set a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Now, how is this news? This has been the President’s position since troops first went into Iraq. At some point, people need to just stop pushing their own agendas and calling it “news”.

Now if he did announce a deadline, that would be news!

9/13/2005 11:20:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics | world affairs

PDC: The first (real) day

Today’s the first official day of the PDC, since the previous two days were officially “pre-conference” days. Big Bill did his speech at the opening. I watched over the Internet instead of dealing with the crowds in the hall. It was a wise decision, if I do say so myself. I could go through my morning news reading while Bill talked in the background. As usual, Bill just gave the party line, the one leading up to Longhorn, I mean Vista. Microsoft has been spamming us with so much Vista stuff over the years, that Billl’s stuff was a yawner. Yeah, it looks nice, and the Sidebar feature will probably be a nice addition. I already feel like I have way too much real estate on my desktop with 2 21 inch flat panels on my desk. Being able to put part of that desktop to better use via the Sidebar will be nice. Of course, I seriously doubt that I’ll be upgrading to Vista. There just isn’t any compelling technology there to cause my company to make the (huge) investment necessary to upgrade everybody.

The Office 12 was another story. I thought that Office 2003 was nice; better than the previous though (once again) not different enough to warrant an upgrade (heck, we’re still using Office XP at work). However, Office 12 looks very nice. I’m looking forward to test driving the real product when its out. Once again, I don’t know if I’d upgrade my current system, though. While it would be nice, it’s hard to justify the cost.

I think that this is Microsoft’s biggest problem going forward. Not Linux, and certainly not Java. Their biggest problem is market. Too much of the market is already “satisfied” with what they have. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Microsoft’s future lies in subscriptions / services. I’d pay a (reasonable) annual fee to keep my Microsoft software up to date, especially if it also included some level of tech support. I think Microsoft understands this too. What they’re groping with is how to get their existing customers to switch. I think it’s going to take cold turkey. They just have to stop offering their products any other way. Of course, for this to work, their update technology is going to have to improve dramatically. Can you imagine going from Windows XP to Windows Vista via an update? Now, wouldn’t that be cool? Or would it just be a headache for Microsoft…

 

9/13/2005 11:15:20 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  PDC 05

We have a new acronym

We seem to have a new acronym. Everywhere I look on the Internet, I see MSM this, MSM that. It took me a while to figure it out. MSM: MainStream Media. sheesh. You’d think that the jokers pushing this would realize by now that everybody knows there’s no difference in the media; they’re all “mainstream”. Quit kidding yourselves, guys.

9/13/2005 11:01:50 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

Lights Out

So, I was sitting in my hotel room getting a bit of work done, when the electricity suddenly went off. It didn’t bother me since I’ve got battery, and its daylight. Since there’s heavy construction going on right outside my window, I figured that someone hit a power line nearby.

It wasn’t until the power came back on in an hour or so that I found out that the whole city had lost power (it made the national news!). At least, how the rest of the world defines “whole city”, since I was sitting in a hotel room in LA watching a national newscast telling the world that all of LA was without power! I guess it’s like those national weather forecasts that always show rain in the Northwest…

At least, this vindicated my not being at PDC today. all those guys were sitting in the dark.

9/12/2005 8:22:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | PDC 05

Free Day

Well, today was a free day for me. Microsoft (in their infinite wisdom) decided to handle pre-conference registration by handing out those colored bands that get used for conferences. To compound things, they handed out the bands first, then (in another room) handed out the bags. So, as a result, my band for today went into my pocket. Well sometime between registration and this morning when I put my pants on, the band disappeared.

So, how does Microsoft handle this? they want me to pay another $600 to attend a rather questionable session on Visual Studio Extension. I laughed, and gave myself a “free day”. Sometimes I wonder just who is running the show at Microsoft. sheesh.

9/12/2005 8:18:41 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general | PDC 05

`

Paul Thurrott has revealed that there will be seven Windows Vista editions:

• Starter
• Home Basic
• Home Premium
• Ultimate
• Small Business
• Professional
• Enterprise

Justin French asks the question, “How would the average home user possibly choose…”.

Well, Justin. I can answer that question easily: They’ll “choose” the edition that ships with the PC they buy. The “average home user” is not going to buy an upgrade for their existing PC. Why would they? They barely use XP’s capabilities, let alone whatever they’ll get with Vista.

9/12/2005 10:03:45 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

At the PDC

It’s Sunday, and I’m at the first pre-conference PDC session. Actually, it’s lunch time and I’m sitting at a table outside of the session room. My first session is on C# 2.0. So far, just one real surprise: Thanks to Generics, foreach has gone from the iterating loop of choice to “not so great”. Because, as when templates were added to C++, it’s much faster/cheaper to just add iteration directly to your generic collection classes than deal with the inefficiencies of Enumerators. It turns out that there are still reasons to use Enumerators in C# 2.0, but it’s a whole lot less clear, and frankly, much more esoteric. Unless something changes, look to see foreach getting deprecated as a general looping mechanism in C#.

A word on what I’m doing and where I’m at: This is being brought to you via wireless access at the LA Convention Center, thanks to our host, Microsoft. They even have facilities here for the “great unwashed” that don’t have WiFi capability: wires for direct connects and even Internet Terminals for those who really travelled light.

This as been my first real opportunity to post to the blog. PDX advertises WiFi at the airport, but I couldn’t connect via my laptop. I would’ve suspected the machinations of my IT department, but the WiFi connection at my home worked like a charm. I don’t know what the problem at PDX was, especially since my Palm LifeDrive had no trouble hooking up (note to self: investigate blogging sw for the Palm). My next opportunity was my hotel room at the Radisson Midtown LA. It turns out that this is the weekend that they’re switching over from wired access (piggy backing on USC’s connection) to their own WiFi solution. So, while there’s no connection this weekend, I should have WiFi capability tomorrow (Monday) morning. We’ll see…

As a result of no Internet prior to the conference, I had to scoot here when I got up this morning, since I’d forgotten to print out my pre-conference itinerary. The good news was that my session didn’t start for 2 hours. The bad news was that I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, and there are no real breakfast facilities near the Convention Center. However, I did have 2 hours, and I saw a Holiday Inn at the outskirts of the downtown LA area, so I hoofed it over there and had a nice, if expensive (hotel prices) breakfast there before hoofing it back to the Convention Center. I still ended up back with an hour to spare .

Today’s the short day. It doesn’t look like anything after the pre-conference session, so I can just head back to my room for the evening. Tomorrow I can take my time getting to the Convention Center.

9/11/2005 12:39:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general | PDC 05

Next Week
Next week, I’m off to the Microsoft PDC for some “geek time”. I’ll either have a lot to say or no time to say anything . Ideally, the conference will have WiFi, and I’ll be able to do some “live blogging”. We’ll see…
9/9/2005 4:45:50 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

A Hit and a Miss

The new Fall TV season has started (sort of), and now I’ve seen the first two new shows on my list (also sort of).

First out of the box was Prison Break, on Fox. Now, I find prisons depressing, so I wasn’t looking forward to this show. But, Diane Holloway from TV Blog and Laurel Krahn from TVPics.com seemed to like it, so I checked it out. Also, it has Dominic Purcell in it, and I loved him in John Doe. As it turns out, the show is very good. It’s episodic, which I like, and the writing is also good. So far, the plot’s been pretty predictable, but the show’s definitely been entertaining.

Not so much with my second experience, Reunion. The show has a quirky twist: it cuts back and forth between the present and 20 years ago, when a group of six friends graduated from high school (20 year reunion, get it?). Apparently, one of the friends has murdered another one of them. So, we get a mix of nostalgia show with murder mystery. The second quirk of the show is that each episode will deal with a different past year, as the show moves up to the present, revealing more of what’s going on. In the first episode, we even don’t know who the victim is yet. One of the friends is interviewed by the police, so is off the list. I suspect that this will be the trend for the next 4 episodes until, by the process elimination, we know who the victim is. Which leads to my biggest complaint about this show: It’s sooo cliche. Here’s an example:

Two friends get into a car. They’ve been drinking a bit. They’re talking and goofing off while driving. Surprise, surprise, they run a stop sign and are in an accident. Of course, this means trouble. It turns out that the driver is the “rich” friend and the passenger is the “poor” friend. Can we guess who’s had more to drink? Yup. So the “rich” friend convinces the “poor” friend to cop to driving, because he’s had less to drink (Warning, Will Robinson, warning!). He does. Then, the other shoe drops. The guy in the other car dies, and the “poor” friend is arrested for vehicular manslaughter. Everybody tells him not to worry, he has a clean record and will only get probation (Hah!). His attorney cuts a deal with the prosecutor, life is good (double Hah!). The judge throws out the deal and sentences him to 12 months in prison instead (it has to be 12 months so he can just be getting out for the next episode!). So, he gets just enough jail time to completely ruin his “full ride” athletic scholarship. Goodness gracious, where do they come up with this clever plot twists?

This is just a piece of the pie. The good news (for me) is that the show is on a high traffic night (Thursdays), and so, even with 3 DVRs going, I don’t have the recording bandwidth to include this show when the season is in full swing. Thank heaven for small miracles!

And, I have to add, they could’ve redeemed this show somewhat by focusing more on the music. Each flashback uses music of the year as background, but they don’t emphasize it enough. They really should be pushing that, a la Big Chill.

9/9/2005 11:46:35 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

What I'm Reading

A couple of weeks ago, when I had dinner with Kurt and his wife, Patricia, we got talking about books. It turns out that Patricia is a fan of science fiction. Who’d have thought! I’m always surprised by just who reads sci fi and fantasy among bibliophiles.

Anyway, this reminded me that one of the things I wanted to do in this here blog was share the books I’m reading. So, here’s the first installment.

I’m currently reading Shadowfall, by James Clemens. This is the first book by Clemens that I’ve read. Apparently, he has a few other books under his belt. It’s the start of a Fantasy series. I haven’t finished it yet (I’m at the climax), but so far, its been a good read. It has a unique take on gods and god-magic. I always enjoy a twist in that area. The story concerns a fallen “Shadowknight” who witnesses the assassination of a god and is promptly blamed for the crime. The ensuing plot twists are fairly predictable, but still, that whole god-magic thing has me hooked. Get this: the gods’ power is tied to their bodily secretions! In fact, there’s a whole economy built around these secretions.

So, for those who enjoy a good book about god wars and divine magic, I’d recommend this book.

 

9/8/2005 7:17:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  books | general

Blame Game

Well, the news is (finally) starting to report good things out of New Orleans. It’s about time.

I was fascinated by the negative comments heaped on FEMA, the President, and (by inference) the Republicans. After all, both the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans are Democrats. Interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that the Mayor, prior to running for that post, had been a long time Republican. In fact, he’d even supported President Bush prior to his “epiphany”. While I don’t doubt that the feds have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do (thank you Ricky Ricardo), I think the local and state leaders better put on their dancing shoes too. Of course, the media may just ignore their contributions to the debacle in the name of “news”.

On the other hand (and there is another hand), the lack of funding for the levees around New Orleans and Dennis Hastert’s comments about the rebuilding the city, smack of hardball politics: Louisiana is run by the Dems, they get no money. New Orleans is headed up by an ex-Republican turncoat, they REALLY get no money. If the Dems are smart (and they’ve shown little sign recently that they might be), they’ll use this to their advantage during the mid-term elections next year. They should stay away from the President, and blast the Republican Congressional leadership instead.

9/6/2005 9:07:58 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics

Some of the fog is clearing

It looks like some of the hype fog around Linux, and specifically desktop Linux, is clearing. ComputerWorld reporter Sharon Machlis recently published a series of articles on her experiences with various desktop Linux distributions, and let’s just say that she was less than complimentary.

It’s about time that there were more clear headed discussion of the Linux vs. Windows issue. Evangelizing (from both camps) is all well and good, but at some time, the guys that are supposed to be keeping us honest need to speak up. Frankly, in the past, there was way too much MS bashing and Linux rah rah-ing for my taste.

Way to go, Sharon, and whomever at ComputerWorld assigned this to you.

9/1/2005 10:44:12 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general