Ah...

The end of How I Met Your Mother was really bugging me (it still is!), but I found a comment on the Internet (the source of all knowledge  ). They speculated a plausible answer to the “riddle” of the ending. Now, I have to see if it’s right!

9/19/2005 9:25:35 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Wha?
Okay, I just watched How I Met your Mother. It’s everything that the critics said: almost good. And then, they had to spoil my whole impression: it had a weird surprise ending. I’m not saying what it was (it’s a surprise, remember?), but now I’m hooked (and confused). I’ve got to see what happens next…
9/19/2005 9:06:06 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Threshold Premiere

Friday night, Threshold, the first of the “invasion” movies, premiered. I had high hopes for this show, because it has Brent (Data) Spiner and Carla Gugino (who was in Karen Sisco). Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my hopes. It wasn’t really bad, just kind of blah.

Molly Caffrey (Carla Gugino) is supposed to be this great contingency analyst, who creates these “worst case scenarios” and the procedures to follow if/when they happen. She’s suddenly thrown into one of her own scenarios, “Threshold”, first contact with suspected aliens. Cute huh? That’s the high point.

Molly never really “leads” the group, even though she’s supposed to be leading them. Everyone just sort of mills around, without any real investment by the characters in what’s going on.

I’m hoping that the future episodes get better…

9/19/2005 8:50:27 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Arrr!

Arrr! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! So, me maties, be sure to pay proper attention to yer speakin’!

 

Arrr!

9/19/2005 4:09:32 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

My latest book

Here’s my latest “What I’m Reading” entry: I just finished Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. It isn’t very long, but it’s quite interesting: fantasy with an African-American twist. Haven’t you wondered why all those fantasy heros were white guys? Well, this story shows what happens when its the African-American that have the fairy trouble.

It’s quite good, if a bit short. Other than the before mentioned African-American twist, it’s a pretty pedestrian story, but what a twist! I wouldn’t mind seeing this one on Sci-Fi or as a movie (are you listening, Hollywood?).

9/19/2005 3:28:00 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | books

Jon Galloway is afraid of DLINQ
In his Blog, Jon Galloway says that DLINQ scares him. He says that he’s afraid of code maintainability and people “abusing” the feature. He could make the same statement about UI development, or threading. Frankly, making it easier to do something increases the chances of abuse. That’s a given. Whether its queries integrated into the language, operator overloading, or even public attributes. This is where standards and discipline come in. Frankly, I think LINQ is ground breaking technology, and DLINQ is just what the doctor ordered for SQL Server queries.
9/19/2005 8:44:40 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  PDC 05 | development

PDC's over

Well, that’s it. PDC ‘05 is officially history. I can’t even get to the online site to post my evaluations of the sessions I saw today.

So, today I spent most of my time at panel discussions. It was great to have the bulk of the panels all day Friday. It made it a whole lot easier to figure out what to see. Which leads me to my central theme for this posting:

This was the best organized conference I’ve ever been to. Now, I’ve been going to development conferences for over 10 years. I’ve seen really big ones, like the year that Software Development was held with the first Java One conference, and I’ve been to really small ones, like the Software Development conference that coincided with the start of the Iraq war. And, yes, I’ve been to conferences other than Software Development too! But, let me reiterate: this was the best organized conference I’ve ever been to. Here are some of the things I think that others should be emulating:

1. Food: There was food available at all times. Easy to eat stuff that included both the typical “junk” food that so many developers run on as well as more “healthy” stuff like tons of fruit. Coffee was also always available in copious quantities. While lunch was also served, I neither partook of it or missed it. I never had to stop going to sessions in order to eat. Instead, I was picking all day long, while packing in the sessions.

2. Lounges: There were lounges set up in the Big Room, each of which was dedicated to a different track. People could hang out in the lounges and talk to experts in that particular field. Okay, so MS was mainly interested in using this venue to push its products. That’s always the case. The main thing was that this created yet another place were attendees could get together with each other as well as speakers they may have heard.

3. Computers: There were PC’s everywhere! In fact, all reviews were done online, so there weren’t the usual little pieces of paper you had to deal with at the end of each session. You could also use the PC’s to get up to date info on the conference as well as just do general Internet stuff, like checking your e-mail.

4. Network Connections: This leads to the next great thing. WiFi everywhere (nearly) and tons of tables set up with both power and wired connections. It was trivial to stay connected with both the conference and the outside world while here, thanks to the ubiquitous network connections available. In fact, I didn’t even attend Bill Gates’ keynote; I watched it on my laptop! No crowds, no lines. And I could read the news while listening.

5. BOF’s: There were tons of BOF sessions. And, these were real BOF’s, not just marketing opportunities for various consultants (or MS for that matter). My only real beef was that the sessions were always late at night (starting at 9:00), and since I wasn’t at a conference hotel, this made attending inconvenient.

6. Shuttles: All of the conference hotels (not mine, unfortunately) were on a shuttle route, with the shuttles running continuously. So, if you wanted to go back to your hotel for an hour or so, and then return you could do it (fairly) easily.

7: Panels: Lots of panel discussions. We tech heads love panel discussions. Get the experts on stage together and give us a chance to ask them the hard questions. And better yet, they reserved a day for these panels, so I didn’t have to give up some other activity to see them.

I don’t know how much money MS spent on this shindig (A lot, I think), and I don’t know how profitable another conference that offered these features would be. I do know that all of these things would attract tons more people than I’ve seen at other conferences recently.

The folks at SD Expo should especially take note.

9/16/2005 3:47:16 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | PDC 05

Democrats: the party of the rich?

Michael Barone had an interesting entry on his blog, discussing Adam Smith. It concerned morality and the differing views of it vs. economic prosperity. Adam Smith’s point, that Mr. Barone commented on, was that a “strict” view of morality was generally valued by the “common people”, while a “liberal” view of morality was generally valued by the more affluent people.

Today, this is reflected in the constituencies of the Republican and Democratic parties. In a weird turnaround, the Republican party now has a core membership among the “common people” while the Democratic party has its core membership among the “affluent” people. Granted, there are still vestiges of union members and the urban poor who vote Democratic as well as the executives of large corporations who vote Republican, but I think these groups are definitely in the minority, the real power works the other way around.

Now, of course, the Republicans are very much aware of their “base”, and have used it successfully. But, the Democrats seem oblivious to their current constituency. I wonder what would happen if Democrats started paying more attention to this.

9/15/2005 9:29:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics

PDC: LINQ and C# 3.0

Anders Hejlsberg is a genius. No, he’s a god! Okay, maybe LINQ isn’t really all his idea, so there’s praise to go around his team. However, all in all, this is massive! Not only does the LINQ project solve what has been a huge problem with general purpose programming languages for years, but it did it in a domain-generalized way. The result f which is a great addition of functionality to C#, and any other language that also provides for its capabilities.

LINQ is big, big, big. Not only the query language itself, which is marvelous itself, but also the concept of Extensions to existing classes, and the various other features being added to C# 3.0. I agree with Anders’ point that it allows for the kind of ease of development found only in dynamic languages without the messiness that typelessness adds. Bravo to all! This technology seems pretty new to me, so I don’t know where it’ll eventually go (I suspect that Sun will be making changes to their road map for Java soon  ), but I think this could be bigger than Aspect Oriented programming.

9/14/2005 7:12:02 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | PDC 05

Google Blog Search
Google does it again. They have a (beta) Blog search engine. It’s way cool. They even (blush) have my pages! What a country!
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