Welcome Back!
Welcome back, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy! Lately, I’ve only been writing about the new shows on TV (at least as far as TV-themed postings go), but both of these shows were fabulous last night, better than anything new that’s been premiered so far. Who says that there’s nothing “good” on TV?
9/26/2005 8:42:04 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Another one bites the dust

Fox has already cancelled Head Cases. That was fast. The show wasn’t that bad; I was planning on giving it another chance. But, I guess it didn’t do well against Lost. I think that Fox is short sighted to use this as a measure, because I doubt that they’ll find something to run that does better. I guess they could always run something that at least doesn’t cost as much to show (maybe reruns of Trading Spouses  ).

9/23/2005 2:43:15 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

More on Bill Frist: Fair's Fair

In the spirit of fairness, I want to admit that I was wrong about Bill Frist.It turns out that he (and just about every other bigwig with the firm) had posted his intent to sell of shares with the SEC earlier, and there was nothing shady about his sell-off. Thank you Yahoo News for pointing that out. It sure would have been helpful if the Huffington Post had done the same (you hear that, Ariana?).

9/23/2005 8:28:10 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics

Bill Frist and the SEC

The Huffington Post is reporting that Bill Frist unloaded all of his stock in a family-owned hospital chain just before it announced disappointing earnings.

Remember Martha Stewart? If this were done by a private citizen, instead of the leader of the Senate, there would be both SEC and Justice Dept. investigations going on. We’ll see how this is handled…

I have to admit, I’m still a bit steamed at how Martha Stewart was treated by the feds. There is no doubt in my mind that they treated her as an “example” rather than truly believed that she was some horrible perpetrator.

9/21/2005 8:48:52 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics

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