No More Radio...

das Blog is live! Thanks to Clemens for all his help...

I installed from source, took about 20 minutes of actual time to install locally, import my old entries from Radio, deploy to my ISP, etc. (Real time was a few hours since I was doing this in-between my VSLive sessions and had to get the ISP to set up the correct permissions, install 1.1, etc) I got it working first on 1.0  at the ISP and then moved it to a box running 1.1: much better..Gonna start the redirect from Radio today.

Now that I was the uber tester, I want to help Clemens somewhat in all of this. I have some ideas on improving the cache using the cache API w/ vary by param, gonna work with Clemens on that one.

Oh yea, comments work!!

Some Damn Islands…

Today Microsoft unveiled to the world demos of the Alpha of Whidbey or the next version of Visual Studio .NET at VS Live in New York today. They say that “this release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will offer innovations and enhancements to the class libraries, Common Language Runtime (CLR), programming languages and the integrated development environment (IDE).  In addition, Whidbey will provide deep support for SQL Server Yukon by enabling developers to write stored procedures using Visual Basic and C#.”

Visual Studio Orcas (another Island in the Pacific Northwest) was also talked about. You can find the roadmap here.  

My drinking partner in Dallas and Barcelona, Ari Bixhorn (oh yea he is also the Lead PM on VS .NET) demoed some neat stuff in an alpha version of Visual Studio Whidbey along with “Edit and Continue” and cool productive VS UI enhancements like improved docking. The most compelling feature is the exception dialog, while also nice and pretty, has suggestions to fix the code and hot links to help, etc. VB .NET sported a smart-tag based right click syntax checker.

I just installed the alpha on my machine last week (as well as the latest Yukon bits), so if you don’t see any blogs for a while, you know why! J

A Meeting with a Mentor..

Having a two hour lunch with your friend and mentor is one thing, having a two hour lunch with your mentor and two of your closest friends and business companions is just pure bliss. That was pretty much the state of affairs today at lunch with my friend and mentor, Peter Bloom and friends: Richard Campbell and Tom Howe. We talked about everything from the future of Linux (which we all agreed needs an economic incentive to progress, see below), visual pinball, the state of on-line poker and lots of other business.

Peter, who was always was a Microsoft skeptic, but not a Microsoft hater, said that his faith in Microsoft technology has grown very substantially over the last few years, especially since .NET has greatly improved. He has seen more and more portfolio companies in his fund make a mission critical business bet on Microsoft and have great success. He thinks the since .NET Microsoft has just gotten it right. That is good news and I have seen much better quality from Microsoft in the last 3 years with .NET, XP and other stuff.

Lastly we all agreed that without an economic incentive and a corporate leader, Linux can never succeed. The reason why is that since it is all volunteer based only the COOL features get built. Richard was talking about how in the open source database he is using, awesome features exist, but boring things like incremental backup don’t. (Which is a deal breaker for any RDBMS for me!) This is why you need  a corporate sponsorship of the whole open source universe. (sorry all my utopian society OSS friends, capitalism works, just ask our friends in the USSR…) Why doesn’t evil Larry say 10 million for the first person to come up with the needed boring feature? This will be fun to watch….

Five in a Row

So today Lance Armstrong won his 5^th straight Tour de France. Only four other men have won 5 times. Lance (if you don’t know), returned from near-fatal cancer in 1999 to win his first Tour and today emulated France's Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault, Belgian Eddy Merckx and Spain's Miguel Indurain. Besides Lance, only Indurain has won 5 in a row. Only one other American, Greg LeMond has won the tour before. Up and coming American Tyler Hamilton took 4^th, despite suffering a broken collarbone on the second day of the tour. So basically Tyler rode 3,000 km with a collarbone broken in two places. This year’s tour was one of the most exciting and Lance only won by 61 seconds over his arch rival Jan Ullrich.

We could be heros...

We all know how I made fun of the RDs that are also Software Legend's. (Why, well, because it is just so damn easy.) So, Eric Sink made a spoof site of the legends here http://notalegend.com/. Eric you are my new hero. (Just for one day. )

Whidbey and Yukon and Orcas, Oh My…

From Information Week:

“Bill Gates and other executives kicked off Microsoft's meeting with financial analysts on Thursday with an overview of the company's development projects, which will be fueled in the current fiscal year by $6.8 billion in spending on research and development, an 8% increase over last year. "There's a strong product pipeline," said Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect….

Microsoft execs outlined key products to be delivered over the next 12 months. They include:

• The Office 2003 suite, with the new OneNote and InfoPath for XML forms;
• An upgrade to the Tablet PC operating system;
• The first beta release of Longhorn;
• Service pack 2 for Windows XP;
• Versions of Windows Server 2003 and Office 2003 for small businesses;
• An upgrade to Microsoft's customer-relationship management application;
• Services For Unix, version 3.5; and
• Upgrades to Project Server, BizTalk Server, Speech Server, and ISA Server.”

Well who the heck cares? We are developers! We care about the development tools. Good news is that I will speaking at VSLive in New York where Microsoft lays out plans for its upcoming 'Whidbey' and 'Orcas' versions of Visual Studio. Everyone can get  a sneak preview of the next release of Visual Studio at the free keynote given by Senior VP Eric Rudder. If you can’t make the keynote, there will be a new Development Tools Roadmap documents posted to MSDN on Tuesday.

39:30

My new 20.2 km Central Park time trial time.

Death to the RIAA

From The Register:

“After issuing a subpoena to the MIT, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) finds itself in yet another legal battle as university officials have refused to divulge their students' names. MIT is protecting students suspected of trading copyrighted files, citing privacy concerns and improper legal tactics by the RIAA as a defense.“

Even Michael Jackson is concerned about the war on music fans. 'Why do the labels need such aggressive measures in their pursuit of our youth? Why not give universities a bit of time to look after the concerns of their students?'

Go MIT! I always liked techies from Cambridge. Michael, well you are strange, but you are correct this time. J

The RIAA must die. The RIAA is pure evil. They are anti-technology dinosaurs. They would rather litigate away the internet than embrace it as a new business model. They screw the artists and the consumers. This is why I openly violate all copyright laws and download MP3s to my heart's content. I am practicing civil disobedience with each download.

So RIAA, how can you stop me? On the techie front, you just can't, sorry. I am way too smart for you. (And when I am no longer smarter than you I have friends who are way smarter than me!) I can make my IP Address look like Saddam Hussein's. You can't shut down my ISP and I don't attend a University, so you have nobody to sue. Just try suing me, ha that would be fun. I have Tom Howe as my lawyer!

Oh wait. You can stop me. You can stop suing ISPs, Universities, etc and work with the artists and the technology industry to come up with a way to monetize MP3 distribution. You can't fight technology (Just ask the Peoples Republic of China and Google). Wishing that there was no file sharing and the internet is not going to make it go away. I am more than willing to pay THE ARTIST for each MP3 that I download. Where does that leave the RIAA. Hopefully in hell where they belong.