Moore’s Law is a fiction invented by Intel. They put those little ‘heat sinks’ on top of processors, but actually they’re not heat sinks. Intel has been fooling us; processors aren’t actually getting faster.
Those ‘heat sinks’ are actually little chronon distillers that remove chronons (particles of time) from the surrounding atmosphere. The processors use these extracted chronons to boost their perceived speed, making them appear to run at 2x, 4x or even 8x real time. Perceived speed increase is proportional to the number of chronons extracted, so as processors appear to get faster, they had to put ever bigger fans on to scoop more and more atmosphere into the chronon distillers.
 |  |
Desktop Chronon Distiller
Typically 2x real time | Server-based Chronon Distiller
Typically 4x or 8x real time |
But they went too far! They are now stealing time from our lives. They distil out so many chronons that the chronon depletion zone extends out of the computer into the surrounding area. The rarefied chronon atmosphere causes time to pass slower for the computer user than an observer.
Chronon Depletion Zone around a typical notebook computer
This is why you seem to lose time whenever you sit in front of a computer and why software projects seem to take a reasonable time to the developers but always appear late to managers!
On my journey to and from the office yesterday, I had my Zune with me and I was listening to one of may favourite podcasts, Hanselminutes by Scott Hanselman. Scott is a technologist and web developer working for Microsoft, he is one of the ‘gang of four’ authors of the book Professional ASP.NET MVC. Scott covers a wide variety of interesting technology subjects and usually invites a guest speaker to his podcast to talk about their niche technology. Hanselminutes is one of the most consistently interesting podcasts I’ve discovered but this week was interesting for socio-political reasons as well as technology.
This week, Scott was in Cairo, Egypt. The podcast was devoted to interviewing Lamees and Abeer, two Egyptian girl geeks. Much of the interview was dedicated to the fact that in Egypt, there are many more women in technology than in the West and the reasons why that might be. Scott estimated that in the company he was visiting, 40% to 50% of the engineers were women. Far from being repressed and stereotyped (as we are led to believe) these women have been treated as equals and encouraged by their families to pursue an education. Get the podcast, have your eyes opened.
Comparing this to my own experience, learning Computer Science at university, in a cohort of perhaps 120 students, I remember only four females. That’s around 3%. Pathetic. In my professional career, in my first 6 jobs there were no female engineers at all on the team. Only when I worked with Nortel Networks in Silicon Valley, USA did I begin to encounter female engineers, even then only in small numbers. In fact, in my entire professional career, I think I’ve only been on one team with one single female member who was truly an engineer and this was again in California. Think hard. How many women do you know in IT or engineering? I know one or two, and they are formidable. I mean that in the nicest possible way. Women make excellent technologists and engineers, for all sorts of reasons. Why, then, are we so poor at encouraging them in the West? This has to change! People like Susanne Dansey, Eileen Brown, Susan Bradley, Amy Babinchak are all examples of successful women in technology that I have interacted with, but half the examples I can think of are in America. These are shining examples, but they represent a pathetically small percentage, there is a great deal of unrealised potential out there.
This podcast has really challenged a lot of preconceptions I had about the Arab world and the middle east. Scott is a natural, masterful interviewer and he skillfully navigated the conversation throuhg some difficult subjects, but the stars were the two ladies. They rose to every challenge with thoughtful intelligent answers, they were such good ambassadors for their country and for their profession.
Thank you to Scott, Lamees and Abeer for a particularly interesting and educational podcast. We in the West have much to learn about the way we think about and treat women.
In a surprise announcement today, Nick King (Senior Product Manager - Windows Essential Business Server) revealed that Microsoft is to withdraw Windows Essential Business Server from the product range. In a conference call with Small Business Server MVPs, he stressed that Small Business Server and Home Server products were unaffected and would continue in both current and future versions.
Support for EBS will continue with the normal Microsoft product lifecycle, with 4 remaining years of full support then a further 5 years of extended support.
EBS customers will be given the option to transition out to the ‘a-la-carte’ server products. For customers with Software Assurance, this will be free of charge. Customers without SA may be required to foot the bill for shipping and/or taxes, depending on local rules. The transition pack will likely include licenses for 3 x Server 2008 R2 (4 x for premium SKUs), 2 x Exchange Server 2007 and System Centre Essentials. User CALs will also be able to transition, but Forefront Threat Management Gateway and Forefront Security for Exchange are NOT included. These details had not been finalized and users should refer to Microsoft for final details of this transition offer.
UPDATE: Wayne Small tells it like it is.
I’ve written several times on why I think free software is harmful (Open Source or Microsoft; The Zen of Free; Free Software: Good vs. Evil?). The unfortunate precedent of giving things away for free on the Internet can result in a race to the bottom.
Some software developers are conflicted about this. They think they have to give their software away for free to get people to use it, but then they try to lay a guilt trip on users to make a donation. Worst of all are the developers who try to monetize their work by covering it in slime. By slime, I mean advertisements.
One case that came to my notice recently is Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a sort of poor man’s PhotoShop, it’s free. It’s a wonderful piece of software that I use all the time, perhaps most days. Visit the web site and see the slime. The site is covered with misleading Download buttons and tacky blinking banners. Even the ‘Donate’ button is hard to see amongst the spam fest.
Guys, either it’s free or it’s not. Be honest with yourselves and with me about whether you want to make money out of your software. If you want to charge me $5, then ask me to pay you $5 and I will. It’s worth it. But if you give me free software, I am not going to pay you for it voluntarily, not ever. Newsflash: free stuff has no value. Your guilt trip is not going to work, neither are your slimy banner ads.
In my MSN Messenger today, a one-line text advertisement proudly proclaims
“<product XYZ> is now fair trade”.
I suppose the maxim “better late than never” applies, but what a shame they waited until consumer pressure shamed them into that decision. Why wasn’t the product always fair trade? The company that _I_ want to spend my money with is the one that can say “our products have always been fair trade”. Integrity is what you do when no-one is looking. My friend Dan Goddard taught me that. Sometimes, doing the right thing hurts you. Those companies that can still do the right thing even when it hurts them are the ones I want to do business with.
On Monday 21st February, I’m giving a live demo to some local entrepreneurs and academics to show how, for me, Windows Live Writer has revolutionised blogging.
Some of the topics I’ll cover and expand upon during the demo are:
My Approach to Blogging
-
Visual appeal trumps content (but the content must still be worth reading!)
Compare these examples. Which one makes you want to stay on the page?
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/default.aspx
http://community.tigranetworks.co.uk/blogs/TiGraNetworks/
-
Link as much as possible. “Givers Gain”
-
Have something to say. Don’t just blog to keep to a schedule.
What is Windows Live Writer
Live Writer is a tool that makes it easy to create and manage blog content accross multiple blogs and service providers.
Setting Up Live Writer [Demo - G-Blog]
Multiple accounts
Live Writer can manage multiple accounts on multiple blog providers. It’s easy to cross-post content or to switch content between blogs.
4. Editing a Post
Linking: Why link to other blogs?
When you link to another blog, this creates a TrackBack on that blog, which links back to your blog. This will enable more people to find your content and will help the search rank of both sites.
Auto-linking
Live Writer has good support for auto-linking and lets you build up a glossary of common links. One obvious use for this is to link to your company web site whenever its name is mentioned in the blog. This is a big time saver and makes sure you link back to your company web site.
Images
Images make blogs interesting. Pages of text are boring. Live Writer has fantastic support for images. Use the Screen Snipping tool (built into Windows Vista and Windows 7) to capture images from the web.
Demo – Screen Snipping and Image Formatting
Views – Edit/Preview/Source
Live Writer shows you exactly what your blog post will look like – before you post it. Handy for tweaking to get that final polished look.
Save Draft
Demo - Save local draft / Save draft to blog
As you do more and more blogging, the ideas start to come, but you don;t always have time to complete a finished article. Save part-completed articles as drafts and come back to them later.
Plug-ins
Live Writer has some built-in plug-ins and many third party plug-ins available, for embedding multimedia and specialist content. Two examples, are the Live Photo Gallery plug-in and the Bing Maps plug-in, as shown here:
GTi Suite, Valleys Innovation Centre
Have you been following this fascinating series on BBC 2? It examines some of the social and cultural repercussions of one of mankind’s greatest achievements – and it’s not all good! Today, I find it quite impossible to imagine life without The Internet, yet only 20 years ago, I had never even heard of it.
The BBC’s web site has some detailed background information and the episodes are available in a 3D series explorer interactive. There’s a blog, too.
There’s an interactive experiment that you can participate in to find out what sort of ‘web animal’ you are; in other words, what are the characteristics of your online behaviour. I’m a ‘Web Elephant’ which means:
Slow-moving - Web Elephants like you browse the internet at a stately, methodical pace - just like real-world elephants who rarely see a reason to rush things.
Social - Real-world elephants and Web Elephants are both highly social. Real elephants are able to keep track of their own extended family trees and may even mourn love ones. As a Web Elephant, you often use social networking sites to keep track of your friends of family and are happy to rely on information from sites whose content is created by its users.
Adaptable - Real-world elephants owe their adaptability to their large brains and versatile trunks. As a Web Elephant you are similarly adaptable and are well-suited to carrying out several different tasks at the same time.
Find out your web animal at the BBC Lab UK web site and share your results on facebook.
It never ceases to surprise me when doing software development, how quickly you can get into territory that very few people seem to have explored, making it difficult to troubleshoot problems. I’ve wasted the best part of a day on an SSL problem. I need to make requests from a web server that insists on SSL, but which has a self-issued certificate, i.e. it is not in my computer’s trusted certificate list. You’d think this was a really common situation that many people would have encountered, but the breadcrumb trail in the net says otherwise. This is what separates a professional software engineer from an amateur – at this point the amateur would probably give up, or put a horrendous hack into the code.
When making the request, the underlying protocol stack bubbles up the following exception:
It seems that System.Net.WebClient (or rather, its underlying protocol stack) has a default policy not to accept self-signed certificates. This is the same situation in Internet Explorer where you get the certificate warning and then the red address bar.
There’s no obvious way to override this behaviour and the solution is not obvious. Here’s what you need. First, implement a method that is responsible for validating X.509 certificates. My method simply returns True, which means it accepts all certificates, no matter what. You might need to be a bit more selective in your situation:
/// <summary>
/// Implements an SSL Certificate Policy for this application.
/// </summary>
class CertificatePolicy
{
internal static bool ValidateSSLCertificate(object sender, X509Certificate certificate,
X509Chain chain, SslPolicyErrors sslPolicyErrors)
{
return true; // All certificates are considered valid, no matter what.
}
}
Next, your application needs to ‘wire up’ this method so it will be called any time an SSL certificate needs to be validated. This obviously must be done before attempting to make any web requests. I chose to do this in my Main method.
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
System.Net.ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback
= CertificatePolicy.ValidateSSLCertificate;
Application.Run(new Form1());
}
And that’s it. Self-signed SSL certificates will now be accepted. Easy when you know how!
For best compatibility, ASCOM drivers and applications developed with .NET languages should target 'Any CPU'.
Some background facts.
- 32-bit processes can run on a 64-bit system.
- 32-bit processes can call into 64-bit code.
- 64-bit processes cannot call into 32-bit code.
- .NET assemblies compiled as 'x86' can only run in 32-bit processes.
- .NET assemblies compiled as 'x64' can only run in 64-bit processes.
- .NET assemblies compiled as 'Any CPU' are JIT-compiled into the 'bitness' of their host process (not necessarily the machine architecture).
- Visual Studio (including 2010) is a 32-bit process. It can debug 64-bit applications but with some limitations.
Truth Table: Where can an assembly execute?
The only scenario that guarantees 100% compatibility is: 'Any CPU'.
There may be a temptation to think that compiling an assembly (ASCOM driver) as 'x86' means that it can run on any system. In fact, most of the time that will be true, but as soon as there is a 64-bit host process then the driver will fail.
On 64-bit systems, by default, 64-bit host processes include: Windows Scripting Host (VBScript/JScript). To see this in action, compile your driver for 'x86' then try to script it on a 64-bit system. Your driver will fail to load.
Development and Debugging in Visual Studio
The above advice notwithstanding, during development you'll face a different set of problems. Visual Studio is a 32-bit process so when it builds and registers your projects for COM Interop, it will do so as a 32-bit process. This means your driver will not operate correctly as a 64-bit driver on your development system. There are also some restrictions on debugging 64-bit processes, for example 'edit and continue' doesn't work. I put this situation to Scott Guthrie and his recommendation was to develop and debug in 32-bit mode. He mentioned that in Visual Studio 2010 the same situation exists and they changed the default project settings to 'x86' for that very reason.
The solution I've used is to create multiple configurations in Visual Studio. My Debug configuration builds in 'x86' mode and my Release configuration builds in 'Any CPU' mode. There are lots of permutations but those would be the minimum.
I’ve had a miserable experience with RSS feeds in Outlook. There are feeds (suc as those from teh Stack Overflow Trilogy sites) that I just know should update at least every few minutes, yet Outlook often takes an hour or more to show any changes. Today after an email exchange with Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror) I think I’ve finally figured out what is going on.
Right, here’s what I think is happening. When a feed is added to Outlook, the default settings (which are hidden under the ‘Advanced’ button) are to use the publisher update recommendations.The publisher of the feed can specify a Time To Live setting, this is the time that content is expected to remain cached before it is refreshed. Outlook interprets this setting as the minimum update interval. Outlook will not check a feed for new content more often than this minimum interval.
The <ttl> element is optional and some feeds (such as those from teh Stack Trilogy) don’t contain it. When Outlook doesn’t find a <ttl>, everything defaults to 60 minutes. So in this default situation, Outlook will check for updates at most once per hour.
To avoid this default one-hour situation, it is necessary to instruct Outlook to ignore the publisher’s recommendations (even though the publisher hasn’t made any explicit recommendations, the absence of a recommendation implies a 60-minute update cycle by default). To do this, when adding the feed to Outlook, click the Advanced button and uncheck the box outlined in red in the screen shot above. Note the yellow highlighted text indicates that the publisher has not specified an update policy.
Unticking that box does allow faster updates, but there is another wrinkle. We;ve removed the minimum interval, but the default settings for the Send & Receive Groups is 30 minutes. So even when the minimum TTL is lowered to 5 minutes, Outlook still will not even try to check more often than every 30 minutes; this is the default setting of the default Send & Receive Group. So, to get full control, it is necessary to uncheck the “Use publisher’s recommendation” box, AND to create a custom Send & Receive group (or modify the settings of the default group). I don’t recommend modifying the default group.
So, create a new Send & Receive group and in its properties, select the RSS feeds that you want to update at the higher rate.
The screen shot above shows my Server Fault RSS feed being prepared for updates every 5 minutes.
This will be of interest mainly to astronomy enthusiasts…
Competition: Win Visual Studio Professional 2008/2010
Thanks to my friends at Microsoft, I have been allocated one copy of Visual Studio Professional 2008 or 2010 to give away as a prize to the ASCOM community, a current estimated retail value of £700 / $800. I’ve decided to offer it to the person with the highest reputation on ASCOM Answers at the end of 28th February 2010.
Rules
- The person with the highest reputation on ASCOM Answers, as adjudicated by me, at 23.59 UTC 28th February 2010, will be the winner.
- In the event of a tie, the winner will be selected based on the highest number of ‘badges’. If there is still no outright winner, then the winner shall be selected from amongst those tied for first place by random draw.
- If the winner cannot be contacted within 7 days, then their prize shall be forfeit and shall pass to the person with the next highest reputation, and so on.
- The winner will receive an individual not-for-resale license for Visual Studio Professional (or equivalent) Edition.
- The winner may elect to receive Visual Studio 2008 immediately, or wait to receive Visual Studio 2010 after its launch date of April 12th 2010.
- The prize is kindly donated by Microsoft UK and is subject to variation in content and delivery date at their discretion.
- Administrators and moderators of ASCOM Answers (i.e. those with a diamond after their name) shall not be eligible.
How Do I Enter?
Simple. Visit http://answers.ascom-standards.org and create a non-anonymous login (I suggest using your Yahoo ID – simply click the Yahoo button when asked to log in). Start asking and answering questions, commenting and voting.
The normal rules apply on ASCOM Answers. Posts must relate to ASCOM or Astronomy and are subject to moderation and editing by other users.
Strategies for Increasing Your Reputation
Reputation is earned by posting questions, answers and comments and by voting on other people’s content. Your peers, members of the ASCOM community, get to vote on your content, so quality and relevance really counts. Here are some ideas for how to maximize your reputation.
- Think of a problem you’ve recently resolved with your astronomy gear. Create a new question that describes the problem, and then answer your own question by providing the solution that you found.
- Look back in the ASCOM-Talk message archives. Pick a question and enter it into ASCOM Answers. If you can find the answer, then add that, too.
- Same as (2) but find questions from other astronomy related forums and mailing lists.
- Pick an existing question on ASCOM Answers that has multiple answers. Create a new answer that incorporates all of the existing answers, corrects any mistakes, and expands upon the content. Format everything so that it looks really great. Then stand back as your new super-answer gets voted up and becomes the de-facto correct answer.
- Vote on other people’s questions and answers. Best practice when casting a vote is to leave a comment explaining why you voted the way you did.
Dos and Don’ts
Remember, everything on ASCOM Answers is in question-and-answer format. Here are some general dos and don’ts:
- DON’T put answers into the question section. Always split your content into a question (or problem description) and then submit your question. Then answer it (provide the solution) in the separate answer section beneath the original question.
- DO answer your own question – this is OK and specifically allowed.
- DO stay on-topic (Astronomy). If you don’t, your posts may be moderated, voted down or deleted.
- DO answer other people’s questions, even if there is already an answer. Your answer may be better.
- DON’T ask further questions in the answers section. If you need to ask for clarification or further information, add a comment to the original question.
- DO tag your questions with up to 5 tags, so that others can find them more easily.
- DO try to re-use existing tags in preference to creating new ones.
- DO accept a ‘best answer’ to your questions, by clicking the check-mark next to the answer. If you answered your own question, then you can still accept your answer as the ‘best answer’ but only after 48 hours have elapsed (this is to prevent people from ‘gaming’ the system).
- DO format your content carefully. Content that is both accurate a visually appealing is more likely to get voted up. The site uses something called MarkDown, which is a common-sense easy-to-use method of formatting plain text content. You don’t need to know and HTML – but if you do, some basic HTML tags are supported too. There’s a full help page provided on the site.
- DO read the FAQ.
Good luck!
This amazing free report by Imperva presents an analysis of over 32 million compromised user passwords, obtained in the Rockyou.com breach.
The report lists the top 20 passwords used, and here they are:
Is your password in the list? If so, I’d consider changing it PDQ.
So many people buy the very cheapest add-ons for their computer, or just buy the first thing they see on the shelves. Let me tell you, there is a lot of nasty rubbish out there. It all looks good in the box, but when you get it home and plug it in, things don’t go so well. We’ve all been there – devices that don’t work after you resume from standby, blue screens when unplugging USB connectors.
My advice: don’t waste your time and money on cheap rubbish. When buying computer add-ons, first visit the Windows 7 Compatibility web site and see which devices meet the standards recommended by Microsoft. When you buy a device from this list, you might pay slightly more, but you can be highly confident that it will work well and will not cause compatibility problems with your other hardware and software.
Software and hardware bearing the “compatible with Windows 7” logo, shown here, has passed stringent tests at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) and guarantees you:
So please, only buy software and hardware that bears the Compatible with Windows 7 logo. Here’s an example of what you’ll find on the web site:
So many people buy the very cheapest add-ons for their computer, or just buy the first thing they see on the shelves. Let me tell you, there is a lot of nasty rubbish out there. It all looks good in the box, but when you get it home and plug it in, things don’t go so well. We’ve all been there – devices that don’t work after you resume from standby, blue screens when unplugging USB connectors.
My advice: don’t waste your time and money on cheap rubbish. When buying computer add-ons, first visit the Windows 7 Compatibility web site and see which devices meet the standards recommended by Microsoft. When you buy a device from this list, you might pay slightly more, but you can be highly confident that it will work well and will not cause compatibility problems with your other hardware and software.
Software and hardware bearing the “compatible with Windows 7” logo, shown here, has passed stringent tests at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) and guarantees you:
So please, only buy software and hardware that bears the Compatible with Windows 7 logo. Here’s an example of what you’ll find on the web site:
I’ve always jokingly said that my favourite computer game is Microsoft Office. Well, I think Microsoft must have heard me, because now, you can play Ribbon Hero and have fun while you learn how to become an Office power user.
They say that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work another day in your life. So it has to be worth brightening up those mundane tasks with a bit of fun! Remember when games used to have a ‘boss key’ that you could hit when your boss was approaching, to instantly hide the game? Ribbon Hero really stands all that on its head. Maybe you WANT your boss to see you playing this?
“Hey look boss, on-the-job training for free!”.
“Well done Smithers, have a pay rise”.
Those canny people at Office Labs have produced another winner. But wait… it gets better. By linking Ribbon Hero to your facebook account, you can publish your scores online and compete with your friends.
What a wonderful idea. Oh no! David is beating me in his sleep! Must… earn… more… points… :)
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