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From “Microsoft Watch” (newsletter):

“More and more Microsofties (past and present) are planting up Weblogs. Some are chronicling the debates inside Microsoft and the rest of the software industry. Others wholly shy aside from any mentions of their employer.

We’ve been progressing out our collection of Microsoft blogger bookmarks. Not too astonishingly, many of these folks are connected to Microsoft’s developer/Web services divisions.

Hither are a few of our favorites:

Joshua Allen’s Better Living Through Software

(Allen’s site lets in a list of other Microsoft bloggers)

Unsubdivided Geek: Chris Anderson’s Blog

Microsoft Web Services Kingpin Don Box

For more Microsoft Web Services-interrelated blogs, gibe this site.

Young Microsoft Hire Peter Drayton

Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo “

No commentary on the rest of the article, but it is interesting to envision how much blogging is in the mainstream (more reason I’m frustrated at my over ignorance of this before december…)

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There is a reason why Contented Delivery Networks live. They survive because the internet is a betterest efforts medium. The internet will e’er be a betterest efforts medium, if only if because of Last Neutrality. If all bits are made and delivered on an adequate basis, and so there is no way to be certain that the bits gestating your TV show will be delivered with any Quality of Service assurances.

For some reason, every Internet bigot out on that point appears to cerebrate that there is some charming bullet that will heal this problem. There is a reason why Cable companies expend so much money on equipment and engineers to make up certain that your favourite TV show renders up when you interchange the channel. Those same engineers do everything they peradventure can to do certain that you make that show at the eminentest potential picture quality. Delivery is not just now about bandwidth allocation, there is an unbelievable amount of engineering that gos in catching TV signals to your screen. It dos work because those engineers command the signal end to end. Its deterministic, not betterest efforts.

Its for this reason I have changed state forth from the internet as the future of entertainment and am centered on Digital TV, whether its delivered by a satellite, telco or cable company. While its dependable that the companies proffering TV oft tread all over themselves and reach things far more hard than they should be, all of the existent innovation is happening on the Digital TV side of the ledger. Why ? Because its a stable, deterministic platform.

With digital video, in particular for cable and telcos, there are specifications and tolerances that developers can utilize to plan interactive applications. Satellite has unlike advantages in terms of broadcast solutions.

in addition, those arranged top boxes that keep to be kicked upstairs and switched out more oft than you switch out your computers ? They are application specific platforms. They are being built at the software and hardware level to take digital video and interactivity. Contrast that with the Windows /Vista platforms that most users have.

Cable has Tru2WAY , Dish Network and DIRECTV have their development platforms. They are not stark, but the feature sets are expounding and the application base and number of developers are dilating as good.

Address me sick, but when thrown the choice of making grow fresh applications for a deterministic platform connected to a specialty application box connected to a high-pitched definition TV with a outside control or a betterest efforts internet platform connected to who cognises how tight a connection to a PC racing who cognises what runing system connected to a monitor and a keyboard, I will accept the first option.

But thats only me.

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The 30 Second Sound Bite is Drained, All Herald the 140 Character “Twitterbyte”
Brightkite: Location Founded Societal Networking

From the report:
Ironically, we are headed up down the same self-destructive road for other kinds of traditional media,as good. Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have got word two things. For the first time; consumers won”t pay for content on the web, so it will have to be ad supported. And second; it won”t be ad supported.

In the cable TV network world, half of all revenues come from affiliate (carriage) fees paid by the Comcasts and
DirecTVs of the world. The other half comes from promoting. But in the TV world, a distinctive half hour show bears out an ad load of about 8 minutes.

On the web, other evidence intimates that consumers will tune up out – click off – if they are haled to see more than 30 seconds or indeed of publicising up front, and peradventure another 90 seconds of advertising over the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been lionized by many as the future of TV, dishs two minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of programming(i.

e. the programming duration of a distinctive half hour show from television). Arrogating selfsame CPMs for web video and TV, and after accounting for turned a loss affiliate fees, a 30 narrow program on the web with two minutes of advertising paies around 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are contented producers cooked to shrink production costs…by 88%?

In fact, the factual economics of web-founded video are far, far forged than this. Our 88% decline neglects the vitriolic impact of à la carte on traditional video economics. In the public debate in Washington, the phrase à la carte refers to the idea that a few firm networks require the carriage of a host of unaccented ones, in effect subsidise a much bigger family of channels.(From MC: This is something HDNet vehemently defends and is working towards terminating) But there’s a much more of import aspect of web-based àla carte that is seldom mentioned-that is, the “à la carting” of the few betterest shows from the rest of the day’s schedule. Or even uncollectible, of the betterest few moments (news stories?) from the rest of the show. On the web, following SportsCenter not but fleeces ESPN of its ability to carry through carriage fees for ESPN Classical and ESPN U (and SoapNet and Toon Disney), it as well, and much more significantly, soaks ESPN of its ability to expend SportsCenter to underpin the economics of the rest of the 24-hour ESPN schedule. And keeping an eye on simply the betterest 30 seconds of SportsCenter fleeces ESPN of its ability to sustain the economics of… good, you catch the idea. Awaiting a few ad sustained shortclips on the web to substitute for the affiliate fee revenues lost by multiple networks 24 hours a day is lunacy. “

Bully job Craig.

The concept he delineates as the “ala carting” of the betterest from the rest is the web video consumers favourite feature, but it’s as well the largest risk to professional video content producers all over. On the Internet, the producers of the most democratic content don’t have the promotional platforms that traditional media does. There are no lead ins for Internet shows up. So there is 100 pct uncertainty as to how many people will take in any paid video. For those videos that do turn democratic, a good deal of the popularity is viral, confining the producers ability to monetise the escalation in popularity.

The Darwinian response to this problem has been to serialise shows. The hope is that if a viewer cared a show, they will come backward for more. Which of course signifies they are simulating traditional TV’s approach to content presentation and engrossing all of the same problems. The changeless need to brush up a show is not simply hard, its expensive. The invariant need to further the show to stand up out in an ala carte universe of an limitless number of shows is still more hard than it is expensive.

Indeed where does this leave behind main video content on the Internet ? The right way in the hands of Google and Youtube and blackened and white-hot hat SEOs.

The ala carting of video on the net will do good those who enable the search for content and can monetise that search.

The economics of holding content will storm severally brought forth Internet content to be dumbed down to levels that make a stark match for Youtube. There will be SEOs that follow up with arbitrage solutions that will take traffic to parked videos. Contented creators will partner with SEOs and make budgets that think over the CPMs they can realize in and around the video hosted on Youtube against the costs of the SEO geting traffic to the video. SEO support will be the only even marginally efficient way to make baseline traffic to a video/show.

Who could have infered that making financially succesful video on the net would ask the same commercializing skills as laboring traffic to parked domains ?

Content created by and for TV networks will have to create some of import decisions. Why wouldn’t advertisers desire to be one of only 2 minutes of ads in a 30 narrow TV picture instead than one of 8 mins of ads on traditional TV ? Will they compensate correspondingly bigger CPMs to be on-line ?

Are TV networks creating a vast mistake by laying their current TV schedules online for spare ? If a welled out TV depict merely has 2 mins of commercials, will that take some viewers to choose catching online ? Will it storm networks to shrink their TV usher ad load ? If thus, by how much ? Specially if and when over the top video enables Internet video to be laid out right on TVs. Will shows up be haled to present dissimilar versions of shows, say with unlike ratings as a means of differentiating TV from welled out shows ? The R shoped version of Friday Night Lights online and the PG version on TV ?

Bottom line is that something has let to present. Business as common is not becoming to hack it. The question is whether the dollars the large TV and media companies are making online from the streaming of their current TV lineups are sustainable incremental dollars ? Or is pullulating the video a collateralized video obligation ? The video equivalent of the collateralized debt behind the sub premier mess. Money that fronts sound while its making out in, but could lead to far, far large problems ?

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Craftsman Style Architecture Doing A Comeback
Quick attempt at a formalizing roman numeric parser… Lots of gotchas.

Today is my 40^th birthday.  Like most other days, I started by taking the air the dog and doing a To-Do list.  Still, today’s list has a particular item:

• Resolve whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.

I’ll concede I am not all thrilled about being 40.  It doesn’t appear that long ago that 40 appeared far aside.  Nowadays that it’s hither, I see that it’s not what I required.  I guessed my life at 40 would be dissimilar.

Many who cognise me would affirm that I have nothing to sound off roughly.  And they would be right.  My life has been filled with blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly grateful.  I am a written author.  Most would see me financially successful.  I am in a career where I love my work.

But all the same…

As the honest-to-goodness supposing moves, nobody lies on their deathbed liking they had passed more time at the office.

Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I bet in front ten years and shaped a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn’t jibe that picture very easily.  Examples:

• I thought by nowadays I would be more substantial in the quality of my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.

• I thought by nowadays I would be a better guitar player.
• There’s a mussy pile in my study that has been in that location for ten years.  (Yes, we went six years ago.  The heap went besides.)  I opined it would be stript up by at present.
• I e’er taken over that by 40 I would have picked up to work on a regular basis and terminate feeding junk food.

I move could on.  And on.  But you catch the idea.

I am allured to entertain my regrets, the places where I had a untimely turn, the places where I would have done a saucy choice if I cognised so what I cognise at present.

But this hale line of thinking doesn’t seem at all contributive to well genial health, indeed today I will prefer to focus on two things which appear more constructive:

1.  Tapestry

One of my favourite Star Trek episodes is called up Tapestry.  It is the story of someone consecrated a chance to re-experience a polar moment in his youth so that he can keep off doing the inexpedient choice he did the first time.  But it sprains out that his foolhardy moment was a decisive ingredient in his late successes.

Today I prompt myself that there are no more do-overs, and I’m not sure I would desire one anyhow.  For every mistake I have done, there were disconfirming consequences and convinced lessons.  I can’t require to keep off the former and maintain the latter.  They descend in concert as an inseparable package.

2.  Life Calculus.

Backward in 2003 I indited an article sent for Career Calculus.  In a nutshell, it alleges that at any contributed moment in your career, what you cognize is far less authoritative than whether you are geting a line.

Today I cue myself that the same principle applies in life.  I am convinced in my first derivative.  Whatever I am today, I intend I will be a best person tomorrow.

Indeed if I’m withal blogging when I’m 50, I ask I will be capable to cover progress on some of the items remarked supra.

And simply to be unmortgaged, if that heap of junk on the floor of my study is however in that respect, it will be bigger than it is at present, and I contrive to cover that as progress. 

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Jerry (no blog) has been evidencing us all about a process they use for consensus  [link from Michael ] building in some standards meetings… evidently the Quaker vote is treated everyone voting on each item as one of:

a) Prefer
b) Can accept
c) Can’t live with

The idea being that fair people will more rapidly come to a decision with they realize what people are unforced to permit and not. Looks interesting.

Several of us in my group are plumping off to do some architecture planning and I intend we will have lots of challenges around consensus – we may have to assign this to the test.

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In September I will be addressing once more at the Business of Software conference, being kept this year in Boston.

And lastly, for something completely unlike, don’t omit the Jam Session at Tech-Ed on June 3^rd.  Several of us minions from SourceGear are bing after to read the stage and pay our rendition of Pinball Wizard.  It’ll be me on acoustical guitar, our development manager Jeremy Sheeley on bass, and our product manager Paul Roub runing the Evil Mastermind Schecter PT that will be paid off later that week.

And BTW, none of us will be trimed as The Vicious Mastermind.  This should be obvious, as The Vicious Mastermind would ne’er do something in reality nerveless like a song by The Who.  Kind of, he would do something like a Kelly Clarkson song and erroneously trust it was nerveless. 

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The book startles out with the basics of parsing and even expressions and all that jazz. But the extent of the code is a bunch of screen shots. We are droping a line a parser/compiler dang it, we aren’t WYSIWYGing our way through life at this point, you have to render some existent frigin code. What you terminate up with is a bunch of screen shots of many tools for droping a line a compiler, but not truly the code, unless of course you proceed snap up the CD and come out all of the code without a lick of explanation from the book. God I go for the code is good documented with comments, or you simply bribed an issue of Compiler’s Instanced and this isn’t the Swimsuit edition. I’ll let in some of my ain links at the bottom, where I present factual code for many of these processes.

OK, so you pay off to meet a bunch of tools, and what do you pay back? Well, you produce a bunch of half-assed tools (good-for-naught for the language if your kid is learning my highly technical blog… In fact, if he/she is I could utilize some interns, must typewrite 50+ WPM and be technical at C, C++, or C#). A numerical expression evaluator is the first. I conceive it is ever the first. People e’er trivialize math. Thence make sure enough you view all the pretty pictures and render to harvest some wisdom from the text. I have a numerical expression evaluator by the way, it’s sent for calc.exe and from what I can assure it has shipped since 16-bit windows. He as well makes believe an attempt at a even expression workbench. You can’t have enough of those (really I’m not being sarcastic hither, I constantly apprize a newfangled regex tool), but and so he ne’er spells anything or manifests compiler technology that utilises veritable expressions. Does he come in NFA/DFA technology? Well, he does discuss it for a few sentences. BNF format? Over again a few sentences hither and in that location. But await, another tool is what you get under one’s skin and this time it is a picture of a drop-downward menu with all sorts of truly teasing names (convert from BNF to XML, exhibit a BNF parse tree, display arranged docs, etc…). At this point use one of the pages to get the drool doing off your lip, because that is as near as you’ll make it this book to anything nerveless.

OK, thus block the tools. At some point he really begins talking about existent compiler technology. I think around chapter 7 peradventure? I rattling should dig out up the TOC on Amazon, but I’m just moving to squander enough time on this book to eat up this posting. Anyhow, they start up discoursing the assorted parsing techniques. Recursive descent (RD), Top-Down, Bottom-Up… I imagine there are some other peculiar names they throw in in that location to pose the reader. After taking all of the major compiler design books I shouldn”t be mystified by something that could classify as a 4 Dummies book (unless it is something like Cross Dressing 4 Dummies, I could probably use that after my Halloween party)…  Anyway, they really donn’t do the entire process justice, and I think at some point some more tools are used, Yacc might be mentioned, and bam, back to the pictures.

At this point I want to identify the worst problem I found throughout the entire book. Plainly the author didn’t have time to eat up the code so they led a bunch of exercises for the reader. Nah, nah… You don”t leave the compiler as an exercise in a book on how to write a compiler. You leave behind bits and pieces, but not the of import stuff. Experiencing my Knuth books, I’m really stormed when he gos away problems as exercises that ask more know-how than what has been provided in the chapter. I don”t mind exercises for the reader, but there is a limit people. Ideate catching backward from Home Depot with a 300 page picture book on constructing a house, that had a bunch of pictures of finished homes, and some text offering up that the building of the house will be resulted as an exercise for the reader. Doh!

At the end of the book, it is ostensible I’m not starting to pay off anything of use and so it starts up talking about code generation. Oooh, something with some meat. In reality, they’ve been mentioning their nodes for the calculator in such a way that the name of the node was pretty often the name of the op code that was rifling to be named. They may have some Fast Introductory implementation code spits as comfortably, but I’m confused at this point (and graveled) because I’ve been fingering this book for an hour. In reality the act of spewing IL is in all likelihood deserving an intact book of it’s ain (oh waitress it is Deep down Microsoft.NET IL Assembler and you truly should buy this one so I catch 50 cents). That isn’t just because that book is really how IL functions and not how to spew it. But I’d remember one does predate the other since finally your runing to go out of node names to match to IL op-codes and when opComplexOperation isn’t mirrored by OpCodes.ComplexOperation I simply don”t know what you’ll do.

How fair of a review is this? Well, I’ve interpret factual compiler books, quite a few of them. I’ve carryed out my ain parsers and compilers many times for many unlike circumstances. I don”t think it is a hard process and I think extending the process to a more general development audience is important. There should be a relatively approachable book on droping a line your ain.NET languages, but this book is for sure not it. I’ll hold searching about, I take heed there is another book focalized on.NET language generation and I’ll have to look it out. Perhaps an O’Reilly publication? Can you catch an accurate review from something in about an hour’s time? Well, I register tight, the words were quite big, most of the content was entirely conversant and entirely about 30% of the page material was text, so I’d go for indeed. Get hold of this for what it is deserving, but if I learn any referral money for that book, I’ll cognise someone is runing low to be expressing joy hysterically when they catch that book in a 2-3 days from Amazon. PS: I didn’t and won”t buy the book. I passed a couple of hours at Borders today working through two books that got my eye when I was very seeking a with child.NET Localization book. I take to dig up up Michael Kaplan, since I’m certain he has saved something someplace.

Lexer/Parser/Compiler   Code and articles for unlike types of parsers
Lexer, Parser, Compiler, Oh My!   Postings, with code, on even more lexer/parser stuff
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/dick/PTAPG/BookBody.pdf  A more tough-core text on parser technologies

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Perchance someplace in this world is a developer considering honest-to-goodness code that I droped a line, avering “WTF!?!?”.   I’m certain I as well had a reason…

Suppose you’re debugging your application and you realise that version 1.0 of an assembly is being charged when you intended it should be version 2.0. Where is the reference to 1.0 coming from?

The well-fixedest way to regain out is to view the Fusion log for this bind. If the version 1.0 assembly was successfully charged, utilize the ForceLog/”Log all binds” option of FusLogVw. And then, seek the line in the log demonstrating the addressing assembly:

Addressing assembly : referencingAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=achromatic, PublicKeyToken=12ab3bf24c56c45b.

It exhibits the display name of the addressing assembly when uncommitted. It doesn’t assure you whether this is a unchanging or a dynamical reference because Fusion doesn’t cognize or care (that doesn’t matter for obliging purposes). So, this could intend that referencingAssembly was built against the other 1.0 assembly, or that it invited it at runtime via Assembly.Load(), etc.

Sometimes the naming assembly is not specified in the log. There are a few potential cases where that bechances:

• The assembly was requested by unmanaged code (interop).
• The calling off assembly was in another appdomain (AppDomain.CreateInstance(), etc.).
• The calling off assembly had not been loaded through Fusion (Assembly.Load(byte[]), Assembly.LoadFile(), etc.).