A taste of development

Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research spelt an astonishing report gentled And Straight off for the News…The Emperor Has No Clothes”. If you can catch a copy, interpret it. Starting with the unsatisfying but waited news that journalism is no longer a service consumers want to pay for, he travels on to the problems presenting Internet video. He does a far best job than I of all time did explicating the failings of Internet video and the expectation of liberal content. This is the report I bid I had blogged.

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. (more…)

Yesterday my coworkers redecorated my office.  Pictures in this blog entry are photos of their work.  Funnily enough, I felt myself quite appreciative of their act of vandalism. 

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.

(more…)

Project Distributor: Introduction to our staggered web service model
So Darren and I have assigned in about a month at present on the Project Distributor website. We are begining to progress to that decisive point where the site is pretty coolheaded, we have plenty of users, we are thinking of operating out of the permissible bandwidth for the demo site, and all sorts of other things that lean to bechance all at erstwhile. At present, there are some problems you can plan yourself out of, and others that you in truth have to hold some money at. Our up-to-the-minutest enhancements can be summarized up in a little list.

• Grease one’s palms a domain name and take up hosting in two places. Project Distributor.com should be up fairly before long to company MarkItUp.ASPXConnection.com
• Have people host their ain versions of the application. And that implies a large source release is in the future. At this juncture risk fragmentation.
• Design out fragmentation with a series of cunning features that will get everyone desire to employ the application at hand.

I’m hither to talk about the last two, since Darren already corrupted some extra hosting for us. The concept will be to free a fairly static version of the application so that groups can host tools, code snippets and other source/binary releases for their teams to partake in. The application is very lightweight and well-heeled to set-up, so it won”t require a bunch of hand holding and configuration to get up and running initially. From our standpoint we resolve a number of issues at this juncture. The most obvious problem is what we separate the Lutz Roeder use case..NET Reflector is the central type of application we’500 love to catch hosted because it makes believe it a bit well-fixed to find oneself, not that Google does a tough job, we’d simply like to get a bunch of tools in one place, with some features for feedback, novel releases, and some nerveless client tools for printing.

(more…)

Sean & Scott  [fixated link]: The example you yielded is outstanding, although I would advise something a little more robust, specifically you believably desire to take into account data to pass between the already escaping instance and the newfangled one made (this takes into account you to mobilise the command line arguments). I pent an article on this last year… however holding up data marhsalling makes believe the code much much more awful.

BTW, there were some underage bugs in the single instance logic that were fixed in next article in the series.

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Is there anything more fun than riding about, developing your hair, pledging a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and ruminating how to exchange the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google ?
Best search ? Too immanent. Better monetization ? After the fact. Best User Interface ? Will we cognise it when we fancy it ? A newfangled and dissimilar search ? Semantic ? Human powered ? We won”t know till we know.

But what about the Google Index, all the websites that are indexed by Google ? What is it deserving to be in the Google Index ? What would you, as a website owner require in order to take your site from the Google Index and no longer be uncommitted when someone does a google search ?

It should simply be a matter of dollars and cents and sense, shouldn’t it ?

How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively touched on ?
Mahalo.com intends it demands to sustain the 25k most common search terms in order to be successful. What would encounter if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo attended the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and compensated them to allow the Google Index ?

A theoretic maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, in all probability closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average ?

The math starts out to pay back interesting. At $1,000 per site median times 100k sites, thats only when $ 1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would plain favour the bigger sites, indeed of that billion dollars, would the top 1k sites get hold of 500k each and the resting 99k parted the rest ? (more…)

Also see: Single source code base for Silverlight and WPF solutions

Also see: Video games

Also see: JSR-294 Superpackages

Tagspace * is a social bookmarking service for software professionals** that encourages sound sleep and sweet dreams by enabling you to be better informed, better connected, and more productive. The more you use Tagspace, the more you’ll wonder how you survived for so long in the cramped quarters of your Web browser’s Favorites folder.

WARNING: TAGSPACE IS ADDICTIVE. REPEATED USAGE MAY CAUSE INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY.
*Tagspace has been shown to be effective in helping to prevent and reduce memory decay.
**No animals or software engineers were harmed in the making or testing of Tagspace.

For more information about Tagspace, see:

Screencast (direct stream): intro2tagspace.wvx Screencast (on MSN Soapbox): intro2tagspace.wmv Text Overview: Tagspace Beta Refresh Overview
Product Roadmap: Microsoft.Community Today and Tomorrow   (…because this is just the beginning.)
Tagspace: In the News
Subscribe: RSS

http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2007/04/16/introducing-microsoft-tagspace.aspx

Also see: Applied Metamodelling: A Foundation for Language Driven Development

An
AppDomain is a light-weight process. 
Well, if you actually measure the costs associated with an AppDomain –
especially the first one you create, which has some additional costs that are
amortized over all subsequent ones – then “light-weight” deserves some
explanation:

 

A Win32
process is heavy-weight compared to a Unix process.  A Win32 thread is heavy-weight compared
to a Unix thread, particularly if you are using a non-kernel user threads
package on Unix.  A good design for
Windows will create and destroy processes at a low rate, will have a small
number of processes, and will have a small number of threads in each
process.

 

Towards
the end of V1, we did some capacity testing using ASP.NET.  At that time, we were able to squeeze
1000 very simple applications /
AppDomains into a single worker process. 
Presumably that process would have had 50-100 threads active in it, even
under heavy load.  If we had used OS
processes for each application, we would have 1000 CLRs with 1000 GC heaps.  More disturbing, we would have at least
10,000 threads.  This would reserve
10 GB of VM just for their default 1 MB stacks (though it would only commit a
fraction of that memory).  All those
threads would completely swamp the OS scheduler.

(more…)

Also see: Introducing Microsoft Tagspace

In school, there were two kinds of tests. The regular kind where you learned and memorized all you could and then did your best on the test. The 2nd kind was the Open Book Test. Where you could use your notes and text books to figure out the answer to a question.

The 2nd was always preferable to the first because it was always a lot easier to prepare reference than to memorize.

Come finals time, a schedule of traditional tests meant packaging hours and hours to study. It was the ultimate experience of Information Overload. It also was the quickest way to forget everything you just learned the minute the tests were over. In fact, if you hung out with my friends and me, the minute tests were over, every penny we had was destined to be spent on beverages that killed more than a few braincells.

Today, life is so much simpler. I can’t remember the last time I had to go to the library or bookstore to search for a book on a topic that was important to me. I can’t remember the last time I HAD to invest the time to read a book as opposed to choosing to read a book that I wanted to read.

There was a time when I would scour online forums looking for any information that would give me an edge. Those days are long gone.

Today, I still read a ton of magazines that I both enjoy and which give me a solid foundation of information that help me professionally and personally, but I don’t stress that I might miss something. I don’t stress if I don’t read an issue immediately when it com (more…)

Also see: Chicago geek dinner 11/22

I have been trying to find a way to allow you to run Virtual PC 2007 with multiple monitors.  Natively VPC 2007 doesnt support more than 1 monitor, however you can “trick” it by using various techniques that expand the desktop area into a larger virtual desktop.

I tried using the awesome MaxiVista tool which can extend your screen across separate PC’s (think “push” remote desktop), but the new multi-monitor compatibility feature of VPC 2007 (which inexplicably does not add multi-monitor support) made this difficult since it ensures that your desktop recaptures your mouse when you move it outside of the VPC window thus preventing the extended screen from being accessible.

So, instead I tried the Remote Desktop approach mentioned in Steven Harman’s blog post.  

Here is a quick rundown on how it works:

Connect 2 monitors to your PC (more than 2 typically don’t work with this approach).   Make sure to extend your desktop onto the 2nd screen via Display Properties -> Settings.  Then launch Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) with the “/span” flag:

mstsc /span

Then just use Remote Desktop as usual by specifying your VPC’s computer name in the connection dialog.

(more…)

Also see: There can be only one… with data

Also see: UI design

Also see: A quick update on me.

Data Types a la Carte. Wouter Swierstra.

This paper describes a technique for assembling both data types and functions from isolated individual components. We also explore how the same technology can be used to combine free monads and, as a result, structure Haskell’s monolithic IO monad.

This new Functional Pearl has been mentioned twice in comments (1 , 2 ), and has now also appeared with comments on Phil Wadler’s blog. Obviously it’s time to put it on the front page.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2700