I was listening to Progged Radio today. It's my favorite “radio” station - it's hard to find the obscure branch of music I like (progressive metal).
Anyway, a song came on, and I had to laugh. It was the title track from “Marathon” by SAGA, and the chorus goes something like this:
It takes time to get to avalon
That's why we're on this marathon
Full lyrics here.
I think someone from the Avalon team needs to pick up this album for those long nights of coding.
While I was out in Seattle last week, I stopped off at MSDN to talk to some people about getting going on the project I'll be working on. One of the exciting pieces is that we're going to be using some really bleeding-edge stuff, like Yukon and Whidbey. So it was convenient for me to grab the interim builds of these products, since that's we're going to develop against. In fact, we expect to track the product teams pretty closely, updating our development environment frequently with new builds.
Like I said, this is exciting for nerds like us. But like most things, it's a tradeoff; we knew that it was going to cause us some pain. This weekend I encountered the first pangs. In the middle of installing Yukon, I got an error message to the effect of “MDAC does not meet the Windows Logo requirements. It will not be installed.” Then the whole install rolled back.
In and of itself, that doesn't sound too bad, but in the wake of it, neither the .NET 1.1 C# compiler nor any version of ASP.NET works on that machine. Joy. Hopefully we'll get it sorted out soon. In the meantime, I guess I can do command-line compiles of my side projects (more about those later) with the Whidbey C# compiler. Not the greatest setup, but enough to give me some confidence before I do a check-in.
I'm in Seattle this week, visiting my wife's relatives. As long as I was here, I paid a visit to the Microsoft Campus, specifically to building 5. I needed to sign some paperwork so I can get started working on the MSDN re-architecture again. I've been off the project for about six months, but now it's really spinning up again - the work we did before was only the beginning.
What does this mean for you, dear reader? Well, since we're going to be doing a lot of cool stuff at MSDN, and since I have clearance to blog, you can expect to hear about it here. For example, MSDN is making the extremely bold move of implementing using pre-release versions Whidbey and Yukon. I've always admired this sort of “eat your own dogfood” philosophy, and now I actually get to be paid to play with the stuff. Woohoo!
RNA interference - seems like this has
potential to cure everything from cancer to the common cold...literally.
(You'll need to register to get onto the site, unfortunately, but it looks like they
won't send you anything you don't want if you don't want it. Also seems like they'll
take a fake email address, since they don't confirm the one you provide. Besides,
it’s Technology Review, so it’s MIT, so what’s to worry about? :)
)
I was wondering today: what would a doctor think if he was watching my stats while I was programming? Would my heart rate go way down? Way up? Would an EEG look really strange?
I wonder for two reasons:
A quick Google didn't turn up anything on studies in this area, but I have to wonder if there's been some work done here.
My friend Rob Engberg and I had a long conversation this morning about privacy and transparency in society. It was pretty interesting: he's sort of a libertarian, and I'm sort of a liberal, so in the end I think we wound up mostly disagreeing over whether society (my position) or the individual (his position) should kick your ass if you spy on me. :)
Anyway, the upshot of all of it was him seeing what he could figure out (just based on looking on the web) about the nondescript building he could see across the street. It turns out the answer is, “Rather a lot.” While this is hardly surprising to people that use Google on a regular basis, I still found this link to be a surprisingly large font of information about all sorts of stuff. Rob jokingly calls it the “Big Brother Jackpot”.
I know I’ve posted about Bruce
Schneier’s CryptoGram newsletter before…but it’s just so good. Here’s another
great article about what’s wrong with the color-coded threat levels (Yellow,
Orange, etc.) that the US Government has been using. To sum up: they’re worthless.
Much as I would like to blame this on President Bush, I’m not going to. His
approval ratings and the tiny amount of public outcry over the massive sell-off of
personal liberties for the (mostly false) perception of increased security point out
that things like this are a consequence of a society-wide fear, not the actions of
one man or one administration.
As usual, the only real antidote to fear is education, in this case about what security
really means. In other words, if you haven’t already signed up for Crypto-Gram,
do!
