April 2007 - Posts
Microsoft made a pretty major announcement today at Mix 07.
They announced that the 1.1 version of Silverlight would contain a cross-platform implementation of the .NET framework, allowing Silverlight applications to be written in any .NET language and still run on all platforms (though it appears that right now it's just Windows and Mac OS X).
Why is this important? It's important for two reasons primarily (that I've been able to ascertain so far):
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The .NET languages are powerful and familiar - there are millions of people developing apps in C# and VB.NET (not to mention IronPython, IronRuby, C++/CLI, etc) for several existing platforms - Windows (Windows Forms), the Web (ASP.NET) and other platforms (the Mono Project). This is just one more way for developers to create powerful applications using a language they are familiar with. Microsoft knew what they were doing when they announced .NET, we just weren't quite ready for it.
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The previous way for you to "program" a Silverlight application was to use Javascript. I read a blog this morning (thought I can't find it at the moment - if I find it later, I'll post again) that said that the same application performing a task in Javascript and in .NET showed that .NET was orders of magnitude better than Javascript. That alone is reason enough.
I haven't had a chance to give any of this a try from the developer's side (or plain old WPF for that matter). But it appears to be something incredible happening here and I am looking forward to giving it a shot!
I was listening to the radio on my way back to the office from my lunch break (I always listen to talk radio when I'm not getting ready for something) and I heard a guest (a columnist for some paper) make the comment that Hillary Clinton "... had no poetry."
The insinuation there being, I suppose, that she's "all prose" and that voters like a mixture of "poetry" and "prose" in their candidates.
I think that's rather eloquently put. However, I must admit that I wonder - what is the ratio of "poetry" to "prose" that most people fall for prefer? If I had to guess, I'd say it was a lot closer to infinity than it is to zero...
In general, I've always been pleased by how well I can use modern programming languages (C#, Java, C++) to create algorithms that "mimic" some business process that we need to have automated here at my office.
Every now and then, however, we run across something that is very difficult to turn into a programming algorithm.
A past example was dealing with Medicare - the way in which Medicare does things (assignments in particular) - differs from any normal business.
The current example that I'm dealing with at the moment is our shipping queue. There are so many conditionals and rules in the process that it makes it very hard to translate our process into code, much less do it efficiently.
I guess this is why "workflow" and "rules" engines are such a big thing lately.
Well, U.Va. finally got some players drafted in the late rounds of the NFL draft.
Jason Snelling was taken as the 34th pick of the 7th round (244th overall) by Atlanta.
Marcus Hamilton was taken as the very next pick (34th, 245th overall) by Tampa Bay (to play with Ronde in the secondary?)
Both of them are great guys so I'm glad to see them get picked up. We'll be back with some much better draft picks next year, i'm sure.
So let's see how everything turned out:
So it wasn't the perfect day that it could have been, but I'll take it.
There's a definite possibility that today is one of the best days in U.Va. spring sports.
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#3 U.Va. Baseball goes for the sweep against ACC foe Maryland at 1pm at Davenport Field.
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#6 U.Va. Women's Lacrosse (the 4 seed) goes for the ACC title against #5 UNC (the 3 seed) also at 1pm in Chapel Hill.
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#3 U.Va. Men's Lacrosse (the 2 seed) goes for the ACC title against #2 Duke (the 1 seed) at 3:30pm in Durham.
U.Va. took two ACC titles last weekend (Men's Tennis and Women's Rowing). Could two more this weekend be possible?
The baseball team had a tough 14 inning loss to JMU on Wednesday. Getting a sweep from border rival Maryland would be a good way to get the pollsters to forget about that loss. We need another sweep or two to lock up a national seed.
Go Hoos!
After a Q&A with Coach Brian Boland posted on TheSabre, I decided to do a little digging into our ACC statistics.
There was a comment in the Q&A that we had won the ACC tournament 3 out of the last 4 years. That's pretty dominant. But just HOW dominant were the Hoos?
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2007
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Regular Season: 11-0
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ACC Tournament: 3-0
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NCAA Tournament: TBD
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2006
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Regular Season: 9-2
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ACC Tournament: 2-1
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NCAA Tournament: 2-0
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2005
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Regular Season: 9-0
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ACC Tournament: 3-0
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2004
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Regular Season: 7-1
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ACC Tournament: 3-0
That's a grand total of 49-4 over the last 4 years (and counting - we may find ourselves against at least one ACC team in the NCAA tournament).
That's a 92.5% winning percentage over a 4 year span. That's domination right there.
Edit (2008.01.07): We played Wake Forest in the NCAA tournament third round and beat them 4-1. So the final numbers after the 2007 spring season were 50 wins to 4 losses for a 92.6% winning percentage over 4 years.
Sean Singletary has a big decision coming up.
He's already made one big decision, by announcing that he will declare for the NBA draft but NOT hire an agent.
Not hiring an agent leaves the door open for him to return if he decides leaving right now is not the right idea.
Vandy Hoo on TheSabre had a couple of interesting comments from Sean's dad about the situation. At first it seems like he's definitely coming back for another year. Then it seems like he's probably coming back for another year, but maybe not if his draft stock were a bit higher...
So on that note, here's some alarming comments from a friend of mine about Sean's potential draft stock:
"You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize Sean may be gone. Ty Lawson is staying in school, Darren Colison is staying in school, DJ Augustin is staying in school. Right now, the only PG's I've got above sean are Mike Conley (who hasn't declared yet) and Acie Law. Maybe Dominic James. Oh, Crittendon also probably staying in school."
Hmm... So by those people deciding to stay in school, Sean's draft status rose quite a bit. Enough to make him a solid first-round pick (which most people think is what it would take to get him to leave)? I'm not sure.
I still think he's coming back. But I guess we'll have to wait until June 18th to find out for sure.
Scott Guthrie posted a couple of entries on new Visual Studio features in Orcas this weekend.
I always enjoy Scott's articles as he is very clear and gets the points and basics across very well.
In his article from Saturday, he discusses the new Language Integrated Query in Orcas. I'm very excited about this feature, particular in terms of querying real databases using it. However, most of the examples I've seen have been in terms of custom classes and entities - not actual databases. While that's definitely useful, and I'm looking forward to that as well, I want to see some better examples about real databases.
So it was with much joy that I read Scott say in that article (emphasis mine):
"In the not too distant future I'll finish the last segment of this language series - which will cover the new "anonymous types" feature. I'll then move on to cover some super practical examples of using all of these language features in the real world (especially using LINQ against databases and XML files)."
Sweet!
If there's anybody reading this, you're probably unaware that my blog is sort of co-located at both http://blog.tlmii.net/ and http://cs.tlmii.net/blogs/tlmii/ - two instances of Community Server running (one with the _override changes to make it work in the root), but only one database backend.
Well after i got that all set up i started noticing that blog.tlmii.net was displaying only my main webpage (tlmii.net) and not what was actually stored on that site. Apparently this is only happening at my office and my home - my non-profit office in Richmond doesn't have the problem and neither (apparently) does my host at their location (no surprise there).
Not really sure what to do except wait it out and hope the DNS issues fix themselves. Just kind of annoying that I have to use the longer address for the site.
Our shipment of 6 one-gig chips just arrived. Two for each of the three computers that already had 1 GB in each.
I "volunteered" to "test" to make sure the chips would work in our machines. They did. Now I'm running with 3GB.
So what was the first thing I did with 3GB?
Load up Virtual PC 2007 w/ a VPC of the Beta 1 bits of Visual Studio "Orcas" and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server "Orcas."
Very nice to be able to dedicate over 1GB of RAM to a virtual machine and not get any hit to the performance of the host machine.
I like it.
Due to the Jamestown 400th Anniversary license plates that the Commonwealth decided to force upon us the last few years I've been very well-aware that we'd be celebrating Jamestown this year. I wasn't really going to get excited about it, but it was interesting nonetheless.
But now i'm starting to hear some more details about what they're doing and it actually sounds pretty cool. To quote a bit from that story:
In stark contrast to the way (white) Virginians have usually presented the town, the new museum treats Jamestown as a compelling, sometimes tragic, intersection of English, Native American and African-American cultures. One diorama shows the rich African culture from which Jamestown slaves were wrenched. We see how the Pocahontas story was later embroidered to raise new London money for Jamestown. In fact, the Indian maiden (actually called Matoakah) was only about 12 years old when she first met the British. They kidnapped her to prevent an Indian war before she was baptized as Rebecca and married to the Jamestown elder John Rolfe, who found her "manners barbarous." For his part, John Smith was accused of mutiny during the 1607 voyage.
I'm hoping they don't go too far with it (unnecessarily villifying people for things that were commonplace then, but that nowadays would be frowned upon). But I'm very happy to see them finally telling the true story of how it all happened. Maybe next we can clarify some things about the Civil War... nah, that's probably being too optimistic.
See Also: Jamestown 2007 Website
The Hullabahoos are an a capella group at U.Va.. I've seen them perform several times and they're solid performers, and a bit goofy, so it's always a good time.
A friend sent me a link to this video:
And it reminded me of this picture:
The first-ever Hullabahoos, and one rather famous (to me) person in the mix there...
Last Tuesday, Nine Inch Nails came out with their latest CD, Year Zero.
I had already downloaded the album a few weeks ago and had been listening to it since.
On Sunday, The NIN Hotline posted a link to a review on IGN that essentially bashed the album. The review wasn't very thorough and sounded almost like the reviewer hadn't listened to the album yet.
That got me thinking. Perhaps it wasn't that the reviewer hadn't listened to the album yet. Perhaps it was that the reviewer hadn't yet listened to the album multiple times yet.
The first time I listened to the album I was... not disappointed... but... not really impressed. Then again, I listened to it on my computer with my crappy old computer speakers closest to me (the nicer speakers are further away and work good for movies when I'm sitting back but not music when I'm actually at my desk). Then I listened to it again. And again. Each time I heard something new. A new layer. A new drum beat. A new guitar riff. A new [some instrument I couldn't identify] noise.
The songs started to grow on me. They crept into my subconscious. I found myself humming the lyrics, tapping the beat on my desk. I started to pick out favorite songs (God Given, In This Twilight, Zero-Sum). It started to come together.
Music reviewers have a responsibility, both to the artists they are reviewing and to their readership to accurately reflect an album's merits. If the IGN author did not listen to the music "in depth", then he did not live up to his responsibility, in my opinion. If, on the other hand, the author did get deep down into the music and still had that opinion... then I guess I'll just have to respectfully disagree.
Neowin had a link to an article talking about how blogs are infested with all of this filth.
I've seen some stuff pop up (comment spam on some blogs I read) but for the most part I haven't noticed too much on blogs.
Since I just installed the "latest and greatest" from Community Server here, I'm curious to see how well it deals with comment spam, etc. I know there are a lot of settings/controls I can use to help and I need to look into them. But I'm hoping it's got some good defensive mechanisms built-in.
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