Off to meet Scoble

I am heading into London to meet Robert Scoble of scobleizer.com fame. Should be an interesting evening.

Technorati tags: Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

A Meme Experiment

Acephalous is conducting an experiment to track the progress of a meme across the internet.  By asking people to link to his post on the experiement and at the same time getting those that do link to beg their readers to do the same, he hopes to have something of interest to talk about during the Meet the Bloggers panel at MLA 2006.

So, to my limited readership…go blog, oh and chant after me…"By your command" in a really bad 80’s sci-fi evil robot type way.

Regatta Manager Videos – Update

It has been pointed out to me that Soapbox is still in limited beta.

 

So you can view the Regatta Manager video’s on YouTube here and here.

Links

Scorbs on WPF and the Internet Sandbox

KarstenJ on Per Frame Animation

Beatriz Costa on CollectionView and CollectionViewSource

Skandia Cowes Week Videos

As I’ve mentioned before, Microsoft sent a film crew along to Skandia Cowes Week to see the Regatta Manager in action and below are the results. There is a technical and business version of the video.  Thanks again to Tim, Heather, Barbara and Ian at Microsoft who made this happen, and to Bubble Solutions for putting together this great film.  I’ll stop now as this is starting to sound like an Oscar acceptance speech…

SiSoft Regatta Manager – Business Edition

SiSoft Regatta Manager – Technical Edition

 

 

 

Skandia Cowes Week, Microsoft, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, SiSoft, Regatta Manager, Simon Middlemiss

An Inconvenient Truth

I recently watched Al Gore, the man who "used to be the next president of the United States" give his documentary.  It’s good, it’s informative and it’s scary as, well, the Earth flooding due to excessive ice melt.  I’m not sure what good it will do though without governments support, and even if they do, what good it will do without the United States taking a lead.  That’s why I hope this documentary and the promotional material and tours that are going with it are a prelude to a 2008 presedential bid. 

Al Gore isn’t what I really wanted to talk about though.

Today ITER received final sign off.  The biggest international science investment since the ISS, ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is a colaboration of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Russia and the US and is possibly the only sustainable way of providing energy needs once we inevitably burn up our remaining hydrocarbon supplies.

It is however an inconvenient truth that sustaining a nuclear fusion reaction which produces more energy than is required to keep it going has been and still is a long, long way off.  It has been estimated that we are 100 years away from an economic, mass producable fusion reactor capable of completely supporting the energy requirements of this planet.

Building on previous successful projects like the Joint European Torus, the ITER project is designed to replicate the entire lifetime of a commercial fusion reactor plant from construction starting next year through to 2016 when the first plasma is expected to be generted upto 2026 when small scale electricity generation is expected and then a decomissioning phase.

It is definately a long haul project, but the huge benefits of clean, virtually unlimited fuel are worth the time and money being spent on what will effectively be the most expensive, technologically advanced kettle in the world!

Iter, fusion, an inconvenient truth

Windows Vista and Office 2007 avaliable for download

The RTM drop of Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 are now both up on MSDN.  I’ve installed Office a couple of days ago and am almost as impressed as I was with Beta 2.  My biggest gripe is that I’d got used to the ‘Send’ button being on a ribbon in Outlook, but hey I’ll get used to it!

 

Having been stuck on Beta 2 of Vista for too long now I am looking forward to a clean install and to getting the Regatta Manager ported to the release code.  I am also looking forward to doing some new developments under the RTM version of WPF, especially as a couple of people have now said that it’s quite a bit faster than it used to be.  If that’s the case then kudos to the product team for getting some extra performance out of it in the last few weeks.

 

The one downside to all of this is that in about six months time the whole hype engine will start again with whatever the next set of new technologies will be (Orcas? Blackcomb?), there’s never any rest for the bleeding edge developer…I love it!

Meeting Richard Dawkins

Well, following the disaster that was getting to his talk and being turned away, it turned out the Italian restaurant we went to was really nice, and that following a couple of beers the entire thing seemed quite funny.  Anyway we managed to finish dinner quick enough to get back to the Oxford Union with enough time to have a drink at the bar and then queue up for the signing session.

Daz said something profound about the need for a rational voice in this day and age, and kept his tongue about the Allied Atheist Alliance, sea otters and Mrs Garrison.  I figured he’d heard it all before so just said thankyou to him for signing his book and asked politely if he would mind posing for a photo.

So here’s a really naff photo from my camera phone of Richard Dawkins and my bodyless head, the only proof of our strange outing to Oxford.

A Planet Sized Cockup

This evening (Tuesday 14th) Oxford Union were presenting Richard Dawkins reading from and speaking about his new book, ‘The God Delusion’ for which we bought tickets about 6 weeks ago. 

Having travelled for 3 hours, driven approximately 60 miles and dodged crazy on coming traffic on Wantage back roads due to a multi-car fire which closed the A34 North we arrived at the Oxford Union.  Spotting a huge queue of people trying to get in we joined the back only to be told about 10 minutes later that the venue was full and that we, along with the huge queue of people would not be able to get in. So we’re sitting in an Italian restaurant drinking beer and waiting for the signing session, which is in….frack. 15 minutes. So 60 miles, 3 hours and we’re not gonna even meet the guy…grrrrr….

Rant over.

Team Test

About a month back we had need to do some load testing, and due to a misunderstanding about what exactly Visual Studio Team System for Software Testers included and how that was different to the Load Test Agent, I overlooked it and started looking for a free web load tester. 

I eventually realised we had the tool we needed already, but I am actually glad I didn’t for two reasons, first because it gave me a better appreciation for where VSTS for Software Testers comes from and second as I was new to how load testing works and what tools were availiable I think I came away with a better understanding of why and how it can lead to a better end product.

Whether or not there is a shared code base between the three load testing tools that Microsoft have produced I don’t know, but the similarities and evolution are unmistakeable.  There is a logical progression from the ‘Web Application Stress Tool’ through ATC and then Team Test.  The end result being a finely tuned piece of software with incredible power.  We managed to identify problem areas, bottlenecks, bad data, plus a whole host of other things using it that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

Team Test is an excellent product, but it’s big, so take the time to learn how to use it properly. 

Check out Bill Barnett’s blog as a starting point, and this post inparticular, the ‘Monitoring and Analyzing a Load Test Result’ article on MSDN, plus the MSDN training resources from the Visual Studio Team System Developer Center.