Hmm...

This is cool.

Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code

Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

InformationWeek

Mine just died.

Turned it off after around two months of constant used.

Waited 10 seconds.

Turned it back on.

Kernel doesn't load.

I tried everything on the Web to get it going again.

Good thing for external USB backups.

Buffalo Technology - Products - TeraStation Pro™ II

I just got done running the Seattle Half Marathon.

13.1 miles of pure goodness.

I forgot my timing chip at home, so I decided to run it nice and slow.

Besides, I really didn't train at all -- I think I did one long run of 10 miles about 6 weeks ago.

I saw some of the trainers from the ProClub about halfway in -- they signed up for the walk, but decided run it.

This is my fourth half-marathon and likely my slowest (~2:20), but it was the funniest long run I have done in a some time.

I saw the below ads on my site today and just had to post them.

Reading this now.  I am very impressed.  I don't know why I haven't dived right into this before.

The Golden Bough - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/187010572/

"Microsoft has quietly launched a competitor to Google Apps for your domain, Windows Live Community Builder."

I use Google App for Domain to get my douglasp.com email, etc.

I can't believe that I haven't heard about this yet...

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

I think that many people know this passage from the Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer on the explosion of the first atomic bomb (in NV).

I recently completed the Gita (not in Sanskirt ) and couldn't find this quote anywhere.

I did, however, read this passage that I kept coming back to again and again:

I am all-powerful Time which destroys all things, and I have come here to slay these men.  Even if thou dost not fight, all the warriors facing thee shall die.

Arise therefore! Win they glory, conquer thine enemies, and enjoy thy kingdom.  Through the fate of their karma I have doomed them to die:  be thou the means of my work.

 

Drona, Bhishma, Jayd-ratha and Karna, and other heroic warriors of this great war have already been slain by me: tremble not, fight and slay them.  Thou shalt conquer thine enemies in battle.

It turns out that this passage is exactly the one quoted by Oppenheimer (the first sentence that is).

I did not realize that he had learned Sanskrit and read the Gita in the original tongue, thus the difference.

I think the reason that I was drawn to this passage was that it reminded me of First Samuel 17:45-47:

... Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.

This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcases of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.

And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear: for the battle is the Lords, and he will give you into our hands.

The really interesting thing about my reading of the Gita was that I was listening to Thus Spake Zarathustra on audiobook.

I have read this several different times, but this time it was intense.  Maybe it was the verbalization or maybe it was the combination with the Gita or maybe both.  Maybe it was there was an element of spirituality justification (via the Gita) for phrases like the below:

"Why so hard!"--said to the diamond one day the charcoal; "are we then not near relatives?"

Why so soft? O my brethren; thus do I ask you: are ye then not--my brethren?

Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks?

And if ye will not be fates and inexorable ones, how can ye one day-- conquer with me? And if your hardness will not glance and cut and chip to pieces, how can ye one day--create with me?

For the creators are hard. And blessedness must it seem to you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax, Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass, harder than brass, nobler than brass.  Entirely hard is only the noblest.

This new table, O my brethren, put I up over you: BECOME HARD!

Another interesting thing was that I really saw (at least in my translation) the real level of affiliation that Buddhism has with Hinduism...

Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita

I happen to have worked on a nice framework to build WS-* services.  I happen to have worked on a nice framework to build REST services.  It turns out the same framework can be used for NET-* services too.  It also turns out the same framework can be used for MSMQ services.

Actually now that I think about it, the framework I worked on can be used to build just about any kind of service you can dream up -- even whatever REST++ is called (trust me, there will be a REST++).  That wasn't an accident, it was the plan. 

We can debate the relative value of all of the above approaches, but the only thing I care about is the ability to communicate data between potentially heterogeneous parties in whatever way possible.  WCF does that, so I am happy. 

That said and at the risk continuing to be labeled a WS-* fanboy, there is a lot of value in what was done in WS-*.

There is the business value.  Think about the world in 1998-2000 (when all this got started).  The conversation used to be about what Java application server you were going to use.  Now it is about how you are going to build your REST or WS-* (SOA) services (implementation details are somewhat interesting, but not the key point anymore).  The Web did a lot of this, but WS-* helped change that whole conversation, especially in the enterprise.

There is the technical value.  Yes, there is some.  The key thing for me is writing down the 'model' for the service.  What are the messages, what are the transmission requirements, etc.  With these 'models' in place, you can do some really interesting things (WCF does somethings here, but we are looking at taking this to a whole new level in some of the other work we are doing). 

Sure, there are things I wish I could have changed.  I do wish we had seen the importance of GET earlier.  I do wish we had seen that pure binary payloads without the Infoset are just fine.  I do wish we had had simpler formats to write down the 'models' (XSD & WSDL (and maybe even XML) just don't cut it).  We have already addressed the first two in WCF and we may have something in mind around the last.

That all said, I think we have delivered significant value to both the industry and our enterprise customers in the form of WS-*.  More importantly, we have well served all of our customers, including those using REST, WS-*, and even customers still using DCOM, with WCF.

I think this may be my last post on this whole WS-*/REST thing.  If you just use WCF, everything is fine.  If you can't use WCF and you are in a enterprise, you should consider using some product that supports WS-*, especially if federated security, transactions, reliable messaging are important.  If you can't use WCF and you are in the Internet, you should consider using some product that has a nice HTTP stack (nee REST).

As for me, I am clearly working on something else.

WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice

You may know some folks on my team from either PDC/TechEd, their books, or their standards work:  Don, Chris, Clemens, Chris, Gudge (update your blog), Mr. Schlimmer, and many others...

I can't tell you what we are doing exactly (although if you search around enough, you can read between the lines), but I can tell you that we are hiring.

We need:

• Experienced language designers and/or compiler front-end/back-end developers
• Example:  You designed a language at some other company (or within Microsoft ).
• Example:  You designed and implemented a front-end or back-end for a production compiler at some other company (or within Microsoft).
• "UI framework" developers
• Example:  You have designed and implemented a framework for rich, interactive user experiences at some other company (or within Microsoft).

If you read one of the above examples and thought, "Wow, that describes what I have done or currently do" and you are interested, please send me an email at douglasp@microsoft.com.

We should have positions posted on some external site shortly, but I want to get ahead of the game.