Nova Spivack posted this praise of digital physics and Julie Lerman reports that Stephen Wolfram is coming to her neck of the woods. Digital physics, of which Wolfram’s book A Kind of Science hopes to be the Principia, posits the idea that the universe is computational in nature, which is to say that behavior over time (gravity, mass, etc.) comes from repeated application of a (relatively) small set of rules to a matrix of state changing automata. Cellular automata are used as their model. CA are a fascinating topic, but to me digital physics has always seemed a non-starter: Buckminster Fuller anticipated my objection with this quote: "To how many places does nature carry out PI when she makes each successive bubble in the white-cresting surf of each successive wave before nature finds out that PI can never be resolved?... And at what moment in the making of each separate bubble in the Universe does nature decide to terminate her eternally frustrated calculating and instead turn out a fake sphere?"

All week I’ve been trying to synch up Visual Studio versions with SQL Server versions. I finally got the right combo: first intall SQL Server 2005 September CTP (en SQL2005 STD Servers Sept2005.iso and en SQL2005 STD Tools Sept2005.iso) and then VS 2005 Team Suite Release Candidate (en vs 2005 team suite dvd rc.iso). Works for me.

Philip Greenspun suggests the use of the mobile phone as identity and storage and an “appliance” into which the phone plugs as the general purpose computer used to perform “home” computing tasks (email, browsing, playing games, etc.) Having used Sun’s SunRay thin clients back in the dot-com days, I can attest to the user-friendliness of “plug and play” computing – put your smart card into any computer in the company and get your desktop. Very, very nice experience. However, I think the idea of a dumbed-down appliance-based OS has been tried and failed – WebTV springs to mind, Audrey, all of those things.

Having praised the SunRay experience, I must also share why I think thin clients are the worst idea ever. At a trade show critical to our company’s success, we uncrated a dozen SunRay’s into the room in which we would be demonstrating our technology. We hooked up the server and booted the system. Every SunRay booted. Every SunRay got to some driver. Every SunRay said “Oh, updated driver. Install and reboot.” Every SunRay shut down. Every SunRay booted. Every SunRay got to some driver. Every SunRay said “Oh, updated driver. Install and reboot.” And so the loop continued.

Our IT guys worked for hours trying to resolve the problem. We had Sun on the phone. We had Oracle on the phone. How could we get a different server? Apparently there were SunRay’s in that town where they filmed The Truman Show and there was some discussion of commandeering their hardware. Eventually, the CEO gave our IT his American Express and said “Go to Office Depot and buy 20 PCs.” And at the end of the show he said “Go to Office Depot and return the 20 PCs.” (An edict typical of our CEOs moral sense.)

Thin clients suck.

Owen Braun discusses one of the new organizational features of OneNote 12 (multiple folders) and has a couple of screenshots.

Kevin Schofield tells of Microsoft’s “central archive of reports from usability tests and user studies on ts products. The reports date all the way back to 1989.” Oh, wouldn’t I love to be able to read what that has to say about Tablet PC user interfaces!

I grabbed the domain languageintegratedquery.com and languageintegratedquery.info (don’t surf – the DNS isn’t set up yet!) and would like to build a community-oriented site that:

1. Serves as a language-inclusive repository for LINQ examples,
2. Provides a forum for discussing LINQ techniques and patterns,
3. Provides technical information on LINQ infrastructure (e.g., implementation, performance, etc.), and
4. Provides an entry point to LINQ related news (i.e., a LINQ linkblog)

The most important technical requirement I have is that the site infrastructure support multiple “timespans” for articles:

1. Long-lived articles (worked-out examples, technical information),
2. Transient news (i.e., blog-style FIFO, “recent news” / calendar-oriented “archives”), and
3. Discussion forums

Nowhere near as important, but the lack of which really bugs me about blog software: I’d like to be able to schedule articles for posting (i.e., “Sunday at 3AM, post the week’s new articles).

Anyway, I currently use dasBlog for this Website, which works great for transient, but poor for articles and discussion. I’ve got FlexWiki already installed on this server for other purposes, and it works for articles, but not for transient news and I don’t think Wiki-based discussions are very effective. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Partially cloudy and 80 degrees here in Hawaii. Hurricane Jova seems to be safely slicing towards the  North. Another day in paradise!

In comments, Mark Mehelis asked some good questions re. LINQ:

• As far as I can tell the syntax between VB and C# is not the same. Do you know why this is? Would it not be better to have this be consistent accross the languages?

The syntax does indeed vary between languages. A consistent query language would definitely have been easier to learn, but what LINQ provides is a set of consistent query operators that can be incorporated into languages in whatever way the language designer sees fit. This makes LINQ slightly less teachable (it will vary from language to language) but perhaps more appealing to language designers, since they aren’t forced to accept a query language that differs from their own language design philosophy. Vick (VB) is emphasizing familiarity and a SQL-like syntax, Hejlsberg (C#) is emphasizing functional-style programming forms. This is also a good place to point out that languages can use the underlying APIs even if they do not implement language extensions.

• Is there some way to have all your LINQ based access through a repository of some type. It would be to easy to pepper queries throughout your code making it a string pulling excersize when your application gained some size.

This is an interesting idea. I haven’t worked with actual LINQ code enough to actually wrap my head around how it affects coupling and cohesion, so I don’t know. We don’t yet know what patterns are productive in LINQ-using programs. Obviously, you could put all your queries in a single class behind a façade and even put that class into its own namespace / assembly. Would that be a good idea? Not sure.

• Also what happens when the underlying data structure in the DB changes? Must you re-compile your code? recreate your classes and then change your LINQ queries?

You definitely should not have to recompile on a DB change, you almost certainly do if you’re querying objects.

Microsoft's reorganization will apparently lump the existing seven divisions:

• Information Worker, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Visio®, Microsoft Project, and other stand-alone desktop applications.
• Windows Client, including the Microsoft® Windows® XP desktop operating system, Windows 2000, and Windows Embedded operating system.
• Server and Tools, including the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, software developer tools, and MSDN®.
• Home and Entertainment, including Microsoft Xbox®, consumer hardware and software, online games, and our TV platform.
• MSN, including the MSN® network, MSN Internet Access, MSNTV, MSN Hotmail® and other Web-based services.
• Microsoft Business Solutions, encompassing Great Plains and Navision business process applications, and bCentral™ business services.
• Mobile and Embedded Devices, featuring mobile devices including the Windows Powered Pocket PC, the Mobile Explorer microbrowser, and the Windows Powered Smartphone software platform.

under three "core" divisions:

• Platforms and Services, under Jim Allchin (who'll retire after Vista ships) and Kevin Johnson
• Business, under Jeff Raikes, and
• Entertainment and Devices, under Robbie Bach

It looks like what they’ve done is put the cash cows under Allchin / Johnson, given Bach a “do-able” challenge, and given Raikes the hardest nut to crack Correction: They gave Raikes Office. Pretty hard to lose money with that... 

Given the size of the Allchin / Johnson “Platforms and Services” division, it’s hard to believe that this will in any way shatter the fiefdoms and levels of middle-manager bureaucracy which are Microsoft’s most serious organizational challenge.

Grrr… Despite the assurances of the salesmen at the PDC, the “Expression bluetooth keyboard” is not compatible with the Tablet PC. So now I have a portable keyboard that only works with my cellphone. Like that’s an important feature. Anyone know of a decent note-taker / outliner for the Smartphone?

For all my concern about the session depths, I will say this: the PDC05 t-shirt is made from a very nice cotton.

Sigh. I’m just ramping up on a project. Client sez all the right things: “best practices,” “do the right thing,” etc. We develop an architectural proposal; they sign off on it. We develop our first prototype, they say “Whoa, nelly! What’s with all them thar interfaces and patterns and whatnot? Couldn’t you just… you know… simplify things?” It drives me crazy: this idea that fewer classes (or, what they really mean, fewer source code files) means “easy to understand.” I’m not talking about “you ain’t gonna’ need it,” either – I’m talking about people complaining about separating interfaces from implementation. Why are all the good clients taken?

casey chesnut, who does things like integrate machine vision into videogames and writes neural nets that defeat CAPTCHAs, says that the PDC was the best conference he’s ever been to, so I guess I’m in the minority in thinking that it wasn’t hardcore enough.

First, I tried in a VPC. That didn’t work because it wouldn’t accept the activation code.

Second, I used PartitionMagic to add a new 20GB partitition on my boot drive. Still wouldn’t accept the activation code. Solved: Realized that I was trying to install PDC disk 1 instead of PDC disk 5. Disk 1 is the public beta of Vista, but at least my copy of “The Details” gives the same activation key for both – in other words, the activation key only works for the Disk 5 PDC build, not the Disk 1 public beta build.

 So, began to install PDC build on my new partition, but the “Choose where to install” dialog refused to recognize my boot drive as a valid place; only my data drive. Rebooted into XP, and BootMagic wouldn’t recognize my data drive as a valid place to install a new OS, only my boot drive. So I put a new partition on my data drive and figured I’d figure it out later.

Installed the PDC Vista build on the new partition in my data drive (which apparently is seen by Vista as the valid boot drive). Install went okay. When the system boots, I see the Microsoft boot manager, giving me a choice between Vista and XP. Choosing Vista gives me a classic DOS prompt saying that HAL.DLL is corrupt or missing. Booting into XP brings me back into my normal system and in fact I can see that my Vista install (on drive E: or somesuch) doesn’t have a HAL.DLL at all. Copying the XP HAL.DLL to my Vista \Windows\System32 doesn’t help.

I actually suspect that the Vista boot is not going to the Vista drive at all, that some weird combination of cables and boot managers has screwed things up. Now my debate is whether I should:

1. Swap cables and see if I boot off my data drive, or
2. Try to install under VPC, or
3. Delete the partitions and wait ‘til next year

I loved the first day of PDC, felt a little antsy by the second, and by the time my flight climbed into the early-morning smog of LA yesterday, I was positively muddled. Speaking in a darkened room to a crowd of strangers is the most inefficient means of communication imaginable, but it used to be that conferences were the only place to learn topics that were insufficient in and of themselves to justify a book and too complex or too esoteric to earn a spot in one of the handful of trade magazines. Now, though, blogging and screencasts have thoroughly risen to the challenge of delivering introductory discussions as well as “tips and tricks.” By the third day of the PDC I was attending 300-level classes and furiously thinking “Go on! Go on! Get to the hard stuff!”

In particular, I couldn’t find sessions that gave me insight into LINQ or Workflow which, along with Atlas, were the major technologies introduced at the conference. Did I see LINQ and Workflow? Yes. Did I see more in the sessions than I saw in the keynotes? Barely. I saw the equivalent of “Hello, World” over and over and in almost every case, I noted sleight-of-hand – a declaration of great capacity bolstered by a demo that, in fact, was without the slightest complexity. I come away from PDC05 feeling that I’m ready to download and install these technologies, but I don’t feel that I have a competitive advantage over developers who chose not to attend the PDC05. I don’t feel that I can go to customers and advise them on these technologies in a way that justifies charging them for that advice. Do the technologies look cool? Sure. Do I have a personal feeling on their worth? Sure. Do I come away from PDC05 knowing where are the corners and sweetspots of the technologies? Absolutely not, despite that type of knowledge being one of the few things that justify the time and expense of traveling to a conference.

These issues and this criticism of the conference structure is not peculiar to the PDC. “Conference sessions” are to the Internet Age what buggy-whips were to the Automotive Age. I just wished that I realized that prior to fastening my seatbelt for the flight home.