Herb Sutter has in the past year made a convincing case that “the free lunch is over” for performance and that languages cannot ignore concurrency and remain relevant. His PDC talk introduces his thoughts for “Concur:” a set of conforming extensions to C++ that provides high-level abstractions (“active” objects and “future” results). In my opinion, the best talk of the PDC and it’s available online.

 He also briefly mentions C++/LINQ, which is the first I’ve heard about a commitment towards providing that capability in C++.

 (I’m confused how it can be “conforming” though, since at the very least it seems to require active as a keyword, but…)

Via http://www.peterprovost.org/archive/2005/10/17/8707.aspx: …this link from EclipseZone.com announcing that Ward is going to be joining the Eclipse Foundation…

Ward Cunningham’s joining Microsoft was (rightly) touted by that company as a bit of a coup. Cunningham is univerally admired for his ability to conceive of and implement simple yet powerful concepts, including the Wiki and FIT and was a prime early mover in the promotion of software pattern languages. He was touted, at Microsoft, as bringing credibility towards their efforts to improve their programming-in-the-large experience. Seemingly, all that came of that was the MSDN Patterns & Practices section, which is almost certainly not the culmination of Cunningham’s hopes and dreams for working at Redmond.

We went down to the start of the Ironman yesterday morning. It’s a great spectacle: 1800 athletes all of whom intend to do something that I couldn’t possibly accomplish. The race begins at 7:00 and the cut-off for finish is midnight, so you have 17 hours in which to: swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run a full marathon. Along a course that runs through a vast lava field, so not only do you have in-the-shade temperatures in the 80s, but incredible black-body radiation (I mean, imagine biking 112 miles through a parking lot).

 An 80-year-old did it with about :45 minutes to spare. Which I thought was impressive until I saw that he had been beaten by a 76-year-old nun. Other especially impressive athletes include Sarah Reinertsen, a full-leg amputee and Johnny Blais, who has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Not that anyone who does it deserves anything but total respect.

 Then, to get out of town, we went up to the summit of Mauna Kea (13,796 feet) to get a tour of the telescopes. Serious geekery.

 The hour or so before sunset on Mauna Kea is incredibly beautiful. The strong inversion layer which gives the mountain such exceptional seeing means that you’re looking down on a sea of clouds and, as the sun lowers, you see an incredible effect where the mountain’s shadow becomes visible, projected into the sky and clouds to the East.

The sunset itself has deep colors but at least last night was not really better than what we get every night from our lanai.

As soon as the colors started to fade we scampered out of the freezing air (it was probably high 30s) down to the visitor’s center at 9,000 feet where there was a Hula Kahiko performance (“ancient” hula: very different and to me vastly better than modern hula and nothing like the skirt-shaking stuff you get at a resort luau). What a rocking day, although by the time we got home we were all dog-tired.

I needed to install Visual Basic on my development Tablet but the VS2005 RC installer blew up when I tried to do that, so I ended up uninstalling Whidbey, but before I could install the RC, I also had to uninstall SQL Server 2005. And then, when everything gets finally re-installed (after, like 8 hours of the machine of uninstall, install fails, uninstall something else, reinstall, etc.) my defect tracking software isn’t working anymore, since apparently it was connecting by way of my now-uninstalled Yukon.

Gawd, I can’t wait for this stuff to ship.

"Persisting Ink on the Web" walks through each of the following tasks:

• Transferring Ink to another Ink-Enabled Control on the Same Page
• Transferring Ink to an Ink Control on Another Page in a New Browser Window
• Moving Ink to Another Page in the Same Browser Window
• Transferring Ink to Another Page as a GIF
• Storing Ink in an XML File on the Web Server to Be Used at a Later Time
• Storing and Retrieving Ink from a SQL Server Database
• Sending Ink to a Web Service
• Surviving a Postback

I just found out you can use animated GIFs in Windows Forms applications – “it just works” when you set the Image property of a PictureBox to an animated GIF. Good to know.

casey chesnut, whose propensity for lower-casing his name ticks off Word auto-correction, says that it is a myth that the best way to be hired as a programmer is to code something cool. casey's right. He’s proved by his Web postings that he can write: neural nets to defeat CAPTCHA, machine vision applications, speech-based interfaces, mobile code, etc. At the very least, it’s clear that when given a problem he’s not going to be sitting around, stumped and discouraged.

Cool doesn’t work: once upon a time, I wrote a column called “Expert’s Toolbox” for a magazine called “AI Expert.” I published stuff like the first genetic algorithm in C++, the first fuzzy logic engine in C++, and the second C++ neural network (missed being first by 3 months! Darn it!). At the time, this was considered cool stuff. I can’t quite say it never made me a dime because my neural network code was used in a mumble mumble developed by mumble mumble and apparently used until at least the late-90s. But essentially, the cool stuff was worthless. Then, in the mid-90s, I programmed what was probably the first profitable non-pornographic Website (a registration system for the Software Development conference – one of the first 10,000 sites on the Web), wrote the first technical article on Java, the first article on servlets, and developed the first XML-driven Web site. Did I make any money off of that stuff? A little, but not much.

You want to know what made me money? Any of this cool stuff? Oh no. Reservation systems. Several years ago, when XML expertise was still relatively rare, I was hired to do what we’d now call the “Web Service” portion of an airline / hotel / car reservation engine targetting medium-sized corporations. Once I got a reputation in that field, the phone rang off the hook.

• Every business in the world must have a computerized inventory-management system.
• Inventory control is domain-specific. If your inventory is seats, you can’t use a system designed to sell books. If your inventory is pencil leads, you can’t use a system designed to sell slots in a marina.
• The best way for an individual or small company to make money in software is to develop inventory control software for a niche. You’ll make money selling it, but you’ll make a ton more customizing and supporting it.

The problem with that is that from a coding standpoint, it’s insanely boring. Believe me, once you’ve solved all the variations of “What if the employee wants to add a lay-over in the middle of the trip and bring a companion along using frequent flyer points and upgrade using their credit card?” you really, really miss watching genetic algorithms co-evolving.

Scoble laments that when asked “new york hotels” search engines do not know the difference between “hotels named new york” and “hotels in new york” (or, to some extent, “new hotels in york”). Scoble wants the initial search-engine return to include questions intended to refine the search. Danny Sullivan agrees, saying that Ask Jeeves had such a thing, but the cost of humans creating relevant questions was difficult.

Here’s the solution, I think. You just throw a bunch of question templates “Are you looking for the history of X?” “Are you looking for reviews of X?” etc., hook them up with random Bayesian connections, and update them as necessary.

What I did this weekend:

 “Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior” has a lot of buzz about introducing the “next Jackie Chan.” Tony Jaa has amazingly spring-y legs and the movie has a couple of sequences that show off his talents pretty well – 720 reverse roundhouse kicks, twisting barrel kicks, sliding under trucks while doing full splits, etc. – and there are a few nice imaginings (a trove of looted Buddha heads floating serenely in cargo nets beneath a crowded harbor), but the plot and dialogue are dreadful even by the most forgiving standards. Also, every fight seems to move towards the same ridiculous “finishing move:” a flying elbow delivered not to the temple nor the jaw nor the ear nor any other place remotely vulnerable, but downward to the crown of the head. Very disappointing.

 “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” ought to be subtitled “Get to the point already!” It is 840 pages of clear, often delightful, occasionally enchanting prose. A few things happen around page 500, and then some other stuff occurs in the mid-600s, and then the last 60-pages are chock-a-block full of action. Unfortunately, these last scenes are filled with characters suddenly revealing capabilities and weaknesses and modes of action which are unsupported by the gazillion preceding words. Not entirely, to be fair, but enough so that one rather resents having attended to them for several hundred pages and having achieved so little insight. Clearly published with the hope of being received as “Harry Potter for adults,” it’s definitely worth reading, but could have been twice as good at half the length.