Knowing .NET

John Montgomery points to this interesting article on the physical effects of Coca Cola. (Short version: you get a sugar spike, one more potent than you could stand if the taste of sugar wasn’t cut by the use of phosphoric acid.) 

I gave up my daily Coke early this year and, doing very little else, dropped from The Most I’ve Ever Weighed to Less Than I’ve Weighed In Fifteen Years. ~240 calories a day ~= 7200 calories per month ~= 2 pounds worth of calories. Once I learned to diagnose the “coming off the morning coffee, ingest coke” urge and manage it with a not-vastly-sugary snack, I haven’t really missed it on a daily basis. I still keep a six-pack around and I admit that I drink a can before Ultimate games!

Here’s a scholarly, but clearly written, article on a generalized algorithm for implementing dataflow using shared memory. Dataflow is a very intuitive calculation model (think “spreadsheet”). When I saw this paper I thought “Wasn’t it known that dataflow could be automatically parallelized?” but maybe not. One way or the other, it is now. The authors even show how their algorithm can be tweaked to improve cache coherency. Nice.

Sadly, it sounds all artsy-fartsy with the blimps moving towards sound or somesuch. Sigh. If your autonomous blimps can detect and move towards sound, at least let paint the target with a laser sighting device to instill an appropriate feeling of dread.

Plus, the party’s being held in a wind tunnel, so that doesn’t make these things sound like they could do much to prevent escape from The Village.

If I had an autonomous blimp (how many times have I typed that phrase over the years?), I would outfit it with targeting lasers and set it to work discovering the calling places of the invasive coqui frog, a dime-sized creature that produces a 110 dB (!) whistle.

Microsoft just announced that the next PDC will be held October 2 – 5 in Los Angeles. Forecast calls for lingering late-season wildfires and a chance of LINQ…

I spent about an hour last night playing with the release of XNA Game Studio. My first impression is that someone at Microsoft needs to contract me to write some tutorials! Heh heh heh.

Actually, I’m greatly looking forward to incorporating XNA into a series of articles I’m pitching on GPGPU programming. Basically, I’ve written the same program in Ruby, C#, C++, C++ with OpenMP, C++ with assembly language, HLSL, and I’d like to add implementations in Accelerator, PeakStream, and any other GPU-based languages / libraries I can find. It’ll be fascinating to see how the XBox 360 stacks up in “one design” racing. (BTW, as much as I love Ruby, it is slaughtered in this type of comparison.)

Say… I wonder if I could develop a tutorial that ran on the XBox 360 that combined audio-video / screencasts / etc. teaching how to program in XNA Studio. I mean, I know I could produce the tutorial, I just wonder if the “XNA Creator’s Club” would allow me to distribute it (i.e., sell it) via XBox Live. Hmmm….

Alan Zeichick brands ECMA a “vendor-driven standards body” and decries “the competitive aspects of turning one company’s impossible-to-implement spec into an industry standard.”

I’m a little more sanguine about ECMA, but only because I’m skeptical that standards (or open source) have nearly the importance they’re generally accorded. (I’m well aware that this is sacrilege.)

Rock Star
You scored 94%!
Link: The BASIC classic rock Test

Where’s the LHS on 6-x;? And does that say “parent friendly” under the “x++”?

I imagine that every single person who reads this blog other than my sister (Hi Donna!) knows who Jon Udell is and knows that he is joining Microsoft. In the small world of “people who make their living by writing about software development,” Jon is clearly the leading light on the technologies collectively known as “Web 2.0.”

Jon has the rare ability to move between high-level conversations with technology business leaders, advocating new ways of sharing information, and demonstrating technical points with his own code. He makes surprising connections between technologies and between technologies and homely matters (LibraryLookup and his walking tour). Typically, he’s constructed these demonstrations with very accessible tools — XML, JavaScript, etc.

There are two things that I worry about Jon’s new position:

• To what extent will the inherent imperative to advocate MS technologies stifle him?, and
• Will he be reduced to just a conduit of information (Microsoft’s new A-list blogger) or will he continue to contribute new creations?

Oh, and I’ll throw in:

• Will direct knowledge of unannounced initiatives keep him quiet on the very subjects on which he’s passionate?

Unfortunately, that last is almost a given. Whether the subject is the way that young people learn programming, design and implementation of dynamic languages, or concurrency, there have been thought leaders at Microsoft who’ve essentially “gone dark.” Presumably, that’s so that they can actually make something rather than talking about it, and I suppose there’s some value in that.

But there’s also value in people who are in the public realm batting around ideas without behing beholden to commercial interest, especially when those people have the rare ability to crank out demoes. One of the most encouraging things to come out of Microsoft in years was Ozzie’s “Live clipboard” — if the boss (or the boss plus a House-like crew of apprentices) produces small conceptual demoes, then one can guess that small conceptual demoes just might be a route to corporate success.

Finally, I have to say that it worries me a bit that Jon is leaving New Hampshire. One of the things that I’ve admired about him is that he showed that a person could have his finger on the pulse of the industry while living in the place that they love — I very consciously took Jon as an example when making the decision to move to Hawai’i.

For a few years, I’ve been a happy subscriber to Musicmatch Universal, a system that gave me on-demand streaming of a sizeable music catalog. Musicmatch also had a $.99 song-purchase facility from which I bought a few songs. Although I’ve always hated the Musicmatch player (bloated, self-updating, etc.) I was content enough. Oh, sure I had to “authorize” my hardware, but how hard was that?

If you’re shaking your head in disgust at my naivete, fair enough: I’m neither 8 nor 80 and I ought to know better than to trust a technology company to provide service. But, you know, just because you know something unethical is prone to happen, it doesn’t make it less unethical when it does.

Musicmatch was bought by Yahoo. One day, for some reason I allowed my Musicmatch Player to update itself into the Yahoo Music Player. “Sign in with your Yahoo id” it prompts. “Uh oh!” I thought, since Musicmatch used my email address and my Yahoo id is something different. But perhaps they’ll map the two behind the scenes — it’s not like that’s rocket science.

Of course they don’t. I now no longer have Musicmatch software and all of the songs I bought refuse to play on any device. Of course they don’t respond to my customer service complaints. It turns out that the amount of music I’d bought was not just a handful, but perhaps a dozen albums or so worth of legally purchased, royalty-paying music. Music that was so easy and convenient to buy digitally that I didn’t give it a thought. Except that now that it’s been taken away from me by the vagaries of the industry, I shan’t ever buy DRM’ed music again. 

Instead, I’ll think about this experience and the greed and incompetence of the music industry. I’ll think “Those frackers took more than a hundred dollars from me, is it immoral for me to recover that music (illegal, yes, but immoral)?” At best, they’ve converted me to buying CDs and ripping them. At worst, they’ve made piracy tempting.

Yes. Right. Geeks are supposed to know that DRM only inconveniences the honest and does nothing to deter the dishonest. Lesson learned.