Knowing .NET

First John Lam and now John Montgomery have dropped broad hints that they will be making announcements at Mix, Microsoft’s April-May show in Las Vegas targeted primarily at Web developers. Obviously, if one were planning on discussing something substantively at the PDC in early October, one might announce it in early May. Hmm… I wasn’t planning on attending Mix, but y’know, I love announcements.

On the other hand, the Pussycat Dolls are the entertainment at the party and if there’d be one thing more depressing than standing around being reminded that I’m no kid anymore, it’d be doing it to a lip-synched version of “Dontcha.”

I knew the Go-Gos. I saw the Go-Gos. The Go-Gos were friends of mine (well, Kathy once met my eyes and smiled and in that moment, I think there was a real connection). The Pussycat Dolls are no Go-Gos.

Brief and funny.

A company’s developed a hamster ball in which you run while wearing VR goggles. My initial reaction was scorn, but adopting Mom’s best “who cares what others think of how you look?” attitude, I have to admit it’s kind of… well, I can’t bring myself to say that I think it’ll succeed, but it does have a certain elegance of function.

Synchronicity-ously, last night I was reading New Scientist’s straight-faced pooh-poohing of the question “Could the world’s energy crisis be solved by a sufficient quantity of hamsters running on wheels?” My favorite response delved into the question of whether caged wheel-running was natural or stereotypic behavior; I learned that if you give hamsters bedding of 20cm or more, their wheel-running drops dramatically. I can’t wait until the next cocktail party!

 Okay, this is pure gloating, but I get paid (or, at least, can justify time spent on…) to think about things as diverse as quantum computing, Ruby IDEs, and trustworthy Trackbacks. Even better, when Tina heard the humpback songstream she invoked a ‘We live in Hawaii’ break and we went up to freedive Puako Bay, where the whales sounded so close we kept expecting to see them appear in the distance (of course, they were actually about half-a-mile away).

So much better than having a nice car…

I’m arranging an interview with a VP at D-Wave, the quantum computer company. Any topics I should be sure to cover?

My long-time favorite Java editor JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA has added a Ruby plug-in that supports Rails. My initial reaction is that the vitally important quality of code completion is well below that of both Ruby In Steel and Komodo. Don’t be too excited by the presence of the Analyze and Refactor menus either — they’re non-functional (or at least I couldn’t get them to work).

The little “ruby” icon beside ‘def HeloWorld’ navigates to the view for the action — that’s pretty slick. You can generate Rails entities (controllers, etc.) via right-click context menus and you can Rake from within IDEA.

My quick feeling is that the plug-in, while welcome, seems to fall well short of the functionality in Komodo and Ruby In Steel much less the full array of functionality available in IDEA (or even ReSharper).

I wonder if anyone else is working on a Ruby IDE.

Hmm… If a site delays its association with a spammer until after it’s been insinuated as a “friend” within target blogs, it can at a ripe moment trigger a slew of spammy FOAFbacks. Thoughts?

Sexy cetacean sounds… oh yeah, baby …

Showing how clueless aggregator sites are, no one seems to be properly freaking out about the claims of D-Wave to be demoing a 16-qubit quantum computer with plans for a 1K-qubit computer within a year. CNet story here, straight link to company here.

The shocking thing about this is that a quantum computer’s information processing ability goes up exponentially as its qubits increase. I believe that Shor’s algorithm factors at O(n) (goodbye standard cryptography) and Grover’s algorithm sorts at O(n^2). The theoretical power is even more mind-blowing: small numbers of qubits can model incredibly complex things (I’m not going to post the thing I’m thinking of without finding a source).

What triggers a certain skepticism is that the few-qubit computers that have been developed didn’t look like they were going to scale and everyone expected it to be quite a slog to find a scalable architecture. D-Wave’s claims imply a huge breakthrough; of course, given the epochal nature of such a breakthrough, very smart people have been looking for just such a thing.

I’m utterly stunned. I use to play with simulating quantum computations and tried in vain to develop algorithmic design methods that were comprehensible, but I did not expect a significant quantum computer until the 2020s.

An “official replica” of the movie bird was stolen from a restaurant in San Francisco.

The reward would be higher, but with a dollar of this, you can buy ten dollars of talk.