rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for May, 2006
May 8, 2006 at 5:32 pm · Filed under Web 2.0
I’ve finally gotten around to listening to the discussion about links and the link economy between Steve Gillmor and Doc Searls (part I, II). Definitely worth a listen.
Good thing, too, since I stepped into an argument about this on Jim’s blog and found him taking issue and posting about it. Jim’s initial point was regarding a recent Seth Goldstein post, Attentrons on the cutting room floor, and specifically the statement:
Strong web bloggers no longer link.
Jim concludes that non-linkers are not blogging, that they are actually columnists, and says:
I [. . .] recognize that sometimes bloggers feel that it is no longer necessary to provide links to source information so that their readers can get context, further information, or view those that came up with the original idea credit.
He goes on to say (in response to me and, to some “elite”, of which I am not one):
The notion that links are merely to build readership is rather frightening to me. It says to me that conversation is important until you reach a point where you can pontificate. That blogging is a culture to grow TechnoPriests. What a drag that would be.
What I should have said is that as a new blogger, linking is required to get into the conversation. I do this not to build readership as I flipply suggested, but to be a part of a community — if readership was truly my goal, I would go on a snark hunt or something.
While there must be those who refrain from linking due to their own elitism and to withhold credit, suggesting this is the motive behind the whole “non-linking” crowd ignores the argument being made. To be fair, I don’t think Jim is ascribing these motives to all non-linkers; however, I cannot agree with the claim that not linking is not blogging. And if he turns out to be right (i.e., once the definition of blogging is finally complete), I suspect it won’t matter. Things are changing, blogs are evolving, tools are getting better. Coupling RSS, gestures, and discovery engines will bring more of the right information without relying on the sacred link.
In terms of the arguments against links, I boil this down to a few points:
- The link-model supports the page-view model. Steve is looking past this model.
- Decorating your text with links interrupts your writing (i.e., the reading). This isn’t about controlling the user, it is about composition.
- Linking is often excessive and can be insulting to your readers.
Steve Gillmor makes his points in his podcasts as well as on his blog — he doesn’t need me to make them for him. Read his latest, Back in the U.S.S.R, on this very topic.
May 6, 2006 at 4:47 pm · Filed under Grid Computing
The Digipede CEO, John T. Powers, has begun blogging at Powers Unfiltered. This will turn out to be an interesting blog. Aside from being really smart, John is funny and opinionated.
Our partner Nathan asks,
when do we get Powers filtered?
BTW: you may recognize his blog template . . . if any of you IE CSS wizards know how to fix the white gap between the header graphic and menu, let me know. John will buy you a drink. 😉
Update: Thanks to Shannon Whitley for the simple fix to the header. It still looks better in Firefox, but I’ll tweak it.
Tags: Digipede, grid
May 5, 2006 at 12:57 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Just yesterday I compared the Digipede Network to Sun Grid. One point I made was that our product is very easy to use . . .
Of course, I’m biased, but: stay tuned for an upcoming independent review that contrasts the Digipede Network favorably against Sun Grid on this very point.
Little did I know that the review would be just a day away.
The review Gridlock Alert For Sun Grid? goes further than I thought. It slams Sun Grid and speaks well of our product. You can see it all in the article’s subheading:
Analysis finds hidden costs in Sun platform, while competing Digipede offering shines
The article also specifically supports my earlier point. The reviewing engineers gave up after spending five hours trying to get something to work on Sun Grid. On the Digipede Network, it took approximately 1/2 hour. In the reviewer’s words:
The difference in ease of use in Sun Grid vs. Digipede was enormous.
Thanks for the great review!
CRN has a more comprehensive review of the Digipede Network here: Grid Computing Turns .Net Into Enterprise Powerhouse.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid, SunGrid
May 4, 2006 at 10:05 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Jon Udell, lead analyst at InfoWorld, recently posted a screencast of the Sun Grid Compute Utility (Screening Room #4: The Sun grid compute utility).
I enjoy reading Mr. Udell on his blog and in InfoWorld as well as listening to him on the Gillmor Gang. He brings together both the broad view of an industry analyst with the deep dive on the technical only achieved by a developer. In fact, he is a developer (for example, he recently deployed metadata searching and exploring services for InfoWorld).
In the Sun Grid Utility screencast, Mr. Udell does a good job of quickly showing the major functionality of the Utility and the Compute Server project (i.e., Java APIs for communicating with the Utility). The screencast is not too different from the webcasts we do for the Digipede Network, our distributed computing solution for the Microsoft .NET platform. The quality of Mr. Udell’s questions in his screencast are on par with the best questions we get in our webcasts — he clearly groks distributed computing.
Sun Grid appears simple but is deceptively hard to use. Simplicity was a primary reason we developed the Digipede Network: we don’t think distributed computing needs to be complicated. I think we have been pretty successful at that. Of course, I’m biased, but: stay tuned for an upcoming independent review that contrasts the Digipede Network favorably against Sun Grid on this very point.
The Digipede Network is a Windows-focused product that shares some similarities to Sun Grid (specifically Sun Grid Engine). Here are some differences between the Digipede Network and Sun Grid:
- We do .NET 1.1 and 2.0, as well as command-line and other stand-alone applications.
- We have full support for COM on both the front-end and on the distributed program.
- .NET and COM developers can serialize assemblies, data and objects into messages do be distributed for execution.
- Our SDK and community site includes samples in many languages (C#, Python, PHP, VB6, VB Script). We plan to put together a Java example, though honestly the demand hasn’t been that great.
- The SDK integrates with VS2003 and VS2005, supplying developers with samples, a developer guide, API documentations, and XML schemas for Intellisense.
- We have a Workbench that allows you to design your jobs without writing any code.
- Our Agents are smart about data and applications. They can cache persistent applications and move data from and to file servers and web sites (in addition to the messaging described above).
- Applications can be configured externally.
- Jobs can be defined through XML or programmatically.
- We have a much richer user experience for control and monitoring of jobs through an ASP.NET Web site.
- You don’t need Solaris 😉
If you want to see this stuff in action, sign up for one of our webinars here or go to MSDN. They recently hosted two webinars on the Digipede Network: Object-Oriented Programming for Grid: Grid Computing for .NET and Advanced .NET Programming for Grid Computing.
And Mr. Udell, we would love to do a screencast with you, too.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid, SunGrid, Udell
May 3, 2006 at 6:09 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
In my previous post, Ah, it was DLL hell, I said I still have a problem. The problem is with Server 2003 registration-free COM and a custom-generated manifest. XP and Server 2003 have different requirements for the location of dependent assemblies, so it isn’t suprising that they might behave differently. Anyway, now that I’ve gotten past my initial issue, the problem is clear. Well, as clear as can be expected with registration-free COM.
The event log said (reformatted and abbreviated for readability):
Syntax error in manifest or policy file
"C:\\ . . . \\DigipedeAutoManifest.manifest" on line 4.
The value of attribute "name"
element "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1^file" is invalid.
The name attribute was a full path to the DLL containing the COM server to be activated. I changed it to a relative path and now it works just fine. The DLL is in the same directory as the manifest (rooted below the executable).
I know for a fact that the full path used to work on Server 2003. I can only guess this was changed by some Windows Update in the past six months.
Now I’ve fixed our code to be compatible with the change.
BTW: the required syntax seems to be <file name="./comserver.dll">. It doesn’t work without the ./. Thanks to Steve White — his articles on registration-free COM are very helpful.
May 3, 2006 at 8:50 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Last week I posted about some frustrating bug hunting:
In fact, I still don’t know what the problem is, but I’m moving on for now (confident that this problem will resurface somewhere else).
I was faced with the problem almost immediately because the feature wasn’t working on Server 2003 either. So, back into it I went.
This morning I figured out the original problem: that special form of DLL hell created by waxy-build up of shifting COM registry data.
Great news! Well, no, not really. Turns out it wasn’t the same problem. So I’m still dealing with a frustrating registration-free COM activation issue on Server 2003. This code used to work. So, I don’t know if we broke something or if a recent Windows Update did. Time to do some spelunking.
May 2, 2006 at 11:05 am · Filed under Web 2.0
A lot has been said about Google complaining to the government about IE7 (from NYT).
Don Dodge says that Google’s honeymoon is over. Perhaps this is true. Their complaining about the way search is handled in IE7 does seem disingenuous.
In the past I’ve said that Google’s goodwill will wane. From Dave Winer’s Geek Dinner for Scoble with relevant excerpt here:
Google has enjoyed a great deal of popularity as an answer to Microsoft’s dominance. They have a stockpile of goodwill and trust from people simply because they are not Microsoft. This is not permanent. The bigger they get, the more profitable they are (if that’s possible), the more people they piss off with their own kind of over-reaching, the more this is going to wane.
Google has some great products, of which search is #1. But, please Google, don’t try to lock in your users by complaining. Do it by making your products better.
Tags: Attention, Google, IE7, Microsoft
May 2, 2006 at 8:29 am · Filed under .NET
If you are like me, you use the Visual Studio Command Prompt frequently, because you need the environment that gets set up by the vcvarsall batch. I’m using the PowerShell now exclusively, but still need this environment. Just calling the batch file doesn’t get the variables set in PowerShell. Adam Barr has a good explanation and solution here (and the interesting bit below is taken from his blog and credited there to Bruce Payette).
My goal was to have these environment variables set for every instance of PowerShell. Not rocket-science, but not terribly straight forward to a newbie PowerShell user either. To do that, I needed to add a script that will get run on every invocation of PowerShell. Here is what I did.
If you don’t yet have a profile set up, then create the required directory (explanation of profile naming is here):
mkdir "$home/My Documents/WindowsPowerShell"
Open your profile (or create if it doesn’t exist):
notepad "$home/My Documents/WindowsPowerShell/Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1"
Paste the following into your profile:
pushd 'C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\\vc'
cmd /c “vcvarsall.bat&set” |
foreach {
if ($_ -match “=”) {
$v = $_.split(“=”); set-item -force -path "ENV:\\$($v[0])" -value "$($v[1])"
}
}
popd
And then start a new PowerShell. Now the environment should be set properly.
Update: I fixed the path to the default profile. Thanks to dreamlusion for pointing out that my info was pre-release and out of date.
Tags: .NET, Monad, PowerShell, vs2005
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