rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
February 21, 2006 at 3:24 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
A paper, entitled, Evolutionary Approach to Realizing the Grid Vision has been published by Marvin Theimer, Savas Parastatidis, and Tony Hey of Microsoft, Marty Humphrey of University of Virginia, and Geoffrey Fox of Indiana University. Presentation from the authors and a link to the document itself can be found here.
This paper suggests several areas of focus to bring the grand vision of the greater Grid down to a practical level that can be accomplished in smaller steps. Not surprisingly, the authors suggest starting first with computational grids. The paper focuses on the basics of this area where the problem set is fairly well understood and puts off those areas that are strictly outside the requirements of a computational grid.
It is partially the “overarching intellectual context” with which the OGSA Working Group is charged that keeps the greater Grid outside the interest of much of industry. This kind of focus articulated in the paper, properly executed, really helps progress towards the greater Grid.
BTW: I still think we don’t know what Savas is actually working on at Microsoft 😉
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid, HPC, OGSA
February 18, 2006 at 11:57 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
Had a great time at Mike Arrington’s party last night, TechCrunch 5.
These parties are on an upward trajectory (I wrote about the previous one here). Last time there were boxes of pizza strewn about; this time there was catering — some of the food was quite good. Last time it was very cold in the backyard; this time there was a tent. Last time it was pretty full; this time it was absolutely packed. Next time, I think Mike is going to have to get an even bigger tent.
Anyway, thanks to Mike and Robert Scoble for the great time. I see in the pictures that Robert and Shel Israel took off their shirts for a photo (I missed that). Here are the Flickr photos. Even better, Robert’s Dad was there. And of course Patrick Scoble was also there. Robert’s dad must be very proud of his son / grandson.
Some people I talked to:
- I ran into Nima Dilmaghani, a developer evangelist at Microsoft. I did a double-take when I saw him, because I don’t usually see Microsoft people at these events. He has the right approach to .NET evangelism: he doesn’t claim it is the right answer to every problem, but can knowledgably explain the relative benefits of the platform in an honest way. Note that link is to his empty WordPress blog — I’m hoping that will shame him into getting his blogging going 😉
- I also talked with Ramana Kovi of ePlatform; look for their launch soon.
Keep your eye on Kevin Burton’s Feed Blog. Word has it he was chasing a scoop last night; I don’t know what it was.
- I talked a bit to Andrew Bunner, Director of Engineering of Rojo. He demonstrated some of the new features for me. I asked him about the AttentionTrust and its principles; particularly about principal #2, Mobility (we’re looking into that). In talking to him, though, I think that there is still a general misunderstanding about the AttentionTrust. It is about the 4 principles and the mission. That’s it. The ATX (attention recorder) allows you to store locally and / or provide data to services (one right now, ROOT). Using it isn’t in any way a requirement of the AttentionTrust’s principles.
- I saw Zach Coelius again, his company Triggit is coming along. I realized he reminds me of my best man, David Shaw.
And many others, too. A splendid time for all, methinks.
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, Scoble, techcrunch, techcrunch5, Web2.0
February 4, 2006 at 2:43 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
I have been working on the Attention recorder for IE 6/7 for the AttentionTrust in my “spare” time. I’m using C++/ATL for this.
I am enjoying working in C++ again (most of my development these days is in C#), but it has brought out to me my personal likes / dislikes about the two languages. I know this post is about 3 or 4 years late, but I wasn’t blogging back when I started with C#.
Things I miss in C++
- Const pointers: The ability to declare that the data referenced by a pointer will be accessed read-only is quite useful. I never liked that this isn’t supported by .NET; though, I understand why it was.
- Macros: This one still gets me. The macro support in C# is nearly non-existent. Why would you want macros? Doesn’t this violate the strong-typedness of the language? Yes, but stringizing and token-pasting is very useful to build maintainable code. I really wish C# supported this.
- copy constructors: Having a default implementation of the copy constructor is quite useful.
What I don’t miss in C++
- Header files: When I used to work in C++ I remember enjoying the distinction between the declaration and the implementation of classes and methods; however, now I just feel like it is an annoyance. The C# approach of leaving this up to the tools is much easier.
- NULL: Back when true and false were added to C++ as language elements, I wished that null had been added too.
- global scope: At first I didn’t like that C# has no global scope (outside of classes), but now I look at C++ and don’t like that I have to put methods that are clearly associated with a class implementation, but static, outside of the definition of the class. Certainly this can be handled with namespaces, but that doesn’t quite do it.
Of course, I much prefer the richness of the .NET Framework to the hodge-podge of class libraries required in C++ to do anything modern: ATL / MFC or WTL / MSXML, etc, . . . I also prefer the overall environment of garbage collection and pointer-safety delivered by a managed environment.
Tags: .NET, Attention, c#, IE, Web2.0
February 3, 2006 at 12:19 pm · Filed under .NET
I started using the new Code Analysis feature of VSTS today, moving from external FxCop usage. A cool thing about this new feature is that is adds supression information directly to the source code in the form of attributes.
I like this since it keeps the supressions with the code. There is one drawback for us at Digipede: we cross compile back to .NET 1.1. These new attributes don’t exist in the old framework, so I added my own for compilation with our .NET 1.1 code:
namespace System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis {
[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.All, Inherited = false, AllowMultiple = true)]
internal class SuppressMessageAttribute : Attribute {
public SuppressMessageAttribute(string category, string checkId) {}
public string Category { get { return null;} set {} }
public string CheckId { get { return null;} set {} }
public string Justification { get { return null;} set {} }
public string MessageId { get { return null;} set {} }
public string Scope { get { return null;} set {} }
public string Target { get { return null;} set {} }
}
}
Thanks to The Moth for part of the implementation. He blogs about the attribute not being included in the Compact Framework here: SuppressMessage not in CF.
Tags: .NET, Code_Analysis, Digipede, FxCop, VSTS
January 31, 2006 at 11:47 am · Filed under .NET
Pat Helland, Senior Principal Engineer of Amazon, gave a talk titled Programming for Scalability. Very good speaker. He went through the evolution to his views of building highly scalable systems and is now an apostate of the ACID, distributed transactions, single serializability scope-religion.
He walked through his approach to designing databases for high scalability from the start so applications don’t need to be rewritten when data-partitioning becomes inevitable.
He didn’t speak about Amazon in particular, but these are the kinds of things he works on there.
While this talk was quite high-level and following the “SOA and messaging” mantra, it was very practical too. If you ever get a chance to hear him talk, take it.
Tags: .NET, Amazon, VSLive
January 31, 2006 at 10:30 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I met Chuck Berg, the chair of the SDForum Windows SIG.
He is speaking February 1st on Getting Started with Visual Studio Team System. I’m sure it will be an interesting talk and a chance to take advantage of his real experience getting it up and running.
If you make it to his talk, try to convince him to blog about his experiences — I’ll subscribe.
Tags: .NET, SDForum, VSTS
January 30, 2006 at 9:19 am · Filed under .NET
In response to the renewed interest in SSDL prompted by the IEEE article, Jim Webber recently posted about how SSDL compares to the existing W3C/OASIS stack. I blogged about the article in my previous post, I like SSDL.
The post is worth checking out if you are interested in SSDL; however, I’m disappointed by the last comment:
Of course the practicalities of the situation with huge existing investments in the W3C/OASIS stack means that SSDL will most likely remain nothing more than a toolkit for academics and geeks.
Pragmatic and perhaps true, but I hope that doesn’t turn out to be the case.
I’m still hoping to see this in a future version of WCF — I’m counting on Savas to make this happen 😉
Tags: .NET, SSDL, WCF, WSDL
January 11, 2006 at 7:37 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
On Thursday, January 12th, Kim Greenlee will be presenting at eBig. She’ll be talking about OOP-G and introduce the Digipede Network. I understand she’ll be giving away Developer Editions too!
Details on eBig’s site, here.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid
December 29, 2005 at 8:29 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Nathan just updated the Digipede News and Announcements feed to use FeedBurner. If you are interested in getting news about our product and company, subscribe to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigipedeNewsAndAnnouncements.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid
December 28, 2005 at 6:58 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
This is not news to those who subscribe to Software Development Magazine, but they reviewed the Digipede Network in their January, 2006 issue. You normally would need to sign up for their online content to read it, but we purchased a reprint link which you can find here. Two things I’m happy about:
- The reviewer had virtually no interaction with us (i.e., install and configuration were easy); and,
- he gave our product 4 stars!
The reviewer, Mr. Rick Wayne, pointed out a couple of issues. Some of these we have already addressed and others are in our plans.
Thanks, Mr. Wayne — yes, we are listening).
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
About me
Main feed
Email subscriptions