September, 2010

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm skeptical of too much hand-waving when computing changes in a general way, but I do think there's been a shift in how we think about the components within computing since its inception. When computing entered the mainstream, mainframes computed the...

Last week I had a great discussion with a friend on Twitter about a post I made where I showed an application written in Azure running on an iPad. He didn’t find it all that interesting – he said it’s just HTML, and any code written...

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." Ayn Rand

A couple of days ago I posted a blog entry about a conversation I had with someone about a new way of working, and the fact that this was a cool thing. In the midst of the conversation, I mentioned an iPad – a computing tablet from Apple. Now, I’ve...

I was flying last week and struck up a conversation with a gentleman in the seat next to me. He runs a series of Martial-Arts schools in Virginia, and as we talked he asked me “What’s Microsoft got coming out that’s cool?” He was...

Microsoft has a culture of “movement”. We encourage our employees to accept new roles, moving forward, rounding out their technical knowledge, taking on new challenges and stretching their intellectual muscles. Today I’m announcing...

I spoke at a meeting last evening in Richmond, Virginia (thanks everyone there for being such a great group) about "Patterns and Practices for the Data Professional". Here are the links I mentioned in that class: Links for Patterns and Practices ...

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it. - Jonathan Winters

Most of you know that I write a technical article each week for the InformIT website - you can see a list of all my articles here . I’ve been writing for that site for – well, a really long time. I have articles all the way back to SQL Server...

I’m traveling to the United Kingdom (York, England, to be specific) in September, joining Brent Ozar, Brad McGehee, Kevin Kline, Simon Sabin – and a host of other top-notch speakers. They will be covering deep technical topics ranging from...

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." - Milton Friedman

I've been reading a fascinating article about the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC facility. It's a scientific research facility that houses a particle collider, which generates an incredible amount of data. Their original plan was to stream the data to...