PatHelland's WebLog

Some friends of mine told me that they don't have Powerpoint 2007 (gasp!) and so it was impossible for them to see this talk. The original blog entry (with PPTX file and abstract) is http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/11/25/the-irresistible...

So, I occasionally ponder the D in ACID transactions and wonder what it REALLY means. Observation #1: Committed Subject To... When I was working at Tandem in the 1980s, we had a complex (and fascinating) multiprocessor system with dual-ported disk drives...

My office is a bit unusual... even for Microsoft. Anyway, during the Christmas Season, I like to add my Christmas Palm Tree that Lisa brought when she moved from Florida. I managed to score some motif appropriate ornaments last year. They are flamingos...

So, Monday, November 19th began slow... We were SO exhausted and homesick but there was all of ROME to see! It was warming up into the 40s Fahrenheit and we had a 2PM appointment to meet our tour guide Georgio. We slept in, had trouble finding food by...

OK... It's Sunday morning, November 17th and we are in Rome until Friday morning. Time to figure out what to do this week! We had received a recommendation for a private tour guide from our new friends Roger and D'Arcy who we met on the cruise. They found...

Saturday, November 17th Warning: This blog entry has no computer architecture content... feel free to skip the travelogue stories! On Saturday, November 17th, it was a travel day. We had to be off the boat by 7:15 to catch an 11:30 flight. This seemed...

In retrospect, we had a good time on our first week of vacation... but we would have had a better time if we'd thought things through. This trip was planned around TechEd EMEA in Barcelona running November 5th-9th. The conference was great and we had...

Oh, my, it was moving!! I used to own a large power boat and have had it in 15 foot seas. Then, I experienced 30-35 degree pitching (forward-backwards motion) and rolling (side to side). I’ve been seasick on smaller boats and this did not bother me. Still...

On Thursday, we had signed up for YET ANOTHER all day cruise… Again, Roger and D’Arcy had wanted to try the “Corleone Village and Wine Tasting” tour but hadn’t purchased tickets as early as we had. So, off we were (without our new friends) onto yet another...

Naples! The evening cruise had been quiet and we were back at it with the tour busses. Our new friends had not been able to book with the Royal Caribbean sponsored tour to Pompeii, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast. D'Arcy had gotten on the Internet and...

After months and months of talking about our second anniversary in Rome, we decided not to go after all... We started the day by sleeping in!!! What a joyous relaxation after TechEd and Tour-busses! We slept late, exercised, and had a couples' massage...

We had determined that D'Arcy and Roger had tickets for the same 10 hour excursion to Florence and Pisa as we did... to get on the same bus, we needed to arrive at the theater together and get the same stickers. We met for a very fast (think inhaling...

We awoke Sunday morning in the harbor of Villefrance which is close to both Nice and Monaco. By 7:30AM, we were in the theater at the bow of the ship sitting waiting to be called for our excursion and to get on the tenders to ride from the Voyager of...

Warning! There's nothing in this blog post but "what we did on vacation"... no computer stuff. So, back in February when I decided to return to Microsoft, I told my bride, Lisa, she would love it. Before contacting Microsoft, I looked online to see when...

Wow! What a fun week from November 4th-9th! I am recounting this on November 25th after two weeks of vacation. Shortly after returning to Microsoft last Spring, I offered to present at TechEd EMEA held this year in Barcelona, Spain. I had proposed three...

The big presentation for me at TechEd was the closing general session. I did an entirely new talk called " The Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects ". This talk was a LOT of work and a LOT of fun!!! I had prepared a 30 minute version for the...

On Wednesday, November 7th, I presented " Data on the Inside versus Data on the Outside " at TechEd. While this talk is now over two years old, it is still one of my favorites in spite of the fact that I have crammed too many slides into the session ...

On Tuesday, November 6th, I presented " Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion " at TechEd EMEA at Barcelona. Unlike most of my presentations, this one had only 45 slides for a 75 minute session and so I went slower and we had...

On Monday, November 5th, I presented a talk I had written before leaving Microsoft. The first session ARC201 was entitled " Metropolis:Interchangeability of Operations " and the abstract and powerpoint deck are attached. Three more talks coming! It...

Every two years since 1985, I have gone to the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California for a very special three day gathering. The HPTS Workshop was started by a number of old-time transaction processing folks including Dieter Gawlick...

As many of you know, Jim Gray has been missing at sea since January 28th, 2007. Jim went on a day sail out from San Francisco and has not been seen since. The search for Jim both over water and underwater has been one of the largest in history and, at...

OK, this blog entry fits into the category of obsessive-compulsive... Every time I hear somebody say "such-and-so is asynchronous ", it kinda drives me nuts. The same thing applies to synchronous . The issue is that these terms describe the timing interactions...

My good friend, Harry Pierson, told me the formatting of my last post sucked and was a pain to read. He took the time to reformat it as PDF. Thanks, Harry! - Pat

I've been enthusiastic about ideas around independent updates to trees of data (e.g. XML or XAML documents) for almost five years now. I'd like to share some of my thoughts... Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about weird stuff. Sorry it's such a long...

So, Microsoft has a number of internal technical community gatherings. One of these is around the folks who are especially interested in storage. Now, while I haven't worked on storage for a while, I love these topics and like to hang out with folks working...