On my drive in today I heard a piece on NPR entitled " Corporate Influence Seen Harming Entertainment Industry " Some analysts and producers say the entertainment industry is struggling because of the corporatization of movie and TV studios. The...

My commute was longer than usual today, so I had some extra time to read and think. The April 2005 issue of Software Development (available only in print form at this moment – See! advertisers still prefer eyeballs on paper to eyeballs on pixels) has...

Yesterday, I was so pleasantly surprised by a product, that I actually went and got all my colleagues, and showed this to them. I was installing Virtual PC for the first time, and when it came time to configure my first virtual machine, a dialog asked...

If you know what having fun means for you, tell us at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/jobs (Tell them the guy on the park bench sent you. And if you are tempted to send Gretchen flowers, ... I'd wait another week or so, and do avoid daffodils, especially...

Don’t tell anyone, but it is spring here in Seattle . The daffodils in the patch of dirt outside my front door have started peeping out. A blossom tree on my way to work is in full bloom. And I saw an e-mail thread yesterday trying to get a crowd together...

The defense would like to enter a plea of guilty to the charge of “1 st degree hypocrisy.” Since my last posting, I have put on weight, eaten more chocolate than I care to confess, and had not an iota of exercise (what is the official unit of exercise...

It's been pretty obvious to my wife and myself that to eat 'well' in the US you need to be 'rich.' Finally, a news story from NPR's Morning Edition that quantifies this succinctly. ( Obesity Often Linked to Income Americans eat about 50 percent of their...

Two compare-and-contrast scenarios consumed some idle cycles in my brain over the weekend. One was a recurring “What if?“ I tend to ponder over. What if someone with a product cycle or two from the automotive industry under his/her belt...

At what point does a system become so broke that you can't fix it, and must build a completely new one from scratch? As one working in the trenches of QA/Test, I lean towards the viewpoint that we do what we can to uncover defects and quantify the...

In the feedback to my last posting, Balaji said “It has been by personal experience too. If we devote much time and effort to architecture, design, clarifying requirements, attention to detail etc, the outcoming product/feature is usually...

<sheepish grin>Well, my first attempt at something technical fell flat on it face.</sheepish grin> Indranil Banerjee (see feedback) pointed out that the Mathew Wilson’s approach, which I was advocating, effectively killed the symmetry...

For the past year, as the whole world and its dog have blogged themselves onto the NY Times bestseller list (and in many cases off it too), I have gazed at my navel, and wondered if the lint there is the same color the world over. Then today, I...

Today is the first anniversary of the day I started working at Microsoft – in the C# compiler quality assurance team. After 21 straight years in Universities, either as a student or in the lab, the past year has been quite a change. It’s...