Brad Abrams : Random

Science Fiction Book Review: Accelerando by Charles Stross

BradA — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:33:15 GMT

I recently finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross and I thought it was a great book… it does exactly what I want from a future-focused science fiction book… it takes plausible advances from today and takes them to their logical extremes. Bing tells me that “accelerando” means “it indicates a gradual increase in tempo, or pace” which, in this context I think refers to the increasing in technical progress over the years the book covers.

Stross starts with some very simple suppositions about future advances that are not a far cry from where we are today: personal devices will help us remember more things and even offload some of our thinking. We will interact with them using outputs such as video glasses and inputs such as invisible keyboards. Stross plays this through many stages evolution up to and past the technical singularity. At each stage Stross colorfully deals with all the social implications of the level of technical advance. He certainly left me asking deep questions about what does it mean to be human, or even sentient. Stross does interject a bit of political views around freedom of information, etc but they don’t really take away from the story..

One of the things that got me hooked on the book was the free ebook download.. i read a bit then went out and got the hardback edition. the “free ebook” also fits nicely the meme of the book.

Give it a read!

A new generation of programmers begins

BradA — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:16:33 GMT

I have started teaching my 6-year old son logo as our summer learning project. My goal is to help him discover the creativity and logical thinking approach that programming requires. And, of course to share a passion that I have with him, so there is a tiny hope we will have something to talk about when he is a teenager. ;-)

Anyway, tonight he just finished his ‘real’ first program! A bit of it was copied from an example and some of it was inspired from watching me play around, but really it was all his idea.

Oh, and you Framework Design Guidelines fans – don’t worry, names like “tri” and “wee” will not last.. what is the naming conventions for Logo anyway? (btw, “wee” is short for pinwheel and tri of course is triangle)

We are using FMSLogo… it is fine, but we’d be happy to move to a .NET version if you can recommend something.

Have you taught child programming? how did it go? what did you use?

Book Review: Outliers

BradA — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:23:02 GMT

I just finished up Outliers: The Story of Success tonight…. Gladwell is a masterful story teller. You can not walk away from this book without thinking about the world differently. Rather than seeing success as a "lucky-break” or simply hard work, you realize the truly noteworthy success is a product of history and community, of opportunity and desire.

In the large, the book made me consider our social trends and what long term, multi-generational effects they are bound to have. In the small the book spurred many conversations between my wife on how to give our kids the best opportunities.

Enjoy!

Top Ten Reasons Why The Most Important Machine Is Unlabeled

BradA — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:57:00 GMT

Today is office move day across much of .NET Framework land.. Good folks across building 41 and 42 are doing a little shuffling around… As part of the move, we all had to be out of the office today. Like any good manager, I wanted to keep my team productive even during this “downtime”.. Many of engineers on the team wanted to work on “their” machines, so we reserved a conference room and had them plug in their machines there then go home or to Starbucks or the local library and work from there remotely. So we ended up with a conference room full of nearly identical headless dev machines, luckily we had the foresight to label them.. all but one of them ;-)

All was going well until machine “Enso01” needed to be rebooted. This is our test pass machine… no one could run or update tests without this machine… so it was arguably the most important machine. Luckily someone on the team happened to be around, so we had them reboot it and we give them this description of where to find the machine:

“Enso01 is a black Dell on a chair near the front of the room. It had a keyboard and funky old mouse attached to it. It is not labeled…“

Which of course forced someone on our team to ask the obvious question that we were all wondering about:

“I'm still curious why we wouldn't put a label on the most important machine in the room.”

Luckily the answer was very clear.. enjoy.. I hope you get to use this someday!

Top Ten Reasons Why The Most Important Machine Is Unlabeled

10. Where’s the fun in that?

9. Label could change performance characteristics

8. Security through obscurity

7. Labels are used with GOTO, and GOTO is harmful, therefore labels are harmful!

6. It is fun to brute force test which machine is which

5. Famous machines don’t need IDs

4. I thought you were going to label it!

3. Through process of elimination, if all other machines are labeled, then the remaining one is Enso.

2. Attempting parody movie, “Dude, Where’s My Server?”

And the number one reason why the most important machine is unlabeled…

1. No budget for labels

Need Windows Mobile Phone Recommendation

BradA — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:02:56 GMT

I am ready to replace my several year old Verizon XV6700… The 2^nd replacement battery is not keeping me through the day any more, it is way too heavy and my colleagues pick on my for using such old technology ;-)

I have a pretty good deal with Verizon, so I’d like to say with them if possible… The killer apps for me today are calendaring and basic email… but I’d love to use the phone as an MP3 player and GPS seems very sexy… I also really like to be able to use my phone as a modem for my laptop…

Do you have a mobile phone you love? What do you think I should get\avoid? Should I try to tough it out until after the holidays?

Thanks!

A Live Mesh Moment

BradA — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:35:09 GMT

While I was out in the bush near Krueger national park in South Africa recently I found a great use for Live Mesh... After a full day of seeing some excellent big game I had a ton of photos to show for my effort.

Later that night, back in the lodge, I was briefly able to get on the spotty, very low bandwidth wireless network to work for me. So I shared my pictures using live mesh and immediately shared getting a cloud hosted backup of my precious photos. As they were uploading I was thinking about how much I wanted to share this experience with my wife and kids who where half a world away and fast asleep.

I thought it would be fun to make the kitchen laptop display my latest pictures. So I "connected" to my wife's machine and effectively got a terminal server session from 10,000+ miles away.

It was exactly like I was sitting at the keyboard of our kitchen laptop. Even over the very bad network, I was quickly able to change her screen saver to point to the new live mesh folder with my great pictures.

When they got up that morning, my five year old son was the first to notice pictures of giraffes and lions on the kitchen laptop! The magic of shared experiences through live mesh!

Throughout the trip whenever I was able to get a little network connectivity a few more pictures would get uploaded and by the time I got the MS office in Johannesburg my family had a full copy of my adventures.

Thanks Mesh.

Very Simple .NET Thumbnail Creation Code

BradA — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

When I was working the update for my Ajax demo, I needed to create thumb nail from a director of photos. There are tons of tools out there to do this, but I thought I'd share the very simple code I used.

It takes all the jpgs in the root path and creates 160x120 thumbnails of them. It also copies the original photo into fullpath.

namespace ThumbNailer
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string rootPath = @"C:\Users\brada\Desktop\ForDemo";
            string thumbPath = Path.Combine(rootPath, "Thumb");
            if (Directory.Exists(thumbPath)) DirectoryDelete(thumbPath);
            Directory.CreateDirectory(thumbPath);

            int imageNumber = 0;
            foreach (string s in Directory.GetFiles(rootPath, "*.jpg"))
            {
                imageNumber++;
                Console.WriteLine("{0}:{1}", imageNumber, s);
                Image i = Image.FromFile(s);
                Image thumb = i.GetThumbnailImage(160, 120, null, IntPtr.Zero);
                thumb.Save(Path.Combine(thumbPath, GetName(imageNumber)));
            }
        }

        static void DirectoryDelete(string directoryName)
        {
            foreach (string filename in Directory.GetFiles(directoryName))
            {
                File.Delete(filename);
            }
            Directory.Delete(directoryName);
        }
        static string GetName(int imageNumber)
        {
            return String.Format("{0}.jpg", imageNumber);
        }
    }
}

Update: A couple of folks asked me about how to do this in ASP.NET... Bertrand has a much more complete example of that here:

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Generating-Image-Thumbnails-in-ASP-NET.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2007/12/05/what-interpolationmode-and-compositingquality-to-use-when-generating-thumbnails-via-system-drawing.aspx

I have a theory... help me prove it!

BradA — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:48:25 GMT

I have a theory that you can't build amazingly great products if you don't deeply know the customer. And the best way to get the visceral and lasting impression is to physically go see the customer work in their own environment.

This where I need your help. I am looking to get smarter about the way custom application development in small business really works. While Microsoft has some great feedback channels for large ISVs and large business. The small business is a slightly harder area for us because of its breath. My, somewhat crazy, idea is to get folks from my team physically outside of the Microsoft campus and get a first hand experience of what life is like for folks doing custom application development in small businesses. To make the logistics easier and to allow more of m y team to go, right now I am looking for folks in the Puget Sound area (for those not in the area, I mean nearby Seattle, WA).

What I am looking for is folks willing to host 2 or so folks from the product development team to come by and observe where you work, how you work, ask you about what problems you face, how you think about the world, etc. The best visits for us would be ones that:

1. Are in small business (1-10 employees)...
2. An office in the Puget Sound area - lots of times these are home offices or even garages..
3. Doing at least part time some sort of custom application development (building a time tracking app, heavily sharepoint customization, data entry application,office VBA work, etc)
4. These apps can be for the companies internal usage OR to license to another company (for example a VAR) or even consumer facing web sites.
5. These are often side job or "moonlighting" as well as full time jobs.
6. We are looking for a variety of technology usage both Microsoft and the other guys. Some examples of what we hear folks are using include Access or VB6 or some VBA in office or some PHP or sharepoint.

If you or someone you know is interested in having a hand in shaping some future MS developer products, want to talk about how your business works, or even just wants to vent about some Microsoft technology please take me up on the offer! Drop me an email brada@microsoft.com and let me know! We have some scheduling folks that will contact you and ask a few questions to see if we can make a fit!

Ready for Houston TechFest Tomorrow?

BradA — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:39:07 GMT

Well, I got into Houston late last night and now all I have to do is talk to a few customers and fix up my demos for tomorrow’s TechFest 2007! This is a FREE event, brought to you by the good folks at the Houston .NET Users group (and their generous sponsors).. I will be talking about Silverlight and some other good stuff.

I hope to see you there!

Devscovery in Redmond, WA and Silicon Valley

BradA — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:46:58 GMT

The good folks at Wintellect are putting on a conference focused on the latest of Microsoft technologies in Redmond and Silicon Valley (both at the Microsoftft campus). This is a great chance to get some training from industry experts.

Devscovery (August 14-16 at the Conference Center on campus; October 15-17 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Silicon Valley) is a three day, multi-track event produced by Wintellect. The keynote speaker at this year’s Redmond event is Mark Russinovich; John Robbins will deliver the Silicon Valley keynote. Other speakers include Jeffrey Richter, Jeff Prosise, John Robbins, Jason Beres, Walt Ritscher, Dennis Hurst, Bryan Sullivan, Scott Seely and Paul Mehner. Topics covered will include Silverlight, WPF, WCF, WF, the Framework, Security, Debugging, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX and more. More information can be found at www.devscovery.com.

PS -- Microsoft employees, drop me a line if you plan to register..

Visual Studio in Second Life

BradA — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:19:00 GMT

Did you know that Microsoft is investing in Second Life? That is right... we recently bought an island and have developed it with some really cool stuff.

Check out the details here https://www.visualstudioisland.com/

I am all for new, cutting edge stuff, so I volunteered to do a talk in the brand new auditorium we build there on the island. Not sure exactly what I am going to say yet, or really how I am going to say it... any tips would be really helpful as I am brand new to Second Life...

It turns out there is quite a bit going on the island. Check out of few events:

All times are PST....

7/31 4:30 PM - Amanda Silver from VB fame will give a talk on Silverlight and VB.NET

8/21 4:00 PM - "Summer Luau" party... I can't wait to see what this is like ;-)

8/30 3:00PM - Brad Abrams ASP.NET AJAX to Silverlight talk

BTW, please look me up if you go to any of these... I am "Drab Beck" in the game... you gotta love this Second Life stuff!

Help! My hard disk crashed

BradA — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:32:05 GMT

The kitchen laptop crashed today with a few weeks worth of unbacked up information (including pictures of the kids recent birthday party, and the like…) I tried booting off the XP recovery disk and running chkdsk, but about 60% of the way in I get an error:

“The volume contains one or more unrecoverable problems”

I have looked online and there a several “harddisk recovery programs”, but it is hard to know of any really work…

Any thoughts or advice for me?

Thanks

Defy All Challenges - Video Posted

BradA — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 03:26:00 GMT

I love the new VS "Defy All Challenges" theme.. One of the thing that gets me up in the morning (ok, more likely staying up at night) is the idea that we are helping development teams across the world create amazingly better solutions to their everyday challenges.

I recently shot part of a Red Vs. Blue inspired video about exactly this... I was honored to be in amongst the some real heavy-hitters that I personally respect a ton!

Soma, Anders Hejlsberg, Brian Harry, Scott Guthrie and KD Hallman all appear for short segments... Expect to see more soon!

Video: Defy All Challenges Mix

I'd love to hear what you think... Who do you think landed the best line?

Reason #73 that JavaScript is mainstream...

BradA — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 21:29:53 GMT

Well, I knew that JavaScript was becoming more mainstream, but I didn't realize it had reached this level..

Wired Al Yankovic's new song White & Nerdy mentions JavaScript right along with Klingon... What's next? Ajax in a country music song? How might that go?? ;-)

Watch the Video... The reference is at about 1:10

A .NET Valentines

BradA — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 08:50:37 GMT

A reader just sent me these two .NET love stores... They are great!

.NET - A Love Story
.NET Love Story Continues...

My wife asked me to write her poetry, but I suspect that is not what she hand in mind... How about you, did you get or give any great .NET valentines yesterday?