Lori Pearce's WebLog

It's Time for the Final Post

2007-12-05T20:33:00Z

Friday, December 7th will be my last full day in the office at Microsoft. December 31st will be my last day as a Microsoft employee.

What's up with that? No...I'm not leaving to join Google or Adobe or even Trumba; I'm "retiring." After 25 years in the industry, it's time for a break, a change, and a good long vacation. It's been a wild ride--I've seen the software industry grow and change and grow and change; it's enough to make my head spin.

I'll be spending the next year working on some home remodeling projects, spending more time in Hawaii and California and in my garden. After that, it will be time to catch up on my traveling and scuba diving.

I leave you with two quotes I've grown fond of recently:

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Lori Pearce

SYNC and the Optimistic Brain

2007-11-09T19:53:00Z

Two articles caught my attention this week. The first was Walt Mossberg's review of SYNC, a joint project between Ford and Microsoft.

"SYNC combines the often separate cellphone and music-player functions into one unified interface that can be controlled by a voice-recognition system that works well. You can command it by voice to play a single song out of thousands on your iPod or other music player. With some phones, it will even read your incoming cellphone text messages to you, and properly pronounce text-message shortcuts such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud.)"

The fact that this system works with just about any USB media device (and not just an IPod) is great news for those of us who prefer devices that don't lock you into one format or one music store. I am currently using a Creative Zen player; it's my second Creative Zen device and I really like how well it works with Windows Media Player.

The other article that caught my attention was an article on optimism and the brain by Robert Lee Hotz.

"Two research teams exploring the anatomy of expectations offer a new perspective on the power of a positive outlook. For the first time, scientists at New York University have mapped the upbeat brain -- finding in a cluster of neurons the size of a martini olive the seed of a sunny outlook on life. At its core, the brain is built for optimism, their work suggests."

Hope you enjoy learning about SYNC and the optimistic brain!

An On-Line Color Thesaurus

2007-11-02T21:17:00Z

Check out HP's on-line "Color Thesarus" here. I submited the ever popular "Burnt Sienna" and it displayed a color square, listed the RGB values for Burnt Sienna and displayed plus four similar (synonym) colors and four antonym colors.

More great scientific visualization

2007-10-09T22:08:00Z

The Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition results are stunning. Check out the winners at: http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/gallery.php?grouping=year&year=2007&imagepos=1 .

2007 Visualization Challenge Winners

2007-10-02T21:48:00Z

GMSV pointed me to this interesting site today. There are some folks doing incredible work with scientific visualization out there and 10 have been recognized in this artical. Check it out.

Why even computers get the math wrong from time to time

2007-09-26T21:59:00Z

There was a nice little blog post on Good Morning Silicon Valley that led to another, really interesting blog post titled "Arithmetic is Hard--To Get Right." Turns out there are "...exactly 12 instances out of the 9 quintillion possibilities it [Excel] goes completely bonkers" and 77.1 x 850 is one of them.

I tried it and did indeed, get 10000 instead of 65535.

The original post is here.

Why not go 64bit?

2007-08-03T18:23:00Z

Considering that Microsoft has been shipping 64 bit OSs (client and server) for quite a few years now and given the fact that most desktop machines are now 64 bit and even many laptops, why are so few applications and customers running native 64bit? Why is everyone installing the 32 bit OS on their 64 bit hardware? Seems like underutilization of expensive hardware to me…must make the hardware engineers cry themselves to sleep at night.

The Windows SDK has had native 64 bit support for as long as there has been 64 bit OSs--both with the Win32/Win64 programming model and the .NET Framework. However, the Windows SDK SQM data (data that customers voluntarily sent back to us about custom install options) indicates that only 20% of Windows SDK customers are installing the native 64 bit components. How come?

Developers will tell you they see no need to port existing client applications to 64 bit. They don't need the humongous address space like a server application would and they don’t think it will give them any performance gains. In other words, not enough bang per buck. Heck, how many 64 bit client applications can you name from Microsoft? Even Microsoft's flagship developer product is not native 64 bit and only supports targeting 64 bit development via cross compiling. We're not really eating our own dog food on that one are we? Kinda sad actually.

Of course, it’s a whole other story when you are talking about server applications like SQL and Exchange. They can take full advantage of what 64 bit OSs offer.

Most folks will tell you that it's the lack of good device drivers on 64 bit that is holding up client adoption. But apparently it’s more than that. Today, there was an article on vnunet.com about how poorly anti-virus software is doing on 64 bit Windows Vista.

And where are the 64 bit games? It seems like some of the higher end games could take advantage of 64 bit. I figure they are likely to be waiting on the device drivers and watching the 64bit OS sales figures.

I believe that when Microsoft starts producing 64 bit versions of its flagship client applications (Office, Visual Studio, etc), we will finally start to see the migration from 32 bit to 64 bit OS installs. Other developers will follow our lead. Question is, when will we step up?

The pause that refreshes...

2007-08-02T18:39:00Z

Check out this article on an interesting study done by Stanford researchers on what the brain is doing during pauses.

When the music stops, the brain gets going

IN STANFORD STUDY, SILENT PAUSES LEND CLUES ON MENTAL PROCESSES

By Lisa M. Krieger
Mercury News

Other sites to read instead of this one...

2007-07-19T21:00:00Z

Why has there been no posting here in a very long time? Frankly, it’s because I find reading other people’s content more interesting than writing or reading my own. If my blog is not interesting to me, why would it be interesting to you? On the off chance that you’ll find any of the sites I read regularly as interesting as I do, this blog post is for you.

1. I read the local news online—I haven’t read an actual hold-in-your-hands newspaper in a long time. For local news I go to the following web sites: The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, KOMO TV, KIRO TV.

Why don’t I check out NWCN or KING5? Because they want me to register and that bugs me—I avoid sites that require registration whenever possible. Yeah, I know, I could just provide an anonymous Hotmail account, but why bother? There are plenty of places to get the news.

I also read a SFGate since I spent the first 30 years of my life in the Bay Area. Occasionally I check out the Marin Independent Journal, the Sacramento Bee (requires registrationL), The Mercury News and KCRA (not nearly as good as KOMO or KIRO) since I have friends and family in the Bay Area and in the Sacramento area.

Another site that makes my required reading list is the Bridges Detail traffic flow map.

2. For national and international news I check out the usual suspects: CNN and BBC and The Wall Street Journal (Microsoft employees have access). I get my stock quotes from MSN—I am sure there are better sites, but MSN is easy. I also get movie times from MSN. The main MSN site is a little too “pop culture” for me. Wikipedia is also a frequent source of quick info.

3. For sports (mostly baseball), I occasionally check out a game with ESPN’s GameCast or listen in with MLB’s GameDay Audio.

4. For tech related news I go to CNET, ZDNet (yeah…I know…it’s mostly the same content), InfoWorld (I still remember when I used to read the actual hardcopy) and Silicon Valley.Com. I have been a fan of Good Morning Silicon Valley for many years and have recently added All Things Digital to my list of regularly sites after John Paczkowski moved there (and Mossberg is always worth a read too J). I used to visit a lot of other tech related sites but got fed up with ads that cover the screen or the ads they make you watch or skip before getting to the real site.

5. I am a good corporate citizen and use http://www.live.com/ as my search site. It works great for me, but if ever fails me, I know who to send feedback to. My home page at work is the internal Microsoft Web site. They revamp and refresh the site from time to time and I think they do an excellent job on it overall. In general, Microsoft has a wealth of internal websites with all the information you could ever need…until they don’t and then you’re hosed and have to find a real, live person to talk to. Easier said than done.

6. What do I read “for fun”? Not much—for fun I usually turn to actual hardcopy books—but I do have a few I check out from time to time. Wet Pixel is one of my favorite scuba related sites. Their Photo of the Week contest is wonderful. I also check out Kona Web, Waikoloa Weather and West Hawaii Today (requires registrationL) for news about my favorite places in Hawaii.

7. And lastly, there are shopping sites. In general, I hate shopping and shopping malls, so I am an internet retailer’s dream customer. Lands’ End and LL Bean (I swear those two companies were separated at birth), Coldwater Creek, Amazon.Com, and occasionally TravelSmith, Orvis, and FrontGate. With the exception of Amazon, I get paper catalogs from all those companies—the USPS must really hate me around the holidays.

Now that I have bored you silly, I’ll sign off.

Lori

It's about time...

2006-09-07T20:11:00Z

Hack, cough, cough...man, it's getting really dusty around here...

Yeah...I know...it's been a while...my bad. No excuses.

Let me get straight to the new data. The Windows SDK Team recently posted the RC1 version of the Windows SDK for Windows Vista and .NET 3.0 RC1. You can download it here.

This summer, we welcomed 7 new team members: Tom Archer, Karen Dominguez, Abhita Chugh, Lisa Supinksi, Sean Grimaldi, Pat Litherland and just this week, Shawn Henry. It's exciting to have so many new faces on the team. I can feel the energy and enthusiams as the newbies dive in to their new roles.

Welcome to the Windows SDK Team Tom!

2006-06-05T19:22:00Z

I'd like to use this post to welcome Tom Archer to the Windows SDK Team. Today is Tom's official first day--though he's been working with us for many months in his prior role as Content Strategist for MSDN.

Tom will be taking over the Tools Program Manager role from Brent Rector who has moved on to bigger and better things on another team (Congrat's Brent!). Tools is a big, complicated area in the Windows SDK so Tom is going to be quite busy.

The Windows SDK Team is Hiring

2006-05-04T22:24:00Z

We have three Program Manager Openings:

The Windows SDK Team is a great team that touches on all the developer technologies in the Windows Operating system including WinFX. You'll have the opportunity to work with great people from all across the Platforms group. We're a small team, so each and every PM owns their areas from start to finish.

If you're a customer focused person who thinks software development can change the world, come join us on the Windows SDK Team.

Photos...

2006-04-13T00:05:00Z

I have finally created a very small photo gallery of some of my favorite underwater shots. All but one (the pic of me) is a still frame taken from video footage shot in Palau last year. None have been cleaned up with a digital image editor yet (I just don't have the time to do that). I'll update with new shots from Papua New Guinea as soon as I finish working with the video I shot.

The gallery can be seen here.

The Windows SDK Team Has A Blog Of Its Own.

2006-04-10T18:22:00Z

Check out the new Windows SDK Team Blog. Today is the kickoff and hopefully it will be a busy place full of useful information about the Windows SDK, the Team and Windows Vista.

Why is the Windows SDK so big?

2006-01-30T21:09:00Z

The flippant answer is: "Because old APIs never die, we just add new ones."

The biggest single part of the SDK is the documentaion. The biggest part of the documentation is the WinFX API reference.

Below is a breakdown of the January CTP:

Win32: 211 MB (reference and conceptual)

WinFX: 467 MB

- Conceptual/Tools/GenRef/Portals: 47.3 MB

- Integrated Samples: 103 MB

- Managed Ref: 253 MB

- Collection-level files: 63.7 MB

As you can see, the managed API reference pages alone are over 250 MB (that's in a compressed help file). These represent 80 assemblies with 281 namespaces and 10741 types with 103704 members. Each one has a reference page.

Now consider that Microsoft has been working on Win32 styles APIs for much longer than WinFX style APIs. There are over 72000 reference pages in the Win32 documentation. Counting the number of Win32 APIs is trickier--it's even more challenging to count COM interfaces.

The other key parts of the Windows SDK include the tools. In the January CTP we ship a bunch of C++ compilers and other tools.

Last but not least, are the samples that exist only in the file system--most of the Win32 samples fall into this bucket. Luckily, these compress very well for download.