Month: October 2002

An interesting article by Robert Cringely : “The case against professionalism: How we have managed the industry almost to death“. I have a lot of sympathy with what he says; having seen something like the secenario he describes for myself.

Some very naughty person indeed has leaked an alpha build of Longhorn to the net. There’s an interesting summary here of what seems to be in it. After (obviously) the “softer” watercolour UI and animated My Documents icon, the most interesting features for me are the Avalon API and the WinFS file system.

Avalon is described as “an XML-based successor to the Win32 API”. I dunno. Sounds like SOAP or XML-RPC. Maybe there’s just one function with a couple of XMLDOCDocument* parameters, or something.

WinFS apparently allows SQL-Server to take over NTFS’s role as the OS’s base-level storage subsystem. That is, all your files are stored inside a SQL-Server database, and NTFS is just a legacy API into that database. This strange inversion was apparently first reported here, but I remember Jon Honeyball mentioning this idea at least a year before that in DNJ magazine. I can’t find the article, though…

Frankly, my mind boggles at this. Files as objects in a Yukon-type DBMS that’s acting as a sub-system of the OS and hosting the .NET CLR? I guess that’s one way to integrate .NET into the OS, but I’d really appreciate a block-structure diagram of this stuff to understand the dependencies. And what about the ability to write stored procedures in C#, VB.NET, etc? Would that subsume what we currently think of as operating system scripting? Yikes.

Today we had earthquakes here in Manchester. One of them even woke me up. Freaky. We just don’t have that kind of thing in Britain.

Some notes an a Presentation on Microsoft’s Palladium DRM system. This is the first description I’ve read with some technical detail and no marketing bollox. The trust-based architecture sound vaguely similar to that of the XBox, which was cracked a while back. It’ll be intersting to see how this plays out over the next few years, especially if general-purpose hardware devices like hard drives start to incorporate DRM technology too.

Visual Studio Magazine has a very interesting interview with Alan Cooper – the original architect of Viual Basic from way back before Microsoft bought it from his company. Lots of insightful comments on the realtionship between how we build software and the way that users experience it, and a fairly positive verdict on .NET. Good stuff: now I want to go and buy his books.

The Write the Right Stuff. Grown-up software production vsMicroserfs. Written for a general readership, this is one of the better non-technical articles on software engineering I’ve read. A very refreshing antidote to our industries’ all to frequent rhapsodizing about the latest system architecture fashion or complex middleware layer. If I could have one sentence from this article pummled into the head of every software development manager, it would be “Don’t just fix the mistakes — fix whatever permitted the mistake in the first place.”

Dave Weiner posted a link to this Doonesbury cartoon. Spot-on, as usual, and the first time I’ve seen a reference to blogging in popular culture. Of course, there areother opinions.

Deeply cool wallpaper. Check out the free gallery. I have Morning Light on my system at 1152×864 – it reminds me so much of the forest on Myst Island and Selenic. #

The Onion: New National Parks Website Makes National Parks Obsolete. #

Extreme Ironing. Love it. #

Explorapedia Nature: Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction. This behaviour is by design, no doubt. Theres a whole load of these atHoppoDoc. Q253912 is splendid…