Can anyone say Skynet?

Robert Cringley's prediction is certainly an interesting one. It strikes me as being a little too reminiscient of Skynet.

The Cost of Fixing Bugs

http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/archives/000879.html

Read the article. I'll be back tomorrow to add some commentary...

Simple Sharing Extensions

http://www.simplesharingextensions.com/

Coming Soon :-)

Microsoft Operations Manager

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 is an Enterprise-class server monitoring system. I've had the pleasure of working with it recently, and I have to say that I'm pretty blown away. To say that it is an incredibly useful product is a massive understatement. I would almost go so far as to say it is indispensible when working on large enterprise environments.

In fact, while Microsoft Operations Manager is targeted mainly for Product Environments (which makes sense) and it is certainly very useful there, I've found that it is also very useful in pre-production environments (such as Development, Systems Integration, Systems Testing, and Staging Environments). It can be very useful in finding and diagnosing small issues before they become Big Problems. In addition, Microsoft Operations Manager can be used quite nicely with the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer tool, delivering reporting to the centralized Microsoft Operations Manager console.

Anyway, I know that this entry kinda comes "out of the blue", but I just finished watching this Channel9 video (that tool that the Microsoft.com team uses is really impressive!), and it reminded me of Microsoft Operations Manager.

The Big One-Oh (10)

Heh, so my server logs show that I just reached my 10th Blog Feed subscriber!!! That's actually somewhat surprising, considering that I am not really pushing the site too much, and the feed link is fairly hidden.

Even more interesting, at least one of the subscribers is from Microsoft. I only personally know three Microsoft Employees (MH, DH, or RB is it one of you???), but I don't think any of them are coming here, but I'll ask.

Anyway. 10. It's a tiny little insignificant number when compared to the rest of the web, but hey, it's better than nothing, right? Right?

Hosted Sites

So, most of these are works in progress, but this is just to give you an idea of what is coming:

http://www.armatu.com
http://www.devsteps.com
http://www.hptkd.ca
http://www.hptkd.com
http://www.localmartialarts.com
http://www.mapbugs.ca
http://www.ontopic.ca
http://www.opentales.com
http://www.outreachforlife.com
http://www.pcrc.ca
http://www.tonyseaves.ca
http://www.tonyseaves.com
http://blog.venturesteps.com
http://services.venturesteps.com

Flash

So this pretty much sums up how I feel about Macromedia Flash. Reload the page to see more.

State of Fear

It's time to take a minute and not talk about business or technology.

I just finished reading Michael Crichton's book The State of Fear. It is, without a doubt, one of the best books I've read in a while. It is masterfully written, and Michael Crichton has thouroughly researched the science, sociology, and politics that form the backdrop for the story.

The story itself is gripping and, on a deeper level, quite frightening. I would strongly encourage you to read it.

Flock

So this is my first blog post using Flock. I've been using Flock as a browser since it came out, and I've just started exploring it's blogging capabilities. So far, it impresses. The level of integration is slick, especially considering Flock is still a pre-release.

ASP.NET 2.0 Continued

Hmmm, I just noticed that all of the web sites that I host off of this same web server stopped working once I had .NET 2.0 installed. I had to set every site to use ASP.NET 2.0 instead of ASP.NET 1.1.xxxx before they would start working again. That's a bit of a pain, and not what I would expect.

ASP.NET 2.0

So here's my first ASP.NET 2.0 project;
http://services.venturesteps.com/

The look & feel might appear to be identical to the VentureSteps Inc. web site, but the back-end architecture is actually quite different, and much simpler. The new site is based on ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages, and let me just say that they absolutely rule! I can't wait to make more use of them.

Processors

So I recently made the switch to an AMD Dual Core processor, specifically the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400. It's basically right in the middle of the AMD X2 lineup, and, supposedly, a great deal.

In recent years, the AMD processors have been hailed as being great for gaming. Not that I have any time for this, but I picked up a few newer games (demos and retail versions) just to test my system out (since I also have an ASUS A8N SLI Premium Motherboard, dual ASUS 7800GTX Cards, 2GB RAM, and a set of 160 GB hard drives in a RAID array). The system absolutely screams at gaming. That's to be expected of course, especially with the SLI setup.

However, when it comes to general "productivity" work, I've been less than impressed. I recently accidentally deleted portions of my ripped CD collection, and took it upon myself to re-rip the missing items to MP3 (using iTunes at 192kbps). I was quite shocked to discover that the ripping process just floors my CPU, sometimes even causing iTunes to outright crash. Needless to say, I am quite disappointed with the performance of the AMD processor. My old Pentium IV 2.4GHz machine had absolutely no problem ripping CDs at this quality, and stayed well under 30% CPU utilization.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live Will Be A Huge Productivity Tool.

I think the above article sums it up well. This is going to be huge for small businesses. Free domain name and website with integrated productivity tools, as well as up to 50 free email accounts with 2GB storage each.

Based on what I have seen so far, small businesses currently in this market are going to find themselves competing directly with Microsoft. While some might have a chance by targeting locally, it's going to be hard to compete with the package that Microsoft is offering.

The good news is for developers; there is a huge potential here to build applications that integrate into Microsoft Office Live and this could become a large, and fairly new market area. While companies have offered services like this before, Microsoft is offering an integrated service with a single unified API for everything. That's huge.

Microsoft Windows Live is, well, live!

Windows Live.
Microsoft Office Live.
Windows Live Ideas.

Wow, so those are pretty big announcements from Microsoft. This is a potentially huge change in focus for Microsoft. I can't wait to see how this plays out, because it's only going to make software and user experiences better.

I'm really looking forward to the Windows Live Favorites and Windows Live Mail. I've signed up for Beta testing accounts, and can't wait to try them!

Microsoft in the Enterprise

There seems to be a general consensus among the more vocal elements of the web community that, in terms of web development, Microsoft no longer matters.

What a lot of people are forgetting about is the Enterprise domain. At this point in time for most large enterprise level development projects, technology like Ruby on Rails, PHP, and MySQL are not options. Most enterprise projects are going to end up using Java or .NET.

Why? The answer is actually really simple. In fact, you can sum it up in one word: support. When a large corporate entity is evaluating technology choices, the first questions they are going to ask revolve around who is going to provide the support. Right now, at least as far as I am aware, there are not a lot of support options for most open source development technologies. This isn't to say that the situation is changing; it certainly is, but the situation right now is such that there is not a lot of enterprise level support for these technologies. Or, at the very least, the perception at the enterprise level is that support does not yet exist.

So what exactly do I mean by support? Well, I can give an example. I'm currently involved in a set of large enterprise applications written in .NET. I can't provide all the reasons why .NET was chosen, but one of the big reasons was because of the high quality support that Microsoft was able to offer. A few weeks ago one of the projects ran into a problem. Microsoft was called in, and they provided a support engineer who worked over the phone and through a remote session using Microsoft Office Live Meeting. When the support engineer was not able to quickly solve the issue, another engineer got on a plane that very evening and flew over. In the end, it turned out the problem wasn't even the result of a bad Microsoft application; it was the result of a particular vendor not properly defining their requirements and application installation procedures. But the Microsoft support engineer stayed on site and helped resolve the issue. In fact, it was likely that the problem would not have been solved in a timely fashion if the Microsoft support engineer had not been there.

This goes straight back to the IBM days, when every project manager knew that the safe bet was to choose IBM. The same is true today; the managers know they are not going to lose their jobs if they choose the company with the best support. Now that isn't to say managers are dumb or short-sighted. Rather, they have their companies best interest in mind. They know that by betting on a system with a good support infrastructure, if something does go wrong, help is just around the bend.

Now of course, someone is going to bring up cost. While I'm not sure how much this level of support costs (and I'm sure it's not cheap) the point is that for many of the open source solutions out there, this kind of support (again, as far as I am aware of) does not even exist.