Rubber Biscuit

As performed on 'Briefcase Full Of Blues'
Bow bow bow...
(Um, do that again)
Bow bow bow...
Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you, hee hee hee, wish you had some meat...
Bow bow bow...
Ummm... the other day I had a ricochet biscuit. A ricochet biscuit is the kind of a biscuit that's supposed to bounce back off the wall into your mouth. If it don't bounce back... you go hungry!
Bow bow bow...
Umm, umm, umm... the other day I had a cool water sandwich and a Sunday-go-to-meetin' bun...
Bow bow bow...
Hee hee hee hee... What da ya want for nothing? ... a rubber biscuit?
Bow bow bow...

Bugatti V Eurofighter

Thanks Jason

Windows Live Quick Applications

Windows Live Quick Applications Beta provides working apps and code to reuse to leverage the new Lives Live services, worth checking out if you want to leverage their colaboration solutions:

Contoso ISV (Systems Integrator / Consultancy)
Adventure Works Resorts (Social Network)
Contosos Bicycle Club (Membership Organisation)
Contoso University (Education)

Notes from the SAF

1. Internet Service Bus
The speaker discussed the growing need for the internet to act as a conduit between multiple client footprints to the same data and services. No longer need to focus on internal ESB but instead treat the internet as THE service bus. Exposing interfaces that can be consumed by rich diverse clients is essential to service adoption.

2. Executive Conversation
Gates talked about, variation in ecological impact of scale up v scale out applications.
Social computing not taking off in professional space outside of the walled garden of the enterprise, adoption of SharePoint wiki and blogs highly sporadic
Computing power being distributed throughout the stack into nontraditional spaces, NICs, video cards etc, standards need to evolve to stop the development costs being so high with vendor tie in.
Role of enterprise architecture discussed as an enabler of business integration, an essential component of large corporations, failed as governance vehicles for small LBU.
Architecture frameworks, unable to adopt one across MSFT due to diversity of technologies, they all failed when attempted to be applied holistically.

3. Data driven approach to distributed concurrent software in the enterprise (REST)
Use of Microsoft robotics run time studio in high performance applications. Data driven premise is based upon the idea of a service is a living document, describing state. Services manipulate document and change the state. An application is a composition of services.
Robotics maps to high performance computing because of coordination of asynchronous components, spanning multiple compute nodes. Robustness and isolation key benefits of this approach. Two major components: CCR - coordination and concurrency library. DSS - distribution services framework. CCR can be used with DSS. MySpace is running on this core technology.
There is s Visual programming language/environment, pure dataflow diagrams used to bind the services together Runs on all .NET frameworks, mobile etc. Integrated Lightweight service hosting environment.
Document drives behavior; make it visible, this exposure makes orchestration simple. infrastructure deals with exclusive or shared access to state in document.
http://microsoft.com/robotics

4.Tafitit.com
Excelent discussion will blog this seperately.

5. Composite application architecture
Proposed a move to four tiers, add "productivity tier" manage the rhythm of the business here, because not all business rules are shareable. Hence one layer of shared business logic (application) and another that is specific to the workflow solution (productivity) lots of discussion about BizTalk being a good candidate in this layer.
Presentation, productivity, application, Data. Example of tiered technology supporting stacks office, SharePoint, soa/BizTalk, ERP
Why SharePoint? They had an interesting perspective that it is really a storage application that can manage lists, views, libraries, versions and deals with security. It provides an abstract layer on top of the data.

6. Amazon ECC, S3, SQS
SLAs mean nothing historical performance is the only thing you can rely upon. Burstable infrastructure can be a way to survive spikes of usage. No surprise here, high level presentation explaining why Amazon did this not some much how they did it. Massive growth in usage, several billion “objects” now stored in S3, replicated across at least two locations for each object.

7. Microsoft Research
As usual very cool presentations of advanced technology research:
Collaboration - education focused, on distributed meetings, multi camera panoramic views etc.
Cool use of surface computing to show other peoples remote actions while playing chess remotely (See CSI Miami if you have not seen this in action)
Natural language processing, mindnet - foundation for a Universal Translator – this looks like some real progress, they showed some impressive stats about the performance of automated translation compared with human translations of knowledge base articles.
Drag and pop - slick predictive destination for touch screens, predicts where your finger is going and then brings the destination to you! Awesome for multi monitor scenarios especially on screens with bezels.

8. Myspace
Very interesting deep dive into the underpinnings of one of the most active web sites on the globe.
Disk IO limits way before disk capacity, new large disks don’t help as they don’t spin any faster. Data centered paired up regionally to provide DR via 2.5 GBS connections. Backups are just dealt with by replication out of region. Backups are after all just another copy to another medium, everything is live forever there are no offline backups any more.
Billions of static objects distributed around their distributed file systems. Active active active datacenters fully redundant persisting transactions across three to ensure DR and HA. Any single data center can sustain a complete failure without affecting the user. Communications links too latent for applications to be unaware of the latency, build this into your transactional model of publishing.
Interesting take of porn scanning, they use humans to scan images and content and add checksums of blacklisted content to a list to prevent future uploads of the content.

9. Paul Glenn - Leading Geeks
Second time I have heard Paul speak, excellent speaker on Geek Leadership. Took many new ideas away, read his book if you want to get them all. Here are just a few that stuck in my mind:
Select Wisely - Pick people who are motivated to do your project. Halo effect – good people on your team will be a great recruitment mechanism. You can’t motivate geeks, all you can do is de-motivate them, so tread lightly to do the least damage.
Fastest way to make a project fail, tell the geeks failure is not an option….

Strategic Architect Forum

More later, but I thought I would share my Q and Bill Gates' A:

Me: We've seen an explosion in the social Web aspects of the consumer space with Facebook and MySpace, but we've seen very little adoption of this technology by the professional information worker. Do you see that occurring, and if so, how do you see that changing your strategy around Office and the collaboration tools en masse?

BILL GATES: Well, this is a fascinating question. We actually have dozens of customers who have taken SharePoint and created something virtually the same as Facebook using SharePoint. It either catches on in a company or it doesn't. It's kind of lonely if you go up to your page -- it's called the SharePoint Personal Page -- and nobody has come, nobody has said they want to link up to you. That happens to you enough times, you know, the thing kind of goes into disuse.

The idea of these social networks, there's nothing really new. I mean, personal homepages were around for a long time. There are challenges that these things face in terms of how overloaded they get, and do they really understand relationships or not. If they don't model the various relationships well, which I claim none of them do, then they have a tendency to burn out.

I have 5,000 friends requests on my Facebook page. I just don't have time in the day to accept or not accept those people. I mean, the thing just does not work for me. So, I apologize if I didn't accept any of your friends requests, but I'm just closed for business until something comes along with a better model for how that works.

You know, if you're a kid, are your parents your friend or not your friend? Well, how can you be hip and talk about what happened at the party last night if your parents are on? But if you don't put your parents on, they might wonder what that means. They might find some other way to get access.

So, yes, people want to share, but, no, people don't want to share, and getting the right type of models in this for software is very interesting.

There are some things like LinkedIn that have gotten some level of activity, and the SharePoint personal pages. Certainly in the next round of SharePoint we're going to make it so if you want to do a Facebook like thing, you just pick the template, you don't even have to write any lines of code. If you're interested in doing it today, we can share the templates of the customers who have done that. I highly recommend it. I think it does lead to some very positive dynamics.

Most things you see on the consumer Web, whether it's wikis or blogs, we are now -- you know, what we do in SharePoint is we say, yes, you can have the flexibility and power of those things, but in an environment where there is a notion of protection and boundaries, and where the name space is connected up to your Active Directory, so the groups and permissions that you're setting up there are exactly what are reflected into this business community. If you want documents to be rights protected, then that works very well.

So, it's easy to go overboard when these things kind of explode, and say, oh, man, we all just need to do something like that. There is a fair bit of activity that is around those things that is not necessarily enhancing the business.

Then again, at the core of it in terms of what people's interests are, what they work on, if it's done right, particularly if you get an organization of a large size and multiple locations, I think it can be incredibly beneficial. We've seen the SharePoint personal page feature catch on and be a pretty important tool inside Microsoft.

First thoughts on second life

My initial interest in second life (SL) was sparked by the discussion of Reuters presence, I guess I was interested in forming my own opinion of the relevance of this environment to an organization such as Thomson, and specifically if we should consider a presence for our vertical-web-search platform Webplus which we have now launched in Westlaw and Web of Knowledge, two flagship subscription products from two of our industry verticals.
If you are looking for the abridged version then my answer is” currently no”, there is no need for us to have a presence and I doubt the value created by the current information providers in SL warrants the initial and ongoing investment.
I landed in SL in the midst of a winter scene near a smart skiing chalet. Landed may not be the correct way of describing ones arrival, which is treated as your birthday from then on. The screen setup was a third person view on my avatar (AV) with a small map showing dots representing other AVs locations and a chat dialog scrolling up the left of the screen. After enabling audio I was able to hear an ambient background noise, the clicking of keyboards, and the occasional unexplainable sounds. I initially tried using the mouse to attempt to move my character, but quickly learnt that the keyboard was the preferred mechanism, both for moving the AV but also moving the camera position relative to the AV.
I wandered around the chalet for a few minutes, got nowhere and then decided to exit the building and walked up what look like a road, things were moving slowly and I dug through he menus until I found a running mode which sped the aV along the road at a brisk pace. Eventually I came upon a group of building which were filled with boxes which I later learned is the traditional way of displaying wares for sale. The walls were lined with pictures requesting you right click on them to learn more, most were consumer oriented clothes, shoes, and several were pornographic and messages for escort services.
Finding nothing to hold my interest I noticed the search button at the bottom of the screen and proceed to try an number of alternatives, I first tried the phrase “kid safe” as I was interested to see if SL was a possible play ground for kids, whilst I was able to find some locations which were unadulterated by the porn or escort industry which is rampant in SL I have come to the conclusion that SL is no place for any child or young teenager, there are too many freaks walking the streets of SL with no restriction on their ability to accost a minor. One could create an environment or island dedicated to children but there is a lack of rigor around identity checks that would make it just a haven for deviants.
My next port of call was to look for Reuters, their location was immediately available via the search mechanism and I teleported directly there. Teleporting (TP in SL) is the preferred way of travelling long distances. When I arrived I was “given” a greeting card which explained some of the capabilities of the Reuters building. As well as a landmark which I could keep to make finding them again easier. This is common practice for many places to provide landmarks which you then store in folders for your future teleporting needs.
The Reuters building was beautifully designed with three floors and many multimedia screens providing news on many subjects from technology to sports. It was very empty with only one other AV around, and they did not stay long. Having exhausted my interest in what is basically a multiplex theatre for news casts, I tried searching to see which Thomson businesses had a presence e in SL, the only one I located was Thomson Scientific, teleporting there revealed a wonderfully complex set of intricately designed buildings which behaved much like a science museum with virtual guided tours and a virtual curator. Whilst on this island I learned to fly, which was just like walking except you had the third dimension at your control also, this proved invaluable when you get stuck and need to cross a chasm.
The most exciting thing I discovered on the Thomson Scientific site was the Jet Ski which I was able to jump on and navigate around the island via the “ocean” at high speed weaving like a drunk until I got to grips with the controls.
That would have been the end of my Thomson Scientific learning’s if it had not been for the very weird character I met on the beach…. So I was standing there minding my own business when an AV dropped from the sky (having been flying) right in front of me and promptly asked me “do you love me?” This was the start of a bizarre conversation during which I tried to explain that that was probably an inappropriate question to be the first thing from their mouths, my logic did not work, clearly whomever was in control of this AV had only one thing on their minds and it was not aligned with my interests!I didn’t know how to get rid of the intrusion so I simply hit search and transported to the first place I could find that appeared (from its description) to be normal! That was the first of many encounters with the weird extreme behavior that one encounters in SL.

The Pulpit

I subscribe to this PBS blog, this morning I read his article on the growing similarity between previous Microsoft business practices and those that we now see in Google, I guess it is not just me afterall....

Grand Forks ND, Road trip

This weekend my wife and I drove to Grand Forks ND to meet up with a bunch of her UND alumni girl friends and significant others. The weekend centered around watching the Fighting Sioux get whipped by Colorado. The stadium was an amazing facility for a college team, it was heaving with students and it was great to see such spirit, this was lacking at my school in Bristol.

The drive to Grand Forks was long and uneventful, during the weekend we were rammed while stationary in a parking lot and the plastic fender was ripped of my wife’s brand new BMW – she was not amused. Thankfully no one was harmed. Plastic can be fixed….

There was no room in town so we stayed in Crookston MN just over the border, which is nowhere in the middle of somewhere. That whole area is flat desolate cold and windy, other than that delightful! Saturday after the game we stayed at one of their old college drinking haunts Bonzer's until the wee hours, I felt very old watching the college kids picking each other up. In ten more years that will be our daughters…. Aghhhhh.

TeKne Awards dinner

Last night I attended the TekNe awards dinner in the Minneapolis Convention Center. If you have not heard of it, it is an event put on to raise money for the promotion of education in science, engineering, math and technology, a worthy cause.

Mick a colleague from Thomson West (which was a platinum sponsor) got to present the last award, he did a great job, we had two tables full of people from across our organization, it was good to see such a turnout.

ATT 3G

ATT wireless finally upgraded the infrastructure around my home and office today to 3G.....
Now we have really useful connectivity.