Software Geek

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A couple months ago I agreed to do an interview with a major national magazine that I enjoy and respect. I rarely do face to face interviews because I have significant trust issues with how an interview can be reflected in a story.

I try to stick exclusively to email for all my interviews. In this case I made an exception because I had developed a good relationship with the magazine.

The interview process was unexceptional. Meaning that it went well. The writer and I got along and I thought it was a fun interview to do.

The article came out last week and I liked it. No problems at all.

Then yesterday, the person who interviewed me, who is also a blogger, decided to blog about our interview. The blog ran on a site that he is associated with, but is not affiliated at all with the magazine the interview was for. He never asked, nor told me that our interview would be blogged about. While I respect the magazine, I am not a fan of the site he works for, or of its affiliated site that the blog ran on. A point I let him know. I would not have done the interview had I known he would blog about it for this site.

As it turns out, he did not clear the blog with the magazine either.

So he traveled on their dime to do an interview for their magazine and then used the interview to generate a blog for his site from a subject that was not expecting to be blogged about.

Ethical or not ?

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http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/01/23/is-this-ethical-for-a-blogger-journalist/

Keith Donald over at Spring Source blogs about what the latest Spring Web Flow release has to offer and requests feedback from the Java/Spring community on these newest inclusions.

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/252297924/thread.tss

One of
the suggestions for a blog entry was the managed memory model.  This is timely, because we’ve just been
revising our overall approach to this confusing topic.  For the most part, I write about product
decisions that have already been made and shipped.  In this note, I’m talking about future
directions.  Be
skeptical.

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"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> size=2> 

So what
is a memory model?  It’s the
abstraction that makes the reality of today’s exotic hardware comprehensible to
software developers.

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The
reality of hardware is that CPUs are renaming registers, performing speculative
and out-of-order execution, and fixing up the world during retirement.  Memory state is cached at various levels
in the system (L0 thru L3 on modern X86 boxes, presumably with more levels on
the way).  Some levels of cache are
shared between particular CPUs but not others.  For example, L0 is typically per-CPU but
a hyper-threaded CPU may share L0
between the logical CPUs of a single physical CPU.  Or an 8-way box may split the system into two
hemispheres with cache controllers performing an elaborate coherency protocol
between these separate hemispheres. 
If you consider caching effects, at some level all MP (multi-processor)
computers are NUMA (non-uniform memory access).  But there’s enough magic going on that
even a Unisys 32-way can generally be considered as UMA by
developers.

(more…)

Until about 2002 I had a broad disdain for most IDEs.  I
just felt they were too pushy.  They were always trying to take control
over my build system or the layout of my source tree.  If I’m going to give
those things up, I want something in return.  For a long time, the tradeoff
never seemed fair.  THINK C on the Macintosh was one of the only IDE products I
actually liked.

Visual Studio.NET 2002 was the first Windows IDE that won
me over.  I still use vi or emacs almost every day, but I’ll admit that I now use
Visual Studio more.

Last year I switched to Visual Studio 2005, and I love it. 
This is a product that is so perfect I worry about its next release.  Now that
Visual Studio 2008 is out, I’ll probably give it a try at some point soon.  But
Visual Studio 2005 is sort of like “if it works, don’t mess with it”.  The last
thing I want is for them to screw it up, and I can’t really imagine how
it could be better.

I guess when it comes to IDEs, I’m just not very
imaginative.  :-)

I started using Eclipse a few weeks ago, and now I
understand a bit more about where Visual Studio has room to improve.  I think
Eclipse is amazing, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

So anyway, here are a couple of my current favorite Eclipse
features:

Constant Builds

When I first installed Eclipse, the very first thing I did
was look for the menu item to start a build.  When I didn’t find one, I assumed
that the Eclipse menu system must be too cluttered and counterintuitive.  How
could they make such a frequently-used command so hard to find?

(more…)

Occasionally I get asked how big the.NET Framework is in terms of surface area for developers.  As you might guess this is something we track.  As you can see, in each release we are adding new functionality that make it easier to build.NET applications.    The number of types in the.NET Framework is 11,417!  Any guesses on how many types will be in.NET Framework 4.0?

 

    

 

       

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/17/number-of-types-in-the-net-framework.aspx

If you’ve yet to be sold on the Internet, grab a seat and your favorite pointing device. My good man Ryan sent me a link to what is undoubtedly the Internet’s Killer App: The Beer Mapping Project

Chicago’s map is a bit limited — my neighborhood alone has over 450 bars — so get on it. It takes a village, comrades.

God Bless America!

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/01/18/435889.aspx

Just to truly demonstrate how sheltered of a life that I have lived… tonight I installed WinCVS and connected to Joe Beda’s (coworker, blog coming soon!) CVS server over the internet. I checked out a module, made a change, and submitted it. I’m so used to the internal systems at MSFT that it just blows my mind to use a source control system that works seamlessly over the internet through multiple firewalls, etc… technology rocks!
http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/68

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, Brian Harry follows up on his recent announcement about Microsoft’s acquisition of of devBiz , developers of TeamPlain Web Access for VSTS. Brian heads up our Visual Studio Team Foundation development team, based in Raleigh, NC. Note that TeamPlain is unrelated to Teamprise , which to quote Jim Newkirk , recently ”announced a complimentary license of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to connect to an open source project on CodePlex.”

If you are an existing devBiz customer, I encourage you to think about and weigh in on the following comment, on Brian’s weblog.

“Another set of feedback we’ve gotten revolves around the devBiz components products - devMail, devDns and others.  We have removed these products from the market and are unsure what our future plans for them are.  I’ve seen requests that we open source them among other things.  We are considering many options ranging from including them in other products to making the source available in some form - either to existing customers, publicly or otherwise.  We want to make sure that customers feel that they have a good path forward.  We hope to reach a conclusion on a plan in the next few weeks on this issue as well.”

If the VSTS team decides to release some of the products Brian mentions as open source projects, I hope and wouldn’t be surprised to see them posted on CodePlex , which runs on Visual Studio Team System.

http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2007/04/02/web-access-for-visual-studio-team-system.aspx

I’m a Firefox guy. The only reason I use it instead of IE is that it feels faster. Seriously.

I find it incredibly annoying that the only websites I frequent that require IE are those run by Microsoft. I’ve nothing against IE (I’ve never had the malware problems), but these websites disrupt whatever I’m doing. Most times I’ll just avoid the site. A good example is the MSN Video portion of MSN. Occasionally I’ll click a link leading to a video, at which point I’m told that I can’t watch it in anything but IE. This is odd since 1/2 of the emails I get link to funny videos on websites that do let me watch them in my browser of choice. Instead of launching IE and watching the (advertiser-supported) MSN Videos I simply move on. I’ve got too much stuff to do to be inconvenienced by this.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by the following error message. The site doesn’t support Firefox — but they’re working on correcting it. It’s a problem, and they’re fixing it. Bravo!

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/04/30/444551.aspx

SD West is next week
and SourceGear has a whole bunch of stuff happening:

Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1

We like to use trade shows as a public debut of new
products.  Last week we
shipped
“dot one” releases
of Vault and Fortress.  SD West
will be our first opportunity to talk with customers in person about these new
versions. 

Interactions like these are a big part of what makes a trade
show trip worthwhile for us.  The business of software can be so impersonal. 
Software flows out our T1 line.  Money flows in.  I love trade shows because
they’re a place where customers are not just rows in a database.  People stop
by and tell us they love our product.  We thank them.  People come and tell us
we disappointed them.  We listen.

Also see: A web site is not an RSS feed…nor the reverse.

But mostly, people come and ask us what’s new.  We show
them.  And their reactions are some of the best product feedback we get.

Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1 have some cool new stuff.  Here’s
a shot of the new “tag cloud” feature in Fortress:

src="http://software.ericsink.com/entries/1738_image001.gif"/>

Come see us in booth 308 next week and we’ll show you.

T-Shirts and Comic Books

align=right hspace=12/>Continuing our Evil Mastermind theme, we
have arranged to have a comic book placed in the conference bag for every
attendee.

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