Hans kicks off into the web logging world with a detailed post on the schedule slippage of Whidbey and Yukon.

The product name for SQL Server codename ‘Yukon’ is Microsoft SQL Server 2005

• The SQL Server team is working hard to release Beta 2 in the coming months
• There will be a Beta 3 release in the second half of 2004. Some early adopter customers will go live on this beta and will provide us with additional feedback before the product is shipped.
• SQL Server 2005 is planned for release during the first half of 2005
• The official product name for Visual Studio codename ‘Whidbey’ is Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It is also planned for release in the first half of 2005.

http://blogs.msdn.com/CSharpFAQ/archive/2004/03/11/87816.aspx

Pat Helland, the MS architecture Guru and all around nice guy, is now blogging... subscribe y'all

It's time to see how good this blog thing really is.

I'm in WA (Seattle to be exact) in early April for the MVP Summit. I'm arriving a bit early and I am really keen to get some whitewater kayaking in. I'm a pretty decent paddler (if my ego does say so itself)- past NZ whitewater team member etc...

There aren't any commercial kayaking outfits that I have been able to find- apart from in rubber duckies... But there just have to be some people who are keen to take a Kiwi like me out boating! Who's keen? I'm mad as a hatter... will run most anything.

Any Seattlites? Any Microsofties wanna go boating with me?

I'm keen to go head out on Fri 2nd April and Sat 3rd or maybe Sun 4th.

Naturally I can reciprocate to any visitors to lovely New Zealand- I know some great 'secret creeks'...email me (chris[at]kognition.co.nz)!

They've got internet @ Sydney Airport.....

But the bloody thing is censored according to David Farrar.... now that would really piss me off.

Amit has blogged that this is available...

Some great stuff on specs @ MS

Scottie, spec me up!

When specs go bad

When you don't have a spec, everything is a bug

One of the problems with the .NET crypto classes is that many of them simply interop into the unamanged CSPs installed on the machine. Shawn Farkas (a Microsoftie) has posted some stuff on using the fully managed bits from the Mono class libraries....

How cool is that. X11 licensed too....

...award for the day goes to

mszCool's Developer Discussion Cave

A tool for configuring SSL for development.....
Wikkid!

“The first cool thing I discovered was SelfSSL – a great tool for developers, too. With that tool you can configure SSL on your IIS 6.0 developer instance with just one statement in a command prompt: selfssl /T.
You won’t believe, but this simple command generates a certificate for SSL, adds it to the certificate store (/T means add the local machine’s certificate to the trusted root authorities, too) and completely configures SSL on IIS. Simply great!!”

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3322891

Not all scroll mice mind you... just dual directional scroll mice- i.e. the tilt wheel ones.

MSN has a sandbox site where you get to play with all their new toys...

like Newsbot

“MSN Newsbot (beta) is an experimental, automated news service. We gather news from over 4,000 sources on the internet and speed your discovery of news stories on the internet. News headlines are clustered together to allow you to compare coverage from multiple sources and each story links to the publisher's site where you can read the full article. “

their search toolbar (I don't think I'll ever shift away from Google as I value searching groups too much.

their social network application

...and a whole schwag of others.

Bill Wert, one of the Test Engineers on the CLR performance team has started blogging....

What sort of stuff do we want to know about code performance metrics?

I'm keen to hear about efficient ways of obtaining metrics- often when I've tried to do it in the past my performance testing code becomes the performance problem.....

Some joker has taken it upon themselves to do an 'audit' of all of the windows mobile MVPs...

I got a thumbs down :)

I don't know who this joker is, but at least I'm not Jason Dunn or Chris De Herrera.... they must have really pissedd him off...

Dale Coffing, proprieter of one of my favourite sites, and all around nice Christian guy got a thumbs down too.... Guess we'll have to drown our sorrows together at the MVP summit.

Scoble has a link to someone grizzling about wasting half an hour only to find that the PPC emulator serial port don't work....

Two things..

1. Half an hour!?! *scoffs* We wasted a day and a half shagging around trying to get a legacy Delphi app to connect to a SQL 7 database earlier in the week (some bizzare bug in the Delphi ADO library in the end) so don't grizzle about half an hour.

2. It can be done.... you just need to google up the solution (1st result... Google is your friend..... newsgroups are your friend...)

1. Click "Tools | Options | Device Tools | Devices
2. Select the "PocketPC 2002 Emulator" in the listbox.
3. In the Startup Server section, click "Configure".
4. You should see a form with 3 tabs. Click "Hardware".
5. You can set 0, 1 or 2 serial ports in the emulated PC. Select the PC's
physical port(s) to be assigned to the PDA's logical ports.
6. Click the "System" tab and change the amount of memory in the
emulated PDA. I've found that unless you change this value, any changes you
make to the ports won't be seen by the emulated PDA.

 

From Gizmodo

'Toothing is a form of anonymous sex with strangers - usually on some form of transport or enclosed area such as a conference or training seminar. 'Toothers meet by first connecting suitable equipment - such as a modern phone or palmtop computer. Users 'discover' other computers or phones in the vicinity and then send a speculative message. The usual greeting is: 'Toothing?'.

If the other party is interested, messages are exchanged until a suitable location is agreed - usually a public toilet, although there are tales of more adventurous spots such as deserted carriages or staff areas. What happens next is up to you!'

...or just virtualize one on my Pocket PC

http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/virtual_ipod_the_ppod.php

”One Person, One Phone”... My Nirvana...

Imagine Sykpe over your Windows Smartphone or Pocket PC. You'd only ever have to carry the one device.

CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada
http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/rec/html/2004scc013.wpd.html

[via LessigBlog]

I'm a bit cynical when it comes to describing the US as the 'Land of the Free'- it is the home of the war on drugs isn't it?

But, my haope is slowly being restored... for example, Harvard University now has a porn mag...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357342

This DOC provides some good detail on all the new language features forthcoming in C# 2.0 (Whidbey)

Are we seeing the rise of a new threat on the internet? That of Scoble 'Unsubscribing' you?

“Slate is a Microsoft company, but I will subscribe from the feed if they don't fix this. And soon. If I subscribe, that means I'll be far less likely to point to you and talk about you.”

Are we seeing the beginning of a whole new revolution in media? Scoble has been on about power over the past few weeks... This blogging thing seems to me to be bringing some of the disruptive power of peer to peer style communications into the more public arena of the web.

How much power does a single person have over the traffic of a site or the ranking on google? With the trickle down effect of posts and reposts through the blog hierarchy the decisions of an 'A-List' blogger must surely have quite wide ranging repercussions. Dare referenced some research being done by HP into some of these blog power network ideas (Blog Epidemic Analyser) and is fairly critical of it. I'm not so pessimistic- I think that some really cool ideas could come out of a temporal analysis of blog interlinking. It would be interesting to see how the migration of data through the internet over time might be related to viral propogation.

Maybe Scoble is more of a Wheezing Sneezing Superbug Carrier on the plane from Hong Kong....

Are there sub propogation structures within interest groups? i.e. Does a piece of information (a post or a link) travel more slowly between interest groups (countries) and then spread quickly within that interest group? Or is it, as I suspect, quite the opposite where links propogate quickly through 'hub' blogs but once they reach an interest group there is a reluctance to indulge in too much re-posting lest we end up with a caucophonous echo chamber?

How quickly does news travel through the blogosphere? How does it survive the trip accuracy wise? To what extent does blogging suffer from Chinese Whisper syndrome where everybody wants (or feels the need) to add their 2c worth. Are there mutation effects that can be easily identified where information is added, removed or spun to the posters views?

Maybe it does warrant some research after all..... I have got a Masters degree to complete shortly.... *ponders*... What do you think?

[Update]

Others think Scoble is a sneezer too....
http://www.webjives.com/archive/2004_03_01_archive.html#107869771669068939

A post by Josh Heitzman seems to indicate that there will be COM interop support in the next version of the CF...

May be old news.. but first confirmation from an MS source that I have seen.

“the next version of the .NET Compact Framework will require C++ exceptions, as they are utilized in the new COM interop support being provided in the next version.  It's my understanding that the current version of the .NET Compact Framework does not require C++ exceptions, because it does not have the COM interop support”

Jim Wilson also has some insights

http://www.devexpress.com

I'll post that full review I've been promising some time later this week.

Someone on the Left must agree with me because I posted
Answering NZPundit at 10am

I personally don't see why race can't establish a valid need in the medical area. I certainly think that culture can never establish medical need, but race almost certainly can.

...and by 2pm No Right Turn had
Typical

The fact is that in the case of health at least, race is need. And all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the right over the failure of the world to conform to their ideology is not going to change that one iota.

NZPundit has posed a challenge based around the following article....
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2833404a10,00.html

Wellington School of Medicine and Health Sciences researcher Tony Blakely has released the latest findings of the New Zealand Census-Mortality Study to show that health policies cannot be based solely on economic need.

Dr Blakely, of the University of Otago, said that in response to the current political debate over health funding he had decided to pre-release the findings of an unpublished study that looked at death rates in terms of both ethnicity and income levels.

Death rates are commonly used as an indicator of health need. Dr Blakely said the results were "too critical" to leave until they were formally published

The challenge relates to the need based vs race based funding debate.

Without actually diving into the statistics and scientific method as NZPundit does....

I personally don't see why race can't establish a valid need in the medical area. I certainly think that culture can never establish medical need, but race almost certainly can. If a certain genetic line is predisposed towards a certain illnesses then there most certainly is a need established. The problem is that any time anyone talks about genetic predispositions and/or genetic flaws on a racial basis they get labled racist.

Eric Gunnerson has an article up on MSDN that runs through the various mechanisms for invoking code on the .NET platform. If it's one this that managed environments are pretty good at it's resolving, loading and executing code on the fly. Eric runs through the performance os standard invocation mechanisms as wll as the more exotic/dynamic approaches.

Take a look.

That's it....

Air NZ, bucket carrier of the wrolds greatest travellers, has just announced that they are putting up the price of Business Class airpoints rewards tickets!... By 20%

So now, not only is it harder to earn airpoints with AirNZ, it's harder to redeem them. They have removed the one loyalty incentive that is not directly price/service based from their arsenal. I've already had a bleet about their baggage allowance rules this month and now they decide to do this!

AirNZ have also put the price up for points transfers from other programmes- so no more American Express points to AirNZ in 2005....

So stuff em! I'm gonna burn up my last few airpoints on some pre increase business class trips to Cairns to go diving and then I'm outa here..... Qantas and One World here I come!

Russel Brown has a good piece on the ruckus between parliamentary Woodworker Gerry B and the the religious leaders yesterday on the wireless.

It also includes some good discussion on Ngai Tahu and their nature as a property rights oriented tribe. Some good commentary all up and well worth a read.

A little birdy tells me that Code Rush, the VS.NET IDE enhancer from DevExpress is due for release today or tommorow! I'll do the in depth blog post on it once I've had the release version for a couple of days.

Cool Tablet App of the Week goes to Art Rage. Loren reckons that it is enough to warrant buying a Tablet PC!

A real painting app for the Tablet... and it's free!

Unfortunatly I fried the OS on my Tablet last night so I gotta try and find a USB CD Rom to reinstall......

Looks like they're gonna be dishing out beta versions of Laguna (SQL Server CE 3.0) at MDC this year....

I seriously tossed up going on the way to MVP Summit but decided to go scuba diving in Hawaii instead.... gotta have some pleasures in life *grins*... It's bloody expensive ofr we antipodeans to get to these conferences too... even with the US dollar as weak as it is.

A recent Mobile Minute had a link to some stuff by Kyle Cordes on the Compact Framework. This short piece by Kyle gives a great once over lightly of CF development and covers off many of the questions that always seem to raise their head in any discussion of CF development. I had a few of them the other day in my web cast *plugs web cast*. Kyle even includes some very interesting BAT file instructions for building CF applications automatically... very cool this.

I'll add just a couple of quick points to some of the stuff there.....

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/Default.aspx

Scoble linked to some leaked videos of the new Motorola devices.