In yet another case of 'oh dear I forgot that word stamps every revision', the California AG has been publishing letters passed across the desk of the MPAA.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001775.shtml

In yet another case of 'oh dear I forgot that word stamps every revision', the California AG has been publishing letters passed across the desk of the MPAA.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001775.shtml

Harvey Silvergate has a very well researched and very well written article outlining the real threat being posed to fundamental liberty in the US today. It is long- took me about 20 mins to read- but well worth it.

I've bitten the bullet and decided to start being better about source control in my business- we're a .NET only (pretty much) dev shop building Smart Client and Smart Device applications mainly for the electricity services industry. Up until now I've been using some rudimentary batch scripts for backup but haven't really been as diligent as I should be. With more people coming on board (more on this another post soon) I've decided to use Subversion for source management.

I had 3 basic contenders for my source management solution.

1. CVS
2. VSS
3. Subversion

I have used VSS before and it is a DAWG! Sorry Korby, but it really is. They reckon that they are going to fix it but IMHO they would be better to throw the sullied name out and start afresh... CVS comes with a bit too much historical baggage for me. So, I decided to wait for Subversion- so far it looks good- good GUI support, merge based, easy branching... that's about all I'd really ask for in source control... oh! It's free too..... as in free beer not free software i.e. it is Apache licensed not GPL licensed... *refrains from ranting on the GPL* 

I installed it this evening and here's a quick tour of what I did in case you are doing it and can learn from some of the stuff I did.

1. Downloaded
   Subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/ (the windows installer version)
   TortoiseSVN http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ (free as in 'free software')this is a nice Explorer integrated GUI
   AnkhSVN http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/(free as in beer) this is a plugin for VS.NET
2. Ran the Subversion installer
3. Decided that I wanted to use the built in Subversion server rather than installing Apache on my box. But the built in SVN server is a simple daemon... so I decided to download FireDaemon (not free but a trial version available) to run the server.
4. Created a repository.... svnadmin.exe create e:\sourcerepository
5. Got the server running against the repository by creating a FireDaemon service to run
   svnserve -d -r e:\sourcerepository
6. Found out that I needed to run the service with certain rights- namely log on as a service (duh!) so I used Local System (reconfigured my FireDaemon service)
7. Gave Local System read/write/modify permission on my repository
8. Configured the repository configuration file for security in %repository%/conf
9. Tested it using Tortoise just by going to Repo-Browser and creating a new folder in the repository.

I found that the most useful document for setting up on my Windows box was the TortiseSVN documentation- it was VERY helpful and easy to read and ran through pretty much the whole lot... I found the Subversion docs a bit too Unixie (I wouldn't know a Linux box from a bar of soap).

I'll post more as things go along....

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

“Check this shit out (Fig. 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap.
      Christ, this was such a waste of my time.
      Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.”

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/03/14.html#a7010

”The way to fight hate speech is by pointing it out. This is a marketplace of ideas. Sometimes the ideas are rotten. That's what a lot of countries, and people don't get. The way to get rid of bad ideas is to point them out. Not ban them.”

'nuff said!

A consortium of communications companies including Nokia, Vodafone, Microsoft and Orange, are asking that ICANN approve its application for a mobile-phone oriented top level domain.

News report here.  Slashdot rumination here.

Calder.mobile from the Guggenheim depicted above.

[via TrademarkBlog]

Make Services Idempotent
http://weblogs.asp.net/ramkoth/archive/2004/03/12/88423.aspx

Legacy Applications
http://weblogs.asp.net/ramkoth/articles/88778.aspx

MS are doing a roadshow security summit in Akl, Wel and Chc at the end of April. I'll be there wearing my presenters hat so make sure that you come up and say hi.

http://blogs.msdn.com/PAndrew/archive/2004/03/13/88762.aspx

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