Nick and some of the Auckland DNUG crew went out for paintball today.... kinda reminded me to post my photos (and some words) about my fun with guns while in the US o' A earlier in the month.

I arrived in Seattle early for the MVP summit so my buddies and I decided to head out for some pistol shooting. We went to Wades Gunshop on Bel-Red Road, just down the road from the Redmond Campus. We hired a lane, paid our $12 for free range over the whole gun cabinet and set about firing every calibre they had bar one (the 500 Magnum which looked more like a handheld cannon).

We shot

• .22LR
• .38
• .357 Magnum
• 9mm
• .40
• .45

I think my favourite part of the day was emptying the whole clip (only 10 rounds these days) of a Glock Model 23 .40 cal pistol at 20 yards. Kinda makes you yearn to be an American and frightened to death of becoming so at the same time.

All in all it was a really fun day- I even wore my special g33k with a big handgun T-Shirt.

As you may already know I kicked off a discussion on the NZ .NET Mailing List late last week around the possiblity of running some free training on a community basis.

I've done some digging and there looks to be enough interest from both a student and instructor viewpoint to make it happen. The plan of attack will probably be to run it via Microsoft LiveMeeting. If you haven't played with LiveMeeting it's a bit of kit that Microsoft purchased off Placeware sometime last year. It allows powerpoiint presentations with live voice and application sharing over the internet in real time. MSDN uses it for their webcasts if you've ever watched one of those.

So anyway, the plan is to run some free training via LiveMeeting over the course of a month or two. The training will happen outside business hours either early in the morning (gotta give the option) or in the evening.

There are a whole load of potential parameters to the final course we could offer so what I'd like to do is solicit some feedback. If you are interested in participating in this community course please answer the following questions by posting me an email to chris(at)kognition.co.nz. I'll be collating the feedback and working on the final course proposal on Tusday night so please answer before Tuesday close of business. Just answer each question with the number and your answer.

1. What sort of time commitment can you make per week?
1 Hours
2 Hours
4 Hours

What is the best course time for you?
Before Work - 7:30am
After Work - 5:30pm
Early Evening - 6:30pm
Late Evening - 8:30pm

What sort of format would you like the course to take?
Lectures Only
Lectures and Labs
Labs Only

Which of the following topics would interest you (please put most important first if you choose more than one)?
ASP.NET
VB.NET
C#.NET
ADO.NET incl SQL Server 2000
Compact Framework
Windows and Smart Client Applications

Do you want the course to have an exam with a final mark?
Yes
No

Would you buy a textbook ($60-$150) if one were available for a course?
Yes
No

This lengthy article runs through, in some detail, the process the Sports Illustrated uses to get their digital photos from the field to production.

Looks like Mossad are having a go at getting New Zealand passports this time around. I'm impressed that our coppers actually nabbed them, one would have thought the Israelis should have been able to run rings around us.

Good to see the government 'treating it like any other case'. Bad to see them out on bail.... I mean can you say FLIGHT RISK! One has already escaped the country.

David Farrar has the first guess at numbers on the Civil Union Bill.... looks promising...

Let's hope we can convince a few more 'classically liberal' ACT members to support it.

Casey has been spending some time playing with neural nets and asks

“i am beating myself up for not learning quickly enough today. does this exist in the neural network world? a machine knowing that its training is going badly and that it needs to train differently?”

No comments on his blog means I'll add my 2c worth here.

The way I see it there are two possible approaches (in mainstream NN theory) that address the rate of training issue.

1. Inertia
While not really providing for the concept of a global track on learning rate, the use of an inertia value provides a useful mechanism for controlling learning rate in a localised fashion. Basically it aims to prevent local minima/maxima solutions from being found.

2. Evolving Neural Networks
This probably provides better for the idea that Casey is looking at. Evolving neural nets change their architecture- usually by adding nodes but sometime also layers- on the basis of the perceived ability to fit the problem. This fit-ability is in turn often determined by the rate at which the potential solution is being approached in training.

Anyway.... those are my thoughts...

Mike Hall is blogging about personalised g33k plates.

Mine is 'XML'.

I have a friend with 'GOATCX'.... now that is a little more concerning... in fact it's concerning if you even know what it means.

Nic is doing it.... so I think I should as well....

Microsoft have a Security Summit (which could also be called "DevDays2004"), and I'm presenting at it, along with a bunch of other neat people (likie Nic). Its on in

• Auckland, 26th April 2004 @ Carlton Hotel
• Wellington, 28th April 2004 @ Hotel Intercontinental
• Christchurch, 29th April 2004 @ Hotel Grand Chancellor

If you have an interest in, or need for, secure Smart Client application, or hack-resistant ASP.NET applications (I think that covers everyone), come along! Its free, tho I think it's filling VERY fast...

Well, it seems I have acrued my first ever speeding fine. One of those damned camera things.....

But the really cool thing is... you can pay for it with Amex... can you say *double airmiles*? At least there is some justice. Can't pay parking tickets with amex... tried that before... had plenty of those already!

Robert Levy, one of the mobility peeps @ MS went for a fly with Paula (another mobility peep). He writes about it here.

I'm partial to the odd flight myself, but usually in a purely simulated environment. Thus it was that I found myself installing MS Flight Simulator 2004 the other night- hooray for the Microsoft Company Store @ MVP Summit.

Why does the thing take so bloody long to install!?! I think I watched a whole Simpson's episode and most of Queer Eye while waiting. Can we please have it ship on both CD and DVD media next time? I got so sick of waiting that once I did actually get up and running I lost interest almost immediately. Hmmm... maybe I'll try again this weekend.

Russel Brown has a good post today on the moralistic ranting and raving that is going on over the yet to be introduced Civil Unions Bill.

As per my last post on the matter, the Libertarian in me would get the Government out of the Marriage business altogether.

Is here

Check out this cool vizualization tool for Google News.

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

I'm off to Vancouver for a couple of days as the next stop on my journey. Scoble was up there over the weekend and reckons that there is a good Iranian restaurant in North Hongcouver (where I'm staying) so I might check it out.

Ian Griffiths has a good post on how to use the using statement in C# to create a better approach to locking than the C# lock statement which runs a real deadlock risk. It would be nice to see MS parameterise the lock statement to provide the sort of timeout functionality provided by this solution.

That siad, with input from EricGu and others the proposed approach looks quite elegant.

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2004/03/23/locking

So I'm off to Redmond for the MVP Summit and going about it the long way.

I flew out of NZ on Thursday morning (NZST) and arrived in Oahu, HI, Wednesday Evening (Hawaii Time). Flew out on Air New Zealand and for all the bitching I've done about them in the past, they were a good choice. Easy flight and while back in coach (hard for a small businessman like me to justify the front few rows) I got 3 seats to myself. I kicked back and watched a couple of good movies- Love Actually (seen already and it is FANTASTIC) and Calendar Girls (OKish). Then I watched some DivX'd episodes of TopGear on my tablet PC for the rest of the time.

Got to Hawaii pretty ate on the Wednesday night and met up with a mate of mine who works as a computer geek for one of our NZ govt departments. He's staying at some pimptastic resort in Hawaii so we cruised back to his place for a few hours sleep before flying out to Kona, HI at about 6am the next morning on Aloha.

We got to Kona, picked up the rental car (a red Mustang Convertable) and then cruised down to the hotel to drop off some gear before we went diving.

We dived with a crowd called Sea  Paradise along the south Kona Coast. The highlight of the diving on Hawaii is the great volcanic structures you get to explore. Plenty of cavesw and tunnels- great fun. Having been spoilt rotten on the Great Barrier Reef last year it was hard to get too worked up about the marine life or the coral, but, it was good diving nonetheless. One guy on the trip flooded his Nikon Coolpix 5300 - moral of the story == don't take your nice US$700 camera to 20m in a shitty plastic bag housing!

That afternoon we cruized back to the hotel via Safeway (where they make amazing custom sub sammies) and pretty much crashed by the pool for the afternoon.

The next day we did 4 dives, two in the morning and two in the evening. Unfortunatly we didn't get to see the Manta Rays as despite being assured on the phone that our night dive would travel (a long way) north to go and see them we ended up doing out night dive south of the dive shop.

Saturday morning we cruised around the bottom of the island. We stopped at some Waikoloa gardens (or something like that) on the road down to the Place of Refuge for lunch- what a rip off! $10 + TAX AND TIPS for a scummy fish burger. The Place of Refuge was OK... wasn't really in a cultural sightseeing mood at the time though.

We kept cruising down the coast through small townships and got hungry pretty quickly so stopped at some crazy little Mexican place run by a genuine spanish speaking mexican matriach- great value! It was in the front of the theatre- look like it was popular with the locals. We got a yummy corn and chicken and bean thing wrapped in corn husk leaves.

We kept driving around towards the Volcano region. First stop was the Volcano Winery- this was a real highlight and is highly recommended - free tasting and it has to be the most exoctic winery that I have bought wine from. Got a couple of bottles to take home- novelty factor mainly. Then we cruised into the Volcanoes National Park. Stopped at the visitor center, which IMHO looks pretty average when you compare it to some of the National Park vistors centers in New Zealand. Then we drove down the Chain of Craters road looking at all of the lava flows and so forth. There wasn't much activity and no visible lava, but, it was an interesting and at times amazing drive.

Finally we drove from the Volcanoes into Hilo where we stayed the night and some big Hotel on the waterfront. Hawaii feels like a place that was in tourist boom mode about 20 years ago- all the big hotels now look a bit tired.

On our last day we drove up the coast from Hilo looking at the waterfalls along the way. THis was the most amazing piece of driving we did. All along the coast are rivers that come as steep rapids right down to the sea and the road runs over them by way of amazing bridges 50m high and more.

That afternoon we drove back out towards the Airport, grabbed some Jamba Juice which is REALLY good btw, and then got to the Airport fairly early. THe lovely ladies @ Aloha Airlines upgraded us to 'first' class. THis meant we got to sit in the big seats, have our drinks poured rather than from a sachet, and sit in the windowless (but airconditioned) room that is the Hilo First CLass Lounge. Just as well we did get to sit in the lounge though as when we came out the airport was chaos- note to self- do not fly out of Hilo on a Sunday night again.

...and that's about it...

The MS newsgroups are one of the best (and most underutilized) resources for .NET developers.

MS have launched a search engine for em- I'm still a big fan of Google groups but this offeres an alternative...