Via Slashdot: the French are apparently launching a pilot fibre optic network offering selected Parisians 2.5Gbps Internet access for 70 Euro per month. They'll throw in TV access and a phone connection as well. Not a bad deal at all, for ~R600 per month.

Joel Spolsky, from Joel on Software, has an interesting little tale of his first review with Bill Gates, back when Joel was the PM for VBA in the early 1990's.


Joel reckons that, despite having spent more than 15 years at the helm of Microsoft, BillG still made sure he was intimately familiar with the key technical points of the products Microsoft was producing. He read Joel's ~500pg spec, cover-to-cover, the day before Joel's review, and when it was all over, Joel concluded:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

I've heard similar stories from guys on the ASP .NET team; apparently he hasn't lost his technical touch.

Since Microsoft's announcement of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 a few months ago, I've been revisiting a lot of the work I've done in the past on parallel programming, and I'm very excited to see how the product will be accepted by the IT and business communities when it is released, especially since cluster computing has thus far been overwhelmingly a Linux affair. If you haven't come across it, Windows CCS, scheduled for release in H1 2006, is a modified version of Windows Server 2003 designed specifically to run computational ("Beowulf") clusters.

Until fairly recently, high performance computing has been the domain of (primarily U.S., Japanese and U.K.) government research, and well-funded departments in big engineering and financial firms. However, the dramatic decrease in the price of computing power has led to HPC clusters becoming far more mainstream, particularly in the U.S.. With Windows CCS, Microsoft wants push cluster computing to ordinary businesses that have big computational needs, but fairly small budgets. Engineering is one potential beneficiary of this push (Microsoft envisions a scenario where almost all engineers have access to cluster facilities), but applications in data mining and risk management, to name just two areas, are both helped by additional computing power and are generally useful to a broad range of companies.

I think as CPU clock speed increases become smaller and further apart, many companies are going to start setting up clusters for their most pressing computational needs. Certainly I think this will be the case in the U.S., and in other first world countries. How the prospect of cluster computing is treated by South African businesses over the next couple of years is going to be very interesting though.

TechEd ended last week, but I've only just had a chance to catch my breath after returning home on Monday. Now that I've worked through my e-mail backlog, here's my synopsis of the conference.

 

Throughout the week I attended breakout sessions primarily in the "Connected Systems" and "Architecture" tracks. Although I'm primarily a developer, I'd seen so many "What's new in WinForms 2.0" and ASP .net Master Pages presentations, I didn't think I could stomach any more. In fact, as a general rule, at conferences I prefer to attend sessions that are on the edge of what I know. I find I get the most out of it that way.

 

"Connected Systems" is Microsoft-speak for distributed computing technologies, and spans Web Services, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, MSMQ, Indigo and general guidance on building distributed systems. Of course, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) made a strong appearance within the latter.

 

The sessions were generally very good, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I'm looking forward to receiving the post-conference DVD though; it'll be good to go through the slides and demos again. Attending >20 one and a quarter hour sessions in the space of five days left me both drained and unable to properly take in half the stuff that was spoken about!

 

During the week I helped out at the "Ask-the-Experts" area and had some rather interesting conversations with European developers building systems with .NET. The diversity of applications to which .NET is being applied is really rather amazing - from process control and automation, to military applications to HR/payroll software.

 

If you've got spare time on your hands and are looking for something to learn about, I recommend going through the TechEd sides on Indigo (the presentations for TechEd USA are available on the web already); until now not much has been made widely known about how to build Indigo systems, and TechEd covered quite a lot. Also, the Patterns and Practices people have started issuing guidance on building SOA systems, and the TechEd presentations on SOA also offer quite a lot of practical guidance on how to build SOA systems with Visual Studio .NET. I certainly found the presentations interesting and useful.

TechEd's Preconference Sessions were today - I attended the “Connected Systems” track, which was quite interesting. The conference looks like it's going to be a blast when all 6,500 attendees are here tomorrow. The RAI Conference centre is absolutely massive. The shot below really doesn't do it justice!

 

I'm going to be flying out to Amsterdam for TechEd Europe on Saturday afternoon, so I'm hoping the decent weather in the Netherlands holds up. I'm going to be helping out in the “Ask the Experts” area for about 10 hours during the conference, which takes place from Tuesday to Friday next week. I'll also be attending sessions inbetween my shifts, so I'll do a post or two during/after TechEd to let you know what happened if anything interesting is announced or spoken about.

I've just uploaded a copy of an e-book I wrote a few years back to dotnet.za.net. The book covers the basics of ASP .NET using the VB .NET language. Unfortunately it has a couple of missing chapters, and there are probably quite a few errors and omissions, but I figured it'd be better for me to make available what I had done rather than let the book rot on my hard drive. The story of how the book came to be is in the Author's Note section, if you want to know more about its history. Go here to download the PDF.

Anandtech have a quick look at a solid-state “hard drive” from Gigabyte. Essentially they've developed a PCI card with RAM slots on it, and a DDR-to-SATA converter; you plug the card into a SATA controller, and to the controller it appears just as an ordinary hard drive would.

A friend of mine suggested that this could be really useful for storing your swap file on - putting more than 1Gb or so of RAM into the card will be a little expensive, but I'd imagine you'll get quite a bit of bang-for-your-buck if you ran Windows' paging system off memory that's an order of magnitude faster than regular hard drives.

Yesterday I received an invitation to help out at the "Ask-the-Experts" area at TechEd Europe 2005, which is taking place in July. I'm probably going to go, so for anyone who's interested and may also be attending TechEd, please leave a comment in this post so we can meet up in Amsterdam. I've heard a lot about the US and European TechEd events, and apparently they're awesome, but it would be nice to see some South African faces while I'm there, if possible!

I launched a new business today, sasmallbiz.co.za, that will provide five-page templated websites to small businesses in South Africa for R79.00 per month. I'm using a web-based system I built a while back to automatically generate simple five-page websites that can be updated via an easy-to-use content management system. I'm hoping that there are still plenty of small businesses in South Africa that have been put off getting websites because of the high costs of design and maintenance and that will take a liking to my service which has no initial setup fee, and allows them to update their own website whenever they like at no cost.

The Business Standard is reporting that Indian villages are to receive 100Mbps fiber connections in a new broadband rollout project which will give villagers broadband Internet access for just ~R10 per month. The project is scheduled to be completed by the end of next year. Meanwhile, back on the Dark Continent, I've just taken over 25 minutes to make this post thanks to my dialup connection giving me a massive speed of ~300bps, for which I am charged over R500 per month (for which I think I can blame both Telkom and M-Web).

The Register has published an open letter to people from the 'Red' (central U.S.) states who voted for George Bush. Although clearly from a radical member of the Democratic party, I think it sums up the political situation in the U.S. quite well, no holds barred.

Scott Guthrie, the Product Unit Manager for ASP.NET, has posted a couple (1, 2) of really interesting blog entries on the status of Whidbey (ASP.NET 2.0) and his team's testing practices. The team has over 100 000 test cases, which together test over 500 000 scenarios (covering the full range of product features on all imaginable configurations of hardware and software). I think we can definitely look forward to a very high quality product.

I've been using Google Desktop Search for about a week now, and my impression of it thus far has been very positive. It's worth downloading for the Outlook e-mail search feature alone, but I've also found it very handy when looking for code snippets or other random pieces of information I have stashed in text files in my bloated My Documents folder.

 

The product is still only in beta, but I've found it to be perfectly usable (in typical Google fashion). It's going to be interesting to see how Microsoft responds...

I finished downloading and installed Microsoft MapPoint 2004 North America today, and it's a very impressive product. The level of detail is very high (considering the whole of North America is covered), and the wealth of demographic data and mapping tools that ship with the product must make it a very useful product for marketers.

Now all that's needed is for Microsoft to release a version for South Africa. That'd probably force me to trundle off to the local computer store and buy a Pocket PC and accompanying GPS module.