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Don Box has a good weblog entry summarizing where .NET remoting is going. We recently changed our product to support this technology and it works well for us. If you control both ends of the application (and you can cut through the WS hype), remoting is a good option.
Pat Helland at Microsoft wrote an interesting piece on the parallels between urban development and IT development. The metaphor is a bit stretched in places (applications are buildings?) but it makes some sense overall.
The biggest difference between the two that I see is that cities grew organically with no real direction or control except that of economic and social imperative, while IT infrastructures grow under the supervision of managers. Sure, there is an amount of chaos in the on going evolution of a large IT infrastructure, but this is nothing compared to the evolution of a large city like New York or London at the end of the 19th century.
I wish that The Economist would publish an RSS feed. I've been an avid reader of the magazine for more than 15 years since it was introduced to me by a crusty old economic history teacher but they have a lot of great content that is available only on their web site. When will old school publications get with the program and publish RSS feeds?
As an addendum to this post: some old school publications do get it. Both the Washington Post and NY Times offer a good selection of RSS feeds.
I ran the Charlottesville Half Marathon this weekend. It was a great race with beautiful terrain and good cheering sections but very hilly. I was getting over a sinus infection that halted my training for ten days two weeks before the race. After a lousy start (:55 at the turn), I finished in 1:52 which is about 9 minutes slower than my best but not too bad.
This new broadband service by Nextel looks very cool. The price per month for the entry plan ($35) is very competitive with cable and DSL plus you can use it where ever you can get a cell signal. Yet another reason to cut the cord. Very cool.
Wired has an article about small form factor PCs. I have to say that I'm a fan. The most recent desktop PC I purchased is one of the XPC form factor machines by Shuttle. It is very small and looks pretty good on the desktop. It really makes no sense to have a big box that is mostly filled with air anyway. If I buy any more desktops in the future (might just stick to laptops), they will definitely be a small form factor.
This CNet article describes some interesting research that supports what I've always believed: mass emails don't work. Some researchers at Harvard Business School studied the effectiveness of mass emails and found that they were not effective. It is much better to send a more personalized message to a few interested people. If my response is important, put some effort into the request.
This article discusses some of the new features in C# 2.0. The improvements discussed will make some of the more repititious tasks easier. I'm looking forward to 2.0 - it looks like it will be more productive.
I'm happy to report that the noise cancelling headphones that I purchased work petty well. They certainly made my flight a little bit more pleasant. Plus, the working conditions on the project I'm on right now are very crowded and they help cut the ambient noise in the office. Overall, I'm pleased.
I just got a set of noise cancelling headphones.
I got some of the cheapest ones I could find just to check the technology out and I like them quite a bit. They probably aren't as good as my old Sony headphones in terms of audio quality, but they do blank out a lot of the background noise in the office so you don't have to listen to music quite as loud. Plus, they sound decent if not crystal clear. The next test is a cross-country flight.
Cnet references some research from the Yankee group that says that moving to Linux might not save money for many companies.
Duh. Any change in working systems is going to be expensive even if the OS is "free". That is why, until there is an event that pushes companies off of their existing systems, they will stay with what they have - UNIX and Windows. If Linux proves to be better than these systems over time, then the event might just be that the critical mass of application availability moves to Linux from where it is now.
There has been a little bit of coverage about a so-called iPod killer that Microsoft is planning on releasing this summer. It really does address one of the chief problems of music subscription services in that you can't play the music on your portable, but unless the catalog is really broad, it won't make much of a dent - it still makes sense to go a la carte if the service isn't going to have what you want. Is owning music that big of a deal? I've got a lot of CDs that I rarely listen to anymore and most music is just not worth keeping forever. Especially if you get a huge selection of new music tailored to what you already like to explore at zero marginal cost.
It is that time of year where we move the clocks ahead. I've never understood the point of this. I guess it is justified by energy savings but it seems like things would be a lot easier if we just pick a time and stick to it.