Edupodder in hot water over student interviews.

I picked up a link to this post from Mr. Scoble’s blog. Its about a blogger who did a postcast with a number of students about emerging technologies and posted it up on the web. He was told in no uncertain terms that kind of behaviour was not allowed.

Now I can kind of understand a business having this kind of reaction, especially when talking about internal operational issues. A university however is a special case I think and this kind of converstation should be encouraged.

Edupodder is obviously taking the issue seriously since it could affect his employment status – but I think it has just been an overreaction from an organisational structure that isn’t really across some of these emerging conversational technologies.

Maybe they should have listened to the podcast

Weather.com switches from WebSphere to open source.

Computer World has a really interesting article about Weather.com switching from their IBM infrastructure to open source (specifically Apache and Tomcat). So why would I post a link to that from my blog?

Well – when I see articles like this (especially when the initial lead comes from the open source news network) I usually expect to read a Microsoft-bash, but this one was a little bit different (it was an IBM-bash).

It would have been interesting to see what a comparable Microsoft solution would have looked like in terms of total costs (licenses, development and support). I know from experience that a bunch (8) of Windows 2000 boxes running on three year old hardware could probably process twelve million hits in about four hours without any caching.

If you applied caching (and I suspect that Weather.com is highly cachable) you could probably grow that figure four to five times (possibly more depending on how evenly the cache hits were spread).

The licenses for Windows Server 2003 Web Edition for the US market kick in at just under $500.00 dollars and you could pick up a dual-proc 1 RU blade for between $2,000–3,000.

So if you bought say twelve of them you are probably looking at about $40,000–$50,000 for all the software and hardware you would need to handle the load, on the front end with a bit of room to spare.

Man – I’d love to get into a lab and prove it!

The relationship between continuous integration and agile methods.

I just finshed reading this excellent post by Aaron about the common misconception that employing continuous integration in your build environment actually means you are adopting agile methods. Unfortunately I’ve encountered this kind of reaction from teams that I have worked with in the past.

Continuous integration gives you a measure of control over any particular project. In some of our clients we use it to keep tabs on how the team are going. Too many commits might mean that they are churning code without really testing it out – too few and they might have hit a snag and are at risk of going dark.

The point is a good team leader can use continuous integrataion to take the temperature of the team regardless of whether they are using agile methods or not.

P.S. I loved the “in the end we are closer to a traditional hunt, gather, and analyze shop” line in Aaron’s post.

I’m a pundit blogger.

Frank did it, so I had to do it to, I’m such a lemming.

You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read. Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

What kind of blogger are you?

Actually, I don’t necessarily agree with the analysis.

Scoble is looking for a bad blogger.

Robert Scoble is looking for an example of a bad blogger in the business world. Thats a tough one, some people have managed to point out individual blogs that they consider to be bad. The problem is that the quality of a blog changes over time as the author changes so sometimes something that is red hot one minute is going to be a snooze fest the next.

Rather than sledge a few blogs in particular I thought I would list out a few behaviours that I find annoying.

• Press release feeds that call themselves blogs. Its OK to have an RSS feed and for it not to be a blog – don’t pretend you are conversational if you are not.
• Blogs that require you to log in before you can comment – I’m not an anonymous poster, but my time is precious to me – respect that!
• Blogs that are written in the third person  – e.g. “Executive Directory Lawrence Figglebottom did …. today”.
• My blog when I do any of the above.

Actually I think that we are all bad bloggers, the medium is too young to really have a list of best practices if you know what I mean.

What would Microsoft do with Claria/Gator?

There has been a pretty strong reaction to rumours that Microsoft is thinking of buying Claria/Gator. Most people seem to be overlooking the fact that this could actually be a good thing ™. Microsoft are probably interested in some of their user profiling technology rather than looking for a new branch to their business.

If other rumours are true that Microsoft is planning to bring out an AdSense-style technology then the Claria/Gator algorithms would be quite useful. The big question mark would be whether the algorithms would still work with out a client-side browser plug-in phoning home.

Regular Expressions == Maintainence Problem?

You are right Joseph – its a great quote. Personally I don’t have too many problems with regular expressions in code provided you treat them less like a literal string and more like a piece of runtime evaluated source code – which is why adding named captures help.

Of course – it helps when you have a RegEx guru on speed dial

Martin Granell is awarded a Solutions Architect MVP.

Martin Granell, one of the consultants at Readify has just been awarded MVP status by Microsoft! I’d like to congratulate Martin, although I am not really surprised. Martin has done a heap of work in the Melbourne .NET community through the user group and helped promote Enterprise Library by doing web-casts with the P&P team and even writing Hands-On Labs for TechEd this year.

It also means that the list of MVPs working at Readify has grown by one to be a total of eight:

• Bill Chesnut
• Dan Green
• Darren Neimke
• Greg Low
• Martin Granell
• Mitch Denny
• Paul Glavich
• Troy Magennis

Very cool! I love being surrounded by such smart people (although that applies everyone at Readify – not just the MVPs).

 

FY06 is going to be big for developers.

Frank is blogging about the beginning of the new financial year. I’ve always found this time of year pretty interesting because leading up to June 30 there are a whole heap of projects that companies what to get done quickly and then afterwards they suddenly get cashed up again for new work.

FY06 is probably going to be big for .NET developers because we are going to see the release of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, and I think people are going to adopt it pretty quick – which means LOTS of interesting work.

This is also the year that Longhorn gets closer to release, although I don’t think we will see it ship until late FY07. Longhorn is important because it will bring together lots of runtime services and put them into the operating system.

Like I said – its going to be a big year!

Visualizers in Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Martin Granell (one of our resident geniuses) sent an e-mail to one of our internal mailing lists with a link to the XML Visualizer for Visual Studio .NET 2003. Its a project up on GotDotNet which has built an add-in which simulates behaviour like the VS2005 visualizer – although this one is XML specific.

Great find Martin!