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Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog
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Saturday, September 28, 2002 |
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Friday, September 27, 2002 |
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reviewed on Blog Critics. Kevin Marks reviews my novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," on blogcritics.org:
About once every ten years, a Science Fiction novel appears that redefines the art form. One that describes a world different from our own, but recognisably ours - extrapolated from current trends, but richly evocative of its difference, adding words to the language that needed to be coined. Books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy,Snow Crash and now Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
What these books have in common are worlds that draw you in and make you believe in the technological underpinnings, accepting them implicitly and learning their terminology (TANSTAAFL, frood, Metaverse, Whuffie) as you go, while you follow the adventures of characters you come to care about.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
I haven't read Cory's book but to be put in the same company as TMIAHM, SnowCrash, it would have to be incredible beyond most SF books. I mean this is a comparison to two of the Top 20 SF books of all time, books that changed SF forever...
6:31:56 PM 
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Web Services DevCon - Part II.
Thanks to some very understanding, caring and generous individuals, I am going to be able to attend the DevCon after all - and I won't have to break the bank to do it! I can't wait! I haven't been this excited about a technical event since Guerrilla COM VII back in 1998.[System.Error.Emit]
Awesome! Update: I found Matt Croydon, who is yet another Web Services guy wanting to meet you . (I am now RSS subscribed) This thing is gonna really rock! I got 2 more people signed up through my blog. I feel like I will know just about everyone there this year - its that intimate - and I really want to meet the rest!
12:16:36 PM
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ASP.NET DataGrid has built-in functionality of paging. However, it has one disadvantage. Even though you are displaying only a small part of entire DataSet, you need to populate the DataSet with whole data. This works well when your DataSet is small but certainly not with huge amount of data. To overcome this problem DataGrid also allows custom paging. In custom paging you fetch only the data that is required to display the current page.
7:19:29 AM
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Thursday, September 26, 2002 |
Matt Pope seems to think that kids not knowing about Blogs makes them come from another universe. Quite an Exaggerated and inflated view of the value and importance of Blogs when most Software Engineers I have talked to don't even know what a blog is.
6:55:57 PM
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Announcing the GotDotNet Workspaces Beta Test: GotDotNet Workspaces is a dynamic online environment where teams can collaborate on software development projects without geographical or network boundaries. Create a Workspace today, or join an existing Workspace
12:24:36 PM
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Wednesday, September 25, 2002 |
Ray Ozzie: Pingback via Dave
I don't have a Discuss link on this blog for a reason: I think that it's a Good Thing that this blog medium is different than a traditional electronic discussion medium - relying on human mechanisms to "spread the word" about interesting referrals, rather than technical mechanisms. These are great uses of automation. But for organizing discussion .. I'm thinking right now that I'd prefer to stick with human talkback rather than automated pingback. Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog] Amen to that.
10:40:24 AM
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Tuesday, September 24, 2002 |
Its getting real close to the Web Services DevCon, being put on by Chris Sells. Chris reminds me that any of my readers and friends can get a 50% discount so I'd like you all to consider it and let me/us know. I can't say enough great things about this conference: its intimate, cheap, real, pragmatic, focused on the people really doing the work and not the marketers. Its a bargain at $445 and a steal and half of that! Your head will spin with all the great info. The thing you may be thinking: I've been to conferences and they are filled with marketing fluff. Not this one. Everyone presenting is really down in the trenches doing the work, making Interop happen, etc. That's why its called a DevCon. Do it. Its worth it.
8:14:27 PM
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Head of Microsoft Research Rick Rashid talks about ongoing MSR projects
"Sideshow" is the internal name for a project in which the company has developed an application that displays a series of windows with useful information on a user's desktop. Using XML and Microsoft's .Net Web services technology, Sideshow can reach out to the Web, corporate servers, or the computer's hard drive and provide quick views of data relevant to the user.
Sideshow team has published the project paper last month that described "notification and awareness platform". It looks like intelligent dashboard that apparently is being regularly used internally at Microsoft by 7000 users. Integrated in Office, this kind of tool will represent dramatic evolution of personal dashboard. I predict Office people are or will be working on productizing this. Groove team should definetely take note. [via Alexis Smirnov] [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]
3:32:41 PM
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Abstract ADO.NET. But anyway, the CVS code is here. You can grab it and give it a look see. Any glaringly large holes that you see, I would appreciate it if you let me know about them before I release the code. [News from the Forest]
9:23:11 AM
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Monday, September 23, 2002 |
Scott Seely delivers another good article on how to use SOAP Faults to deliver the appropriate level of detail to the developer at development time, and to the customer while the Web service is in production. (14 printed pages)
9:28:17 AM
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Eiffel ENViSioN.
Interesting announcement on the Eiffel Software site: the ENViSioN .NET version of Eiffel will be a free download. To quote:
The Free Edition is targeted for students, hobbyists, and non-commercial developers who wish to be able to take advantage of the pleasure of programming in Eiffel, but who cannot justify spending a larger sum of money for features that they won’t be using. The Free Edition has most of the features of the Enterprise Edition, except for some productivity-enhancing tools (EiffelBuild and auto-documentation) and commercial licensing (or ability to create a .NET signature for commercial software). Eiffel Software is pleased to provide this version as a service to all those in the world who want to be able to work with the latest from Eiffel Software.
According to the download page the release of ENViSioN is imminent. [Cook Computing]
9:20:05 AM
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Sunday, September 22, 2002 |
Whew! A Big Fall Cleaning. Sue and I have spent the last 4 hours cleaning out the spare bedroom of 9 bags of papers (trash), filed all the boxes of technical books back into the office, and refiled more than 400 Science Fiction books in alphabetical order in the office. Finally had to make an entire shelf and more just for Philip K Dick books and a few for Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker! Also uncovered in the rubble was my long lost HP Jornado PocketPC so now I can start playing with Smart Device Extensions and .NET Compact Framework Beta 1
3:49:01 PM
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