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When I asked my local Blockbuster how are they countering the netflix patent for online rentals, the person didn't have a clue! After days of pondering what they used as a way around to the online rental patent, I found following explanation on MSN Money's article, Is Blockbuster doomed? as a part of what Reed Hastings CEO Netflix states.

"Netflix won patent protection for its business model of taking orders online and mailing DVDs to customers. To date, imitators such as Blockbuster and Wal-Mart Stores haven’t stolen enough business to make it worthwhile for Netflix to spend the money in legal fees to enforce the patent and shut the copycats down, says Hastings. So we don’t really know if the patent will hold up in court. But even if the big video chains successfully challenged the patent and ran a big online-based mail-order business, they’d still have a tough time competing because of their brick-and-mortar overhead.

Netflix sews up rental patent: CNET News 24th July  
Netflix's Patent May Reshape DVD-Rental Market
Online rental patent granted to Netflix
Blockbuster enters online DVD rental business
Netflix patent buys time - Article

I was fortunate to attend the January meeting of London .NET developers group meeting in which David Sussman spoke about ASP.NET 2.0. After six months, last weekend I attended San Diego Day of Whidbey conference where Rob Howard (former ASP.NET Program Manager) did two excellent presentations on “Whidbey Overview” and “Whidbey Infrastructure”.  Both of them happen to be co-authors of A first look at ASP.NET 2.0 with Alex Homer.

David Sussman	Rob Howard

An updated version of their book, ASP.NET v 2.0: The Beta Version is out now. A list of Visual Studio 2005 Express beta products can be found here. Now after listening et. al, I'm  wondering when would I meet the author, Alex Homer? His recent two part series on 15seconds on Accessibility Improvements in ASP.NET 2.0 is a good read.

“Joel on software forum” have an interesting discussion on Java generics (aka Templates, Paramterized types)

Also, an Anders Hejlsberg, article on “Generics in C#, Java and C++“

In the Day of whidbey meeting, someone asked Chris Rolon how could he execute a line of code in string, reminding me of finite state automata problems. Today I found couple of good articles on CodeDOM namespace and thought should post the links here.

• Using the CodeDOM
• Microsoft .NET CodeDom Technology
• The Code Project - Compiling with CodeDom - .NET
• Dynamically executing code in .Net 
• Dynamic Code Generation and Code Compilation
• Compiling .NET Code on fly
• Generating code from code - .NET

Also, for the record, Picasa rocks!

Googling shows that Urdu has 58 Million speakers in eight different countries and since its closer to hindi (182 Million speakers), there are many more people who can understand Urdu (however the script is quite different; like hebrew its written from right to left and is mainly derived from Arabic script). Google.com.pk would be Google in Urdu, very interesting to see the diversity unfolding Google especially when there is no "counterpart" in globalization; yahoo.com.pk/ or pk.yahoo.com or something of simillar genre.

”A picture is worth a thousand words” so following two pictures will be two thousand words then. Ok, briefly speaking, I'm using WinXP SP2 now (after a long use of SP2 beta) and it looks cool.

And this is the error I encountered on INETA's website. Their speakers always emphasize on having a customerror page, oh well.

Amidst reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, looking into Found in translation: Microsoft tool talks pretty and Ken telling me about Microsoft research’s stereoscopic vision based distance calculator, I was wondering how long it will take Artificially Intelligent systems to comprehensively capture (or mimic) the generation of novelty in human minds. The same old question arise, could intelligence be formulated? The fuzzy situations we humans deal everyday and the diversity provided by our out-of-the-box thinking, could it be mimicked or portrayed in a machine? Or the question might be, is it even needed to depict this behavior to exhibit intelligence? May be our intelligence has anomalies from cognitive science perspective as alternate lifestyles couldn’t be justified rationally? I believe that probabilistic analysis of all possibilities or even heuristic approach in game theory doesn’t lead to intelligence. With a node range of 8 moves or more, if an “intelligent” program can formulate the possible moves and start predicting and blocking the moves towards a chess mate, would it be called intelligence? May be so, but still not human intelligence. To mimic this trait we’d have to simulate forgetfulness with very high hybrid (voice, imaging, sensory) information processing, memorization and retrieval speeds however today’s Floating point operation frequency (fops count) is not up to par. Here is an interesting logic theorem:

Thinking is a species of computation. (FUN)
A Turing machine can compute any computable function. (Turing­Church thesis)
Digital computers implement Turing machines.
Therefore,
Digital computers can think.

Searle's Chinese Box: The Chinese Room Argument and Artificial Intelligence by Larry Hauser

Some Links and quotes on AI

• A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. - Anon

• But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding? This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions ["Could a machine think?"; "Could an artifact, a man-made machine think?"; "Could a digital computer think?"], and the answer to it is no. (Searle 1980a, p. 422)

• Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity – Anon

• In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture. Henri Bergson French philosopher, 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, 1859-1941

• MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
• American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• AI on the Web (Berkeley)
• What is Artificial Intelligence? (Stanford)
• OpenAi - - Creating the standard for Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy of AI
•  Artificial Intelligence Quotations
• AI intro

Artificial intelligence newsgroups  

• microsoft.public.artificial.intelligence
• msn.computingcentral.artificial.intelligence.general
• comp.ai - general AI
• comp.ai.fuzzy - fuzzy logic
• comp.ai.genetic - genetic algorithms
• comp.ai.jair.announce - Journal of AI Research
• comp.ai.jair.papers - Journal of AI Research, the articles
• comp.ai.nat-lang - natural language
• comp.ai.neural-nets - neural networks
• comp.ai.shells - expert system shells
• comp.ai.vision - machine vision

For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier... I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. - Stephen Wright

Yes, yesterday was my 24^th birthday, and yes,  I’m getting old. To celebrate, I was taken out to lunch at Heider baba by work colleagues, (off course I got to choose the place) and we discussed google’s hiring and the following program on prime numbers. Andrea initiated the event, Mini brought me balloons and Reza, Mhel and Scott covered my food, so that was some good treat.

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])

{

       int StartTime, EndTime;

       long long PrimeNumber=3, TestNumber=3, TestingFactor;

       long long CounterVariable, NumberCount=1;

       bool IsPrime = true;

       struct __timeb64 tstruct;

 

       while(1)

       {

          _ftime64( &tstruct );

              StartTime=tstruct.time;

 

              TestingFactor = ceil(sqrt((long double)TestNumber));

 

              for (CounterVariable=3; CounterVariable<=TestingFactor; CounterVariable+=2)

              {

                     if (TestNumber%CounterVariable == 0)

                     {

                           IsPrime = false;

                           break; // not a prime number

                     }

              }

               if     (CounterVariable>=TestingFactor && IsPrime != false)

              {

                     printf("%d:\tPrime Number:", NumberCount);

                     printf("%d\n", TestNumber);

 

                     NumberCount++;

                     _ftime64( &tstruct );

                     EndTime=tstruct.time;

                     //printf("\tTime Taken: %d\n",EndTime-StartTime);

              }

               TestNumber+=2;

              IsPrime=true;

       }

        return 0;

}

Later after work, Lorry took me out to Olive Garden for dinner for my all time favorite shrimp primavera and then we opened gifts. I got a cool Birthday card from Ken, Krikorian movie money from Eric and gift card from Cathy and Larry. Lorry bought me clothes, a mug, bear and a really cool clock with a birthday card J

 

I also get a very good gift from Scott Mitchell, well, its on my birthday so I regard it as a gift. He referenced me in his article Decompiling .NET Assemblies in the following words.

 

A more detailed look into code obfuscation can be found in Adnan Masood's article: Intellectual Property Protection and Code Obfuscation.

 

Those who know Scott Mitchell would know its high praise.

This month’s Los Angeles Area .NET Developers meeting’s speaker was no-intro-required Jeff Prosise, the renowned author and speaker among Microsoft circles and beyond. Topic of his presentation was “HACKED! How evil people attack ASP.NET web sites, and what you can do about it”.  The presentation was similar to DevDays security track presentation I attended in April and a roundup was published on 15seconds. The difference would be more of the speaker as it’s more like Chris Rolon vs. Jeff Prosise presentations, both are very good. Jeff is a confident and educated speaker. He brought up various good points and his presentation was excellent, audience liked it and I personally found it a good learning experience. His approach was methodical and bullet point oriented; modelling the attack, Security method evaluation, implementing the solution, measuring tradeoffs etc He explained the xp_cmdshell vulnerabilities and cross site scripting in a broader and more organised context with examples of automated tools and companies he has worked with.

This was LA.NET user’s group largest meeting with around 100 people and like last time, I didn’t get to win any free cool goodies! UCLA Gonda Hall Room 1357 wasn’t big enough to fit was all and some of us were standing at the back, but since I didn’t complain at that time, it seems like presentation was quite engrossing! We are looking forward to attend more of your presentations Jeff, thanks for your time.

My long awaited Jeffrey Hasan’s Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C#: Using the Web Services Enhancements 2.0 is finally out. I wrote the following review for this book on Amazon. Expert SOA includes reference to my article on Evolution of Web Services in its appendix which is an honor. Thanks Jeff!

Practical, Developer Oriented and Contemporary!, August 2, 2004

Developing distributed applications has become an increasingly indigenous part of a present-day developer's software life cycle. XML web services provide us an easier and standardized way to facilitate distributed communications. Service orientation takes this to another level, i.e. standardizing loose coupling of these services via contracts. Hasan's book provides answers for today's enterprise needs to learn and formulate their existing distributed communication frameworks as they shift towards Service Oriented Architecture.

This book is about technology we can implement today; it's neither a superficial overview of terminologies nor is it a manager's guide or executive summary. Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# is the answered prayer of various developers like me who were looking for a book which comprehensively addresses SOA in Microsoft.NET and couldn't find much help. There are only a handful of books out there on this thriving discipline, Service Oriented Architecture, and most of them fall short in technical implementation details. Most importantly it answered my own skepticism of having another fancy TLA (three lettered acronym) and how can it change the way we program distributed apps today. You'll have to read it to get the answer. Hasan acquired Masters degree from one of the top 10 US schools and you'll see the academic excellence in his writing. His technical fluency, vocabulary and in-depth explanation are salient features what give this cutting edge technology book priority over its counterparts, if there are any.

Expert Service-Oriented Architecture isn't just a good read about SOA but as title depicts, also a great reference for WSE 2.0. Individual chapters are categorized in a way that each chapter covers a topic of interest; WS-Security, Policy Frameworks, WS-Addressing & Routing, Design Patterns and so on. Therefore it provides excellent reference for WSE 2.0, a fairly new release from Microsoft providing support for latest developments in Web Services arena. Examples in this book are simplified but not trivial, simpler but not marginal and the style shows them coming from a software developer who encounter real world application architecture challenges. Jeffery touched various important topics concisely which a developers encounters either in practice or theory; for instance RPC vs. document literal invocation, web services building blocks, digital signing with x.509 certificate, integrating web services and MSMQ, XML schema definition etc. The last chapter, beyond WSE 2.0, I found very interesting since it addresses Microsoft's new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture code name "Indigo". WSE 2.0 is here for a relatively small period of time till indigo kicks in with support for secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. However, future proofing the applications is what Hasan explained in this book and you have to read it to know it like Emerson said "Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them

APress Link