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Our Mount Wilson Adventure is published!

As a side note, as NEC is rapidly thriving and therefore we've out grown our space and had to move to a new cool new building. I've got a nice new bigger, better and uncut cubicle “Adnanotopia“ whose pictures I'll be posting soon.

 

Couple of days ago, I and Rob were discussing merits and pitfalls of template based code generation in llbgen and codesmith. Also, that it's a fallacy code generation has become somewhat synonym to ORM (Object Relational Modelling) and ORM faces several challenges when it comes to support legacy systems.

This reminded me of Kathleen Dollard, author of  “Code Generation on Microsoft.NET“ in August's INETA LA.NET developers group meeting on Code Generation listed the following six rules of code generation.

She said that initially it started with five rules as in her book.

1. Generation is under your control.
2. Metadata is a distinct morph-able entity.
3. Generation is a repeatable, single click process.
4. Handcrafted code is sacred and protected.
5. Quality equals or exceeds manual apps in all areas.

Later on, she added the following.

5 1/2. Code generation should pay back on the first project.
5 3/4. There is no free lunch.
6. Code Generation should not be too complex.

By experience, I believe these rules stand correct if you are considering automated code generation. If interested, check out Raptier, LLBGEN, CodeSmith and Kathleen's website for further information.

Kathleen will also be speaking to Dev Connections.

Bernard Wong does an excellent job of developer event's evangelism; kudos to him on the launch of new .NET user group in Santa Barbara. He maintains a list of socal development events which comes in pretty handy and I try to attend most of them. In first week of November, in time tested Los Angeles.NET developers group, we have a promising event coming up on enterprise library, the meta framework. I'd love to attend it but unfortunately, I'll be attending dev connections in Las Vegas. Also .NET rocks is coming to town. For the complete list of socal events, also check socal.NET group's events portal and LA.NET events calendar.

Enterprise Library for .NET
Monday, November 07, 2005 at UCLA campus, Center for Health Sciences Room 53-105
Keith Pleas (Brought to you by INETA) ::  Sponsored by Axis Technical Group

Learn how to leverage the Microsoft “Enterprise Library” of application blocks for .NET to build an enterprise application framework for your organization. The Enterprise Library version 1 for .NET Framework 1.1 was released nearly a year ago, and Enterprise Library version 2 for .NET Framework 2.0 will be available soon. The Enterprise Library (or "EntLib" for short) is not a “component”, or even a framework that you can use as-is. It’s something that you can create your own application framework from, and package *that* framework for your developers to use. In other words, it's like an application framework starter kit.

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.NET Road Trip - Long Beach and San Diego
A sneak peek at new and exciting things coming in Visual Basic 2005 and Mobility Development in Visual Studio 2005; and lots of giveaways including DNR swag, sponsor software, and even mobile devices!! AND post-event DNR interviews with local developers who are doing cool things with .NET 1.1 and the beta of 2.0!

There will be parties along the way! Of course, they'll be blogging and podcasting photos and video (for the next DNR Movie), and a new .NET Rocks! show online every day during the road trip! Ok, maybe not EVERY day, but they're producing a show in every city!

The VS 2005 Road Trip has stops in San Diego on 11/3 and in Long Beach on 11/4!  Carl Franklin will be presenting awesome topics on Visual Basic 2005 and Richard Campbell will be showing off some of the latest mobile devices along with tips on Mobility Development in Visual Studio 2005.
There will be giveaways and free food. The event will even be podcasted!  Click on either location below for more event detail!

Chris Rose, our former DBA and a friend mentioned yesterday the need of having to use SQL server reporting services subscription emails “WITHOUT Outlook and Exchange”.

He suggested and I concur, there would be two ways to do it.

1. Configuring a Report Server for E-Mail Delivery

Use the RSReportServer Configuration File and edit the SMTP portion of it.

<RSEmailDPConfiguration>
<SMTPServer>mySMTPServer.Adventure-Works.com</SMTPServer>
<SMTPServerPort></SMTPServerPort>
<SMTPAccountName></SMTPAccountName>
<SMTPConnectionTimeout></SMTPConnectionTimeout>
<SMTPServerPickupDirectory></SMTPServerPickupDirectory>
<SMTPUseSSL></SMTPUseSSL>
<SendUsing>2</SendUsing>
<SMTPAuthenticate></SMTPAuthenticate>
<From>my-rs-email-account@Adventure-Works.com</From>
<EmbeddedRenderFormats>
<.RenderingExtension>MHTML</RenderingExtension>
</EmbeddedRenderFormats>
<PrivilegedUserRenderFormats></PrivilegedUserRenderFormats>
<ExcludedRenderFormats>
<RenderingExtension>HTMLOWC</RenderingExtension>
<RenderingExtension>NULL</RenderingExtension>
</ExcludedRenderFormats>
<SendEmailToUserAlias>True</SendEmailToUserAlias>
<DefaultHostName></DefaultHostName>
<PermittedHosts>
<HostName>Adventure-Works.com</HostName>
<HostName>hotmail.com</HostName>
</PermittedHosts>
</RSEmailDPConfiguration>

The MSDN Article discusses both local and remote SMTP service usage options.

2 xp_smtp_sendmail

This would be an awkward work around but for some reason, if you can't use the reporting services SMTP configs (one scenario I can think of is local exchange being blocked from sending any outbound emails i.e. no relaying outside the active directory and you don't want to open it up just for reporting). Therefore, since you don't have the luxury of having a custom report config for every report, it can have subscription to generate target file (PDF, XLS, HTM, XML etc) on file system. Let the SQL server handle it via  xp_smtp_sendmail or a bare bones app to send out an email. The other SMTP relay can be controlled and locked down. My two cents. If you know of other ways, please contribute.

For further reading on Microsoft's SQL server reporting services, my article:

Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

Food for thought: Having an nBIRT Project -  Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools; a similar open source approach as Eclipse's BIRT (no this is not plagiarism, its inspiration!)

SQL Server Reporting Services Forums
Anything and everything pertaining to SQL Server Reporting Services.

via Scobleizer referencing ZDNet’s George Ou

Now that's a memory / CPU hog right there.

NASA's World Wild...really awesome .NET app. From their website..

“World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there...”

Download

 

Here at Next Estate, we have very talented folks; Likes of Rob Walling, Calvin Park et al. However, technology is not their only talent.  Following is the series of limericks came into being when some bagels were brought...classical pieces of IT-Poetry.  

Since the move we are not able
We thought we would set the table
There are bagels galore
Cream cheese and much more
And for Joon's 1 year we are now stable  

Since we are doing limericks this time
They say that each should be five lines
From all we expect
Each to do their best
And everybody to add a new line
-Dean Nedelman  

These bagels are so fine
And just in the Nick of time
Though I fought my poor will
I’ve taken my fill
Working here I can not whine.
-Nick DeNicholas

Dr. Atkins said carbs take their toll
So I need to exercise self control
I’d sure like to try it
But, on that crazy diet
Can I eat half or just eat the hole?
-Greg Cannon

Thanks for going out of your way
To create a great start of day
For it’s acts like this
That make others wish
They were a part of a team like this!

© 2005 Gus Lira. All rights reserved. Patent Pending

My eyes have grown quite weary.
My heart, a little heavy.
For each week, without fail
Arrives an email
With another *#?+#* poem.
--------------------------
Peter Kerr
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

When work becomes a dull routine,
You surprise us with treats and cuisine
For your great attitude,
Please accept our gratitude;
From DEV: Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Dean.
-Greg Cannon

I bring a yogurt to work each day to avoid starvation
But today I arrive and see “bagels in the usual location”
With all this food I begin to think
I guess I’m going to need some drink
Another water bottle joins the earthquake rations
-Joanne Siegel

Launch event is here! I'll be attending mine in Anaheim, hurry up and get registered to Walk away with “a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition and SQL Server™ 2005 Standard Edition”.

It seems to me a clear violation of (SD3 + C) Secure by Design, Secure by Default, Secure in Deployment and Communications principle. The scary thing was, I could even reproduce it in IE 7.0 beta; not a firefox vulnerability of course (not that I'm a firefox fan but people!).

Next time you have your cc number, SSN or BoA password in your clipboard, please don't be browsing “those“ sites.

Be careful with Ctrl-C

Via Stefan Goßner:

[From a mail thread]

Data stored in clipboard can be accessed by a malicious website through a combination of Javascripts and server side code (like ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, CGI, ...).
Just try this:
Copy any text by ctrl+c
Click the Link: http://www.friendlycanadian.com/applications/clipboard.htm
You will see the text you copied on the Screen which was accessed by this web page.
A malicious websites can easily steal sensitive data (like passwords, creditcard numbers, PIN etc.) stored in your clipboard while surfing the web. To prevent this you should change the security setting Allow paste operations via script for at least the Internet Zone in Internet Explorer to Prompt. Per default this setting is set to Enabled.

More on Thinking About Security: Secure by Design, Secure by Default, Secure in Deployment and Communications

My school's webct server is down due to hurricane Wilma; I'm hoping not to find it floating in the water after its gone. I wonder if I can get away with not submitting assignments and claiming that Wilma ate it, would it work? worth a shot I guess.

On channel 9, Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg, talked to Frank about  about MSN Search, relevance, neural network, black box, data mining, level of trust in today's search world etc. It's pretty interesting, I enjoyed listening it.

They also discussed evolving search as a platform and what challenges big 3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are facing while trying to provide most relevant results.

Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg - Frank talk about MSN Search

Doctors (not the real kind) are in fashion.

I've always been impressed by the success story of Adam Kolawa, Parasoft co-founder and CEO, who “came to the United States from Poland to pursue his Ph.D. In 1987, he and a group of fellow graduate students founded Parasoft to create value-added products that could significantly improve the software development process.“.

NY Times reports “Working in Google's favor is its practice of putting new Ph.D.'s to work immediately in the exact areas where they have been trained - in systems, architecture and artificial intelligence. Google, the company, may falter, but Google, the human resources experiment, is unlikely to be the cause.“

However, it seems Microsoft has a different understanding.

“Microsoft has yet to disavow old templates for hiring. Its chief college recruiter, Ms. Roby, says that among computer science Ph.D.'s, "it's less likely to find someone with the desire to work on projects that will ship every 24 or 36 months.“

And as Joel Spolsky in his recent essay mentioned:

“A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said. That's true. Google also uses full-text-search-of-the-entire-Internet the way Microsoft uses little tables that list what error IDs correspond to which help text. Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn't.“

If Microsoft doesn't shed this habit of "thinking in if statements" they're only going to fall further behind.

For further reading Joel's essay, click here.

PhD hiring at google answers

Murphy's First Law of Software Development: Every Software Engineer continues his state of chatting or forwarding  mails unless he is assigned work by manager.

Murphy's Second Law of Software Development: The rate of change in the software is directly proportional to the payment received from client and takes place at the quick rate as when deadline force is applied.

Murphy's Third Law of Software Development: Bugs can neither be created nor be removed from software by a developer. It can only be converted from one form to another. The total number of bugs in the software always remains constant.

More of Murphy's laws and corollaries

Michele Leroux Bustamante mentioned IASA in May 2005 SoCal tech summit in her session “Deploying, Versioning and Mastering the Offline Experience for Smart Clients”. An emerging resource for serious enterprise architecture work. Following is the mission statement from their website.

“The International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and sharing of issues related to software architecture in the enterprise, product, education and government sectors. IASA will function both as an umbrella organization to chapters spread throughout the world, and as a driving force for research and standards which advance the understanding of software architecture. IASA’s will fulfill it’s purpose by creating and helping to sustain city chapters in the form of Software Architecture user groups and fostering the sharing of ideas and information between these city groups and industry thought leaders.“

Google personalized page has loads of goodies...eHow wiki, QOD etc...some of instant favourites I recently read...

We work to become, not to acquire."Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard."
- Colin Powell

It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.
- P. G. Wodehouse

Here are the files from the Summit, Enjoy!

Craig Utley
Jonathan Hawkins
Mickey Williams

Fall 2005 Technical Summit

I started using Thunderbird several months ago but it didn't work out. There were lots of features missing (mark all as read, OPML built-in, read new feeds at one place to name a few) so I had to come back to SharpReader, a fine product. I found Thunderbird slow, less-featured and not very interactive, something you normally don't expect from a mozilla product.

 

For those looking for Thunderbird OPML extension, I've used it,  it works well for OPML import/export.

 

Improved Thunderbird PML

http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2005/01/17/improved-thunderbird-opml

 

Another hack: To read new feeds at one place, I had to create a search folder with selected criteria to look into my subscriptions and bring the newest post; something avaialble by design in sharpreader.

Hurry folks....now its time to show off the hours of presentations and training you had on master pages, themes, partial classes et al ....

Participate in Free Beta Exam 71-528: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0-Web-based Client Development

Check your MCP Flash newsletter for details!

Registration begins: October 17, 2005

Beta exam period runs: November 7, 2005 through November 18, 2005

Find exam preparation information.

Beta exams have limited availability (approximately 500 seats worldwide), so please follow the registration information to make your reservation.

 

Dear Fellow Computer Science Enthusiasts

 

10/9 was a giant leap for R&D in CS; a completely autonomous land vehicle completed a 131.6 miles track and won $2 mil in DARPA challenge. I’ve been following this competition closely for two years now and disappointed that MIT / CMU’s Red team couldn't make it. Alan Turing was seldom asked for things computer can’t do, which he mentioned in his 1950’s famous paper as computer can’t do X (list includes enjoying strawberry and driving in middle of Cairo). Cairo or not, now we have machines which can autonomously drive and vehicles on variant terrains…Woo Ho!

DARPA Grand Challenge Race, LA to Vegas
Stanford's Stanley takes DARPA's $2 million
http://www.grandchallenge.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

C# 3.0, as announced in PDC is coming with lots of goodies for instance extension methods, lambda expressions, type inference, anonymous types and the .NET Language Integrated Query.

Some important links:

• C# Future Versions home
• C# 3.0 Language Enhancements in action
• C# 3.0 LINQ in action
• C# 3.0 Language Specification

• Door ke dhol sohanye baj ryeeIn دور كے ڈھول سہانے بج رہيں
  
• Neye boolo to suntee nheiN نہيں بولو تو سنتے نہيں

“She was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman.“

Francois Marie Arouet  de Voltaire Commenting on scientist Emilie du Chatelet

Einstein (enthusiastically): Energy = mass times the square of the speed of the light

Mileva Maric: Would you like me to check your mathematics?

An excellent program by PBS Nova.

A group photo of NEC attendees for San Diego Fall 2005 Technical Summit.

(Right to Left) Neal, Me, Antony, Ajit, Calvin, Ana

It was previously mentioned as left to right, thanks for the correction Rob!

[From Dr. Dobb's AI Expert Newsletter]

Evopedia is an online encyclopedia with a difference. It evolved.

Evopedia's home page explains how. In evolutionary programming, you need a problem, a way to generate random solutions, a way to evaluate solutions (a fitness function), and a way to mutate solutions. For Evopedia, the problem is the need for an informative Web page about some topic. To start, Evopedia creates some Web pages at random from other pages, using Markov text-generation. It copies them to www.evopedia.com under their topic headings, and waits for several weeks while gathering stats on their usage. The worst pages (presumably the least read) are discarded; the best are kept and mutated to make new pages. These get copied to the site in their turn, and so the cycle repeats, converging eventually (so Evopedia hopes) to sense.

To mutate pages, Evopedia swaps sections within them, replaces sections with new sections, or adds or removes sections. Its home page is weak on detail, but as common in evolutionary programming, it appears to model these mutations on the behaviour of DNA. Those unfamiliar with genetic algorithms will find copious information on the Web; a good intro with clear diagrams is the Evolutionary Computing chapter of Shahab Mohaghegh's Virtual Intelligence and its Applications in Petroleum Engineering.

Does Evopedia work? Here's the entry for Cake Recipe 

Now Isn't this cool!, what do you think Mr. Turing?

Caltech's research output is amazing! Several blocks down from our residence, this comparatively very small university (900 undergrad, 1200 grad) has hosted best