Now after cloning everything with an n-* prefix, we're traversing down in the object hierarchy.

POCO is an acronym for Plain Old CLR Object. It is a play of the term POJO from the Java programming world used by developers targeting the .NET Framework. Similar to Java, the term is used to contrast an object with one that is designed to be used with a complicated, special object frameworks such as an ORM component. In .Net terms, the word is most often used in the programmatic sense to differentiate a non Serviced Component (see MTS) from a "standard object" though it can also used in a tongue in cheek manner referencing the perceived complexity of Java based programming frameworks (see EJB). POJO is an acronym for Plain Old Java Object. The name is used to emphasize that the object in question is not somehow special but an ordinary Java Object, in particular not an EJB (before EJB 3, that is).

or like Neal (not the cowboyneal) would say "EJB's are just darn bloated beasts!"

In the Time Magazine's Feb 20th issue's cover article, In Search of Real Google, I came across several interesting things. Like Dr. Eric Schmidt; Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer

"We try very hard to look like we're out of control... But in fact the company is very measured. And that's part of our secret."

And

"The Company isn't run for the long-term value of our shareholders but for the long term value of our end users"

Sounds pretty bizarre from traditional wisdom but then again, there have been previous sayings of similar nature.  I assume it’s safe to say that where tradition ends, Google starts!

Reference:

In Search Of the Real Google
An inside look at how success has changed Larry and Sergey's dream machine. Can they still be the good guys while running a company worth $100 billion?

Does anyone know what happened to the .NET show? Since WinFX SDK (LIVE! from PDC05) last year 07 Nov 2005, there is no new episode. Also, there are no updates on the .NET show blog, people have been wondering and tech community is definitely missing the updates from Robert Hess and Erica Wiechers.

At the same time, MSDN TV and DNR are doing very well. Mark Miller’s episode on Refactor and CodeRush updates will be live soon and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Get the improved and updated Enterprise Library, a collection of reusable and extensible application blocks for enterprise development with Visual

More...

National Geographic and IBM are embarking on a landmark five-year study that will assemble the world's largest collection of DNA samples to map how humankind populated the planet.

The Genographic Project will use sophisticated computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people—including indigenous populations and the general public—to reveal man's migratory history and to better understand the connections and differences that make up the human race.

Read More and Participate

Finally, someone did pay attention to my growing concerns I've been raising with Jeremy Cunningham for the longest time, thank you Purdue University. In the ACM Tech newsletter this morning, I read.

Fewer Females in Computer Science
Purdue Exponent (02/15/06) Weibel, Kristin

Purdue University's computer science department has implemented a few changes in order to attract more female students to its program. The department has created a Recruiting Committee Task Force to combat the popular stereotype of computer scientists being nerds with pocket protectors and poor social skills. The university plans to sponsor visits to high schools in Indiana to discuss the computer science program. The task force also plans to stress how varied careers are for people who obtain technical degrees. ...

Click Here to View Full Article - Web Link to Publication Homepage
visit http://www.acm.org/women

In other news
Microsoft Announces Recipient of $1Mln Academic Research Funding
A Google for Coders (Why, what's wrong with Koders?)

This morning I recieved ACM Crossroads magazine and found Paul Graham's interview on "The Future of Programming". While answering a question about future programming disciplines, Paul said

“I don’t think Microsoft realizes the danger they’re in. They’re worrying about Google. And they should. But they should worry even more about thousands of twenty year old hackers writing Ajax applications. Desktop software is going to become increasingly irrelevant."

In my personal opinion, he has spoken too soon. Microsoft has immensely contributed in web development and has increasingly become agile to industry needs. Comparing Ruby on Rails with ASP.NET would be a futile exercise. There is inertia but the power of innovation will catch on. If you've seen LINQ, DLINQ and XAML floating around, you'd know what I mean.

It also has Nova GSCIS ad on page 5.

If you are all hyped up with Info Cards and Bill G's latest announcement about it, check out details in the following MIX'06 session.

Using InfoCards for User-Centered Identity

Also further details on

Alex Barnett blog

Following are the details of February's San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers group monthly meeting.

San Gabriel Valley .Net Developers Group Monthly Meeting

 Wednesday, 15^th Feb 2006

Best Practices with the .NET Event/Delegate Framework

This session will start with the basics: we’ll create and handle unique events with custom event args, and then dive into the details of the architecture that supports this. Learn how to reduce the working set, improve performance, and avoid memory leaks. We’ll also show how to protect against malicious or poorly-programmed event handlers.

Speaker's Bio:

Mark Miller has strong expertise in decoupled design, plug-in architectures, and great UI. Mark is Chief Architect of the IDE Tools division at Developer Express, and is the visionary force behind productivity tools like CodeRush and Refactor!, as well as the DXCore extensibility layer for Visual Studio. Mark has been writing software for over two decades.

For meeting Agenda, RSVP and directions, please visit our website.

Yes, I'm sticking to my a-book-a-week resolution for this year. My January books were

• Creepers 
  by David Morrell
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money--That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
  by Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter "
• Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• Velocity by Dean Koontz

However, I end up not finishing Creepers and instead listened to The Google Story by David A Wise. (Review by Rob)

Now, for this month my books would be.

• The Rising: Before They Were Left Behind (Before They Were Left Behind) -- by Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins
• Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim Collins
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
• Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

I've been following Udi Manber for some time now; his work as Yahoo! chief scientist and later at Amazon / A9, Udi is author of several books and research papers[1]. He's among few people who are zealous about academia's close participation in industry. Good news is,  he is now @ Google...

Amazon.com Unit Exec Takes Post at Google  (AP)
Udi Manber Leaves Post at Amazon.com Subsidiary to Become Google's Vice President of Engineering
SEATTLE (AP) -- The head of Amazon.com Inc.'s online search effort is leaving to join Google Inc., the latest in a series of high-profile hires for the search engine leader...
read more

[1] Udi Manber's Papers Published in ACM

A text compression scheme that allows fast searching directly in the compressed file
Udi Manber April 1997  
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS),  Volume 15 Issue 2

On maintaining dynamic information in a concurrent environment
Udi Manber December 1984          
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing

Probabilistic, nondeterministic, and alternating decision trees (Preliminary Version)
Udi Manber, Martin Tompa
May 1982          
Proceedings of the fourteenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
   
This work generalizes decision trees in order to model algorithms which allow probabilistic, nondeterministic, or alternating control. Two geometric techniques for proving lower bounds on the time required by ordinary decision trees (Dobkin and Lipton's -&-ldquo;region-counting-&-rdquo; technique as applied to the knapsack and element uniqueness problems [1], and Reingold's technique as applied to set equality [4]) are shown to be special cases of one unified technique, which in fact applie ...

Session 10: Concurrency control in a dynamic search structure
Udi Manber, Richard E. Ladner
March 1982          
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD symposium on Principles of database systems

Applications of Ramsey's theorem to decision tree complexity
Shlomo Moran, Marc Snir, Udi Manber
October 1985          
Journal of the ACM (JACM),  Volume 32 Issue 4
   
Combinatorial techniques for extending lower bound results for decision trees to general types of queries are presented. Problems that are defined by simple inequalities between inputs, called order invariant problems, are considered. A decision tree is called k-bounded if each query depends on at most k variables. No further assumptions on the type of queries are made. It is proved that one can replace the queries of any k ...

Using induction to design algorithms
Udi Manber
November 1988          
Communications of the ACM,  Volume 31 Issue 11

An analogy between proving mathematical theorems and designing computer algorithms provides an elegant methodology for designing algorithms, explaining their behavior, and understanding their key ideas.
 
The complexity of problems on probabilistic, nondeterministic, and alternating decision trees
Udi Manber, Martin Tompa
July 1985          
Journal of the ACM (JACM),  Volume 32 Issue 3

This work generalizes decision trees in order to study lower bounds on the running times of algorithms that allow probabilistic, nondeterministic, or alternating control. It is shown that decision trees that are allowed internal randomization (at the expense of introducing a small probability of error) run no faster asymptotically than ordinary decision trees for a collection of natural problems. Two geometric techniques from the literature for proving lower bounds on the time required by o ...
 
Experience with personalization of Yahoo!
Udi Manber, Ash Patel, John Robison
August 2000          
Communications of the ACM,  Volume 43 Issue 8

Suffix arrays: a new method for on-line string searches
Udi Manber, Gene Myers
January 1990          
Proceedings of the first annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Publisher: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Integrating content-based access mechanisms with hierarchical file systems
Burra Gopal, Udi Manber
February 1999          
Proceedings of the third symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
Publisher: USENIX Association

How to find it (abstract): research issues in distributed search
Udi Manber
June 1998          
Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing

How to find it (abstract): research issues in distributed search
Udi Manber
June 1998          
Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures

Future directions and research problems in the World Wide Web
Udi Manber
June 1996          
Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
Publisher: ACM Press

DIB—a distributed implementation of backtracking
Raphael Finkel, Udi Manber
March 1987          
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS),  Volume 9 Issue 2

DIB is a general-purpose package that allows a wide range of applications such as recursive backtrack, branch and bound, and alpha-beta search to be implemented on a multicomputer. It is very easy to use. The application program needs to specify only the root of the recursion tree, the computation to be performed at each node, and how to generate children at each node. In addition, the application program may optionally specify how to synthesize values of tree nodes from their children's va ...


A text compression scheme that allows fast searching directly in the compressed file
Udi Manber April 1997          
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS),  Volume 15 Issue 2

A new text compression scheme is presented in this article. The main purpose of this scheme is to speed up string matching by searching the compressed file directly. The scheme requires no modification of the string-matching algorithm, which is used as a black box; any string-matching procedure can be used. Instead, the pattern is modified; only the outcome of the matching of the modified pattern against the compressed file is decompressed. Since the compressed file is smal ...

Scalable Internet resource discovery: research problems and approaches
C. Mic Bowman, Peter B. Danzig, Udi Manber, Michael F. Schwartz
August 1994          
Communications of the ACM,  Volume 37 Issue 8

Fast text searching: allowing errors
Sun Wu, Udi Manber
October 1992          
Communications of the ACM,  Volume 35 Issue 10

Flying through hypertext
Patrick Lai, Udi Manber
September 1991          
Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext

via NBC Caltech Freshmen Get Stranded On Hike As Part Of Dorm Initiation

POSTED: 10:04 am PST February 1, 2006
UPDATED: 10:27 am PST February 1, 2006

PASADENA, Calif. -- Two dozen Caltech freshmen dressed in outlandish get-ups as part of a nighttime dorm initiation got stranded on the flanks of Mount Wilson while walking down a dirt road from the observatory, it was reported Tuesday.The road was blocked by a landslide that occurred last year, the Pasadena Star-News reported."You've got to remember that common sense is not factored into the intelligence quotient," Deputy Greg Gabriel, who leads the Altadena Search and Rescue team, told the newspaper.

and now you see…We were not the only ones!!!

Hiked Mt. Wilson (5,710 ft) and Got Rescued by Helicopter