好好学习，少少上网

网络上有很多好玩的东西，有很多有用的信息，但网络终归只是工具而已，和计算机是一样的。同样，网络游戏和计算机游戏一样，只是帮助人们放松的工具，不是目的。

 

是不是在我们的游戏开始和游戏中，也应该加入类似 “ 请适度玩游戏！ ” 和 “ 先完成功课、工作！ ” 之类的言语？

 

原先，我们总是指责网吧，不负责任地随意向孩子们开放。但有多少人，想想我们的游戏开发商们，也应该多付一些责任呢？

 

网上看到一篇文章，关于陶宏开教授。尽管对于实际的效果，我很怀疑，但我还是很敬佩他。

 

陶宏开教授炮轰 “ 传奇 ” 开发商

http://www.dahew.com/2004-12/10/content_91559.htm

Wishing for Orcas: IIS marries ASP.NET

 

I want IIS to finally marry ASP.NET, once and for all. I’m looking forward to much more than the current integration that exist today between ASP.NET v1.1 and IIS6 where you’ve to deal with a lot of duplicate functionality.

 

Take for instance authentication: you’ve got IIS authentication and ASP.NET authentication, this could be integrated in a way that setting authentication for a website could be done in one shot and without leaving room for any confusion.

 

Session state management, extension mappings and custom errors are just other duplicate features. Let’s take custom errors: IIS configuration offers its very own “ Custom Errors ” tab for mapping HTTP error codes to files while ASP.NET has a element that you can set in your web app config file. They both do exactly the same thus they’re different, separate features.

 

But what I would like the most to see unified is the HTTP pipeline, definitely. This is currently also duplicated in IIS and ASP.NET and you’re forced to make a hard choice. You may go down to the metal ISAPI route, where you can write really high-performing extensions and modules while loosing the easy access to key ASP.NET services like caching OR you can go the ASP.NET way of writing handlers and modules having easy access to all offered services but loosing on the performance side of the equation.

 

And finally, do we really need to have different names for IIS and ASP.NET?

 

Asus WLAN Hard Drive Enclosure

[ Tom's Networking via Engadget ] The WL-HDD is about the most flexible NAS product that I've come across in its connectivity options, both wired and wireless. In a nutshell, about the only thing it doesn't do is share an Internet connection. But otherwise it can connect to an existing non-WDS wireless network, bridge or extend (repeat) a WDS-based one, or form the core of a new WLAN.

FINALLY! Someone went ahead and built the drive enclosure I was looking for months ago. Too cool - this thing has 802.11g, ethernet, usb, etc. Here's the specification and overview .

One question: USB 1.1!?!?!?! What!!

How can I create my own Electronic Programming Guide (EPG)?

Second in a series of responses to Media Center Development: What topic(s) shall I blog about next ?

--> Niels: An idea: In a number of countries (like Denmark...) we don't have tv-guides in MCE2005. So we are forced to rely on the build-in screen to start recordings. And its not very good (have to know channel number and so forth). So being a nerd, i want to make my own. But how do you go about doing that? The Television-class with a hosted html-application? Or how about making a webservice, that interfaces with MCE (for recordings and stuf), so that i can create a Compact Framework-app, that can start recordings...

This would be my approach...

1) Create the Guide UI with a Media Center Hosted HTML Application  and license the guide metadata from a third party.
2) Use MediaCenter.FindProgram and MediaCenter.FindService to tune currently broadcast content from the Hosted HTML Application.
3) Use the Click-To-Record Feature to programmatically schedule the recording of TV programs and series from the Hosted HTML Application.

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Back from India! (by yag)

Just back from India. What an awesome trip. My thanks to everyone who worked to set up the events and meetings and to everyone who attended. I just wish that we had more time to visit the country.

Before I get some sleep, here are some links to articles or reviews of our sessions:

• Sathyaish writes a review of our session on Channel 9. Sathyaish - it was great to meet you in Delhi.
• Anjana writes about our trip to Satyam .
• We were interviewed by ciol.com while there. You can read the article here (registration required).

As I find more links, I'll post them.

Where should I host my interview with Johanna Rothman?

 My own site (i have hosting that will allow this, even the bandwidth)

  ITConversations.com (which is known for having some great content)

•  I need to cut the interview down to less than an hour (That's cutting at least 10 minutes of good chat), preferably to 45 minutes.
•  I need to give them exclusive rights to publish (though I retain the rights to publish if they don't) which means I can't post it on my site (with full content) and on their site as well.

Setting up the XBOX Media Center Extender

On Friday I picked up an XBOX Media Center Extender and decided that I would spend some of the weekend setting this up… The good news is that the entire setup process took less than 10 minutes for the XBOX and for the Media Center PC.

Setup is a two step process.

1. Install the Media Center PC Setup Disc, let the software “do it’s thing”…

2. Install the XBOX Media Center Extender “Title”

That’s it… couldn’t be easier. The XBOX Media Center Extender package comes with a remote control and an IR dongle to plug into one of the 4 game ports on the XBOX – this also gives you the ability to play DVD’s through the XBOX.

In less than 10 minutes I was watching TV, viewing photo’s, and playing music through the XBOX – right now I have this running over a hard-wired connection (I have a long ethernet cable), the home has wired and wireless networking, but the wireless network is 802.11b, which isn’t fast enough for video – so, the next step is to replace the long ethernet cable with 802.11a/g. That’s probably going to wait until next weekend…

– Mike

i really have to fix my blog

Ok. i really have to start building the new blogging software soon. this is getting to be really annoying. wordpress is cool and all, but my copy doesent like adding plugins or anythin like that. so, a custom build in ASP.NET is needed. i will try this soon, and see what happens. more on this over the week.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit blog.lotas-smartman.net for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Do We Love XSLT Because It Is Difficult To Learn?

M. David (on his XSLTBlog ) asks why some of us are drawn to XSLT and has a great quote (well sort of quote) from Tim Bray from a late night drinking session at XMLDevCon:

to understand XSLT you must first reach up with both hands and grab the two halves of your brain peeling each back until you have successfully turned your brain completely inside out

M. David thinks that it is just because XSLT is hard to learn, and we love to torture ourselves.  Me, well I think that some of us realize (in the deep dark recesses of our brains) that procedural programming (aka what most people call programming) is preventing us from reaching out full potential and that some form of declarative programming is the future.  XSLT reminds us that there is more then just procedural programming out there, and we really have to stop and open our minds to other forms of programming.  I think that once we get beyond the coding everything procedurally mentality, we will finally be able to develop systems that actually learn, and are not just programmed ( Domain Specific Langauges   hint at just the beginning of our trip down that path).

The preceding blog entry has been syndicated from the DonXML Demsak’s All Things Techie Blog .   Please post all comments on the original post .  

New IT Showcase Content Available

Recently our in IT department has releases a whole bunch of new Content on how we do IT internally. Check out the great content below!

Creating an Active Directory Site for Exchange Server
Detailed discussion and procedures on how Microsoft IT created a dedicated Active Directory services site to optimise the performance of Exchange Server 2003.

Note on IT

Security Enhancements for Remote Access at Microsoft
Detailed discussion of how Microsoft IT significantly improved the security of its corporate network remote access solution using the latest generation of Microsoft products, such Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003, Internet Authentication Service, Internet Security Accelerator 2004, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, SQL Server 2000, Public Key Infrastructure & Certificate Services, and Connection Manager. The solution deployed, called Secure Remote User (SRU), enabled Microsoft IT to manage specific remote desktop configurations, ensuring that all established security requirements are met when remote users access corporate network resources. SRU contributes to reducing the external attack surface of the Microsoft corporate network, thereby better protecting its intellectual property.

 

White Paper

White Paper Presentation

Monitoring Exchange Server 2003 at Microsoft
Overview of how Microsoft IT uses the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) Management Pack for Exchange Server 2003 to manage the messaging environment. Best practices and lessons learned from Microsoft IT early adopter experience are detailed.

Solution Brief
Solution Brief Presentation

Load Balancing an RMS Cluster Using NLB
Detailed procedure on how Microsoft IT uses Network Load Balancing to evenly distribute the work load with its Windows Right Management Services server pair.

Note on IT

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6630 out of the running for my 3G phone?

i was reading my blog subscriptions just before i go to bed and i found this post over at Russell Beattie’s blog about the Nokia 6630 phone. Vodafone Ireland just released a 3G network for users, and the 2 phones they are currently selling are the Motorola V980 and the Nokia 6630. i am concidering getting a 3G phones, just because of the extra speed for surfing with the PDA on the bus or the like, and the 6630 was top on my list. but after reading about what Russell had to say about the phone, i have though otherwise. it sounds like a really cool phone, but thats a bit of a pain. My windows smartphone has shed loads of ram (32mb in total, for both sortage and RAM) and i, on most days, would be reading email, listening to music and have the calender open at any one time. i can also have MSN Messenger open too. i know the data speed is faster, and so is the processor (my smartphone is 132Mhz, the nokia is 200Mhz), but i think the next phone might be a smartphone 3 or the Orange SPV500, which are actually both the same phone….

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit blog.lotas-smartman.net for full links, other content, and more! ]]

the PiMCast is born

As you can see with 1 post (2 with this one), 1 comment and 1 trackback I’m far from the top of the bloggosphere... but all this is about to change. On Friday I had this great conversation with Volker , a colleague of mine; we had just participated to a dotnetrocks radio show and were discussing the podcasting phenomenon; how cool it was and how Podcasting enabled the immediate dissemination of educational and/or entertaining content. The main appeal we found was its “on the go” consumption. But in the discussion we realized that there was a big element missing in the Podcasts: video. Why should the ears get it all, we got eyes too; this is why we decided to launch the PiMCast ! (a contraction of P ortable M edia C enter C ast).

 

But enough with this single dimensional blog… if you want to know more about PiMCasts please check out www.pimcast.com , it’s still a bit rough right now as we registered the site less than 38h ago, but this is where we will be posting very soon the PiMCast FAQ and our first PiMCasts

 

Stay tuned and long live the PiMCast J

 

Transactions - The concepts - Part 3

Today, as we write application code we generally are not dealing with immutable state/data, we are applying application logic to state/data so that it transforms from one known state to another known state in a consistent, all or nothing fashion. Today, when performing this in code that does not involve Transaction Managers or Resource Managers, we use Try/Catch exception handling statements to mimick the "Commit" and "Rollback" concepts of transactions. The difficulties with such an approach is that as we scope certain types of work and/or scope more than a few simple actions into a unit of work, the level of complexity in nested try/catch code grows and can easy reach a point where it cannot truely provide the "Commit" and "Rollback" concepts of a Transaction.

For example, take the Try/Catch below

try
{
 // operation(stateX)
 // operation(stateY)
 // operation(stateZ)
}
catch
{
  // cleanup after states X, Y, and/or Z, as something has gone wrong and we need to get to a previously known state
}

The challenges with using try/catch in a Commit/Rollback style are some of the following:

- If stateX is shared between between more that one execution contexts, another execution context may read an inconsistent state and hence a "dirty" read, as the scoped unit of work may fail
- What if an operation on stateY deletes/alters a resource and how do we "Rollback" in the catch.
- How do we coordinate with resources that are transactional, i.e. if stateX represents a call to a transaction queuing/messaging or database system. How we coodinate between the different resources and unit of works!
- and there is lots of other problems

While all of the above can be eventually handled in code, with careful planning and structure, but what is the essence of what we are trying to achieve in the code and does it form a pattern! It is the "Commit" and "Rollback" concepts of a Transaction and if we factor the patterns, interfaces, contracts and interactions of Transacional Processing into the code we have more flexibility and agility. Please note I am not suggesting that every try/catch has a "Commit" or "Rollback" focus, but we sometimes use try/catch to group actions into a unit of work in which we determine the outcome of a unit of work by interrogation (using if statements) and do not negotiate/coordinate the outcome of the unit of work (as an example). Also, to provide the most flexibility and agility, we need for the actions that are grouped into a unit of work to be able to be aware of the (transactional) context. We also have the problem that try/catch is not context aware, i.e. it only knows a single execution context, and while dealing with a single execution context may suit us some times, we need to be able to handle both concurrency management and recovery control at the same time!

One approach to providing a cleaner implementation, is to factor out the interrogation and make it the negotiation/coordination of the outcome from the application logic and for an intermediary to work as a coordinator between the resources being used and the application logic. The coordinator controls the enlistment of resources within a scoped execution context (as defined by the application code) that we want to be transactional. We then need to define a number of common interfaces and interaction semantics, so that the use/enlistment of one or more resources in the scope/context of a unit of work is clearly defined. This can be achieved by having methods/semantics/behaviors common to all resources so that the different stages of moving/transforming from one known state to another known state as a unit of work or as a part of a unit of work, happens in an all or nothing fashion.

All of this fits quite nicely with the 2 phase commit (and even the one phase commit) protocol as to how the "Commit" or "Rollback" semantics of units of work can be achieved.

Oppps ....... Hmmmm .....  since I thought I was going to be able to do this is 3 to 4 postings, I seem to have underestimated and need one or two more. I think I will leave it here for now with this posting and follow up with a part 4,5,6