Paul Mooney

Launching MOM and Virtual Server

We Launched MOM and Virtual Server today in New York City at Microsoft’s new spacious Rockefeller Center office with about two hundred in attendance. The event was very well run; the young woman at the check-in desk knew my name even though we hadn’t met in over a year! There were two great presentations by Craig Lieboff and Donnie Hamliett on Virtual Server.

I was recalling the first presentation Donnie gave on MOM about two years ago at Microsoft’s west side office. During his talk there was this deep “awooga” sound that kept him spinning around like a teacher looking to see who was the trouble maker in the class calling out “awooga”. He didn’t say anything but he kept eyeing a few of us to see who was messing with his mind. When we broke for lunch I had a look out the window with a view of the Hudson River and New Jersey and there at the pier at 46th street was an ocean liner setting sail for some exotic clime, “awooga”!

RD 4 NJ

Are there any television producers out there in blogland? I’ve got a great concept for the next hit Reality TV Show, NJRD. The life and times of the first and only Microsoft New Jersey Regional Director as he encounters clueless corporations, hapless end users, demanding Dot Net enthusiasts, corrupt politicians, nefarious gang land types and the ever present Linux Users.

Jeffrey likes NY

Jeffrey Richter likes NY, especially when an assembled group of Dot Net enthusiasts challenges him on threading, VB.Net, AppDomains and the CLR. “How can you argue with facts”? We had a great time, we must have had a great time because we stayed in that room for 8 hours! Then many of us went to our UG meeting for two more hours! It all has become so social, people in the back of the room jump up to wave to me, when I go out in the hall I meet people I know attending other events! It’s like being back in school, when I knew so many people.

Today’s festivities were set in motion way back in April, when I suggested to Jeffrey that he might like to spend a day with NYCDOTNET. I also convinced Jeffrey that he might like blogging, but he couldn’t believe anyone in there right mind would surf to his site to read about his life with code. So they don’t exactly surf over, many now subscribe to his feeds, others link to him and we are all learning from each other.

NYC.Net

Tomorrow at Microsoft’s NYC office we will be having a UG marathon! At 9am we will begin with a special workshop featuring Wintellect’s Jeffrey Richter that should last till about 5pm. Then after an hours break we will have a meeting of NYCDOTNET on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services with Microsoft’s Jaime Basilico.

 We always have a good time at NYCDOTNET UG meetings, what makes them fun is that after two years everybody knows everyone. Jeffery Richter was to give a talk at our UG last September, but something came up and he had to cancel. I met him back in April at the first Devscovery in Washington DC where I suggested that he might enjoy doing a days workshop with our engaging group, he immediately said “YES”.

Where is the Tablet PC?

What’s up with the Tablet PC? I thought they would be flying off the store shelves this quarter with the release of Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005. Some of the Tablet manufactures do offer a link to Microsoft’s update site, but NOT ONE is featuring Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 as a selling point. What is wrong with this picture?

OneNote with its SP1 is an application born for the Tablet and it now sells for 50% less then its launch price. I love OneNote (I was a beta tester) it alone is enough reason to purchase a Tablet PC.

InfoPath can empower anybody to create a form and forms are the Tablets best friend, just check the box or fill in the dot. Why aren’t the Tablet manufactures hiring advertising agencies to write jingles about OneNote and InfoPath?

A few months back the Tech gossips were talking about the “death” of the Tablet, but Microsoft replied; OneNote, InfoPath SP1, Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 will save the day.

Does anybody in this world know about Dothan? The next generation Centrino? The Intel Pentium M processors 735, 745 and 755 are built on Intel's industry-leading, high-volume 90nm manufacturing process technology - the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing process in the industry. The 90 nm process produces smaller, faster transistors and uses Intel's strained silicon technology to give its transistors a speed boost, resulting in higher performance headroom.

I’m tall I like headroom, but apparently NOT ONE of the Tablet manufactures are offering the LATEST technology in their products! So who in there right mind would spend $2000+ on last years technology?

Get Source

As a result of the ongoing success of the Microsoft Government Security Program (GSP) and positive feedback from governmental entities, Microsoft Corp. announced it will offer access to the source code of its flagship desktop offering, Microsoft Office 2003, as part of the GSP. Building on the existing GSP Windows® source offering and the availability of Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas announced last year, the Government Shared Source License for Office gives qualifying national governments and international organizations access to source code and technical information about Office 2003. 

 

Get on the Bus

Went to West Orange NJ yesterday for a MSDN Event, the map on the Microsoft Events site indicated that this event was somewhere in the middle of Kansas but that didn’t deter me. When I pulled into the parking lot there was an amazing sight, a huge tractor trailer with a satellite receiver on top. It was the Microsoft across America truck débuting in New Jersey, COOL!

Microsoft Partners around the country can sign-up for a chance to walk their clients through demos of Small Business Server and Virtual Server on brand new HP hardware with Intel microprocessors inside. Murph from TechNet gave me the royal Tech tour; they have everything but a barbeque outside. Surfing the internet from a parking lot sounds like the inspiration for a song. It was fun, but so were the MSDN presentation with Rob and the exciting movie we got to sneak into afterwards!

AMD-64+1

The AMD-FX 64 Chip was launched in San Francisco one year ago today. I was there; AMD flew 64 of us out to the city by the bay to be a part of history and to receive the first 64 AMD FX-64 bit chips. It was a great party; we were all extremely excited about embarking on the next platform of power computing.

One year later we are still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. So little software has been written for the 64 bit platform, who would have thought we would still be waiting for Windows XP 64 Edition (and it’s going to be another six months at least). Drivers are very hard to come by and as for the promise of 16gigs of RAM show me a Motherboard manufacture who is producing 8 slots for memory.

I wish America was a nation of computer enthusiasts, we change jobs, cars and spouses more frequently then we upgrade PC’s. Has anyone ever seen the President emerge from his helicopter with a laptop bag or holding a Tablet PC? I’ll bet Osama bin Forgotten is booting-up a nice new AMD 64 Mobile Laptop running SUSE 64 Linux and sending Gmail invites to all his friends.

New technology is our heritage, invention and innovation should define us as Americans. Congratulations AMD, for giving us the power of 64 bit computing for our homes and offices, thank-you for the vision and all its possibilities.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0, the internet as platform. Tim O'Reilly is asking for submissions of questions to ask the information age luminaries who will be gathering in San Francisco October 5-7 at Web 2.0. Here is my question:

All the capital has been flowing to into the Security black hole, we need to free our imaginations and create an economic engine that benefits all of us. We’ve built the network, we’re connected, and we know the power of people collaborating. A single idea can spark innovation; do we have the courage to ignite that spark?

IT Forum

Went to the Plaza Hotel today for a Corporate Security IT Forum organized by Forbes and I had a great time. Arrived early to a warm welcome by the bright and beautiful woman who take care of every detail, got my badge and program and went in to a royal dining room where a huge breakfast was all laid out. Soon after sitting down with my fresh fruit I was joined by Robert Littlejohn, we introduced ourselves and then William Cook asked if he could join us. We had a great chat about travel, traffic, the Far East and the fine hotel we found ourselves at. It was only hours later after hearing them speak and reading the program that I realized just who they were.

It was a marathon of panels done at a very professional pace with all the appearance of a television show. As always in the small town that is New York I met a friend whom I hadn’t seen since the last Forbes event we attended. Then we had a great chat about New York food, seafood: some people today would have you believe New York food is bagels and pickled pig. New York is by the sea and our summers were always spent at the water swimming, fishing and eating fish.

We got chicken at the Plaza today, but there was nice silverware and linen napkins! The afternoons talks were very good, a who’s who of the Tech world all with worthy things to say.

By five I was ready for the cocktail reception, and lucky for me they had good beer at hand, big shrimp and what we New Yorkers love, crab cakes. I was in heaven and who should come up to me and say “hi Paul” but John Kirkwood, one of the afternoon’s speakers. He knew me, and I know I had met him before but neither of us could remember where or when. It just goes to show if you keep going to these events you’ll get to know everybody. Then Lt. Colonel Daniel Ragsdale joined in the conversation, he was incredible. Standing there in full military dress describing his trip to DEFCON, this guy knew his computer security and the three of us had a great time exchanging stories and amazing tales. What a day and now if I ever see Lt Colonel Daniel Ragsdale again he’ll come up to me and say “hi Paul” and I’ll know I met him before but I may not remember where or when but we'll have some more stories to tell...

How would you run Microsoft?

How Would You Run Microsoft? # from the channel9 forums:

I would fire 90% of Microsoft's Marketing staff because they really have no understanding of Marketing or Technology. Marketing is all about creating NEW products that will sell, so if you want to do Marketing for Microsoft you should be knowledgeable about software development. The Patterns and Practice Group and the Developer Evangelists are the best thing Microsoft has done to “turn the company around”, Marketing should also go through this regenerative process.

With all the savings from firing the Marketing crowd I would hire 10,000 Developers and get to work on Win-FS because it’s needed and I love a challenge.

I would establish a second Microsoft Campus in North West New Jersey, the first Technology State because it’s at the center of the North East corridor: MA to VA. Microsoft needs a presence in the North East, their small little satellite offices just haven’t had an impact.

Active Directory

Have you ever had aspirations of becoming a System Architect? Those of us who have come of age in the .Net era understand connected systems, now that Web Services are set to play a bigger role in enterprise computing we need to know more about Servers. AD, Active Directory the best place to start. Learn AD and you’ll understand how Windows Server 2003 works with Exchange and SQL.

Where can you go to learn AD? How about a series of Webcasts at your computer? OK, but how much is that going to cost? Follow this link and you can listen to a series of live or recorded webcasts for free....Active Directory Week

SpeechTEK

At SpeechTEK this past week in NYC the TALK was about the successes and POSSIBILITIES of software that can speak and respond to our voices. I was impressed by the state of the art of Speech enabled platforms and inspired by the potential for future developement. SpeechDEV is the next conference I would like to attend, because as we well know “its all about Developers”.

As Developers we have two ways to go: VoiceXML and SALT. Most of the participants at SpeechTEK were in the VoiceXML camp and very vocal about it too. Microsoft is working the SALT mine and you can download their SDK's.

VoiceXML like HTML will be big because more and more people will quickly learn how to use it. Much can be done with SALT now, but that of course is more for propriety platforms. We've been here before it seems...

SOAP Specs

 

SOAP is a lightweight protocol for the exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML-based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. SOAP can potentially be used in combination with a variety of other protocols; however, the only bindings defined in this document describe how to use SOAP in combination with HTTP and the HTTP Extension Framework

WS-Enumeration

Web Service Enumeration (WS-Enumeration) 

WS-Transfer

Web Service Transfer (WS-Transfer)

EMMA

EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language

W3C Working Draft

The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multi-modal interaction.

First there was the command line and keyboard, then came Mr Mouse. The Tablet PC gave us a Pen and some digital ink that didn't get on our hands. Multi-modal is about using many ways to access our computers. We have been talking to computers since day one, but now they are listening and responding..! How about gestures? I'll bet you have made a few gestures directed at your computer, well be careful, they are watching and UNDERSTANDING YOU now!

I was at a talk today at SpeechTEK by Wu Chou and Michael Johnston, they are doing some amazing things and they would like your imput, www-multimodal@w3.org

Virtual Server 2005

Try Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

Virtual Server 2005 is a new virtual machine solution designed for the Windows Server 2003 platform. Virtual Server 2005 helps increase operational efficiency in software test and development, legacy application re-hosting, and server consolidation scenarios. Download an evaluation copy and try it for yourself.

This is a cool product, a great way to test and learn about Networked Systems. Virtual Server 2005 is Launching in two weeks in NYC along with the latest version of MOM.

 

W3C needs YOU

Tim B. Lee met me today in NYC at SpeechTEK and he had a lot to say about standards. Tim B. Lee is associated with such standards as HTML, HTTP and URL, he told a good story about how URL became URL through the efforts of several comities over many years. The W3C creates comities who work out problems and try to reach conclusions to help lead the web to it's potential. Just as American democracy works best when everybody votes, the W3C would like more people to sign-up to help them reach their potential.