rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
May 19, 2009 at 10:45 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I didn’t really make it to the IIW yesterday, but I did make it to the dinner. I hope to make it there by lunch today.
Instead of going to the IIW yesterday, I got pulled into a meeting to help work through some client issues. The actual problems were completely tangential to my role on the project, but given my background I was happy to help.
That morning meeting became contentious. After the fifth time of hearing the same inadequate solution with a dose of attitude . . . well . . . I don’t cotton to that.
Kind of a mess, really. I wouldn’t have done it at all except that I was helping out a friend.
And now, off to the IIW 2009A, day 2.
Tags: IIW, IIW2009A, Software-Development
May 16, 2009 at 7:22 pm · Filed under Web 2.0
I will be attending the Internet Identity Workshop #8 this coming week (http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com for more info).
It runs Monday, May 18th through Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
I’m a bit overbooked this week. The song remains the same. I’ll be there as much as I can and at the dinner Monday night at the Tied House.
If you want to meet up, contact me at robert at rwandering dot net or use the form at =rwandering.
Tags: Identity, IIW, IIW2009A, IIW8, OpenID, XRI
May 10, 2009 at 10:09 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I’ve been running Windows 7 RC since Thursday. My impressions are mostly quite favorable. It is all I wanted Windows Vista R2 to be. Actually it is all I wanted Windows Vista RTM to be, but I’m happy to have finally gotten there.
I’ll post more on this later . . . as time permits.
May 6, 2009 at 9:23 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
As I noted recently, I have been working with Giles Thomas and Glenn Jones at Resolver Systems on a sample mixing distributed IronPython objects with Resolver One spreadsheets.
I like those guys. They are smart and do excellent work.
Anyway, they released the sample earlier today. From their site:
As of version 1.5 (which is currently in beta), the world’s coolest spreadsheet can use Digipede Network grid computing to distribute and execute workbooks in parallel. The example on the Exchange is based on the excellent IronPython sample created by Robert W. Anderson of Digipede. The Digipede Network is a brilliant way to get distributed, parallel computation on Windows. It only took a few minor changes to convert Resolver One to run on the Digipede Network and to get the IronPython sample to execute Resolver One workbooks.
Giles gives some more background to the path that got us here on his recent post, Resolver One and Digipede.
The combination of our two products offers a pretty elegant solution. Like I said before,
Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .
. . . like Excel and Windows HPC Server. No, don’t. Trust me. It is really hard, complex, and brittle.
Tags: Digipede, Excel, grid, HPC, IronPython, ResolverOne
April 29, 2009 at 9:12 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Ironically, this message is intended for those who won’t find it in their feed reader.
I had hoped the transition to rwandering.net would be mostly automatic, but it seems that many feed readers ignore the “permanent” in the 301 redirect. That is, they are happy to redirect but ignore the fact that the feed URL changed. So when the old feed stops redirecting, b’bye.
The feed for this blog is http://feeds.rwandering.net/rwanderingMain.
I am making this statement for completeness.
April 17, 2009 at 9:50 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
We had a call this morning with Giles Thomas and Glenn Jones of Resolver Systems. They demonstrated Resolver One running on the Digipede Network.
They used my IronPython Worker sample and customized the front-end Python code, leaving the C# adapter as-is. With very little coding they had an elegant grid-enabled spreadsheet. Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .
Giles said they will have support for this in Resolver One 1.5, coming out in the next couple of weeks.
Very cool.
I’ve just installed Resolver One to take a closer look. Already I’m impressed, but I’ll leave that for a future post.
Tags: Digipede, Excel, IronPython, Python, ResolverOne
April 16, 2009 at 5:08 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
This is a public service announcement to release engineers and developers out there.
Your installers — and core components for that matter — shouldn’t be performing checks that preclude new versions of Windows.
This is particularly relevant with a new version of Windows coming soon. In fact, I’m writing this because recently someone told me that his team’s software wouldn’t install on Windows 7. The release engineer fixed it by increasing the high version limit.
That is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate any upper bound on a version limit. The premise is that developers shouldn’t assume that their software won’t work on future versions of Windows.
Windows Logo requirements have required this for some time, and in fact there is a certification test called the HighVersionLie that tests for just this case. The test sets the Windows version to an artificially high number to see if the tested software still installs and runs.
BTW: One reader from Microsoft told me a similar story at last year’s PDC – this posting was prompted by a different conversation altogether.
Tags: HighVersionLie, Windows, Windows7
April 13, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I use speech recognition a great deal – and I recently switched to Windows Speech Recognition on Vista. And I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for Google Apps, because I think it offers superior performance for JavaScript apps.
Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR. According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).
Google: when are you going to put the effort into this? The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.
Rob Chambers: how easy is this really? You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.
So now, I’m using IE8. Google Docs with WSR works great there.
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, IE8, Microsoft, WSR
April 9, 2009 at 8:15 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am migrating this blog from http://et.cairene.net to http://rwandering.net.
This should be transparent, but if I lose you in the process, you’ll know why.
Tags: blog
April 6, 2009 at 6:31 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
. . . or IronPython-ipede (Part II).
I have been playing with IronPython a little. With the release of Digipede Network 2.2, I am now able to post the sample I wrote. It shows how to distribute IronPython objects on the Digipede Network. You can find it on the Digipede community site. See the posting there for details and download instructions.
The sample uses IronPython 2.0.1 and the included version of the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). While I focused on IronPython in this sample, it would be pretty easy to expand it to support other DLR-based languages.
Comments welcome. I am specifically interested in feedback on DLR integration and initializing ScriptScope objects for each worker thread. It seems that I should be able to do some of this only once at global scope.
By the way, one thing I like about this sample is that it shows how to keep user code completely de-coupled from the Digipede Network while still taking advantage of our deployment and payload distribution model. This has always been supported by the Digipede Network, and this makes a good example.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, DLR, IronPython, Python
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