Most anyone who has tried Microsoft's Live.com has seen that performance is a problem. Here's what Microsoft is learning about performance from building Live.com. Scott Isaacs talks about some of the challenges inherent in building client-centric interactive applications that run in a browser. Some of the issues are reducing the number of connections to the server, XML parsing time, and server vs. client rendering. Some good insight into Microsoft's process.
April 2006 Archives
John Markoff has an article in the Times today about new Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Schwartz is an out of the box idea man, as opposed to McNealy's obsession with Microsoft (although that's a vast oversimplification) and former president Ed Zander's intense sales focus. (Also, Jonathan's blog has a nce tribute to Scott.)
Accompanying the article is a photo of Schwartz in front of a Sun sign somewhere on one of Sun's campuses. It's notable because it shows the original version of the current Sun logo -- before someone had the idea to turn it on its corner. I've always thought that Sun has the best company logo in the computer industry.
Speculation that Scott McNealy might step down as Sun Microsystems CEO proved to be true yesterday. In conjunction with another mediocre (but roughly in line with expectations) earnings report, Scott handed the helm over to Jonathan Schwartz (this puts "all the wood behind one arrowhead" as Schwartz adds the CEO title to his existing President title). One wonders whether this is a precurser to more aggressive headcount reduction, in an attempt to return SUNW to profitability.
Scott has always been a larger than life figure, for Sun employees and outside observers alike. Most notable over the years have been his somewhat over-the-top attacks on arch-rivals Bill gates and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. Whether you agree with Scott or not, he has long been one of the more entertaining leaders in the computer industry. It will be interesting to see how much we hear from Scott in his new role, and in the future if/when he moves on to new opportunities.
From 1984 to 1987, I worked at Microsoft. For about half that time, I was a member of the Windows 1.0 development team. I joined Microsoft straight out of college. Although I’d had several summer jobs doing programming since high school, this was my first permanent job in the software industry. Here's my version of the Windows 1.0 story.
Continue reading How Windows was Born.
How the Major Lerague Baseball Schedule is Created. Or rather, how hard it is to do, without actually talking about how it's done. I can envison feeding all the parameters and rules into some sort of expert system, and then letting it crank away for a while generating possible schedules. Each possibility would get a score, allowing you to rank the schedules. If you find something that needs to be tweaked, that's a new rule to feed the system.
Sounds like a job for Prolog. Or LOGLISP, if that still is used anywhere.
Amazon Wire is a new monthly podcast from Amazon about books, music, and movies.
ALE is Ajax Linking and Embedding. In the same way that OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) allows Windows applications to embed each other's content, ALE allows Ajax-based applications to embed and enable editing content from other applications.
Google has done some similar work in v2 of their maps API. I wonder how Microsoft plans to to handle embedding in Atlas? The ability to encapsulate functionality into controls in the ASP.NET environment would lend itself well to this.
Frustrated by my (otherwise excellent) host's slowness to move to PHP 5, I did a quick search and see that most everyone else is in the same boat. Hosts just aren't moving off of PHP 4 until there is broader application support for v5.
This is frustrating for those of us who would like to take advantage of the the improved object model, the XML parser, and the SOAP support that PHP 5 offers.
