March 2007

One of the YouTube awarded videos. Brilliant!

Just arrived at the 4th Microsoft Mashup Day (here’s a video from one of the past events). It’s really fun. This is my second one and I am planning to take the opportunity to do some work with the Windows Live SDK, perhaps develop a Windows Sidebar Gadget and do …

I just wanted to let you know that there might be some troubles with my domain name in the next few days. I am trying to transfer from register.com to godaddy.com and renew my domain registration for another 9 years in the process. I am doing this because godaddy.com seems to support …

/**/ This has been an extremely busy week. It’s been the first time since my PhD I actually stayed at the office overnight and continued working throughout the next day non-stop; and I did that twice in the week. We hosted scientists (for various events) so I also had to …

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82. Link to John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies – New …

I went to the US Postal Services website to let them know of my upcoming change of address and I saw an R2D2 moving around. A quick search on the Web revealed that for the 30th anniversary of StarWars, R2D2 will become a letter box around the US. Hmmm. Read …

I just read on the Web about the availability of this package from Microsoft. Cool. I knew a CTP was coming but didn’t know when. I’ve been trying to explain to scientific workflow people that Windows Workflow is a generic framework without any built-in semantics and that any type of …

Woo hoo! I’ve been waiting to blog about this for some time. Steven Newhouse is joining Microsoft and the HPC team. The OMII has a blog post about it. I’ve known Steven since I returned to Newcastle in 2003 and engaged with the Grid community. He’s a great asset for …

This must be one of the smartest purchases I’ve made. My Salomon X-Frees have been getting really really old; I bought them 6 or 7 years ago. I have been demoing various skis throughout the season but last Saturday I tried a pair of K2s (the Apache Recon); they felt …

A group of people I really like in Microsoft (they are a fun team) released their very interesting work as a preview. This type of work is very relevant to cross-organization collaboration, virtual organizations, Grids, etc. “The Security Policy Assertion Language (SecPAL) provides a flexible and robust declarative authorization language …

I am having a blast these days even though it’s been pretty busy (especially with the condo buying process in motion). Yesterday we had a full day of presentations from my group’s various interantional collaborators. It was great to see all the fantastic things they are up to and chat …

This prototype implementation looks very cool. If the idea takes off, we may finally find ourselves doing some exercise while working :-) For some time now, Microsoft’s visitor center has been showcasing a similar concept for the Windows Live Local data. However, nothing close to the sofistication of the prototype shown on the …

Our Technical Computing @ Microsoft (my team’s web site) is live. Woo hoo! No feed for changes yet or blog aggregation but all is coming! This is just v1.0. URLs that will direct you there: http://www.microsoft.com/science, http://www.microsoft.com/tc, http://www.microsoft.com/technicalcomputing. Read more [...]

/**/ A tear almost went down my face. I am so happy to see Patric’s work finally out there. Patric says: After almost 4 months of development I’ve uploaded the first release of Soya yesterday night =) Please feel free to browse through the web site , download the latest release …

/**/ I am going to move the administration of my domain to Windows Live Domains. I hope the process is seamless but if this site disappears for a while, you’ll know something went wrong. What prompted this? Well, yesterday Google mail (all my personal email is routed via this service) …

It’s been a while since I started considering the purchase of my own place here in Seattle. In February, I started the process and at the beginning of this week I made an offer for a great condo in West Queen Anne. It was only the second time I went …