That's what research is all about... having fun and being innovative :-) I love the way the "MySong" work is presented through this blog entry... examples, people having fun on camera, the paper, the science behind the project. Great stuff.

I am in San Diego with Lee Dirks. I've had very interesting meeting with Lynn Fink and co, Mark Ellisman and team, and Fran Berman and the technical/scientific leadership of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It's been a fantastic day. At the end, we were treated to a private tour of the machine room, which is huge. We saw a BlueGene from up close, the machines powering the Protein Databank, those for the Encyclopedia of Life, and many many other cool projects. The infrastructure and operations of a supercomputer facility are fascinating.

Very productive visit and, of course, always great talking with very smart people.

My team, and Dan Fay in particular, has been involved in the funding of the World Wide Telescope effort. I've seen demonstrations of it and it's absolutely gorgeous. I was even lucky to see it running on a 4 x 3 large display wall with modifications to take advantage of the HUGE pixel surface. It is absolutely gorgeous. I believe there is going to be a TED talk by Curtis Wang today demonstrating the software + service. The tool and service will be widely available later in the Spring.

Update: Brief TED video-introduction is now available.

:-) Nice prank.

When Radiohead released "In Rainbows" I downloaded it without paying. I had told myself then that if I liked it I would buy the CD, as I did today. Kudos to Radiohead for trying something different. Now, if they had only included Seattle as part of their tour (I saw them live once but I'd love to see them again... I wonder whether they'll be in Glastonbury this summer).

Great information and insight into what the SharpOS folks are doing. Singularity, Spec#, Sing#, House (which I didn't know about), and other cool technologies are also mentioned.

It's unfortunate for me that they opted to use GPL v3.0 as their license since I can't look/play with the code (since I will be "tainted" :-(.

Cloudo

According to their technology page, they don’t use Flash or Silverlight which is hard to believe given what they show in their guided tour. Also, they suggest an “automatic sync” of files between a desktop and the cloud. This cannot be achieved with just an in-browser app. One needs to install software locally.

The experience seems really nice. No word on what happens when you don’t have net connectivity of course :-)

What I do like about this, in contrast with other similar in-browser “OS”es I’ve seen, is that they are thinking about 3rd party developers. They seem to have a story about 3rd party applications. This suggests that they are building a platform, which would be cool (one of the reasons Facebook has been so successful is because they built a platform for developers… the strength of Microsoft as well, right? :-).

Chris was visiting with his partner last weekend. We had a great time (loooots of food)... well, I had a great time... I hope they did too :-)

Chris took this great photo from my balcony while trying his new camera. That's the Magnolia hill and the Seattle sky :-)

Back in June 2007 I switched from T-Mobile to ATT in order to get the Blackjack I because the salesman told me that WM6 was “just a couple of weeks away”. Early December I went to complain because the update was still not available. Unfortunately, they promised to get back to me but nothing happened. I went to complain again. I talked with the store's manager and explained how they had misinformed me; this time they offered to exchange my Blackjack I with a Blackjack II at no cost. Two days later the WM6 update became available :-)

I knew that I really didn’t need the Blackjack II because I had already ordered a new device. It was just for the principle of it.

That new device has now arrived. It's the HTC Touch Cruise. I am sooooo jealous of the iPhone's smooth and well-thought out interface. The HTC Touch Cruise has great specs (GPS, HSDPA, great camera, it's fast, lots of memory + 4 GB SD, etc.). The interface is just not finger-friendly and I really don't want to be using the stylus. Otherwise, it's a great device.

Surely we can do better on the interface front.

We are experimenting with the processing of large amounts of scientific data so we asked for a copy of the SDSS SkyServer data. Alex Szalay was very kind to send us a copy...

Tony Hey opening the box with the hard disks of the SkyServer data.

This is of course SneakerNet in action :-) This is exactly what Jim Gray was talking about (see also his Distributed Computing Economics paper).

I've started interacting with Bora Beran, a post-doc researcher working for Catharine van Ingen, over the last few months and I love it. He's very energetic, creative, and with great ideas. Have a look at his ontology-driven Hydroseek work (resulting thesis).

He's just started blogging about his work and prototypes. Definitely worth checking out. He does need to blog more frequently though ;-)

Just spent the entire night at the office. It's the ThinkWeek paper deadline today and I've been working on three of them!!! But it seems that we'll submit all of them on time, if nothing goes wrong. I am very excited about the ideas we are proposing. Well, I hope that other technical folks inside Microsoft think the same :-)

So the weekend is here and I am heading to Calgary to meet Jim. We are going skiing for two days. I am looking forward to seeing him again after so long and hanging out with my pal on the Canadian slopes. Should be fun. I wonder whether we'll be able to do some pair coding or book writing... knowing Jim, there'd probably be some alcohol involved :-)

Update: Well, the papers got submitted in time (5 hours before the deadline) but I still managed to miss my flight to Calgary :-( I am waiting for the late evening flight now :-( Sorry Jim!

Of course it's all over the technology news. It's huge. I do hope it happens. Not everyone agrees.

While exchanging emails about this with a friend, I did the calculation... Microsoft has around 80,000 employees... The $44B offer in cash represents around $0.55M per employee :-)))