People started posting their condolences on Lee’s Facebook timeline so I guess it’s ok to post this note now. Earlier this morning I received the sad news that my good friend and colleague at Microsoft, Lee Dirks, and his wife, Judy, were killed in a tragic accident in Peru. Their …
A recent question at the REST in Practice discussion group, reminded me of the research work that Jim and I did on the SOAP Service Description Language (SSDL). It was an active time of discussions with the Web Services community. We really disliked WSDL and we really liked REST. We …
Geese crossing the busiest intersection in Bellevue :-) Everyone just stopped and watched while they took their time to cross!!! :-)
It took me few hours, spread over a number of weekends, to figure out the solution to the following problem so I am recording it in case it’s useful to someone else out there. I am using PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile, and the Google Maps control for a mobile app I …
We spent 5 days on the road. Mary, Tini, Nuno, and I went to Zion and Bryce canyons in Utah. We flew to Las Vegas, stayed for a night, got our rental, and then drove by lake Mead and Hoover Dam, before settling at Ponderosa ranch for few days. The …
I met Kyril back in 2006. I was already in Microsoft for a year when Jim Gray and Tony Hey asked me to join Tony’s Technical Computing team as an Architect. Kyril was in my interview loop for the job. We spent a lot of time talking about eScience, research, …
Jim Gray (1944-2012). Here’s to a wonderful human being, an amazing scientist, and a great role model. I am so honored to have known, have worked with, and have had him as a mentor in Microsoft. Jim was the one who advised me to move to the US and join …
Welcome to the second edition of The Hermes Series, a non-regular and often random collection of notes & thoughts about knowledge representation and reasoning, graphs, technology, and all things from around the Web. In this second blog post in the series … The Internet of Things and Glanceable Data The …
I have been using the beta version of SkyDrive for a while now and I love it. I was a huge user of Live Mesh for its peer-to-peer synchronization capabilities. I am certain I will miss that feature but I understand the need to remove complexity and streamline features as …
I am an information junkie I enjoy keeping up with the world of technology. I take notes, keep links, and write about the things that interest me. I try to identify the connections with what I do at work, with what excites me. I like to share. I learn a …
As I suggested a week ago, my weblog was going to change. The majority of the work has now been done. There are still few things that I need to fix or transfer from my old site but most of the content is now in its new place and the …
In the coming days, this blog and my entire corner on the web at http://savas.me are going to change. After 8 years of faithful service, I am retiring “pblog”, the blogging engine I wrote back in 2003 and further evolved few years later. I have already transferred all the blog …
In my previous post I shared my excitement about my new role in Microsoft. I work together with some amazing people on hard problems, in a domain that really excites me: data, information, knowledge at scale. We now want to grow the team and so we want YOU! :-) We …
Over the last three months I’ve been having an incredible time at work. I opted not to talk about it because I wanted to make sure that it sticks this time :-) Before my current role, I participated in great startup efforts within Microsoft, projects with great vision and immense …
Happy New Year everyone! 2011 was a slow year for this blog. Early last year I joined Erik Meijers team in order to work on an incubation project that involved actors, distributed graph-based processing, a highly-scalable and reliable document store, and more. Given the non-public nature of the project, I …