Chris Pietschmann

I've read a couple of "Intro" to neuroscience and psychology books, and what I've learned has fascinated and inspired my way more than anything I've learned about computers and electronics over the years. The Brain is truly the more complex "computer" the work has ever seen!

Here's a couple books I've read that I highly recommend:

A User's Guide to the Brain: Attention, Preception, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John Ratey

Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin

A couple other books I highly recommend that are related to this area; even if they are more Sociological:

Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan

Be The Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog ... And Your Life by Cesar Millan

I've decided to start in the pursuit of a degree in Neuroscience; instead of Computer Science even though CS may be "easier" since I've been doing software programming/development/architecture for ~8+ years now. There are TONS of things that an academic path in Neuroscience can lead to. So, I really don't know exactly where I'll end up, but I do know that i want to learn more about the Brain, how it works and what awesome things can be done. Just think about what could be done with interfacing the brain and robotics, and how that could help someone with an amputation or paralysis. Or just working with artificial intelligence to create a computer that a person could truly interact with naturally. Or helping research and cure debilitating neurological deseases/disorders.

In addition to working, I'm currently enrolled in a few classes at the University of Wisconsin this semester. Technically, I'm a full-time student, but I still have work to do, a wife, a baby girl to raise, and plenty of software development technology to learn and write about. So, if I EVER thought I was busy, man was I wrong. I'm the busiest now than I've ever been, but man is it all enlightening!

Consequentially, as a result of studying Chemistry, Biology, Psychology and perhaps a little Sociology in the pursuit of Neuroscience, I may be blogging about those topics at times too in addition to software development. Just to warn you, this blog may transform to a whole different level of interesting; that is if I have the time to write.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm not disappearing from blogging or the web as you've seen (I know I have) other developers do when they go through certain life changes.

College, General neuroscience, psychology, sociology, college

My Brother In Law, Jeremy, is back now after his second tour in Iraq. This time he was gone only 12 months, instead of 18 months the first time. He has a wife (my sister) and 3 boys (3yrs, 6yrs and 9yrs) of whom were eagerly awaiting his return. The people at WXOW Channel 19 in La Crosse, WI interviewed them when he returned to Wisconsin.

Written Article - "Family waits for soldiers return"

Video of Interview - "Family waits for soldiers return"

The above picture is from the video, and is most likely owned / copyright WXOW Channel 19. FYI, This picture is not under the Creative Commons Attribution License that covers all other content on this blog.

General

Now that it's 2010, and over a year since the first Community Coding Contest came to an end, I'm thinking about running the contest again in 2010.

Last time it ran for 3 months and we had 6 really great entries. This time around I'm thinking that it may be better to accept entries for 6 months, and have the voting run for a full month. This will give much more time for entries to be submitted, and for people to work on their entries before submitting and/or voting begins.

These are just some initial thoughts, and I'm going to need input on everything from YOU (the community) before I can make a final decision as to when and how to run the contest again. I'd really appreciate if you could fill out the following survey and tell us what you think.

Community Coding Contest 2010 Pre-Contest Survey

Also, we will need some prizes donated before the contest will be able to go on. If you or your company are interested in donating prizes or monetary support (web hosting fees, mailing expenses, etc.) for the contest, please contact the contest directly here: http://communitycodingcontest.org/contact.aspx

You can view the official contest website here: http://communitycodingcontest.org

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks!

asp.net, ASP.NET MVC, Bing Maps, C#, General, Silverlight, vb.net community, contest, bingmaps, .net framework, software development

I just finished installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 within a Windows 7 Virtual Machine running within Windows VIrtual PC and the Final/Finish screen of the installation wizard contains a weird, blue, Mac-style Button. Ok, I know it’s not exactly how the button are in the UI of Max OSX, but it’s much closer to that than it is to Windows 7 buttons.

The button looks so incredibly out of place, and I wonder who decided that it should be used, especially since it doesn’t match the UI of either the installer or Windows itself.

You can see a screenshot of it below:

General visualstudio, .net framework

I really haven't been reading enough books of the the last few years. Sure I read a ton of blogs and such online, but what about books? Books are nice, cohesive collections of information; at least most of the time. There are a lot of things I'd like to learn more about, both related to computers and not. So, sometime in January (this wasn't a new years resolution, just a coincidence), I decided to try to read at minimum 12 books throughout the year. Basically, at least 1 book each month, and after seemingly falling behind a few times, to my surprise, it seems that I am on track.

Here's the list of books that I've read so far this year in order of first to most recent:

1. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin D. Mitnick
2. Beginning Spatial with SQL Server 2008 by Alistair Aitchison
3. A User's Guid to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey
4. Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan
5. Pro WPF in C# 2008 by Matthew MacDonald
6. Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 by "The 4 Extended Foreheads" (Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie)
7. Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
8. A Brief History of Time: The Updated And Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition by Stephen Hawking
9. jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault, Yehuda Katz
10. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Keep in mind that it took me anywhere from 1 to 3 months to find the time to read some of these books.

The book I am currently reading is...

Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog ... And Your Life by Cesar Millan

Wow, and to my surprise I'm currently on book number 11 for the year. Maybe I'll be able to read a total of 12 or 13 books before the years end. I guess only time will tell.

Happy Reading!

General books, personal

Some of you that follow my blog may have noticed that it’s been almost a month since I’ve really posted anything. I know I’ve done this in the past when I’ve been busy working on other things (mostly to get paid), but this time it’s for an entirely different reason…

My wife and I had a beautiful baby girl! And, we’ve been adjusting to our new sleep schedule of only getting 2-4 hours of sleep maximum at a time. Anyone with kids understands how it is with a newborn, and now only after having one do I fully understand. After all, I was sleeping way too much before anyway.

Things have been going absolutely wonderful!

I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to have enough time to keep on blogging and learning now that I have most of my time dedicated elsewhere. One thing I don’t want to do is completely disappear from the web, like I’ve seen other tech bloggers do after a major personal life change such as this. So, I’ll just keep on blogging here and there, and maybe I’ll still be able to improve the quality of my posts.

Thanks!

General general

I first started downloading Windows 7 Ultimate off MSDN using the old File Transfer Manager and it was taking FOREVER to download. The download started out good, then it dropped off to about 40KB/sec and said it would take about 14 hours to finish! Man, I was hoping I’d be able to get it downloaded quick so I can start updating my machines today/tonight.

Then I saw a Twitter post by @Rickster_CDN mentioning a link to a page with the AKAMAI links for TechNet to download Windows 7 WAY FASTER! Actually the link is to the “Top Downloads” page on TechNet.

It turns out that MSDN has the same kind of “Top Downloads” page, so  you can really use AKAMAI to download Windows 7 much FASTER whether you have an MSDN or TechNet Subscription.

Here’s the Links:

TechNet Top Downloads with AKAMAI Links

MSDN Top Downloads with AKAMAI Links

I’m currently downloading Windows 7 Ultimate RTM at about 1.3MB/sec and I have about 28 minutes left. It sure beat the crap out of the File Transfer Manager downloading at about 40KB/sec.

Happy Downloading!

General windows, msdn, technet, akamai, download

Microsoft has announced the initial pricing for Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services. My question is still "What is the Minimum it will cost to host a small website/application on Azure?"

If your application is racking up "Compute" time when ever it is "live", then that equals a total of approximately 720 hours of "compute" time for a total of $86.40 per month.

If you store less than 1GB of files, that's $0.15 per month.

Then if you also use a database with SQL Azure, that's an additional $9.99 per month for up to a 1GB relational database.

Now if the website uses 10GB of bandwidth (that's how much my blog used last month), then that's about $1.50 per month.

If you add all these up, that's a Total of $98.04! And that looks like the very minimum cost of hosting an average "small" app/website on Azure. That surely doesn't make me want to switch my DiscountASP.NET and GoDaddy.com hosting accounts over to Windows Azure.

I can't believe Microsoft isn't making it cheaper to host a small website on Azure, by making the "Compute" time so expensive. Unless of course I'm misunderstanding how "Compute" time is calculated. Does anyone know if I am correct in assuming that 1 full day of hosting your application will rack up 24 hours of total "Compute" time? I hope I'm wrong on this.

Below is a summary of the pricing:

Windows Azure:

    * Compute @ $0.12 / hour
    * Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
    * Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

    * Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99
    * Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

More Info on Azure Pricing

General, Azure azure

I’ve been questioning here and there as to what happened to Managed JScript on the Dynamic Language Runtime. The most recent preview release is really old, and it has since been taken out of any further preview releases of the DLR, where as IronRuby and IronPython continue on.

No More Managed JScript on the DLR?

For some time I never really got any good answers. Well, it’s really sad to hear that apparently Microsoft decided to drop it completely.

According the this link, a member on the DLR team has this to say:

“The DLR JScript was experimental for informing the design of the DLR (expression trees, interop, callsites, hosting, etc.). The JS we released with asp futures and the Silverlight dynamic sdk became very old and unserviceable as the DLR continued evolving for release in CLR 4.0. unfortunately, there are no plans at this time to develop and release a DLR hostable JScript.”

“Experimental for informing the design”??

I understand what this means, but since Managed JScript was used to help build the DLR from the beginning then “Why didn’t they keep it up to date?”

Plus if you go read the Initial Announcement of Managed JScript over on the JScript Blog you will see the following statement:

“We are working to make sure that Managed JScript is a first class language on top of DLR.”

What part of that post and the above statement specify that it’s only “experimental” and not to actually ever get released?

I’m really curious to find out who actually made the decision to drop it, and what the real reason is. Was it you ScottGu?

Why not Open Source it?

Well, the next logical question to ask is “Why not release what was done for Managed JScript as Open Source under a Public License?” At least this way it would allow the community to take it and run with it.

Are there Alternative Implementations?

None that I could find for .NET and/or the DLR. If you know of any, please let me know!

I did however find the Rhino project from Mozilla, but it’s for Java. According to Mozilla, “Rhino is an open-source implementation of JavaScript written entirely in Java. It is typically embedded into Java applications to provide scripting to end users.”  I guess this could be a start at building one for .NET/DLR, but…

Update: I did find the MyJScript project on CodePlex; it’s not a complete implemenation, but it does show the basics on how to create your own scripting language on the DLR. There is also an companion article to the MyJScript project: http://www.dotnetguru.org/us/dlrus/DLR2.htm

Further Info

Here’s a few links that have some small bits of info in addition to that linked above:

http://dlr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=58121

http://dlr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=41990

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jimmy-Schementi-Inside-IronRuby/?CommentID=472955

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/John-Lam-and-Martin-Maly-Deep-DLR/?CommentID=472957

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed-jscript-announced.aspx

Conclusion

I’ve very disappointed to hear this sad news. However, I guess I could always work on building my own Managed JScript compiler/library for the DLR; if I could only find the time in between my other open source work and other paying gigs.

Until then, I guess I can only hope that Microsoft (or would it be ScottGu) decides to reconsider.

JavaScript, General javascript, dlr, .net framework

Congratulations 2009 Microsoft MVP!

Dear Chris Pietschmann,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

Toby Richards
General Manager
Community Support Services

I’m lucky enough to be one of the April Fools MVPs. Last year I wasn’t sure at first if the email was an April Fools joke or not, and this year I’m just as happy that it’s not. This marks the second time I’ve been awarded Microsoft MVP. Last year I was awarded in the “Virtual Earth” category, and last fall they renamed me to “Windows Live Platform”. This year I am awarded in the same “Windows Live Platform” category.

In case you’re not familiar with the Microsoft MVP Program, here’s a link for more information:

http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/mvpawardintro

And Congratulations to all those that have also been awarded MVP on this April Fools day. Especially to those who’ve gotten awarded for the first time; keep it up.

Thanks!!

Chris Pietschmann

General mvp