Inside the Black Box
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At Googleâs corporate campus, a squad of engineers strives to improve the quality of its searches by tweaking its ranking algorithm.
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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This week we dig deeper and look at the Silverlight.createObjectEx function, understanding your hosting options, properties, the enableHtmlAccess property, and much more. By Adam Nathan. 1210
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But it's not as simple as point-and-click.
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What kind of E-mail is landing in Martin Taylorâs in-box right about now? Itâs probably not unlike some of the messages Iâve been getting in response to a story I wrote about Steve Ballmerâs Oct. 27
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Inside the unfathomable superhuman future after the 'singularity.' By Bruce Sterling from Wired magazine.
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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Sometimes, the two concepts can blur.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Virtualized rootkits - Part 1 &gt;&gt; Advertisement &lt;&lt;  ALERT: "How A Hacker Launches A Blind SQL Injection Attack Step-by-Step"!" - White Paper  Blind SQL Injection can deliver total control of your server to a hacker giving them the ability to read, write and manipulate all data stored in your backend systems! Download this *FREE* white paper from SPI Dynamics for a complete guide to protection! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/bsq.asp?Campaign_ID=701600000004c29
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On the Dotvoid.com blog today, there's a new post that shares some handy code to parse out information from the incoming user agent string for the visitors for your site.   Recently I experimented a bit with an Apache log file analyzer written in PHP. It's not all that difficult were it not for trying to parse the browser, or user agent, string. [...] For my purposes I don't care much for the operating system details. This is the result so far. I'm still not very satisfied but I thought maybe other people might be interested and maybe help out.   He provides the code in the format of an encapsulated PHP function that returns the product they're using, the version number of the browser and other various comments.
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Also: Windows worm travels with Tetris [News.com Extra]
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A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
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Also: Microsoft plans new BizTalk release for this year. [News.com Extra]
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As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, Ed Finkler has posted the latest version of his Inspekt security tool.   Although downloads have been on the Google Code site for a bit, I recently put up a new build of Inspekt. This could probably be described as a late alpha release, with most proposed features implemented.   Also included in this new edition are full API documentation for the application, some documentation on its basic usage and, of course, the source of this latest release.
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PHPKitchen has an interesting post covering one of the banes of most web developers existance - the "back button problem".
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.