The b2 PHP scripting package that I've used to run this blog for the past several years is hopelessly out-of-date. Basically the only way I've been able to keep it up online and keep it secure from hackers is to systematically disable features (I could fix it but I haven't got the time or motivation honestly).

With the recent launch of Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, I've decided to abandon this blog in favor of a new Live Spaces-hosted blog. I plan to leave this blog in place until I have time to figure out how to extract the content from MySQL and take the PHP scripts offline for good.

You'll now find me at:

Chris Russell's Space v2

Over and out.

Original Electronic Music (oem) Radio is a SHOUTcast stream that showcases experimental music contributed by electronic musicians.

>> visit the oem radio homepage and check it out.

Some interesting comments posted by PC World staff blogger Edward Albro about Microsoft's acquisition of Sysinternals.

> Microsoft Sucks Up Sysinternals (PCWorld.com)

It's too bad that Albro decided to lead with such an incindiary headline. Otherwise, it's a well-written and thought provoking editorial.

I've heard it said "never trust a software engineer with a soldering iron."

... Hell - forget the soldering iron. I got myself a new Stihl MS390 gas axe (that's a chainsaw in case you don't hang out at Gritty's in Freeport, Maine).



Welcome to the Pacific Northwest. Time to do a little yard work.

The other day at work I made the mistake of using the phrase "begs the question" incorrectly. I was prompty corrected by a co-worker. To help me avoid such embarrassment in the future, I went looking for an explanation of "begging the question" and came across this great website:

> Common Errors in English

G4TV has posted the animated Star Trek doll shorts from their Star Trek 2.0 show on YouTube.com. These are hilarious:

Flash Videos:

• Poolside


• Coffee House


• Cribs


• Karaoke

... Tune in and prosper!

Picked up this slashdot.org story while eating a salad at my desk earlier today:

Rico Mariani, an eighteen-year Microsoft veteran, speaks at the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club about his experiences at Microsoft, industry trends, etc.

It's an amusing and interesting talk. Download the video from the U Waterloo Computer Science Club's media server.

> NewsForge article: 18 Years of Software Tools: An Insider's View

> Download the video (Windows Media format)

I got back into Seattle late last night after spending a week back in Maine visiting with Vicki and the dogs, trying to get a few repair items completed, and generally trying to figure out what the hell-all-else needs to get done in order to get them out here in Washington with me. I wasn't nearly as productive last week as I had hoped I would be. I did manage to get up on the main roof, get strapped off to the chimney, and fix several cracks in the mortar that was leaking in the recent heavy rains. Also, did a quick run down to Massachusetts and delivered several 21" monitors and some workstations to my Dad who will put them to good use.

So it's Sunday morning and I'm sitting in the P & G Speakeasy Cafe in Duvall drinking a quad-shot mocha and taking advantage of the free wireless and mellow B.B. King pumping out from behind the counter. This is a chilled little cafe and I think I'll be hanging out here a lot if for no other reason than they have broadband and I still need to drop some more trees before getting a satelite signal out at the house.

An interesting conference early next year will be the ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM'07). http://www.program-transformation.org/PEPM07

I last posted from a dinner in Bozeman, Montana where dad and I were eating breakfast, gassing up the Mazda 6 wagon, scraping the bugs off the windshield, and considering how much more to drive. Well, we kept going... Finally made it into Spokane, WA in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday but decided to keep going... Eventually we checked into a hotel in Wenatchee, WA Thursday night after driving through some really beautiful country East of the Cascades along the Columbia River valley.

Thursday morning, I got up early took the car out for gas, a run through the car wash (which got some of the bugs off the car), hit the drive-through expresso bar and then blasted out on Route 90 West through North Bend, Snoqualmie, and then on to Issaquah where MS has provided me with short-term living accomodations (furnished apartment unit - one of seemingly endless units clustered on the hills of Issaquah).

Dropped dad at SEATAC Saturday morning @ 5:00 AM PDT for his flight back to Boston, went grocery shopping, and then slept all day Saturday until about 8:00 this morning. Today, paperwork: expense reports, mortgage papers, etc. All the stuff that makes life worth living

I miss you guys!

Dad and I made good time and covered some ground last night. Overnight we drove from St. Paul, MN and am now sitting having breakfast in Bozeman, MT. It's been a good drive. Planning to make it to Spokane today and then check into a hotel and crash. This leaves Thursday and Friday in Washington for kicking around. If the weather is good, we plan to take Route 2 through the Cascades out to Monroe and down through Duvall. Dad's turn to drive. I'm tired

eWeek posted an interesting story on Komoku, a startup with a PCI bus card and corollary host software that ferrets kernel-mode rootkits. This seems like a sensible approach. I imagine that it will become a standard feature of high-end MB designs to have some sort of dedicated SPU over the next several years that's supported directly in the OS kernel. In the meanwhile, solutions like that proposed by Komoku look intesting.

>> Government-Funded Startup Blasts Rootkits

Vicki and I are in Washingon this week searching for a new home. After a lot of driving around, and a lot of dissapointing trips to see houses packed one-atop-another on hillsides, I think we've found where we want to be in Duvall where we made an offer on a house this morning. It's not a done deal yet. We're holding our breath. This place is great and if I thought I had access to a lot of woods in Maine... Man is it nice out here and not too far from Redmond.

... extracted from a posting I made earlier this morning on the Code Generator Network discussion list:

Goggle Challenge:

Put on your amber abstraction goggles and focus of applying generic programming techniques to codifying the infrastructure required to meaningfully express, synthesize, and execute hierarchically-specified systems regardless of their semantics. In other words, build a generic component factory, and generic glue to assemble, audit, and actuate graphs of manufactured components that conform to an abstract design specification (encoded in a language of your design).

For the challenge, you're allowed zero coupling between your factory and glue infrastructure code and the semantics of any problem domain. Additionally, you're allowed zero coupling between problem domain semantics and the syntax of your design specification language (i.e. it needs to be self-describing). Note: you ARE allowed to couple your glue infrastructure with the syntax/semantics of the design specification language (ultimately, something has to be nailed down).

Extra credit: Provide an API that lends itself equally well to both human and programmatic exploitation.

Vicki and I walking the Huskies on Popham Beach, Phippsburg Maine.

Q: What happens if you point Windows Explorere at a network directory containing 5K files?

A: Nothing. At least not for about a week.

It's official: I'm joining Microsoft to work on tools and technologies related to the Windows kernel in mid-May.

>> Microsoft Redmond campus building #40 Aerial View

Just doing a little late night reading on intrapreneurship and came across the 1987 Gifford Pinchot essay "Innovation through Intrapreneuring." This reads as fresh today as I'm sure it did in 1987. A great read.

>> Innovation Through Intrapreneuring - Gifford Pinchot

>> Microsoft "Vienna" Project on Wikipedia

Walking the dogs earlier this evening I listened to a fascinating Podcast of Jeff Hawkins speaking last fall at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program.

>> Hawkins' Stanford ETL Program Presentation (MP3)

Overheard during the Q&A @ the end of Hawkin's ETL talk at Stanford:

Q: Do you think it's ethical to build intelligent machines?

A: We're implementing an algorithm in Silicon. It's not like we're building something that's going to feel bad about being mounted in a box and stuffed on a rack somewhere!

Q: Are you sure? (nervous laughter from the audience)

Numenta

Numenta is building a new type of memory system, called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), modeled on Jeff Hawkins' theory of how the human neocortex works.

>> Numenta, Inc.
>> Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM)
>> On Intelligence Book Homepage

Postscript: Man - there just aren't enough hours in the day.

>> Multivalued Logic NNs