Just found this piece about why users should be scared of Apple's push-channel to the iPhone. Quote:

Why not find out which apps are getting the most use and offering the developers special licensing deals? Better yet, why not sell that information to third parties like advertisers to help them work with highly used apps to sell ad units or sponsorships while getting an additional cut? This new tunnel for data is a veritable gold mine that's not just metrics--it's attached to user IDs and billing information too.

That's somewhat interesting, but doesn't scare me. What scares me is that Apple has a backchannel AND the device has GPS built in. I'm keenly aware that the mobile phone carriers can triangulate my whereabouts with some precision, but that's the carrier. Here we're talking about a third party that happens to make the hardware and with whom I have no contractual relationship whatsoever. I'd own the device, my contract would be with AT&T.

There's significant uproar whenever any app is trying to phone home for privacy reasons. If that is worrying you even for tiny little moment, you should be worried about what Apple is doing there.

Winer writes:

The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.  

A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do. 

Amen. With what's currently considered a "tech blogger" I really, really don't want to be in that crowd. When I look at TechMeme, the scene seems to be increasingly degenerating into a bunch of self-congratulating, "Boy, am I important", corrupt attention whores seekers who are pimping themselves out to PR bribes and advertising traffic without having much of an original idea themselves.    

Turns out that I much prefer TechMeme's sister site WeSmirch these days. The drama is the same, but the people being talked about are either in entertainment and make a mess out of themselves for a living or are wrecks much beyond what a geek would ever become. That's more fun to watch. A pissing match between TechCrunch and Blognation or whether some stupid idiot from Gizmodo gets thrown out of CES is so very interesting that I rather keep track of what Britney is up to.

It is ridiculous how many people spell ridiculous 'rediculous' these days. I must be reading the ridiculous spelling 'rediculous' dozens of times a day. English is my second language and I'm far away from claiming that I know it all, but if thousands of people keep making the same mistake on a regular basis it just makes my eyes bleed and my brain's spell-checker revolt. Same goes for 'definately' (wow, I really need to clean out the spam on that old page) and the horrific 'there' instead of 'their'.

Luckily, I just found that I'm not alone:

If you are looking for a brilliant speaker for a conference, consider Chad Hower. As you might know, I make very few endorsements of that sort. Chad has been touring the Middle-East and Africa region for Microsoft in the past several years and spoke at countless conferences. And there might be is no better source for "travel war stories" than him; the stuff he's been through on his trips makes my (known to be extensive) travel history pale in comparison.

Chad is leaving the company in a few days from now and I wouldn't know anybody here who wouldn't be sad to see him go. The good news is that he'll be an independent speaker and if you run a conference or a user group anywhere in EMEA, you should really consider have him come over and talk.

The other reason why it's good to be back near my stuff for World Cup watching. Projection surface approx. 3.20m x 1.80m. 

empox v. (ĕm-pŏks)
      1. The act of adding POX endpoints to an application.

Ahh, lovely.

No text. Just a link: http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/5388

Update: Check out what Stefan Tilkov links to in response. I say "EXACTLY my point!" ;-) 

Today's news from Apple is significant. Sun already runs Windows and now Apple runs Windows. Cool.

Paint

Everyone seems to be giving some tech predictions for 2006 on their blog. Here's mine:

The DRM opposition will start turning DRM against the music and film industry and embrace DRM to create a distributed file-sharing protocol and applications that implements "lending between friends" and ensures that within a group of users, only as many copies of digital works can be played concurrently as the number of original, legally acquired media that have been contributed into a pool. The protocol will ensure that the media integrity is preserved insofar that no two people can, say, play different songs from the same album concurrently unless there are enough copies of the same album in the pool. Media players supporting this protocol will eventually be clever enough to prioritize and shuffle playlists in a way that the fewest possible media are required in the pool. 

Since "lending" will later be found to be still too problematic from a legal standpoint, the physical media constituting the media pool will be put into a network of escrow services and acquiring a temporary DRM license to play a particular music album or video will automatically result in a "one-cent" sale transaction and transfer of ownership rights of the physical media for the period while the license is valid and therefore result in a legal digital copy of an legally owned media to be played.

In short: It'll remain interesting how the whole DRM situation develops. To me it seems consequential that the content consumer side will take a page out of the content provider side's book and use the same technology arsenal to try to achieve exactly opposite goals. I think there's a resonable chance that DRM will at least backfire for all digital media that's already published and out there. And that's quite a lot.

My stance on what's appropriate and inappropriate with respect to DRM is "undecided", even though I deplore Sony's rootkit DRM trickery. At the same time there must be a reasonable business model for entertainment media. Someone just has to find one that is sustainable and works. Luckily not my job.

Sabine and I were just browsing Channel 9 using TVTonic on our Media Center PC that's been recently connected to this christmas gift. We watched a few snippets of Microsoft PMs and other folks presenting their latest stuff and then that. Sabine (she's a nurse) said "...oh, that's like Hospital TV".

I can't help but admit that she does indeed have more than just one point in saying that.

I am aboard SK938 (SAS) right now. I am on the Internet. Connexion by Boeing. Chatting with Scott Hanselman using MSN Messenger. Blogging this. If there is something like "geek orgasm", this is it. Eight hrs to go to Copenhagen. This R-O-C-K-S.

Happy New Year! It's a tiny bit late, but the last year ended and this year started with a flurry of activities that didn't leave me with much energy to blog. Before Christmas I went to New York to see my friend Stephen Forte and his wonderful girlfriend Kathleen, and right after Christmas I flew out to spend a few days with Steve Swartz and his fabulous wife Allison in Venice, Italy where they spent 3 weeks experiencing the wealth of Venetian culture and history (Allison is a scientific authority in Renaissance art history, which makes this even more fun).

And after these little tours I had to lots and lots of intense learning for the German "Whidbey Ascend" training series I am doing with Christian Weyer and Christian Nagel of thinktecture. In this series, which is hosted by Microsoft Germany and open to invited partners, we present a quite complete overview on the Visual Studio 2005 innovations. Of course, if you know me and Christian and Christian, you might be aware that we are all "server guys". So, of course it turned out in a way that I ended up with the complete Smart Client part of the schedule in my hands: Windows Forms, Visual Studio Tools for Office and Device Development. All these topics weren't exactly in my comfort zone for presenting in front of an audience when I committed to do them, but the time investment really paid off last week when we did the training for the first time. And I am actually quite glad that I had to force myself to learn all these things, because I was quite surprised bythe power of much of the new tooling, especially by Visual Studio Tools for Office. My first impression is that with these tools, Office really becomes a viable Smart Client platform.  

My other topic on that training I feel much more comfortable with: Visual Studio Team System. That stuff is good. You'll hear lots more about Team System and the architecture features of Visual Studio here in the upcoming weeks and months.

Next weekend and the beginning of next week I will be spending over in Seattle to play with some new distributed systems technologies at a friend's house and office.

Other developments:

• Omar Shahine and Scott Hanselman put a heroic effort into completing "newtelligence dasBlog 1.7 Community Edition". I will have to set up the Wiki or a redirect to his Wiki some time this week. Omar and Scott practically own the dasBlog development effort now, since I just couldn't make time in recent months. There are still features I would like to add, but Omar and Scott run the shop now. Hence the "Community Edition" moniker. The new version (which I still need to install here) has dramatically improved performance, scores of fixes and a set of subtle, but good new features. A first shot at referral spam blocking is a regex based exclusion filter.
• Werner Vogels has been named CTO of Amazon.com, which is amazing (and Amazon could hardly find anybody better).
• My company has a new web site design. Much simpler and hopefully clearer. It's still a bit of a construction site, but which site isn't.

More later.

Was den deutschen Sprachgebrauch angeht ist die IT Branche in Deutschland unfassbar gruselig, wenn's um den Einsatz von Anglizismen angeht. Doch da wird nicht nur aus Gründen der "Coolness" der (fast) passende englische Begiff der deutschen Entsprechung vorgezogen. Nein! Wirklich übel ist, dass man dabei häufig auch noch direkt die Ernsthaftigkeit des gemeinten direkt mit aus dem Fenster wirft. Drei Beispiele:

"Meeting" : Lass uns mal hinsetzen und etwas unverbindlich ein bisschen Kaffee trinken, Schnittchen knabbern und labern.
dagegen
"Besprechung": Wir setzen uns um einen Tisch, arbeiten die Agenda durch und nachher weiss jeder was als nächstes zu tun ist.

"Community": Hallo, wir lieben Euch alle. Wir wissen zwar nicht genau warum, ist ja aber auch irgendwie egal, gell?
dagegen
"Interessengemeinschaft": Wir haben alle die gleichen Interessen (und Probleme), arbeiten zusammen dran und haben vielleicht auch Spass dabei.

"Get Together": Bleibt doch nach der Knechterei eben noch 10 Minuten hier. Wir haben auch noch ein Gläschen Prosecco.
dagegen
"Treffen in der Kneipe um die Ecke": Habt Ihr noch Lust auf ein Bier oder 5, damit wir auch mal über was anderes reden können als das Projekt?

Wenn ich über "Service Oriented Architectures" rede und den englischen Begriff auch im Deutschen verwende, dann tue ich dass, damit jeder weiss, worum es geht und mit der gleichen Fachbegriffswelt auch in der englischsprachigen Literatur nachschlagen kann. Dass aber direkt jeder Satz in dieser unserer Branche ohne Einsatz eines einzelnen (englischen) Fremdwortes offenbar gleich als unvollständig oder grammatikalisch falsch (oder zu unaffig?) gilt, ist arg peinlich. Mea culpa. Ich erwische mich auch selbst dabei. Nicht gut.

That blue thing that I am running PowerPoint on during my talks is an Alienware Area51-m laptop. Heavy like a block of lead, battery life of about 2 hrs (which makes me carry two), but very fast and "feel good". Except for some minor annoyances, I am happy with it for about a year now. And I don't think I have every had a machine that was still faster than most of the other machines out there 12 months after I got it. One big problem I had with it until today, though, was that the machine got increasingly louder - more precisely, the fan noise was just unbearable. Since the machine is essentially a high-end desktop in a notebook shell, the box needs a lot of cooling. It turns out that the elaborate cooling mechanism that Alienware puts in those machines clogs up easily with dust, but hides the dust quite well. So while the machine looked "clean", it really, really, really wasn't. Wow. Yucky! Now it's all clean again and the fan is back to a bearable noise level. It's happy to be breathing again.

Wow. It's been a long time. 2 years again, already? Mr. Forte lets me stay at his house and invited me to his Christmas party in New York and since I am not going to Denver for the rest of the year as I was planning and I still need a few miles to retain my current status tier with Lufthansa for '05/'06, there wasn't much to think about. I am thrilled to go back. In the two years I lived in Manhattan ('95 and '96), New York has become my "second home" and it is always fantastic to go back. I love The City. Dec 17-21.

If I were really good at writing about life, love, happiness and tragedy, weird relationships, drama, grand obstacles, successes and defeats, and all those sudden unexpected turns and twists that a story could possibly have, and I had been willing to share what went on with and around me in real life in the last six months -- my blog would now have an entirely different audience and I could easily sell the movie rights by now. So the actual reason why you haven't seen much happening here is simply that a dramatic surge in "personal life activity" (no, not starting at "no life") took over the "blogging timeslice" and had, frankly, some adverse effects on my work morale at times. The good news is that there is definitely light at the end of that tunnel and the better news (for you as a reader) is that this place here won't be as quiet as it has been in the recent months. I've got some interesting stuff cooking.

The good news is that the V|@gr@ spam is getting less, but what scares me is that I start getting lots and lots of religious spam from Jesusland. 

In two hours I'll be back on the road (well, airport, to be precise). Today I will fly out to Reykjavik in Iceland where Achim and I will do the first of a series of SOA workshops with Microsoft EMEA from Monday to Wednesday, explaining principles of Service Oriented Architectures and the application of those principles in real applications with today's technologies. Other stops on the tour will be in Denmark in early December and, early next year, in Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands (AFAIK, all of these events are invite-only Microsoft customer events). A German-language, newtelligence-branded edition of that workshop will take place December 1-3 in Düsseldorf and we plan a newtelligence event in South Africa in early March 2005.

When I come back from Iceland Wednesday night, I'll stay home for less than 12 hours and will then fly out to Denver for a long weekend and when I come back from there the following Wednesday I'll go straight at our own TornadoCamp event held in Bad Ems (half way between Frankfurt and Düsseldorf). Coming back it'll be another short turnaround of likely less than a day before I will leave for the Microsoft EastMed Developer Conference in Amman. (Very much looking forward to that)

So with that schedule and a few customer engagements in between, I have plenty of days on the road and only two days left at the newtelligence office, before I'll move my office desk to Denver on December 11 for the rest of the year and into the new year so that I can spend Christmas with Jen, get some better traction with Visual Studio 2005 and do some writing. And for when I come back on January 10, the schedule looks just as busy for the following weeks and months.

I've got nothing against advertising on websites. However, there are two things that are completely annoying. The first are popup windows and my popup blocker is taking care of those. As an alternative, the advertising people have invented the Macromedia Flash-popup that pops up on the page and obscures the content for a little while. That's annoying but something I can absolutely deal with. What I cannot deal with, and that's the second annoying thing, is that some advertising twits try to entertain me with music and or other sorts of 30-second audio/video shows. You people might find that cool, but I don't. Sound effects and music are strictly an "opt-in" feature on my computer and at my work desk. I just uninstalled the Flash player. Silence has returned and websites became instantly more useful. Try it.

[Usually it's as easy as this: In Internet Explorer select "Tools/Internet Options" on the menu, then click the "Settings..." button in the "Temporary Internet Files" box on the "General" tab of the dialog that opens up. Click the "View Objects" button in the "Settings" dialog that opens up. There will be another window opening. Find "Shockwave Flash" and delete the object. Close IE. Done.]

Wenn eine Regierung soweit ist, daß sie den nationalen Feiertag aus kurzfristigen, taktischen Erwägungen abschaffen und für die eingebildete Hoffnung auf ein halbes Prozentchen Wachstum im nächsten Jahr verhökern will, dann ist das die bedingungslose Kapitulation vor der eigenen Inkompetenz. Und obwohl ich ganz sicherlich nicht dem rechten, nationalen politischen Rand zuneige, fällt mir nur ein einziges passendes Wort dazu ein: "Vaterlandsverrat".

Harald und der ARD sei Dank. Dann kann ich ja den Fernseher wieder aus dem Keller holen.

At a friend's company, a network hub has been dying a horrible and slow (literally) death until this morning when it got replaced. Of course, they are asking how a networking device like that, without moving parts can start to produce random errors, become gradually slower and sporadically just outright stop working for a little while and then be fine again. Given that after my mostly unsuccessful and expensive attempts to do anything with hardware, a buddy of mine once said "if there is ever a robot invasion from outer space, we'll send Clemens and he'll kill them singlehandedly", that's an excellent question for which I have no good answer, but only a theory: bit erosion!

I suspect that they (our friends) have unhealthily balanced data that has substantially more "1"s than "0"s. Now, when you look at "1" vs. "0", you'll immediately know what I mean. "1" is a lot more edgy and when you send "1"s through a data bus or through a cable, it's pretty obvious that every "1" will scratch along the sides here and there. If you have balanced data, the "0" (round and smooth) will usually polish it all out and while the data bus shows a little bit of wear and tear over time, it usually works well for many, many Exabytes. Now, if you have many more "1"s go down the data bus than "0"s, the bus gets all scratchy from the inside, actual potholes develop and subsequently "1"s start to get stuck. When they get stuck, "0"s bump into them, other "1"s slip past (probably even through a "0"!) and it's all getting really messy. And when you look at it all on a few levels higher up, you start losing packets and stuff gets slow and in the end everybody is unhappy and blames it on the software. The only cure for the problem that I can think of is to do data balancing that ensures a proper proportional flow of "1"s and "0"s. I think that's a totally plausible explanation and cries out loud for software that fixes this problem. ;-)

I feel like I have been "out of business" for a really long time and like I really got nothing done in the past 3 months, even though that's objectively not true. I guess that's "conference & travel withdrawal", because I had tone and tons of bigger events in the first half of the year and 3 smaller events since TechEd Amsterdam in July. On the upside, I am pretty relaxed and have certainly reduced my stress-related health risks ;-)

So with winter and its short days coming up, the other half of my life living a 1/3 around the planet until next spring, I can and am going to spend some serious time on a bunch of things:

On the new programming stuff front:
     Catch up on what has been going on in Indigo in recent months, dig deeper into "everything Whidbey", figure out the CLR aspects of SQL 2005 and familiarize myself with VS Team System.

On the existing programming stuff front:
      Consolidate my "e:\development\*"  directory on my harddrive and pull together all my samples and utilities for Enterprise Services, ASP.NET Web Services and other enterprise-development technologies and create a production-quality library from of them for us and our customers to use. Also, because the Indigo team is doing quite a bit of COM/COM+ replumbing recently in order to have that prohgraming model ride on Indigo, I have some hope that I can now file bugs/wishes against COM+ that might have a chance of being addressed. If that happens and a particular showstopper is getting out of the way, I will reopen this project here and will, at the very least, release it as a toy.

On the architectural stuff front:
         Refine our SOA Workshop material, do quite a bit of additional work on the FABRIQ, evolve the Proseware architecture model, and get some pending projects done. In addition to our own SOA workshops (the next English-language workshop is held December 1-3, 2004 in Düsseldorf), there will be a series of invite-only Microsoft events on Service Orientation throughout Europe this fall/winter, and I am very happy that I will be speaking -- mostly on architecture topics -- at the Microsoft Eastern Mediterranean Developer Conference in Amman/Jordan in November and several other locations in the Middle East early next year. 

And even though I hate the effort around writing books, I am seriously considering to write a book about "Services" in the next months. There's a lot of stuff here on the blog that should really be consolidated into a coherent story and there are lots and lots of considerations and motiviations for decisons I made for FABRIQ and Proseware and other services-related work that I should probably write down in one place. One goal of the book would be to write a pragmatic guide on how to design and build services using currently shipping (!) technologies that does focus on how to get stuff done and not on how to craft new, exotic SOAP headers, how to do WSDL trickery, or do other "cool" but not necessarily practical things. So don't expect a 1200 page monster. 

In addition to the "how to" part, I would also like to incorporate and consolidate other architect's good (and bad) practical design and implementation experiences, and write about adoption accelerators and barriers, and some other aspects that are important to get the service idea past the CFO. That's a great pain point for many people thinking about services today. If you would be interested in contributing experiences (named or unnamed), I certainly would like to know about it.

And I also think about a German-to-English translation and a significant (English) update to my German-language Enterprise Services book.....

[And to preempt the question: No, I don't have a publisher for either project, yet.]

Microsoft seems to be struggling with the Messenger service in the past two days. Right now I cannot sign in, I got booted frequently yesterday and yesterday night I could see everybody but chat with noone. What really sucks about that is that I realize how much some parts of work and life have become a dependent on Messenger working - and switching to another service or between services is not really a good answer to the problem. What's the Messenger SLA (Service-Level Agreement), anyways? 

I just saw this cry for help over on weblogs.asp.net and thought it'd make sense to answer with Elvis. ;-)

I wonder when "the Americans" (sorry for making a horribly generalizing statement here) will understand that creating an edit control with a mask

(###)-###-####

is a thoroughly bad idea.

We set up a new blog here - primarily for our own amusement. Expect no seriousness there.

The Register is a really fine site. Usually. Except when Mr. All-bloggers-are-idiots has one of these "I don't get it, but I have a deadline, so I'll just make something up!" days. But I guess that's no real news.

Update: ... and corrects himself.

I had the dubious pleasure to fly with Northwest to Seattle last week and for me, Northwest is now finally blacklisted. Not only do they still fly hopelessly outdated DC-10s (I am not qualified to make a judgement about the airframe, but I am qualified to make a judgement about the cabin), but I also really have a problem with the cabin crew attitude. There's nothing wrong with the cabin crew's average age being well above 50, but I do have a problem with them acting as if they're looking after a kindergarten. Point in case: "Madam, can I have a 7up please?" Answer: "Son, the galley is up there in front and you may want to stretch your legs anyways".

I can't decide what I dislike more: IE6 randomly locking up or Firefox crashing on uncaught null pointer exceptions.

This Slashdot story reminds me why I hate NBC Sports. I lived in New York in 1996 during the Olympic Games and I got to see soapy stories about which terrible obstacles athletes had overcome to end up winning whatever competition and ... NO SPORTS. And in 2000 I happened to be in the U.S. again during the Olympics and I got to see NO SPORTS. German ARD/ZDF will have literally hundreds of hours of live coverage from Athens from early in the morning  into the night each day. Olympics is about sports and it's also about the guy who comes in on 36th place in Marathon, running a record for his country. NBC dilutes the experience. too bad, America doesn't get to see the Olympics.

News is what is made news.

Point in case: This sentence on my blog here: "There's apparently a related project Boa (another serpent name along the family line of Viper that was the original codename for MTS), including the business markup language BML (pronounced "Bimmel") that he's involved in and he talked a bit about that, but of course I'd be killed if I gave out more details." now prompts, directly or indirectly, this here on Microsoft Watch and this on eWeek.

Nobody said that the project was software in product development. Nobody said it was about stuff that would eventually ship. Nobody really said anything that would be in any way relevant to technical or business decision makers today. What this shows is that there's a bit too much appetite for the next big thing while we're all still working on making the current big thing happen. Do you seriously think I am someone who'd casually leak Microsoft trade secrets on his blog?

And.... seriously.... go back and read the first six sentences on that entry with your brain switched into "active mode".

AAMOF, BOA along with BML are PBS TLA's created when we were TUI and MSU while having a late dinner. TMA in this industry and way too much fuzzy MBS. TWOP! IAR, giving out SSI under NDA would get me into VDS, get me?.

(You can speculate all you want in the comments section).

Arvindra Sehmi, Architect Lead at Microsoft EMEA, father and mother of the Microsoft Architects JOURNAL, the inspiration and project lead for the FABRIQ, the man who's dragged me twice through Europe on the EMEA Architect Tour (2003, 2004 video archives) and the owner of the Architect Track at TechEd Europe is now finally blogging.

Monday I'll start earnestly working on this year's "summer project". Last year's project yielded what you today know as dasBlog. This year's prototyping project will have to do with running aggregated RSS content through FABRIQ networks for analysis and enrichment, solidifying the newtelligence SOA framework (something you don't even know about yet and it's not Proseware) and architecting/building a fairly large-scale system for dynamically managing user-centric media for targeted and secure distribution to arbitrary presentation surfaces. (Yes, I know that's a foggy explanation). Will the result be free stuff? No. Not this time. Will you hear about what we learn on the road to Bumblebee? Absolutely.

Na, das hier zum Thema XPSP2 lässt aber tiefer blicken, als das den Herrschaften bei Heise lieb sein kann:

"Ungewöhnlich ist, dass der RC2 nicht nur als Gesamtpaket heruntergeladen werden kann, sondern auf Wunsch auch per Windows-Update zur Verfügung steht. Damit reduziert sich der Download auf rund 100 MByte, sofern er denn gelingt -- bislang bricht er bei Tests in der c't-Redaktion noch nach der Übertragung von 1,5 MByte ab."

und jetzt das "Update":

Der oben beschriebene Abbruch des Downloads des RC2 via Windows Update v5 tritt nicht auf allen Systemen auf. Betroffen sind nur jene, bei denen zur Installation ein CD-Key verwendet wurde, der von Microsoft für ungültig erklärt wurde.

Dazu fällt mir jetzt so ziemlich gar nichts mehr ein.

Two non technical comments in a day; very rare. And two "thank you" messages, too. But this one has to be:

Thank you, President Reagan. Sir, you will have my respect forever for winning the cold war and having more than just a leading role in the fall of Berlin Wall.