Hilary Pike now blogging

So it looks like Hilary Pike has decided to give blogging a real try. Welcome Hilary!

Good Times at a Halo 3 Party

Dan Waters has a video blog about a recent Halo 3 Party he helped pt together. It highlights one of the cooler parts of his (and to some extent my) job.

Oh for the simple early days of programming

The other day at a conference (ReMIX07 - what a great event) a couple of us had a brief chat about the old days. I think it was started by one of the speakers talking about managed code and garbage collection as if they were both new and part of object oriented programming. Of course both have been around for decades and pre-date object oriented programming by many years. BASIC-PLUS ran on a virtual machine and had garbage collection back in the 1970s when I first started using it.

This all started me thinking about the old days. I guess that is a sign that I am old. I hear people talking about being in the field for 20 years as if it were a long time and think "wow it's been a long time since I was only 20 years in the field." I read yesterday that 66% of Microsoft employees are under 40 years old; 18% under 30. Since I started programming in 1973 I suspect that something like half the employees at Microsoft are younger than my first computer program. Somehow I find that scary. But I digress - perhaps another sign of age.

At ReMIX I was hearing about a lot of exciting new technologies for software development. Silverlight for managing media.  The Expression Suite of tools for design for user interfaces in all sorts of applications. WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) for enhancing the user experience of client applications. Popfly for mashups. The list goes on and on. Don't even get me started on new dynamic languages like Ruby and Python. On one hand it is a very exciting time to be in the computer industry and in software development in particular.

On the other hand part of me longs for a simpler time. The introduction of the CRT as a viable tool started this mess off BTW. Before that most input was done in strictly formatted punch cards. It was all about getting the data in a form the program could digest easily. Oh sure we still had to validate data but getting it is was easier. And output was also simple. Your choices were basically to print a report on a line printer, punch things to still more cards or write things to a tape of disk in a format that was arranged a whole lot like that on a punch card. Input and output was simple.

Giving everyone their own terminal with a screen complicated everything. I don't miss having to specify the X and Y coordinate for every object (and I use the term object loosely for what we did in the early CRT days) on the screen. Windows Forms (which I first discovered in Visual Basic) were a huge advance and remain quite simple to use. Still once a program had to care about the user the door was opened for the need for real designers.

I guess my hope at this point is that people will use tools like Expression and WPF to allow designers to design and set up the user interface. That should let programmers deal with the easy stuff. The stuff that for me is more fun - working with the data.

In the mean time I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by all the new stuff. It's great and it will make things better for the users of course. But I can't help but think that in some ways all this growth in tools, in options, in the whole field means that computing is becoming more and more a young person's job. I'm running as fast as I can to keep up. At some point one has to specialize I think. A little simplicity in the way of a narrower focus may be the best path to continued sanity.

[Cross posted from my blog at http://act2.spaces.live.com more computer science stuff is usually at my high school computer science blog but this seemed a better fit elsewhere.]

Clint Rutkas Joins Microsoft

I'm happy to welcome Clint Rutkas to the Academic Relations Team at Microsoft. Clint has an interesting blog at http://www.betterthaneveryone.com/. At his site you will find some interesting tail of a computerized disco dance floor among other projects. He's also created a computerized bartender. Both are programmed using C# as I understand it.

Clint has been contributing to Coding4Fun for a while (big surprise there huh?) and that work will continue as well. This week Clint is at GameFest. I look forward to reading that trip report.

I can see that Clint is going to be an interesting and valuable member of the team. Welcome Clint!

Mr T's Rants

Who is this Mr T (or is it Mister T) and why does he fascinate me so much? OK I'm playing with you. I just want to see how long this takes to show up on Technorati.

Microsoft Web Experience events in LA & Denver

Let it not be said that I am not a team player. Apparently Kirk Allen was accused of running a stealth event that not enough people knew about. So for the ones in LA and Denver he is trying to bribe motivate bloggers to create a buzz around the event. So here is my modest attempt to help. Well maybe the drawing for an Xbox 360 had something to do with my generosity.

Microsoft is hosting free Microsoft Web Experience events at the Los Angeles Microsoft office on June 8th and the Denver Microsoft office on June 15th. They will be presenting information on building the next generation user experience on the web. They are providing breakfast and lunch, hosting a reception with beer and wine, and attendees are automatically registered in a drawing for an XBox 360 and a Zune that will be given away at each event. For more information, visit http://kaevans.sts.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/webexperience.aspx.

Technorati tags: MicrosoftWebExperience

Email Addresses

I was reminiscing about email today. I thought I would give a history lesson in case some of you were having trouble getting to sleep.

 As some of you know I came late to the Internet and email. I didn't get my first email address sometimes in 1982 which was long after a number of my friends got theirs. The first address that I used beyond just digital (in 1983) was

{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4} !decwrl!ark!thompson

You'll notice a couple of things. One is that the username was last not first. Also there is no @ sign. Thirdly there are a couple node names in the list. Things were complicated back in those days. One had to know the path between your computer and the computer you were sending to which is why the user name came last. Only the final system would try to find the user once the email got to the right place.

 There were some key Internet systems that most other systems were programmed to know how to reach. Those systems were programmed to know how to reach many other systems. So often when one gave out their email address you would start with a couple of computers that someone's computer was likely to know. Those are the systems in the curly braces.  You would give someone a couple of key systems in hopes that their computer knew how to get to one of them.

decvax was one of the key Internet router systems and the gateway into and out of Digital Equipment which had one of the largest computer networks in the world.  ucbvax was at the University of California at Berkeley and was another key system. ibmnp4 was the IBM router. All three of those systems knew how to get to decwrl (Digital Equipment Corporation Western Research Lab) and decwrl was in charge of knowing how to get to all of the computers on DEC's network. ark was the name of the computer I lived on and decwrl knew how to get to it. The ark knew how to get to other systems inside the company network but relied on decwrl and decvax to find a way to computers outside the network.

 Once upon a time you had to be a real geek to use email. Today we have DNS and things are a lot more simple. Perhaps its too simple.

More bloggers in my group

Jim Pinkelman is my manager. He hasn't said much yet but when he does I think it will be worth it.

Dan Waters is new the company, new to the group and on his way to moving to Florida from Texas. He's already blogged about one big academic event he's been to - a conference on a cruise ship.

. . . . .

J Scott Thompson is not in my group and he is no relation but I do like his "Dispatches from the World of K-12 Education"

Edwin Guarin now blogging

Edwin Guarin the newest member of the ADE team is now blogging.

As for me I am still active at my high school computer science blog but I am also getting active at my general education issues blog at On10.net.

Alfred Thompson

Updated Blogging At

Computer science education related things continue to be posted at my Computer Science Teacher blog. It is aimed at being helpful to K-12 computer science teachers but middle school and high school computer science teachers will probably find it the most useful. I occasionally add a post at MSDN Student Flash with my friend and co-worker Diane Curtis. That site is primarily for college and university students but some high school students may find interesting things there as well.

Social computing stuff continues to be posted at my Cyberspace People Watcher blog at Windows Live Spaces.

Recently I have been posting some entries at the A blog on Education in general at On10. On10 is a really cool site with videos for people who enjoy technology. The topics of my blog at On10 are general educational technology and education things. Several other people contribute education topics there as well and you can get to those all at once using the education tag.


Alfred Thompson

People in my group who blog (Updated)

Seems like more of us are blogging every day.

Diane Curtis (at Windows Live Spaces)

Diane Curtis (ath theSpoke)

Philip DesAutels

Ivan Lumala

Ranjan Sen

Juan Vargas

Sam Stokes

Gus Weber

Brandon McMillon

Alfred Thompson

Randy Guthrie

Krishna Kumar

Martin Schray

People in my group who blog

Recently a number of the people I work with have created blogs. I thought is only fair that I link to them. Here they are:

Diane Curtis (at Windows Live Spaces)
Diane Curtis (ath theSpoke)
Philip DesAutels
Ranjan Sen
Juan Vargas
Sam Stokes
Gus Weber
Brandon McMillon
Randy Guthrie
Alfred Thompson At MSDN At Live Spaces
Krishna Kumar
Martin Schray

Also blogging at ...

Recently I have been posting some entries at the Education Blog at On10. On10 is a really cool site with videos for people who enjoy technology. The topics of the Education blog at On10 are general technology and education things and several other people contribute there as well.
Computer science related things continue to be posted at my Computer Science Teacher blog. Social computing stuff continues to be posted at my Cyberspace People Watcher blog at Windows Live Spaces.

Alfred Thompson

Hello

All I really wanted to do was create an account so I could leave comments. I already blog at:
Cyberspace People Watcher - a blog about social computing
Computer Science Teacher - my blog for high school computer science teachers with useful (I hope) resources and discussions.
My (Alfred Thompson) personal web page is at http://www.acthompson.net in case you are interested in finding out more about me.