for my many trains of thought
Since I work for Symantec (currently on our parental controls service) and I'm an expecting first-time dad (July seems to be approaching very quickly!) I definitely took the time to read the recently released Norton Online Living Report for 2009. Lots of statistics in there based on a very large survey. Some of the numbers are downright scary. I won't have to worry about them for a couple more years but if you're a parent with kids who are online you should definitely check it out ......
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ar... The engineering Windows 7 blog has done another great post! This time on the Windows Touch elements and what was done to improve Windows w/ regards to touch and multi-touch UX as well as why. The most interesting part of the blog post to me was the information about the telemetry they reported during the beta (how often particular touch features, like scrolling content, were used and how successful people were w/ particular touch ......
I love this stuff... APOD rocks!
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090325.html
I love the
Parallel Programming in Native Code blog and I'm really excited to get to utilize the concurrency runtime for real when it becomes available. Here is a good post with some details on how the
resource allocation and management algorithms work in the concurrency runtime
Was thinking about
this paper the other day while I was in a conversation and thought it would be cool to post it on the blog since it is one of my favorite computer science papers ever and is written by none other than
Ken Thompson.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Paper on some scary abuse of DNS and other protocols that can be used for command/control of botnets. Hard to detect these sorts of things.
http://www.shmoocon.org/slides/botnet_v1.0_2.pdf
http://www.prace-project.eu... I'm interested in digging into this article (and the Go engine and computer used) to see what types of algorithms are being used in cutting edge Go programs. I wrote and maintained a hobby chess engine for quite a while and I credit that with giving me a lot of the knowledge and insight I have regarding tree-based search schemes and heuristics as well as helping to improve my debugging and ......
Since I wasn't able to attend PDC last year, I'm still catching up on the sessions. I've watched almost all of them (starting w/ the native and parallelism stuff since that was the most applicable to me and working my way towards the rest of it.) Last night I watched the session on Code Contracts and Pex. I have to say that I'm REALLY impressed.Code Contracts in .NET expose a bunch of great features for runtime checking and static analysis including:Pre and Post condition checkingObject InvariantsDocumentation ......
I was doing a code review this morning for a coworker and the change he made relied heavily on win32 InterlockedXXX() functions so that he didn't need to use a critical section. He thought that this would be faster. I have used those methods before but never really understood how they worked so I did a little detective work and discovered this old MSN Magazine article. It turns out that the InterlockedXXX() functions merely utilize functionality (such as the XADD instruction) supplied by the underlying ......
I've been doing a lot of work with IO completion ports lately and I have to say it's definitely a love hate relationship. The code can be really hard to debug unless you have good fundamentals in writing multithreaded code. One way i've been using IOCPs gets extra sticky because i'm using them to manage the two ends of a proxy. There is a socket going from application->me and a socket going from me->remote server. Tracking the state of the two sockets and keeping them in lockstep so that they ......
Code contracts are one of the concepts in programming that really resonates with me. The ability to verify that a contract between a method or class and its caller or consumer is met strikes me as an incredibly powerful model. It looks like .NET 4.0 is going to have code contracts that can be injected into your code (seems like it modifies your binaries kind of the way aspect oriented programming does in java) to enforce contracts at runtime and also compiles against them statically.Are there any ......
Disclaimer: I don't intend for this blog to be a giant Norton ad, but when the products I work on get released I am really proud of them and want to talk about them.Here is a great review of N360 v3.0. Prior to shipping Norton Internet Security 2009 HardwareGeeks were pretty Anti-Symantec. It's great to see that turning around. Kudos to all of my fellow engineers who are making this happen!I have worked extremely hard on the N360 product over the last 3 versions (mostly in backup) so i'm really happy ......
I know how these guys feel. I've been doing a lot of application compatibility work lately myself on Norton Online Family. It's really important that the software works well and interacts well with other Symantec software as well as other software including IM clients, web browsers, internet security suites, personal firewalls, etc. The interplay and intertwining of these applications can get really interesting when you start getting into API hooking and driver level code where IO requests are being ......
If you enjoy this blog you may enjoy some of my postings on the Norton Protection Blog
I am really geeking out on Evernote. There aren't many platforms where you can't use it, and even on those you can use the web interface.
http://blog.evernote.com/2009/03/03/evernote-mobile-web-android/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/03/02/Cyber-review-underway/
Very encouraging! I wonder how many of the recommendations will make it to the public?
At this rate it won't be too long before my entire consciousness is in the cloud. When I bought my new Macbook and started splitting my work between windows and os x I really started to make use of cloud based services. First Google Reader (which is AWESOME.) and now Evernote. I take a TON of notes and I think that Evernote is going to make life much easier for me. Here's how it usually breaks down for me- While I'm reading I use my iPod Touch to take notes- When I'm working on iPhone apps or just ......
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL57/
REALLY enjoyable PDC session on the future of programming languages. Some great questions come up:
- Does the language matter now w/ IDEs being so powerful (my answer: YES!!)
- Are programming languages like fashion?
- How to bridge static vs dynamic typing in complex environments
- and much more. worth a listen, for sure.