AOP and MS Azure fabric

I attended the CMAP meeting tonight. I enjoyed the presentation on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and Microsoft Azure fabric. The presenter knew his material and demonstrated the need for AOP and the proper use of it. I came away with a good understanding of how MS implements AOP in .NET and some of the extra tools needed to make it happen. (Interestingly, you cannot do it with just Microsoft tools. Or so I currently believe.)

After the meeting I chatted with a few folks about programming, assignments, and non-techie stuff.

All in all, a good meeting.

Only two years behind

I was going to comment that the "Square object is not a Rectangle object" problem is solved by using immutable objects, an insight I had on this evening's commute home, but others have beaten me to it. And more eloquently than I would be.

There is one here, and another one here.

On the other hand, I'm still happy that I had the insight.

Open Source Bridge 2011

I'm attending the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland OR this week. I've been to this conference in the past. The conference is small and casual, with sessions on technology and also social change. The presenters and attendees are passionate about their work, and conversations are always interesting.

Windows Phone 7 demos

I attended the CMAP meting last night. The presentation was on Windows Phone 7. it was a disappointment.

The WP7 platform seems powerful enough, although programming requires a lot of different concepts (GUI design, web services, .NET, C#, and Microsoft's XAML are all necessary) and a simple program is complex.

Part of my disappointment is with the demo. The presenter built a "typical" application, using the above-mentioned technologies. The process took almost an hour, and in the end the program did not work. The presenter had to display a previously built program, a trick used by cooking shows on television.

Microsoft would benefit from the concept of "Hello, World". Their demonstrations of new tech are complex and pull together multiple technologies. Good in that it shows the total power of the platform, but it misses the immediate gratification and confirmation of the new tool.

Science fiction convention

I visited the local science fiction convention (Balticon) this week-end. A good decision.

The "con" was filled with science fiction enthusiasts. Many were people involved in IT; I talked with several folks about programming technology. Mind you, I made it easy to spot me as a computer geek. I wore t-shirts with computer programmer themes and carried the trusty HP-35 calculator. The shirts and calculator were conversation-starters, and I talked with people about things from FORTRAN to Python.

The con had a lot of creative and smart people. It had sessions for science fiction, hard science, culture, and writing/publishing. I looked for the sessions with the odd-sounding titles; I've found that those are the sessions with the new and different ideas.

It was good to get away from the office and talk with other people about the future of computing.

Lunch among techies

I lunched with a long-former co-worker, someone from a mid-career UPS project. He was a contractor on that project while I was an employee. Now he is an employee at NCQA in Washington, and I am a contractor at a government agency. Odd how situations change!

We had a nice lunch, talking about things technical and fun. The ability to meet folks for lunches like this is one of the reasons I like this assignment.

Fun with virtual machines

I spent some time with virtual machines today. It was interesting comparing the behavior of VMware's VMware Player against Oracle's Virtualbox.

I'm using VMware Player 3.1.4 and Virtualbox 4.0.6. (Microsoft's Virtual PC refuses to run on my PC. Apparently my hardware is not worthy of such a lofty program.)

I have VMware and Virtualbox running on Windows 7. I created virtual machines for Ubuntu and Kubuntu in each virtual environment, four machines in all. My experience has been good with both VMware and Virtualbox. I can install the guest operating system, configure it, get updates, and install new packages.

There are some differences between the two.

The machines under Virtualbox can use bridged networking to find my DHCP server; the machines under VMware cannot and must use NAT.

The installs for Ubuntu went well. The installs for Kubuntu were a little rougher for VMware. The VMware Tools package expects gcc and make, neither of which was installed by default. Running the Kubuntu Software Management package solved the problem easily.

Performance is acceptable but not stupendous. This is due, I am sure, to my equipment. The PC is a fairly recent one (about two years old) but it is not the datacenter-class server designed for hosting virtual machines.

Overall, I am pleased. I can work with the virtual environments, which is my goal.