matt.griffith

Now that the Windows Presentation Foundation APIs have stabalized it is time for me to start seriously playing with it.

Jon Udell recently posted the screencast of a interview he did with Jim Hugunin. In this screencast Jim demonstrates IronPython. Jim & Jon do a great job explaining why you should install IronPython. Dynamic languages are a great way to explore new APIs. And IronPython is a great way to explore .NET APIs. But there weren't any demonstrations of how easy it is to install IronPython; until now.

In this 5 minute screencast I show you how to install and set up IronPython so you can use it to explore WPF.

A Flash version of the screencast is available here.

Jon Udell thinks Microsoft should Open-source WPF/E. I almost always agree with Jon. And when I don't at first I find that I eventually do. Maybe I should outsource my thinking about this industry to Jon. Anyway, I agree with Jon this time too.

Late last year Dare suggested that Microsoft should either disband the IE team or transfer it to the MSN division. I agreed with Dare too - again, this happens a lot.

Now Microsoft Offers To Help Firefox Run On Vista. Here's a silly idea. Microsoft should kill IE and then let the MSN division support development of Mozilla.

I wonder what it would look like if Google, MSN, and Yahoo were all contributing code and patches to Mozilla? Could it work? Would it work better than trying to hammer out specs? After all, isn't the code the spec anyway?

I just watched a version of this talk by Luis von Ahn on Human Computation. I watched it on UWTV, but this one on Google Video is much easier to use online.

This is the sort of thing that will drive real gains artificial intelligence. Get your Humans United Against Robots T-Shirt today ;-)

Seriously though, check out that talk. It is fascinating.

Dare is correct. I misapplied the idea of "Commoditizing Your Complements". I'll blame it on my wishful thinking that there would be an advantage for Google to release GFS & BigTable into the wild.

I do think there is an opportunity for Yahoo! to marginalize the advantage that GFS & BigTable give Google. I don't think it is fair to compare Hadoop to Mozilla. Mozilla was a much more speculative project. There are plenty of companies that have an interest in seeing something like Hadoop succeed. Those same companies have a real interest in helping develop it. I think it would be more accurate to compare Hadoop to Jboss, Linux, and/or Apache.

It is a mistake to think of Yahoo! selling advertising real estate. Maybe that is true for Yahoo! and MSN. But it is not true for Google. Google is building an advertising platform. I think Yahoo! and MSN are trying, much less successfully, to do the same. Right now Google's software gives them huge advantages in the Ad Platform space. But if Yahoo! and MSN can catch up then we're in for another platform war. And frankly I think the coming Ad Platform war will make the browser war look tame.

The thing that scares me the most is what happens to my data if Google starts to lose that war? I recently started using Gmail for all my email. Right now Google makes it possible, but not easy, to get my mail out. But if they start to lose ad revenue to Yahoo!, MSN, or someone else will they try to lock me in to Gmail? The same fears would apply to MSN & Yahoo! if I used their services instead.

Google seems to be re-building Hailstorm. But the trust problem that Microsoft had with Hailstorm wasn't just because they are Microsoft. Google will have the same trust problem. It just might take people longer to catch on.

I won't trust anyone with my data. For something like Hailstorm to work we need a federated storage system that is separate from the services that use the data. WinFS was one attempt to solve part of this problem. Ideally this would be a P2P system similar to GFS & BigTable. But Amazon is showing that something like S3 could work here too.

I wish I had more time to think about and work on this space.

Installing SQLite 3 on Windows is pretty easy, once you figure out what you need to do. But when I started using Ruby on Rails I struggled to figure out what I needed to do. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how you can install SQLite 3 on Windows so you can use it in your Ruby on Rails applications.

A flash version will eventually be available here.

Steve Pavlina is talking about a unique problem he has. He is wondering what he should do with the extra money he has.

What’s the best way for me to think about money now that I’ve achieved my original goal? What should I do with the excess cash each month? Do I invest it? Do I funnel the cash into expansion? Do I pay off my mortgage? Do I donate it to charity? Do I form a non-profit? Do I ignore the problem for now and just stockpile cash until I figure out what to do with it? Do I try to increase my income even more? If so, what sort of paradigm would motivate me to do that?

I've spent some time thinking about this over the last couple of years. Unfortunately I am not in the position that Steve is in, yet. But I plan to be eventually.

I would not start a non-profit. Hiring employees is too inefficient. I'd look for ways to amplify the money that I had available. I would lean towards investing in other small companies that are congruent with my goals of doing more good than harm in the world.

You could start by finding another couple who are in the position that you and your wife were in just a few years ago. A couple who has an idea for changing the world but hasn't taken the leap yet because they lack the financial freedom that you have achieved. You could fund their startup. Help them bootstrap in exchange for an equity position in their venture. Think Pay It Forward but with a happier ending ;-). If their venture succeeds then you'll have another stream of income that you can then use to do it all over again. If it fails you probably won't be out any more than you would have been if you had donated the money to a traditional inefficient charity.

I would probably lean towards investing in companies that have a good chance of becoming profitable so they could turn around and reinvest the same way. But I would not rule out becoming an Angel funder of non-profit ventures that have a good chance of becoming quickly self-sufficient given enough money to get off the ground.

Another possibility is funding an X Prize. Look for a problem that you are interested in seeing solved and then try to think of a way to offer a prize that would encourage companies to invest money doing the research and development to solve the problem. This presentation on IT Conversations explains how offering 10 million dollars as a prize ended up generating 100 million dollars in research and development by companies trying to win the prize. It also kick-started an industry that would have take years to get going on it's own.

At RailsConf 2006 David Heinemeier Hansson talked about the new REST features coming to Rails. If you want to play with this stuff you'll need to know where it lives.

There are two pieces you need. ActiveResource is the piece that let's you consume REST services as if they were ActiveRecord database backed models. ActiveResource is part of Rails 1.1.4. But ActiveResource has nothing to do with exposing your application's resources in a RESTful way.

To expose your application's resources you need the simply_restful plugin. David did mention simply_restful during his keynote, but if you're like me, you didn't pick up on that the first time through ;-)

I'm not sure what versions support what features. I'm using Edge Rails right now. You may have everything you need in Rails 1.1.4 + simply_restful. But you may need to bleed on the Edge to keep up with any changes that happen on the way to Rails 1.2 release.

As of this morning I've officially lost 100 pounds in 8 1/2 months.

But another PhysicsDiet.com beat me to the 100 pound mark by several months. jm3000 lost 100 pounds in about 4 1/2 months.

I don't have a final goal weight in mind so I'm not sure what my next major weight milestone will be. I will probably drop below 200 pounds before I'm done. But for now I'm focused on getting my Body Fat below 15%. Once I do that I'll reevaluate where I am then I'll decide if I want to shoot for 10% Body Fat.

Lately I haven't been tracking the calories I'm consuming or the calories I'm burning from exercise. I've been using a combination of portion counting and weighing some foods. But I don't track the details anymore.

I spent several months doing different experiments trying to figure out whether I could optimize my diet by eating different ratios of macronutrients or varying the types of foods I ate. But in the end I found that it mostly doesn't matter what I eat as long as prefer healthier foods over non-healthy foods and control my calorie balance.

The key factors for me are:

• Eat 5-6 small meals a day
  This is a critical component of my success. At first I didn't think it mattered. But when I experimented with some of the ideas from Body for Life I learned that eating 6 small meals a day is the best way to control my appetite and my emotions. I'm much more even tempered now. And I'm never hungry now as long as I eat at least 1500 calories per day. I usually eat around 2000 calories per day though.
• Regular vigorous exercise
  For a long time I thought eating 6 small meals a day was the key to my improved mood. But recently I went about 2 weeks without doing much exercise. I've been under a lot of stress recently and I got a bit depressed. After one particularly bad weekend I jumped on my stationary bike for an hour. That's when I realized that I have to exercise to be happy. Without exercise I get much more stressed and I let little things bother me much more than they should. Exercise is the best way for me to deal with stress and relax. Exercise also helps me lose weight, but not as much as you'd think. Controlling your calorie intake is much more important if your goal is to lose weight. But exercise is critical to your health. You can't be healthy without exercise even if you control your weight. And now I know that I can't be happy without exercise.

If you're curious you can read more about my journey over on my PhysicsDiet.com Blog.

Well it took longer than a few minutes, but DHH's keynote is now online.

I first started looking at Ruby on Rails more than a year ago. I even bought the first edition of Agile Web Development with Rails as soon as it was released. But I didn't do much with Rails until recently. I didn't want to struggle with setting up Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL. I've installed Apache and MySQL on Windows before and it wasn't much fun.

But now you don't have to worry about installing anything to try Rails. InstantRails includes everything you need to set up a fully working Ruby on Rails environment. Better yet, with InstantRails you don't have to install anything. You just unzip InstantRails to a folder and you have everything you need to try Ruby on Rails. If you decide you want to get rid of it just delete the InstantRails folder and your machine is back to normal.

I think this is such a big deal for Windows developers that I created a screencast showing how you can get a new Ruby on Rails application running on Windows in under 5 minutes.

5 minutes to Ruby on Rails nirvana

A flash version will eventually be available here.