Live Chat Programs

Also see: When Will Foreign Ownership of US Sports Teams Start ?

InfoWorld sees blogs in the enterprise [from Dave Winer ]. Amar (coworker) brought this up to me (the idea of using a blog for internal communication) and it seemed really interesting. It would be a great way for people to see what execs are up to and thinking about…
http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/79

Also see: Parallels adds “Express Windows Installation”

I can say without question that this was the most amazing, annoying and difficult deal we have ever done since I bought the Mavs.

The annoyance. One agent who made a truism of the saying that “no good deed goes unpunished”. That said, I have nothing but respect and admiration for Devean George. He told me that he would trust his agent as he had done for the last 10 years and take whatever may with that decision. He had the balls to stick to it. Even with people yelling and screaming at him. That said, as I write this, I really have no clue why the agent made the decision he did.

The dirt. Peter Vescey’s ridiculous assertion that Avery asked me to trade Dirk. Even in the Nellie years where we discussed trading every other player on the roster, Dirk was never mentioned. There has never been a discussion of trading Dirk during my tenure, EVER. Vescey’s source is an out and out liar.

The thing about dealing with the media in this business is that they thrive on rumors and get bored with reality.

For example. Several local media outlets had no interest in sending anyone to New Orleans to cover the All Star game or Dirk’s appearance there. That changed once the trade rumors started. Then all of the sudden, every media person they could find was there. Newscasts led with the rumors. Newspapers speculated and comments on the impact of the rumors if true or not true. There was reporting on rumors about rumors. All of which is fine. I get that and in many m (more…)

Pure, Declarative, and Constructive Arithmetic Relations. Oleg Kiselyov, William E. Byrd, Daniel P. Friedman, and Chung-chieh Shan. FLOPS 2008. (source code)

We present decidable logic programs for addition, multiplication, division with remainder, exponentiation, and logarithm with remainder over the unbounded domain of natural numbers. Our predicates represent relations without mode restrictions or annotations. They are fully decidable under the common, DFS-like, SLD resolution strategy
of Prolog or under an interleaving refinement of DFS…

[The] attempts to define decidable multiplication even for the seemingly trivial unary case show the difficulties that become more pronounced as we move to binary arithmetic. We rely on a finite representation of infinite domains, precise instantiatedness analysis, and reasoning about SLD using search trees.

So you’ve read The Reasoned Schemer and were excited about the fact that unlike the built-in operations in Prolog, arithmetic relations (over binary numbers) were fully implemented. For example, addition could also be used for subtraction and multiplication for factoring numbers and for generating all triples of numbers related by multiplication. Now comes this paper to explain the motivation behind some of the more arcane definitions needed to implement arithmetic in a fully relational style, and to prove their properties formally. The paper develops unary and binary arithmetic relations in pure Prolog (with no cuts, negation or introspection). (more…)

Also see: Updated Finalization and Hosting

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So why is it the American people allow our politicians to do the same things over and over and we believe them and expect results different from previous elections ?

I’ve looked at the websites of current and previous candidates to get an understanding of their platforms. They all have positions, some of which I agree with , some of which I don’t. But there is one thing that is missing from each and everyone of them, any manner of implementation. Health care, spending cuts, retaining or repealing tax cuts, keeping or removing troops, the soundbites with pretty numbers never end. Not a single candidate provides details on how exactly they are going to accomplish anything. Don’t they realize that economists exists to make lottery ticket buyers look smart, not presidential candidates ?

It reminds me of business plans I get from kids who tell me about their vision and project all kinds of numbers leading to grand results. They can site historical facts and figures, but when it comes time to get into details of exactly how they are going to execute on their plans, the response is basically that they will figure it out as they go. I wouldn’t invest in a business that is winging it any more than I want to vote for a presidential candidate that is winging it.

Unfortunately , they are all winging it. i have no question that they have every detail about how to spend their campaign contributi (more…)

Also see: Presentations…

Also see: JSR-203 more New I/O APIs - NIO.2

Also see: From C# to Java: Part 4

Looks like my post went live over on the IETB regarding changes we made to the BASE element in IE 7. Previously the BASE element had some issues, primarily by design, that made certain actions within the guts of IE very easy to do, but polluted the exposed object model and overall tree hiearchy. Well, it was time to fix that. If you are interested in how we fixed it, go check out my entry All your <base> are belong to us.

There have been some comments on the post so I’ll try to cover them over here with what might be some interesting posts about how IE works.

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2005/08/30/424084.aspx

Also see: Help John Baez and Mike Stay!

One thing about Jerry Yang that I always have admired is that he cares. He cares about his employees. He cares about his products. He cares about his shareholders. Most of all he cares about building a world class company that can be great at what it does.

If you look at Yahoo singularly, it is a great company. For he and David Filo to build a company with more than 6B in sales and more than 25B in market cap is an astounding feat. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it has had to weather both the Internet Bubble Bursting and the emergence of Google as a force in search and online advertising.

These are both issues because Wall Street has made them issues. The bubble speaks for itself. Google is a Wall Street issue for Yahoo because Wall Street wants Yahoo to keep up with the Googles.

That’s a problem for Jerry. Building a world class Yahoo to be the best company it possibly can be using the management skills that Jerry and company have is a far different challenge than optimizing the stock price. Particularly when Google is your stock comp.

Which is exactly why Jerry and David should sell to MSFT.

If there is one thing Microsoft does well , its ignore Wall Street and invest in its corporate strategies. It has so many huge lines of business, that Wall Street has learned to just let those that need to germinate do so. XBox. MSN. Online. Microsoft gets more leash from Wall Street to develop businesses than any company on the planet.

So the question isn’t whether Yahoo sho (more…)

Also see: SIGPLAN Workshop on Undergraduate Programming Language Curriculum

<%@ Page Language=”C#” %>
<script runat=”server”>
 protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 if (!IsPostBack)
 DataBind();
 }
</script>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head runat=”server”>
 <title></title>
</head>
<body>
<form id=”_frm” runat=”server”>
 <asp:DetailsView
 ID=”dv1″
 DefaultMode=”Edit”
 DataSource=’<%# new object[1] %>’
 runat=”server”
 >
 <Fields>
 <asp:TemplateField HeaderText=”First Name:”>
 <EditItemTemplate>
 <asp:TextBox ID=”FirstNameTextBox” runat=”server” />
 <asp:RequiredFieldValidator
 ID=”FirstNameValidator1″
 ControlToValidate=”FirstNameTextBox”
 ErrorMessage=”First name is required.”
 Display=”Dynamic”
 EnableClientScript=”false”
 SetFocusOnError=”true”
 ValidationGroup=”bug”
 Text=”*”
 runat=”server”
 />
 </EditItemTemplate>
 </asp:TemplateField>
 </Fields>
 <FooterTemplate>
 <asp:ValidationSummary
 ID=”vs1″
 DisplayMode=”List”
 ValidationGroup=”bug”
 runat=”server”
 />
 <asp:Button
 ID=”Button1″
 Text=”Post Back”
 ValidationGroup=”bug”
 runat=”server”
 />
 </FooterTemplate>
 </asp:DetailsView>
</form>
</body>
</html>

(more…)

Also see: From C# to Java: Part 3

A file is an assembly if and only if it’s managed and it contains an Assembly entry in its CLR metadata.

Determining by hand

A fast way to determine whether a file is an assembly is to run ildasm.exe on it. If it immediately gives an error saying that it may not be a PE file, then it’s not a managed file. But, if it is an assembly, then ildasm will show an entry for the Assembly definition (“.assembly“ in the MANIFEST window or at the bottom of the original window).

Determining programmatically

From unmanaged code, you can call GetAssemblyFromScope() on the IMetaDataAssemblyImport interface for the file. If it returns S_OK, it’s an assembly. If it returns CLDB_E_RECORD_NOTFOUND, it’s not an assembly.

From managed code, if AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(), Assembly.Load*(), etc. succeeds when given that file, then it’s an assembly. If the load failed with a BadImageFormatException, then it may not be an assembly. There are other reasons, however, why that exception may have been thrown (maybe it’s an assembly but could not be loaded because it has an incorrect format). Coming soon in v2, if the hresult for BadImageFormatException is COR_E_ASSEMBLYEXPECTED, then it’s because it’s not an assembly. Catch the exception and call System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.GetHRForException() to get its hresult to find out.

Note that this assumes that you are not concerned about performance. If you are concerned about that, then the way to op (more…)

Also see: This Guy Proves Anyone with a Keyboard can be Stupid

For a while there, it looked like North American sports teams owners were going to take over European Soccer. The biggest Premiere League names were getting bought up. Then a funny thing happened. The US Dollar turned upside down against major currencies making deals that once looked tenable, all of the sudden seem very, very expensive.

But as is the nature of currency exchange, for every Yin, there is a Yang, or in this case an Abramovich or any number of wealthy Europeans or Russians who are coming to the US in search of bargains. Of course there are also the exploding number of Chinese Billionaires with global aspirations as well.

A quick trip to NYC to shop for currency induced bargains need not stop on 5th or Madison Ave. It is just a matter of time, and maybe not much of it, before we start to see our sports teams gobbled up. With the international
flavor of both the NHL and NBA, is there a better way to “mainstream” a person, product or service into the US than through the purchase of a sports franchise ?

With the lack of Salary Cap of MLB, why couldn’t or wouldn’t an ultra Wealthy (as in guys or girls who make me look poor) Sports Fan take advantage of the fall in the value of the dollar and come in and buy an Iconic or even mid market franchise and spend spend spend ?

With the price of NFL franchises now past a billion dollars with half the Dolphins apparently selling for more than 550mm, how many individuals in this country that don’t already own a franchise actu (more…)

Also see: Infrequent blogging

Also see: Data Types a la Carte

Also see: ReflectionTypeLoadException

I’m a Firefox guy. The only reason I use it instead of IE is that it feels faster. Seriously.

I find it incredibly annoying that the only websites I frequent that require IE are those run by Microsoft. I’ve nothing against IE (I’ve never had the malware problems), but these websites disrupt whatever I’m doing. Most times I’ll just avoid the site. A good example is the MSN Video portion of MSN. Occasionally I’ll click a link leading to a video, at which point I’m told that I can’t watch it in anything but IE. This is odd since 1/2 of the emails I get link to funny videos on websites that do let me watch them in my browser of choice. Instead of launching IE and watching the (advertiser-supported) MSN Videos I simply move on. I’ve got too much stuff to do to be inconvenienced by this.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by the following error message. The site doesn’t support Firefox — but they’re working on correcting it. It’s a problem, and they’re fixing it. Bravo!

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/04/30/444551.aspx