I was playing with the Windows Media Center on my server at home (sorry... can't say why given I don't watch TV :-) and I saw an ad of Coldplay's new album. I thought... wow... this is such a cool advert, great visuals, great atmosphere... it must be the same company as the one that did the iPod ads. Surely enough, it was an advertisement of the new album's availability on iTunes.

Now, why can't Microsoft have great ads like this? :-(

Coldplay are touring and they are going to headlining at the Pemberton festival. I am soooo tempted to go to this one as well despite it being very expensive.

As promised in my previous post about Sasquatch, here are some photos...

This sounds like a very fun workshop. Now, all we need are fun papers as well. So, start those word processors and discuss your views, observations, thinking. The Program Committee is looking forward to reading what you have to say.

Call for papers.

Workshop web site.

I've been doing some catching up with few of the blogs I follow. I just read few of Steve Vinoski's latest entries. Worth checking out.

• Just What We Need: Another RPC Package
• Defending Something Other Than RPC

Ok... Sasquatch was nothing like Glastonbury. Wayyyy too small.

I arrived there on Friday late afternoon. I thought I would just set up my tent and then start doing things, jumping from party to party with live music. Nope... it was a quiet Friday evening. There were some ad-hoc parties going on in the camp site but no live music or DJs. I met lots of people though in the camp site so it was a pleasant, albeit quiet, evening.

I spent all Saturday in front of the main stage, jumping around...

• I loved Beirut and the The New Pornographers.
• M.I.A. was so full of energy and had the crowd going. Highlight... getting people from the audience on stage to dance (the security guys went mad since the stage was absolutely packed with crazy-dancing youngsters :-)
• Modest Mouse were brilliant
• R.E.M. were at a different level than anyone else, despite the rain. I did feel like I was the only one who knew their songs (sign of my age difference with the young folks right in front of the stage :-)

Sunday I visited the other two stages and the comedy tent and only saw the later part of the main stage performances (again, around 20ft from the stage :-):

• The Maldives were great (Yeti! Stage)
• Andy Peters (comedy tent) was hilarious
• Saw the last couple of songs of Tegan & Sara (they seemed nice)
• The Presidents of the United States of America was amazing. I had been listening to their music for some time so it was nice to see them live.
• Michael Franti & Spearhead... WOW!!! So much energy. This guy was amazing. I am definitely going to look for his music but I think his live performance was absolutely great.
• Death Cab for Cutie... definitely one of the highlights.
• The Cure!!! No words to describe the feelings really. The only band that played for 2h40mins non-stop. They didn't talk to the crowd... they just played music, non-stop. Even from the start you could tell that you were in the presence of legends; that they were at such a different level than anyone else. Was it their attitude? Was it their music, their passion, their complete emersion into the moment? They definitely made a huge impression on me. Absolutely fantastic!

Photographs to follow when I get around to downloading them from my camera.

The Live Search team made a decision to pull the plug on Live Search Academic and Live Search Books (including the book scanning project). This is sad news for those of us who had high hopes for those services and the value they were adding to the academic and research communities.

Please be assured, however, that my group is going to continue its efforts to provide tools and services to the academic/research communities, like our "research output repository" platform (including a personal research repository application), the virtual research environment, World Wide Telescope, the bibliography search space, and many more. Please stay tuned!

Very funny :-)

(sent to me via email from Santosh)

In my ever futile attempt to persuade everyone in my team to stop printing, I purchased an eReader. I went for iRex's Iliad...

• It has a larger screen than other popular readers;
• Note taking capability (even though the design and the form factor of the Sony eReader made me almost ignore this important feature);
• WiFi and memory card support;
• Not coupled with a particular service;
• It looks soooo much better than the ugly Kindle (but it's not as nice as the Sony one);
• It has a cool name from the Greek mythology :-)

The technology is amazing. Today is one of those rare sunny days in Seattle so I took the Iliad out in the sun. It's just like paper. Beautiful.

Using the Web as a platform? Not having to build an entire ecosystem of infrastructure protocols in order to utilize another organization's/company's resources (by paying for it of course)? Living the distributed, large-scale computing dream without having to build your own infrastructure? How, why didn't anyone tell this to the Grid community long time ago? Oh wait! :-)

Animoto's scaling up story through the use of Amazon's Web Services is a great one!

Now, I wouldn't usually blog about a ./ article like this but the highlighted sentence made me laugh, something that I seriously needed after a tiring day full of meetings...

"According to BBC, the director of the Vatican Observatory stated in an article titled 'Aliens Are My Brother' that intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. 'The search for forms of extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God. — Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God.' Mind that this is not the same director who said that evolution is more than a mere theory — that was Father Coyne. I myself agree. There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on earth."

I try to spend few hours a week at the Armbrust Lab, trying to understand what the scientists there are trying to do and how their work could be helped by technology-based automation solutions, especially around the area of data management. The week before I sat in their weekly meeting, where Francois Ribalet talked about the problem he was facing in trying to process a number, rather than just one, Flow Cytometry data files. I thought... well, that's a very easy to solve problem, right? That could be an easy-to-build solution... read the data, move it to Excel or SQL Server (or mySQL or Oracle... it doesn't matter), and then allow Francois ask any type of question over the entire set of data.

Right... on Friday I started the coding exercise. I found the Flow Cytometry Standard and opened Visual Studio. Oh my!!!

I had completely forgotten that we were exchanging data using such formats not so many years ago. Binary format, byte offsets, bit order significance, custom encodings for matrices, etc. etc. etc.

It was not long after I started writing the code to process the sample file I was given, when I realized the huge reduction in keystrokes in the world that XML must have introduced. Not because it's text-based. The common data model, the common data processing rules have enabled an ecosystem of tools that make it trivial to process XML data files, without having to write custom code. The applications have to only worry about the interpretation of data rather than reading/writing/navigating, with semantic computing technologies trying to automate that part as well.

The code is now finished. Lots of custom, non-reusable C# code (following good class design, writing good comments, etc.) in order to process the header segment. I've even had to come up with a regular expression in order to tokenize the header segment of the standard (I love trying to come up with regular expressions, even though I am probably not good at it). Here it is... (just in case someone wants to process a Flow Cytometry data file :-)

/\$((?<variable>[\w-[\d]]+)|(?<variable1>[\w-[\d]]+)(?<parameter>\d+)(?<variable2>[\w-[\d]]*))/(?<value>[^/]+)

I loved the process but surely we shouldn't have to do this for every data file. No matter whether you love or hate XML, we all have to appreciate the benefits in productivity that it has brought us.

Now, on to reading the actual data and building the solution for Francois.

Dan Fay told me about the availability of Bird's Eye view photos of major cities in Greece. I was able to find the place I spent 4 years of my life while an undergraduate in Greece, in Thessaloniki :-)

The new feature that I really love, though, is the incorporation of Wikipedia articles.

If you were to recommend a Mac laptop, which one would it be?

• MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.5GHz, is there an SSD option?)
• MacBook Air

Please note that I am not after a power/dev machine like my Thinkpad T61p but it does have to be fast enough for some modest development tasks.

I think I have already linked to Bora's blog but one more time doesn't hurt. I've been privileged to see some of the stuff he's working on and, I can tell you, it's very exciting! Stay tuned.

While catching up with my blog reading, I found through James Hamilton's blog (an excellent one to monitor btw and I am lucky to read his Microsoft-internal version as well :-) that David DeWitt is joining Microsoft as a Technical Fellow to lead the Jim Gray Systems Lab.