In yet more SVG-related news, Microsoft demonstrated tools it's building for its SVG marginalizer - Sparkle. You can see more on Channel 9. I came across this on Slashdot. It appears that they're talking about Microsoft Expression, which I linked in the SVG discussion.

After reinstalling Visual Studio 2003 (while I could try diagnosing every single possibility, I just needed the machine up and running as soon as possible), the problem persisted - "Could not create automation server" whenever I added a project to a solution, failing the operation. Somehow something was broken during the process of uninstall a prior CTP of SQL Server 2005 (and the .NET 2.0 runtime), and installing the newer version.

In any case, I eventually tracked it down to the scripting engine being broken, so I downloaded the 5.6 scripting engine. Of course the MSI was blissfully unaware, and thus belligerent towards, Windows Server 2003 (which I use as a development/test workstation), so I had to run it in an XP compatibility mode, but that solved the problem. This is entered in the archives just in case someone in the future has this problem.

I've unintentionally come across this website several times (today I had a need to reference a double-slit experiment), and each time it has sucked me into meandering through its excellent interactive demonstrations. While this is high-school level physics, if you haven't brushed up in a while it can be eye-opening and educational. The site appears to have been designed some time back, and aesthetically it is subjectively rather dated, but it is pure genius the way it uses interactive elements for education - This is the sort of thing that demonstrates computer and web learning at its finest.
 
Irony (or is it?) - Mental confusion over how to spell genius ("Genious? Hrmmm...")

This entry doesn't really relate to software development, but nonetheless it covers human behaviour and subconscious decision making that does significantly impact our marketplace.

Here in Canada, a year or so ago there was a big kerfuffle in the federal government concerning transfats - a controversy that got a tonne of press (both by boosters encouraging this consumer protection, and critics who decried it as the actions of a nanny state). Namely, that there were calls to ban transfats from the food system, legally eliminating this purportedly dangerous, artificial fat from grocery shelves. This would have made us the second country, after Denmark, to ban transfats. Transfats are, of course, the hydrogentation of otherwise normal, in-moderation-healthy unsaturated fats, molecularly altered to improve handling (hydrogenated oils are solid at room temperature, and in fryers need to be changed less frequently), and reduced spoilage and possibly consumer convenience - goods stay "fresh" on grocery shelves for longer, while baked goods made with transfats, for instance, often stayed bizarrely fresh out of the package for days. Humorously, a couple of decades ago transfats were seen as the saviour from the evils of saturated fats.

While McDonalds, along with the other big fast-food companies, are addicted to transfats, and they're finding it difficult to cut their use of the stuff, I've been noticing more and more formulation changes on store shelves - I've always been a label reader - with transfats being voluntarily eliminated from whole categories. Occasionally this change has occurred silently (there was a mass migration from trans-fats in potato chip products about a year ago, with only a few of the companies actually noting the dramatic health benefit change), while in other case it has come with a huge marketing campaign. Even for those people blissfully unaware, the quantity of transfats in their diet has plummeted, apart from a couple of hold-outs like McDonald's french fries.

So why has this mass change occurred? I suspect two reasons:

• The publicity relating to the debate brought this to the attention of the public, and the public started to subconsiously (or consciously) associate transfats with bad things. This subconscious association is enormously effective in altering behaviour at the root level. Children's treats like Goldfish, which used to be made with hearty amounts of transfats, were suddenly like handing your child a pack of cigarettes, which obviously is unacceptable to parents. The Goldfish company, after switching to a transfat free recipe, claimed that they did it out of the goodness of their hearts, and there was little public demand. I suspect that they are being disingenuous, and they knew that their marketshare would disappear if they didn't accommodate this new health information.
• Legal concerns. Now that everyone knows that transfats are dangerous, and we know that alternatives are possible, food companies are building themselves a massive liability risk with every transfat laden product they ship. It's one thing to rely upon them when there is ignorance, but quite another to turn a blind eye to their dangers when it has been well documented. I suspect a lot of the silent switching has been to limit future legal threats.

Interesting seeing the impact public information, and the future threat of lawsuits, has had upon such a huge part of our marketplace. And in such a short period of time! Government intervention was entirely unnecessary (and might actually have slowed the switch, as what should be a simple health debate would inevitably turn into a bunch of partisan nonsense, with the opposition party and boosters sucking back a tub of hydrogenated oils in the name of freedoms, proclaiming the rights of all Canadians to eat transfats. Such political nonsense is typical in those scenarios, regardless of who is in power and who is across the floor).

Brad excited by what he saw at PDC.
Brad Feld, venture capitalist: 2006 Will Be The Year of Microsoft.
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

A surefire way of getting linked on Robert Scoble's highly rated and ranked blog is to say something promising about Microsoft, or to say something negative about Microsoft in a way that Mr. Scoble can easily defuse while pretending to agree with you (such as http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/16.html#a11174, where Scoble subtly claims that Balmer was being misinterpreted). In this case, a VC was drunk on the PDC, and like many before him presumed that everything Microsoft spins is gold. Many foolish predictions have come out of such a situation.

In any case, while Microsoft will continue to do very well by any definition, it's quite a stretch to call 2006 the year of Microsoft.

• SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 will barely be out of the gates, having come out (hopefully) at the end of this year - I believe early November. It will be quite some time before legacy shops (which are of course the bulk of SQL Server customers. The RDBMS market isn't a heavily expanding market, and is largely selling to existing customers or trying to steal customers from your competitors) will upgrade their SQL Server installs, especially given the large schism to 2005. Visual Studio 2005 is a great product, but it's largely an upgrade/maintenance release for the existing Visual Studio base, a large percentage of which are on the MSDN program anyways and thus will upgrade at no revenue advantage to Microsoft.
• Vista will see adoption among the leading edge, and of course will replace XP on new PCs (to no gain to Microsoft), but it will see negligible adoption in corporations. Many corporations haven't even modernized to XP at this point, 4 years after its release and despite it being a minor difference from 2000. Vista represents a pretty large transition.
• Office 2006 is similar to Vista - it'll take years to see heavy adoption in the corporate space, and otherwise will largely be sales to new buyers (who will just be getting 2006 instead of its closest competitor, Office 2003).
  
• Many of Microsoft's new technology platforms will see negligible adoption in the first, and even second, year. This is just experience talking, but there is a long list of examples of highly lauded Microsoft technologies that struggled or saw little adoption for years (.NET being an excellent case. By now we were supposed to be awash in .NET applications. While it is a superlative web platform, and was a critical upgrade to classic ASP, the desktop world has been barely impacted by .NET at all, against most predictions)

Undoubtedly Microsoft has some great products, but we're talking about a company that needs to maintain a revenue of $10 billion a quarter, and with programs like software assurance and the MSDN program, these upgrades are long overdue. If anything, these releases are about avoiding a loss of revenue stream rather than an increase of revenue stream.

This technology demo is a fantastic watch, and is truly a revolution in the way data access will occur in our .NET applications. A LINQ technology preview can be downloaded for the just-released Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate here. The LINQ project page can be found here. I'm trying out the LINQ technology preview and will post more thoughts shortly.

Another part of the LINQ project to watch closely will be the Object Relational technology in DLINQ. Both of these will be hugely useful in dissolving the tremendous disconnect that has traditionally existed between relational persistent storage and our code.

Tough to listen to the hype machine kicking up for C# 3.0, though, given that C# 2.0 isn't even to production yet. It's great to be prepared for new technologies, and to get your input in at this stage so they can make it the best that it can be, but still it's really difficult to find the time to learn currently impractical technologies when there are so many practical technologies we can learn to help us today.

If you're in the Cogeco service area (in Ontario and Quebec), you owe it to yourself to look at their broadband solutions. I've been a cable-modem customer for about 4 years now, in different parts of the city, and have been extremely pleased. Prior to that I was a Rogers cable-modem customer, and my experience then was much less satisfactory.

This comes to mind watching the download task for the newest Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate progress - 2.5GB in, my average download speed is a constant 650KB/second. Not Kb/second, but real, bonafide KB/s. Amazing.