https://www.sqlazurelabs.com/

You can see a quick demo of this functionality in my MIX keynote.

I want to personally thank Mike Pizzo, David Robinson, and Jack Greenfield for their work on this service over the last couple of weeks.

Great work guys!

You can watch it at http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02.

http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010/03/16/open-data-for-the-open-web.aspx

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

I am in the midst of preparing a special surprise for MIX 2010, but I did get a chance to finish Singularity Sky (in which you can find the above quote).

I don’t have time for an in-depth review, but I do plan on reading the sequel when I get a chance.  Net: according to my rating system, this book is a fair trade.

I had an opportunity to have Graham explain his theory over lunch a few weeks ago and I find much to like about it.

Interestingly enough, I was rereading Leviathan the other day and the introduction had me thinking about Graham’s theory.

NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people’s safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

Both Graham and Hobbes are worth reading…

From naming, to versioning, to security, the number of things you have to get right is quite large.

Creating a Web API introduces more complexity; security writ large, versioning writ large, subscriber management, reporting, billing, etc.

At MIX, we will talk about the things that can help you build out Web APIs, including  OData and “Dallas”.

There are also some interesting startups that provide services to help you kickstart your Web APIs.

One of which is WebServius, which I call out because I know one of the founders (they are also part of our BizSpark program).

They provide both free and paid services to enable you to focus on the Web API itself (still not an easy task), while letting them worry about security, monitoring, etc.

It is exactly these sorts of services that will help get more and more Web sites to offer Web API.

Over time, more and more developers will realize that it is the Web API, not the Web site, that truly captures and exposes real value.

The Twitter API is one of the first evidence points of this movement.

I long for the day when I can pivot and access any piece of information on the Web in tools like Excel or DabbleDB.

If you run a Web site, why not start today?

Why rapidly?  I found that it merely iterated things (lists of gear, skills, books, movies, etc.) that I already owned or had (some) experience with.  In addition, it gave very light treatment to things that I believe can really help define virtue (not in the sense that you think, but in the Roman sense) like Cicero’s De Officiis (that said, perhaps the fact that it covered Cicero at all is something).

I am not going to give this a “Give me my money back” rating, however, for two reasons.

First, the introduction to the book that tells of the author’s experience at the Running of the Bulls was well written and (I thought) strangely profound.

Second, it gave me the best chuckle that I had in recent memory in recounting an (a somewhat off-color) Churchill story, which I have provided below.

Churchill entered the men’s room at the House of Commons to find his political rival Clement Atlee standing at the urinal.  Churchill took a position as far away as he could from Atlee, only to hear Atlee jab, “My dear Winston, I hope that despite being adversaries in the House, we could be friends outside of it.”  Churchill replied: “Ah, Clement, I have no quarrel with you, but in my experience, whenever you see something big, you tend to want to nationalize it.”

.

The goal of the work is two-fold: convince you to have a “philosophy of life” and that Stoicism is an ideal candidate for this philosophy.

Most of the book is taken up examining of Stoicism from a purely pragmatic standpoint, but it is all toward helping to frame what a consistent philosophy of life should entail.  It explores Irvine’s discovery of Stoicism, provides a very nice overview of various Stoic techniques and tales from his adventures as a practicing Stoic.

Above all things, this is a handbook for the budding modern Stoic.  It covers techniques like negative visualization (imagining that you will lose what is most precious to you), self-denial and daily mediation.

Using my rating system, I give it a fair trade.  If you are not familiar with Stoicism and it speaks to you, this book could enter “change your life” territory.

A couple of personal observations/insights…

One of the things that I enjoyed was the comparisons between Stoicism and Buddhism.  Many of the same principles and techniques are found in both.  I am beginning to think of Stoicism as a “Western Buddhism” in many ways.

I have found the techniques, particularly negative visualization, to be quite powerful.  Contemplating the loss of your children is a powerful way to appreciate them and generate personal joy no matter what your current circumstance.

This the key goal of Stoicism; to gain tranquility in the worst situations; to appreciate the things that you have today, rather than the things you want.

Typically this sort of self-denial is coupled with metaphysics hat justifies this denial for a reward after death (this is not the real world, the next one is).  Further, this sort of metaphysics (read: monotheist religions) often punish anyone that does not adopt the same self-denying world-view.

I jettisoned the shackles of that world-view long ago.  In the process, I viewed any philosophic system that taught self-denial as inconsistent with human nature and evolution.  This was always my complaint with Buddhism and the reason that I was attracted to Thelema.

What was so interesting about Irvine’s work was that he tackled the human nature and evolution issue head on.  He claimed that self-denial is unnatural. To over come this, he did not resort to the Platonic/Christian trick of claiming that the natural world is somehow debased.  Rather, he simply states that man can use his reason to overcome nature (which is the cause for our dissatisfaction with present circumstances) and in doing so achieve happiness.

Evolutionary forces have led us to a state of continued dissatisfaction, a state of unhappiness with our present circumstances.  That is the state of nature and is good (we are all here after all), but this state of nature is the cause for our unhappiness.  If we use our reason to temper our desires, it is possible for us to win a reprieve and experience joy with what we have right now.

When I first worked here in 1999, I recall the reaction when I told people I worked for Microsoft.  It was less than ideal.  11 years later, the tone is different.  I credit Dan’l Lewin and the presence of a campus here with helping to moderate and improve the perception of Microsoft in the Valley.

Over the past month, I have begun to meet with a few technical leaders in the Valley to discuss things Microsoft and my team in particular are working on.  I don’t sense disdain, just indifference.  As a result, I believe we miss out on the opportunity to participate in many of the technical conversations that permeate the Valley.

I am committed to changing that, in my own small way.  Microsoft has both the ability and the responsibility to work with the technical community here to advance the state of the art.  I am looking forward to it…

“Intellipad” is a .NET application that is used to write a .NET application: (large portions of) itself.

Most of the commands are in IronPython.  Further, the tests are in IronPython.  You can run them from the command buffer in the tool (>>>Test(“TestName”)) and they ship in the CTP.

Beyond IronPython, “Intellipad” supports “modes” for “M”, T-SQL, and lots more.  Of course, since the tool is completely extensible, you can add whatever language you want, as I did with MUrl.

BTW:  In case it is not clear, this is all still in CTP, the team is still working on it, so stuff can change.  I know the “M” and “Intellipad”/”Quadrant” teams believe strongly in text as a core way of “modeling” software, so you can expect that principle to be honored.