I started playing with Acrylic a bit today and I'm amazed (bet you didn't see that one coming).

For the purpose of reference, so you know where I'm coming from, here's some background:

• I started doing graphics work with Paint Shop Pro back in the day and I eventually moved onto Adobe Photoshop 5.5.
• Since then, I've only upgraded to Photoshop 6.0, so I haven't had much experience with the newer CS versions of PS.
• I've used Illustrator a bit, but mostly to draw my lineart, and not for any serious graphic design.
• I have a copy of Corel Painter 8 or 9, but I never got into it because it was sooooo poorly optimized that I'm not sure how anyone seriously used it.  Likewise, doing freehand artwork in Illustrator 9 is insane.  At 300dpi, an 8x10 image takes nearly 5 minutes to save (and I'm on a 2.4 Ghz Pentium IV with 1280 MB of RAM).
• I've also worked with Corel Draw and Flash.
• I haven't been doing as much artwork lately.

Okay, with that out of the way, I'd like to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by Acrylic (I remember reading a lot of bad first impressions very early on).  Some observations first:

• First of all, it seems to combine many of the tools into one as it allows for the creation of pixel (bitmap) and vector layers so that you can work with both types of objects in one document.  Previously, at least with PS6, this was not possible.
• It's much more finely optimized than Illustrator or Painter.  No slowdown at all (and I'm currently on my laptop).
  
• Some of the new UI paradigms are great; I'm quite fond of the "combo-lock" style toggles and the easy to access sliders (in PS6, a lot of the sliders are hidden/context sensitive).
• To go with the above, many graphic artists are going to have to do a bit of retraining.  I mean, gosh, I feel like the Adobe PS interface is so ingrained in my mind that I find it a bit hard to adjust...I feel kinda lost .
• Acrylic allows to to completely customize the hotkeys!  Excellent!
• Unlike the Adobe products I've used in the past, this, even in such an early stage, ships with tons of predefined brushes.
• Wow, I love the way it allows you to toggle the width of a vector brush stroke.  I think I'm in love.  Illustrator was such a pain in the ass in this respect.
• There's an XAML exporter as well (as a seperate install).  I'll have to try that out later and see how it works.  I'm actually quite curious how the vector and bitmap objects will map to XAML.
• I don't know that I'm so fond of the way the layers are represented.  Unlike in PS, where layers are in their own window, the layers are represented with a subwindow of the main document.
• Where is the history?
• There is no "Save for Web" option as far as I can tell...
  

I'll keep updating this post as I play around with it a bit more.  I think I'm going to move one of my current projects into Acrylic instead.  So, my biggest question now is: Microsoft, how much is all this gonna cost?  If they price it around PS, work on a some minor UI oddities (embossed icons? I dunno), and add a web optimization interface, I think they have a winner on their hands as it seems, at least on initial inspection, to be quite a good product.

Now what I really want to get my hands on is Sparkle.

Have I mentioned that I'm excited about the tools and technologies coming out from Microsoft in the near future?

Via Manuel Clement, there is a preview (CTP) of the Acrylic graphic design tools available for download from MSDN.

I also came across a set of videos for the Visual Studio Express line of tools (and .Net 2.0 in general).  Gonna have to slot some time for these videos.

Lots of exploration to do this weekend when I get some time.

There's a great article in this month's Time magazine on Steve Jobs and Apple's success, even though the company operates counter what conventional wisdom dictates.

One bit that really caught my attention was Steve's "Parable of the Concept Car":

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he'll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. "Here's what you find at a lot of companies," he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple's gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. "You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

"What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible.' And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse."

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that's the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. "Sure enough," Jobs recalls, "when we took it to the engineers, they said, 'Oh.' And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, 'No, no, we're doing this.' And they said, 'Well, why?' And I said, 'Because I'm the CEO, and I think it can be done.' And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit."

I think this is a common downfall of many organizations and projects and it results from a sort of "design by committee".  Fred Brooks makes a similar point in The Mythical Man Month with regards to building software:

Simplicity and straightforwardness proceed from conceptual integrity.  Every part must reflect the same philosophies and the same balancing of desiderata.  Every part must even use the same techniques in syntax and analogous notations in semantics. 

Concpetual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.

In the case of Apple, Steve Jobs is the bolt that holds the whole structure together and the success of Apple can be directly related to Jobs' vision.  From concept to implementation, he enforces coceptual integrity at all levels of the organization.

I think the significance of conceptual integrity struck me when I was sitting in OfficeMax one day as my wife was looking for some supplies for school.  Christopher Lowell's Seven Layers of Design: Fearless, Fabulous Decorating was sitting on a desk that was next to the executive chair that I was fiddling with.  In summary, Lowell drives each of the project rooms in the book with his "seven layers of design" to demonstrate how easy it is to change a room from drab to fab in seven easy steps (yes, that sounded non-hetero in my head, too).  As I flipped through it, I couldn't help but admire how he made his philosophy so succint and consistently applied it throughout the book; it made it seem so easy.

I think the lesson to be learned from this is the importance of conceptual integrity from design to implmentation.  Good designs often fall flat in implementation due to poor adherence to the core concepts and ideas of the designer.

I came across a blog post today that examined Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 speech, titled Cross of Iron.

What struck me a bit was the similarity of his message and vision to that of the Dalai Lama when he was at Rutgers a few weeks back.

In particular, the following excerpts mirrored the the perspective of the Dalai Lama with regards to war in the modern, globalized world:

"First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations."

In his lecture at Rutgers, the Dalai Lama expressed that, in today's world, as we are increasingly dependent on other nations in one way or another, it doesn't make sense to label countries as enemies and wage war.  In doing so, in a sense, a nation wages war against itself.  This is true on many levels with the US as we have seen our soldiers die, our funds sink into a hole as a (very expensive) natural disaster hits our shores, and our reputation damaged for the near future.

Gonna have to read the rest of that sometime later today.

With the release of Visual Studio.Net 2005 right around the corner, I think it's about time to start a deep dig into ASP.Net 2.0 and C# 2.0.

The MSDN documentation is as good a starting point as any book, and it's free to boot!  As my friend Dave likes to say, "You can't beat free!"

Here are some of the more interesting topics (a personal bookmark of sorts, I guess):

• An Introduction to C# Generics
• Iterators
• Nullable Types
• C# Programming Guide (including the above)
  

Perhaps the feature I'm most excited about, with regards to C# 2.0, is generics.  My goodness, this will save so much time, effort, and silly code.  I've been using various typed collection generators so I'm happy to see this added to the framework.  On the ASP.Net front, I'm very excited about the provider model (and all of the different built in components like membership and roles), Atlas, and master pages.

A lot of stuff to digest, for sure.  Now my only question is how long it will take before any of our clients are even remotely interested in doing projects with .Net 2.0.  Past experience tells me it'll be at least 2-3 years before companies start to move over and some may never do so (Newegg is still using ASP Classic; why change what's not broken?).

I keep telling myself that I'm going to start a small mini-project in ASP.Net 2.0, but I'm just too turned off by the idea of mystery feature cuts between beta/RTM and the final product.  I've been in a "wait and see" type of mode, but reading more about the framework itself.

On a loosely related note, I found that Jason Gaylord did a port of the very early .Net 2.0 starter kit photo gallery project to .Net 1.1.  I've been looking for a good .Net photo gallery app for a while now, so I may take a look into this.

On an interview yesterday, one of my interviewers asked about my experience at ITT.  Specifically, he asked whether I knew Chris .

Now a quick flashback; Chris was my second level manager at ITT.  Towards the end of my stint at ITT, he and I were butting heads over whether to use Plumtree to satisfy an internal client's request.  Obviously, management wins in these situations.  He also took me into his office one time and chewed me out for asking for a raise (which he was nice enough to give to me anyways).

Back to the interview; I was kinda thrown off a bit and had to think for a moment on how to respond.  I mean, I have no hard feelings towards Chris, as I was able to work with a lot of freedom and responsibility when I was at ITT, but I can't say that we parted ways on the best of terms.  I decided to give the honest answer: Chris is one of those stubborn, hardnosed guys that can be difficult to work with at times (I am too ).  I think he took it well, as anyone who knows Chris knows that he can be a tough to work with at times (as am I).  All in all, I think it was a bad interview, but not necessarily any fault of my own.

To begin with, I had missed several tabs of an Excel spreadsheet that I was supposed to fill out and email back to the HR recruiter (who notices tabs in a spreadsheet?).  Doh!  In addition, there was tons of paperwork and a set of pre-interview questionaires that the recruiter had to fill out (would have been faster if I typed it instead of her).  That alone took 1.5+ hours to complete.  Then, during the interview, it really didn't seem like the interviewer was very interested (seemed as if he had more pressing matters).  He pretty much asked me the same questions I answered in the pre-interview questionaire (even though he was holding and obviously reading it).  Blah!  I also brought along my laptop with demos of my work, but the interviewer was obviously not interested, as I hinted several times that I could demo some of the work that I mentioned in my resume.

Not only that, it wasn't overly technical at all.  Actually, there was no discussion of technical skills whatsoever, which is a bit disappointing, as I think it gives good insight into the types of people an organization has (and also gives me a chance to shine).

As an aside, I've always wondered why IT consulting companies still rely so heavily on paper based procedures.  It would have been much easier to have the forms online and allow applicants to fill it out before the interview.  I mean, who keeps records of the addresses of your employers filed in your head?  What about reference contacts?

They did have a very nice building though.  Damn, it's one of the nicest buildings I've ever been in (even nicer than the Merrill Lynch Hopewell campus, which was a pretty nice building).  Even had a huge Samsung DLP television in the conference room; Awesome.

Overall, not a very good interview, but who knows.

In any case, it's one of those "wow" moments when you realize how small the world really is.  As I learned in the last month, one of my coworkers here at Immedient, Evan, previously worked at MarketSource, where my friend Hoon had worked just a few months before (he's now an actuary).  Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, the recruiter mentioned that she used to work down the street from where I work now and she used to cold call our company (for what purpose, I don't know).

A small world indeed.

As I was laying down to sleep one night last week, I started thinking about the computer science field and where I would want to focus if I were to do graduate studies (probably software engineering or UI related work).  I started to build a "map" (okay, it's not really a map) of the CS field in my head and I thought I'd share it with anyone that's looking to study computer science.

Without further delay, here is my map and commentary:

Core Principles

In my opinion, the core principles of computer science are:

• Mathematics.  At the heart of it all, computer science is really a branch of mathematics.  I don't think anyone who doesn't have a fondness for math (you don't have to be terribly great at it) will make it far in computer science (and if they do, they probably copied their calc. homework ).  If you look at most computer science curriculums, you'll find that they're heavy in mathematics.
  
• Programming Languages.  All computer scientists must know at least a few useful programming languages (and the good ones know many). Programming languages are the mechanism by which we communicate human ideas and concepts to machines.  Different areas of study will typically involve different types of languages.  For example, most application development is done in a general purpose programming language (like Java, C#, or Visual Basic.Net).  From my understanding, most of the work in the field of AI is done in functional languages such as Scheme, Lisp, and Prolog (these languages were designed for AI).  In mathematics applications, you'll find that many computer scientists rely on math programming languages like MATLAB.  So each branch in computer science typically relies upon and utilizes different types of languages (although you see crossover as well).
  
• Tools and Environments.  All computer scientists rely heavily upon their tools to get their work done.  From emacs, to vi, to pico, to Visual Studio.Net, having the proper tools for the job is very important to the computer scientist.  The core tool is almost always some mutation of a text editor (like Notepad).  Most computer scientists are familiar with at least one or two different environments/platforms as well (for most universities, this is Unix/Solaris).
  
• Algorithms.  In computer science, there are a few universally useful algorithms and concepts that everyone learns.  For example, binary sort.  Another good example is recursion (not so much an algorithm as it is a concept).
  

Main Branches

In my view, CS can be broken out into three main branches:

• Mathematical. As I mentioned, computer science is deeply concerned with solving problems in the area of mathematics. This branch of computer science is really about the application of computing to solving mathematical problems. For example, one of the persistent problems in computer science is how to efficiently factor large prime numbers (the basis of current data encryption algorithms). While this itself is more of a mathematical problem, the practical application of such solutions falls into the computer sience field. Computer scientists in the extremes of this branch (those that are practically pure mathematicians may rarely program computers and work primarily with algorithms and pseudocode).
• Theoretical. This branch of computer science deals with the theory of computing. For example, creating, categorizing, and analyzing algorithms. At Rutgers, I would say, from what I garnered from my TAs, most of the graduate level research was in this area (as opposed to mathematical or practical). The work done in this field is often not useful by itself. For example, I would classify the graduate work that Larry Page and Sergey Brin did at Stanford into this branch. Google, the search engine that you and I use daily, really falls into the third branch.
• Practical/Application. While the Rutgers graduate curriculum focuses primarily on theoretical computing, some schools focus more heavily on application/software development. This includes the actual implemention of theoretical algorithms, building user interfaces, and writing software (in the general case).

Of course, the boundaries between the different branches are not hard boundaries, but rather very loosely defined; however, generally, there is a distinction between one extreme and the other and, typically, someone intersted in one extreme will not be interested in the other extreme.

Number of Students/Types of Students

What I've noticed is that there are generally more students in the third branch than the others, with the least number of students in the mathematical branch. What I've also noticed is that at the left end of the spectrum, you'll find most of the nerds. On the right end of the spectrum, you'll find mostly geeks.

At the far right end of the spectrum (also the most populous among the CS students), are the idiots. These guys are the ones that always try to mooch code off of you as the deadline for handing in the assignment looms near. They are the stragglers that try to latch onto the nerds and geeks in hopes of getting that CS degree because of the tech boom and not because they are intrigued by the different aspects of computer science.  Not all idiots are doomed to failure; to be honest, I would classify my mother into this category (she has a masters in mathematics with "computer option").  I really don't know how she managed that one, but she told me that there was a lot of mooching  In any case, she's been highly regarded everywhere she's worked for the last few years as one of the better AS/400 developers.  So all hope is not lost; most of the idiots can become very successful and productive programmers once they realize that mooching can't get them through life.

Moving on, there are also the assholes. They're like idiots, but their people skills make them even worse since they posess superior people skills and they will try to manipulate the nerds and the geeks. You can spot these types of people by how they try to use other to their advantage.  For example, organizing study groups.  Real nerds and geeks don't need study groups to prep for exams. And if they do, they will typically do so with a select group of fellow nerds and geeks.  Another common behavioral trait is that they tend to ask many stupid questions, which, aside from the idiots, everyone in the damn lecture hall knows the answer to already.  You can almost hear everyone groan when one of these guys/gals raises his/her hand during a lecture to ask a question with an obvious answer. They ask not because they're curious, but rather to get facetime with the professor. These types of people will typically end up in IT management because of their type A personalities and lack of any real understanding of CS. It's like they accidentally enrolled in CS when they really should have enrolled in business, finance, or opertions management.

Real World Applications

Just for the sake of illustration, I listed some of the real world applications (off the top of my head) assiciated with each branch. Don't make too much of my placement of the text as, clearly, database systems require significant knowledge from each of the branches.

Areas of Study/Disciplines

As with the real world application, these are just rough estimations of a few of the areas of study/disciplines in computer science (random list off the top of my head).

Summary

If there's one thing that you can take away from this, it's that computer science is not for everyone. I think people don't realize how math heavy it really is and how certain fields require extensive knowledge of mathematics. At Rutgers, for example, I think calc. II and introductory linear algebra are required.  You'll find, though, that almost all levels of math courses beyond the required ones play a significant role in different areas of computer science (for example, calc. III and linear algebra (non-intro) are important for anyone that wants to get into computer graphics). In fact, you'll find that many of the courses in math and computer science are cross discipline and can count as credit towards either major (like linear optimization).

In addition, at the graduate level, there are different types of philosophies at different institutions. At Rutgers, the curriculum and research has a heavy theoretical bias (from what my TAs told me) whereas, based on my research, a school like Steven's Institute of Technology offers more practical masters/certificate programs.

I don't know if this will actually help anyone, but I'm throwing this out there for anyone that's thinking about obtaining a computer science degree. Bear in mind that this is from the experience and perspective of one person, me and I offer none of this as fact, so take it with a grain of salt

Talk about monstrosities.  Wow.  Check out the Asus N7800GT dual GPU vid card

Good news for us CS (computer science) graduates!  Well, at least according to Mr. Gates:

"Gates addressed University of Michigan students Wednesday in kicking off a three-day college tour aimed at getting young people interested in computer science and related fields.

Gates said the global market has greatly expanded the need for technology and innovations and needs young people to create them. Although many computer science jobs are being created overseas, there still are plenty of opportunities in the United States, Gates said."

For anyone that may be interested in CS, stay tuned.  I composed a little mini-map of the CS field (at least according to my knowledge of it) that I think is helpful for those of you thinking of getting into CS.  I think I'll work on that this weekend (if I can find my map (I have a habit of writing random things on random pieces of scrap paper that either end up being recycled by someone or lost in a pile somewhere)).

On a sidenote, I encountered this lovely error message (twice!) yesterday while working on a project:

Yes, not once, but twice yesterday!  Luckily, my computer didn't explode and, to my amazement, the Earth still exists.  Whew!  Here I was hoping for the worst, too.  I started laughing as soon as I saw it and just had to take a screenshot and share

As anyone who has used the .Net System.Web.Mail namespace can attest, the default .Net mail classes are woefully lacking in functionality.  It's really a shame too, considering that they're based off of the very powerful CDONTS/CDOSYS libraries, which allow a lot more functionality.

In this first investigation into unleashing the full power .Net web mail, we will create a simple web interface to send email messages with a user uploaded attachment without saving the uploaded attachment to disk first.

Some of this functionality is likely built into many third party mail packages, but why pay for it if you have time and you can build it for free?

So if you're still interested, hop on over to the workshop article.

As always, please leave comments, questions and criticism in the post.