Despite all those Discovery channel shows, sharks are still one of the most misunderstood animals in the oceans.  They are magnificent creatures who's ferocity, for the most part, is exaggerated due to the media frenzy that occurs with each shark attack, which typically leads to the killing of the suspect shark at human hands.  Quite sad when such a creature is simply living within Nature's guidelines.

Perhaps what's even more disturbing is how the Chinese and the Japanese systematically hunt, de-fin, and then discard live sharks.  I once saw a video of this when I was in high school (you can find a similar PSA-type video here) and I will never forget the image of the blood red waters around the vessel, the writhing sharks, still alive and bleeding after the dorsal fin was cut off discarded like garbage into the ocean.

Absolutely sickening...

So it's encouraging to read that Yao Ming, a prominent role model to Chinese youth and Chinese society in general, has sworn off shark's fin soup and has apparently picked up a cause to help promote wildlife protection.  Hopefully, this leads to a decrease in the incredibly grissly, wasteful, and disgusting practice of finning sharks.

I came across an article on Tomshardware this morning regarding Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, who is now starting a social networking site/portal for seniors.

... <that's me sitting here contemplating>

Yeah, sounds familiar to me alright.  Back in the summer of 2000, I was working with a Mister Ezra Hedaya at a small startup called iCanServices.  The idea was to tap into a largely ignored marketspace: the "mature adult" (age 55+) internet user and offer them a way to stay in touch with their families, with each other, and offer a variety of services specifically tailored to these users.

It's one of those situations where the idea was ahead of its time.  One of the biggest issues was that most of the elderly were very wary of computers and certainly, the high prices of components those days didn't help much at all.  It was a big stumbling block to try to introduce a web application when most of the users didn't have access to the web. 

Fast forward to today, seven years later.  Technology has slowly melded into the society even more so since 2000 and a new generation of these mature adults are starting to retire from a business world that has embraced computers and the Internet as a daily instrument.  Computers and internet connections while certainly commonplace in 2000, were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today and nowhere near as affordable.  With the introduction of UMPCs (Ultra Mobile Personal Computers) and the slew of really cheap desktops nowadays, Captain's dream might have taken off and perhaps I'd be a wealthy IPO millionaire today (yeah, in my wildest dreams).

Chalk this one up as another missed opportunity

I came across an article on some common myths with regards to Windows passwords (via Fark).

The short of it is to keep the password easy to remeber, make it at least 15 characters, and don't forget that you can use spaces in passwords as well to create passphrases.

Man, I don't about anyone else, but I personally cannot wait for these guys to open a can of whup-ass :D Graaaaaawr (I really mean that)!!

The schedule can be found on the Team USA subsection of NBA.com.

I'm really looking forward to this team play as it should be some fast paced, exciting basketball.

One has to wonder, what would the world by like if he had won the presidency?

I pondered this as I was laying down to sleep last night, after viewing these two videos which I came across in a thread on Fark.  I think the world would be a very, very, very different place had Gore won the presidency in 2000.

An incredibly revealing set of videos made by Spike Jonze (of Adaptation and Being John Malkovich fame) shows a very personable, humorous, incredibly intelligent, and passionate Al Gore.  His vision is not just about global warming and the environment (although he does bring it up in the video).  He has a genuine conviction to making America a better place for the lower and middle class in America through education, fostering our competitive advantages in industry, and ensuring that American's are ready for the coming (this was shot in 1999) information age.

I think that seeing his interaction with his family and especially his daughters in these videos actually reveals a great deal about him and the values he brings to the table as compared to Bush, who also happens to have two daughters.

Part 1 and Part 2.

And if there was any doubt that the election was stolen: "How Bush Defeated Gore--The Real Story"...watch how Clayton Roberts, director of the Florida Division of Elections, squirms.

So this afternoon, I received an email from Kevin Downs (as I'm on his mailing list), the developer of NDoc with the following:

I have decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0 and no longer participate in any open-source development work.

The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work with!

To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago! Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for community projects.

Once ‘Sandcastle’ is released, it is my belief that it will become the de-facto standard and that NDoc will slowly become a stagnant side-water. This will happen regardless of technical considerations, even if Sandcastle were to be less feature-complete. It's just an inevitable result of MS's 'not-invented-here' mentality, one only has to look at Nant and NUnit to see the effects of MS 'competition'.

This is not, however, my only reason for stopping development work - I have a big enough ego to think I could still produce a better product than them

As some of you are aware, there are some in the community who believe that a .Net 2.0 compatible release was theirs by-right and that I should be moving faster – despite the fact that I am but one man working in his spare time...

This came to head in the last week; I have been subjected to an automated mail-bomb attack on both my public mail addresses and the ndoc2 mailing list address. These mails have been extremely offensive and resulted in my ISP temporarily suspending my account because of the traffic volume. This incident has been reported to the local authorities, although I am highly doubtful they will be able to do anything about it.

This has was the ‘last-straw’ and has convinced me that I should withdraw from the community; I’m not prepared to have myself and my family threatened by some lunatic!

Kevin

P.S. If anyone wants to take over as admin on the SourceForge NDoc project - contact me. If not, I'll be removing myself in 14 days.

It's kind of upsetting how this has panned out as I can certainly understand Kevin's displeasure at how he was treated by a few members of the community.  But at the same time, I'm curious as to why the project, while surely utilized by many .Net developers world wide, never picked up more developers to help share the load.

While it is quite disappointing as I really liked NDoc's simplicity and ease of use, I had felt that this would be the likely end once I started reading about Microsoft's Sandcastle project.

As for the individual(s) who perpetrated the email bombs, all I can say is WTF?  That's a terrible and childish way to get what you want.

The way our lives flow through time and the repitition that each of us encounter, day after day, tends to blur the multitude of crossroads that we reach and the different decisions that we make at each of these crossroads.

In a sense, this is what it's like to walk around a crowded city like New York City.  There are turns everywhere and roads and alleys which lead to every nook of the city.  But by design, it's never difficult to get back to where you were in case you do make the wrong choice and turn down the wrong road...these decisions come in passing and perhaps you don't even think about it.

But in every life, there are milestones that approach and crossroads that split into two clearly defined paths with no readily apparent way back to where you started. Looking down either road at this intersection, we imagine ourselves in the future and what it would be like to take either path.  Will we be fortunate and meet success or will it come to be that our decision haunt us in our dreams?  The decision is never easy as unlike a city street, it may be miles before we reach the U-turn.

I've felt this rarely in my near 25 years of life.  Even marriage was an easy and natural decision for me.  And now such a decision weighs on me with a paralyzing force; I just don't know what to do.  I am comfortable, but not completely satisfied.  My sensible side tells me to continue on the path that I have taken.  The dreamer in me tells me to ditch the map and head into the unknown.

Ah, to be at a crossroad in life, to be at once filled with hope and fear as well.

Wow...talk about extraordinary craftsmanship:

http://www.starcraft.org/fanart/reallife3dart/1104

C# 2.0 has barely been with us and already, the 3.0 spec is shaping up.  While the change from 1.0 to 2.0 was dramatic in the way that it simplified what used to be quite laborious tasks in C#, the change to 3.0 is perhaps too bold of a jump, bringing the C# language close to the territory usually reserved to academia and research divisions.

Perhaps at the heart of this is the introduction of LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) to the C# specification.  Several changes and additions to the C# language were necessary to make this possible and make it "user friendly".  One of these is the introduction of Lambda Expressions to the C# language, giving C# a feel closer to that of....JavaScript.  Yup, good ol' JavaScript (one of my favorate languages).

Daniel Cazzulino touches upon some of the interesting "side effects" of this change in the language while Abhinaba believes that while the new language features are certainly welcome and useful to a set of users, for most, it will only add to the "surface area" of the C# language and frustrate/confuse users.

C# has originally developed from C++ /Java and is (was :^) ) a strongly typed object-oriented language. The new features being introduced like closure, continuation (yes, yes very limited continuation) in C#2.0 and now type inference, lambda expressions are de-generating the language. Even though there are people go gaga about continuation and lexical closures these are fundamentally functional language features and should be left to that. Introduction of bits and pieces of functional language features are not going to add value to C# and at the same time the surface area of C# is growing beyond what most developer can grasp.

I tend to agree with this view.  Having spent most of my career as a consultant and dealing with many developers who did not come from a math, engineering, or computer science background, I can say with 50.01% accuracy that 87.96% of .Net developers will a) be confused and befuddled by the new language features, b) never use the features and never even know that they are there, or c) change professions :P

Okay, maybe option c is more of a pipe dream.  But regardless, the surface area of C# is becoming quite large and perhaps even a bit, how shall I put it, unwieldy?  Whereas developers used to have disagreements over implementation and architecture details, will we now see disagreement over language feature usage and constructs?  One thing is for sure, I'm certain that a lot of developers will be left in the dust.

Most of the mid-career Microsoft developers I've met got their start doing VB6 and VBScript with ASP.  In the transition to .Net, I've discovered that many have not really transitioned so much as adapted; kind of like they're still writing VBScript...except it's called VB.Net now.  This isn't the territory of VB developers only, however; I've met many C# developers who just have no clue and continue to do silly things like concatenating huge (I mean HUGE) strings.

Well, in any case, enough ranting I guess.  If you're interested, take a look at the language specs over at MSDN (already got 'em printed and stapled).

The USA has been around for a little more than a mere two centuries. Admittedly, there isn't much history to be had in such a short span of time, at least relative to Old World countries in Europe or the empires in the East which have millennia of history.

But none-the-less, in these two-plus centuries, I'd like to think we've made a name for ourselves, particularly in the fronts of industrial and technical innovation and engineering.

The light bulb, controlled nuclear reactions, mass produced automobiles, microwave ovens, the telephone, and the cell phone to name a few, are all innovations that came out of the US. These are historical advances in the course of mankind that will have a lasting impact for decades to come.

Should we not, then, protect the sites where such innovations originated? Then  should we not place a value on these sites as a sort of historical monument to ingenuity and weave them into the fabric of our history?  These are our Colosseums, our Leaning Towers, our Pyramids; these are historical monuments at  their birth.  Protecting these sites is the logical thing to do as, indeed, the history of the US is one of industrial and technical achievement.

So it is quite sad to find out that the legendary Bell Labs Holmdel facility (right in my backyard) is going to be razed for a new office complex.

If such a legendary landmark is razed for new office complexes, it would be quite a shame as it has indeed generated an enormous wealth of technologies and innovations in the 5 or so decades it was in operation.