This is just “WOW”!!!

Western Digital just released a new 2TB disk. Time to upgrade my home storage solution :-)

As always, James is keeping track and analyzing storage-related costs.

On Thursday I was at Big Daddy’s for Fractal’s visit to the Pacific North-West. Netflix’s Adrian Cockcroft has been a “roadie” since their beginning and listed under “guilt by association” on the band’s site* :-). He made the trip with them so it was nice to catch up with him. To my surprise, eBay’s Paul Strong was the band’s drummer :-)

I liked their non-mainstream sound. It was a good night! I now have their CDs and getting more into them.

Tonight I am going to the Tractor Tavern for North Twin’s CD release. Again, unknown music but it’s just soooo much fun going to small gigs, drinking beer, meeting and talking to people.

* I hate frame-based layouts :-(

Yes, I am a big fun! :-)

Thanks to Nuno for forwarding.

Alex Wade and I are going to be in the UK in February to talk and showcase Famulus. We are going to have the new bits with us for developers to play with and new features and samples to talk about. Here’s the announcement.

MSR Research Output Repository Platform @ Dev8D

Come participate in the JISC Developer Happiness Days at Birkbeck, University of London, and join us on Friday, February 13^th for a half-day exploration of the MSR Research Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”) .  Alex Wade and Savas Parastatidis from Microsoft External Research will be there to keep the happiness flowing and will combine a few short demos with lots of hands-on labs and interactive sessions.   We will show off some of the great new features coming in Beta 2 (RDFs support, data model extensibility, semantic-store integrated authorization, etc.) and will share lots of code samples (e.g. simple inferencing).  Let us know what you want to cover!   

The MSR Research Output Repository Platform is a freely available platform built on top of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and the ADO.Net 3.5 Entity-Framework.  Beta 1 of the platform is currently available here .  We will also bring along an early drop of our pending beta 2 release, and will help you get it installed on your laptop if you want to play along!   Software!  Prizes!  Beer! 

If you plan to join us on Friday, please register for the Dev8D event  and drop us a note at scholar@microsoft.com and provide your name & institution.

It’d be great to see you there. Feel free to send us suggestions of things you’d like to see explored, covered, demonstrated or what we should avoid.

It’s been a wonderful weekend so far. The weather has been amazing: sunshine and blue sky. The snow was not fantastic, though, but we can’t have everything.

It’s been absolutely fantastic seeing Jim and his wife again. I miss it how we tease each other and all the geeky discussions :-) Here are some photos from Sunday...

We are actually on our knees at different levels. He’s not that much taller than me :-)

 
Going down hill (I was skiing and taking photographs with my expensive digital SLR... I never learn :-)

  
Jim in action. Yeah, he thinks he’s cool because he snowboards. Skiing is more “in” these days :-)

From the top of Blackcomb

Time to get ready and go out for dinner at Whistler village.

This is just crazy. Over the weekend and during a conversation with my skiing baddies Simran and Theoni, Simran mentioned the story of a woman who had 69 children!!! We couldn’t believe it so he just sent us the reference.

Apparently it’s a story from the 1800’s reported by multiple sources. It’s not 100% certain though.

This guy had two wives, the first of whom gave birth to 69 children: 4 x quadruples, 7 x triples, and 16 twins!

Page 96 of the “Quadruplets and Higher Multiple Births” by Marie M. Clay.

I am seriously impressed. A huge improvement, in terms of speed and responsiveness from Vista. I’ve been using the M3 build of Windows 7 for some time now but the Beta 1 is awesome. I love the “boot from a VHD” feature.

It’s going to be available for everyone on Friday. Give it a spin.

I was wondering whether the community out there could help me. If you don’t know the answer, please blog about it and point people here so we can find the answer, if there is one...

Few months ago I read in Robert’s blog about the distinction he made between “Infrastructure as a Service”, “Platform as a Service”, and “Software as a Service” when talking about the Cloud Computing continuum. I am writing two articles on Cloud Computing and I’d like to find out whether there was a prior use of those terms in the same context before Robert’s entry. I am not aware of any others and Robert didn’t know of any prior references. Do you?

Please leave a comment here or just email me at savas@parastatidis.name.