Memory Lane: Too much RAM!

Once upon a time …… Or at least 20+ years ago my friend Johan and I struggled with the delightful dilemma of having to much RAM in our shared computer. Johan, which at the time worked for IBM could by a blazingly fast IBM PS/2 50z at about 50% off the market price. If I remember correctly it costed 25.000 SEK with the discount. A lot of money now, even more then. So Johan asked if I would pay half and we could share the computer. We used time slicing, one would have it for one week, then bring it to the other. At that time we lived in the same building and my mother managed to get hold of a “computer desktop” with wheels which we placed the PC (sorry PS/2) on. We would go down the elevator, run through the long corridor and up the other elevator, how’s that for timesharing ?

Johan was also able to buy extra RAM (which was very expensive then) cheap from work. If I remember correctly we had 4M RAM (yep, Megabytes, not Gigabytes) which was a lot then. DOS could only use 640K directly, the rest was fixed with extended memory stuff which I have mostly blissfully forgotten today.

We never succeeded in using all that RAM so we had to find another use for it.

Enter Virtual Disk!

Since we had an excess of RAM we could use a good program called Virtual Disk (or something similar) to create a volatile disk from some of the RAM. We created a virtual disk of 2M from our total of 4M. We could then copy programs, mostly games, onto this superfast volatile disk and run them much faster.

.NET Technology Roadmap

On 30:th of September I was at Microsoft and listened to Michelle Leroux Bustamente who was giving a seminar called “NET Technology Roadmap” (Swedish intro: at PC-Ware). Michelle’s title “Survive the Technology Avalanche” had a bit more bite to it

Slides, code and other resources is now available online.

dasBlonde – Survive the Technology Avalanche – 2009 EU Tour

Another nice Windows 7 UI feature

While copying a rather large file on my Win7 RC machine I noticed that the Explorer icon in the taskbar looked different. It turns out that Windows 7 is coloring the icon to show the progress of the file copy operation.

As can be seen below it matches the “Copying Item” dialogue.

Nice work Windows 7 team!

SQL Azure Database CTP is here

Steve Marx tweeted that the SQL Azure Database CTP is here. I Just signed up for it, will be fun to try out.

I firmly believe that Azure needs a solid SQL storage to succeed. SQL Azure seems to be Microsofts SQL cloud offering.

Once I receive an account I plan to take (parts of) an existing application and port all of it up to Azure and see what happens.

Technorati-taggar: Azure,SDS

Memory Lane: Sorting many records using tape drives

A lot of you who have studied Computer Science have been confronted with sorting problems. They are good  computer class assignments, implementing bubble sort and other sorting algorithms.

The problem we discussed about sorting when I studied Computer Sciense in1986 was of a of another kind. The problem was how to most efficently sort many records using tape drives.

It felt a bit obsolete even then, but the problem was real in some situations for data centers at that time. Some data was to large to sort in memory, or even on disk, for servers then. We had some assignments where we calculated how to most efficently sort large data sets using multiple tapes and tape drives. The key to it all was to have two or more tape drives and three or more tapes and increasingly refine the sorted data by attaching them in the correct sequence.

I kind of prefer todays SELECT name FROM users SORT BY name ASC

Nowadays disk and RAM is ridiculously cheap. But 20+ years ago both were expensive and the capacity was only a fraction of todays capacity. So using tape drives was important then.

Memory Lane

Had an idea to write a couple of blogg posts on stuff from memory lane. I’ve been working professionally with computers since 1987 and using them for fun even longer. It has happened so much in the field of computers these 20-30 years, and it feels that the pace is increasing even more.

Have to try out the new SDS stuff

Have to try out the new relational SDS stuff on Azure. A good start would be to download and test Jeffs code (C#) that he put up on his blog.

Btw: he has an example using Java and JDBC as well.

How to disable Certificate Error Warning in IE

Genellay this is not a good thing to do! But sometimes when you work in development environments you need to do this to keep the Certificate Error warning from coming up. In my case it was needed because the logout is actually a logout on several levels using HTTP-redirects to travell between them. This was made impossible by the Certificate Error warning page.

To turn the warning off, change the followin registry key to 0.

HKEY_USERS\<SID>\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings:WarnonBadCertRecving

Don’t forget to turn it back to 1 after testing though! Otherwise you are a bit unprotected.

Trying out Microsoft Online Services

I registered for the free trial of Microsoft Online Services that I wrote about earlier. It’s a bit confusing the whole concept and admin stuff, but I’m just playing with it so far. The Sharepoint Online stuff looks almost exactly like an ordinary MOSS installation, I whonder why

I will try out some more stuff about it later and share my experiences.

Also read about Microsoft Online  Services at Microsoft Nyhetsblog (Swedish). Would be interesting to see how many people are trying it out? I can really see that this offering (Exchange+Sharepoint especially) would be interesting for a lot of customers. Especially smaller businessess that don’t wan’t to run their own IT-department.

Open question: Does this stuff run on top of Windows Azure?

SQL Data Services going relational

Microsoft announced today that SDS are getting relational features and dropping the ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) features. It will still be possible to use HTTP/REST to access relation datá through ADO.NET data services. I think this is good news, I wasn’t all that comfortable with the ACE concept as a replacement for SQL. So much of current programs, services and products rely on SQL and it would be hard to port them to Azure and ACE. Porting for Azure and SDS with SQL will be much easier and probably speed adoption.