Random

A history of what comes next...(totally random!)

Scott Galloway — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:18:07 GMT

This is basically a brain dump…watching / reading too much Sci-Fi :-) Was thinking about the Technological Singularity and how it could happen…which lead me to a different slant on the topic…Be glad I usually spare you these strange mental spasms! I kinda liked this one tho’

Starter phase: transparent electronic retinal implant

Uses nano electrodes to stimulate the retina given specific wavelengths of infrared light. A minor modification would allow the use of this device as an optical overlay. A very small camera may be implanted within the vitreous fluid of the eye, allowing the instantaneous interpretation of the current visual field.Such information can also be 3dimensionally processed through the use of synchronized implantable camera electrode modules in both eyes. A very small, directable and morphable lens in front of the camera module would also permit focus / zoom functions for the user. Direct nerve / optic center stimulation using variable length nano scale electrodes. Covers a precisely shaped 3 dimensional area of the brain, permitting direct creation of eye equivalent images.

Even further, the creation of interface layers within the brain, permitting replication of communication patterns when passing through the brain. permits the replacement of any brain function by electronic simulation. There should be no realistic boundary to this technology, with any structure able to be simulated.a fully deployable, nanoscale mesh running throughout the brain would enable complete neural interface capabilities. This deep interaction would allow the exact replication and expansion of neural function in an external ultra computer. These simulations are well suited to quantuum computing devices. The vast increase in speed of processing and virtually limitless computational and memory enhancements provided by these computer allows virtually limitless enhancements of the human mind. Instantaneous with the creation of the first of these devices is the arrival of true ai.

Once humans experience true computer interaction they choose to forever abandon physical form. Able to live infinite lifetimes in a few milliseconds, the physical form quickly becomes abandoned. The last hold outs quickly find themselves alone on a planet of abandoned bodies. The vast worldwide network now comprised on trans humans is every individuals prefect heaven. We are become gods...time begins.

Zeroes and Ones

Scott Galloway — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:57:56 GMT

Ah, the early nineties! Zeros and Ones, along with the video below it defined the early nineties for me (sorry aggregators you have to come to the site to see these :)). I’m 36 years old tomorrow (8th Feb) and the world has changed so much in the last 19 years. The time of these songs was right at the start of the internet, the early nineties.

At the time I was barely even aware of the changes happening all around us. I remember using gopher and seeing the very first browser NCSA Mosaic at University .Though I had my first email account in 1990 I was never part of the BBS scene. Suddenly everything in the world was changing, the subject of the second song really reflected the times. The Berlin Wall was coming down, there was a new optimism starting to spread and it was the start of the amazing ride which was the nineties.

Personally I was just moving out of my parent’s house, discovering life outside a tiny little village in the South of Scotland for the first time (and girls, drink and other umm…substances; I was a late starter). I started down the road of becoming a physicist, a path which ultimately I left. I was overwhelmed by the rate of change I encountered and just couldn’t keep up, this was also the year we discovered that my mother had Hodgkin’s disease, something which changed my live to a really drastic degree (and came close to destroying me and my family).

So, I dropped out of University and my life almost came to a shuddering stop; I worked as a trolley boy in a local supermarket for the next few months…

Eventually, thanks to the UK funding system at the time which gave you a 1 year ‘false start’ for University grants and the most supportive parents who I could ever have had, I went to another University (The University of Stirling). This was a remarkable place which let me figure out who and what I wanted to be. Part of this was the isolation, it’s a campus University completely separate from anything else and singularly remarkable for it. I started out studying Japanese, Psychology and Computing (not exactly focused!), I had great friends (very unusual for me, I’m a loner), even lived abroad for a year . I studied in Holland, a country to which I owe a lot of how I came to think of life, and even convinced me that much later on I could live in the states. I had some American friends at the student house of the University of Groningen where I studied Clinical Psychology (really, more by default than anything else…). My friends who I haven’t seen in years were amazing, intelligent people who’d experienced so much of life (particular shout out to Bryce Bedford, one of the smartest people I’ve *still* ever met). Anyway, that was the most remarkable 5 years of my life, from 1990-1995, and one which shaped me from a 17 year old country bumpkin to someone who loved learning and yearned to experience everything life had to offer.

Now, I’m closer to 40 than 30 and realizing that I dropped out of life once again a few years ago. To borrow a line or two from an old pop song:

“Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history”

We’re in the middle of an historic economic depression, the world is changing radically once more and oddly, I think it’s an exciting time! The last 19 years were an amazing time when the rate of change around the world accelerated, the internet came into being and the world became connected in a way it never has before.
Right now, it feels like the world is waking up from the last couple of decades and deciding where we should all go next. We’re all being forced to think about what the next 20 years will be like, and, in part realizing that we can’t really know.

I believe in the Technological Singularity, it’s as close to religion for me as I’m ever likely to come and I’ve come to realize that this belief will shape my life for the next few years. I think we’re already seeing the rise of the next phase of civilization. With the dawn social networking, the rise of ‘viral’ thinking in entities like Twitter, massive knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and the remarkable interconnectedness mapped by Google, I really believe that we’re on a road to something amazing.
This ‘reset’ gives us the chance to decide where we want the world to go, our children are the smartest they have ever been and we’re finally veering away from the nightmare prophesied by Idiocracy.

It’s an exciting time, and at the same time scary…but then revolution always is.

John Lam’s Dev Kit

Scott Galloway — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:35:43 GMT

Kind of a ‘tools’ list but a great post on what John uses on his machine…a few new ones I hadn’t seen which is always nice!

Ok, time to get serious...

Scott Galloway — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:51:46 GMT

This site is increasing in subscriber numbers (literally doubled in a single day on the feedburner feed...not sure why!).I've also finally gotten my act together and got my old domain pointing back here again (only took me umm...a year). I guess it's time I got more serious abut this site again.
I've held off posting any more articles for a long time (read the blog, I suffer from a chronic lack of self confidence) but I guess it's time to get back on the bike. What I do want to post about is the more basic stuff, especially around how to best design and build an ASP.NET site. Oh, and I just realized...for those who don't know who the hell I am, I'm a Program Manager on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft...one of my responsibilities for vNext of ASP.NET is to 'own' (MS term...basically means 'be responsible') the ASP.NET Page Framework. I was an ASP.NET developer for a long time before this and I'm passionate about our technology.
I think a theme of my posts / articles will increasingly be wading through all the new stuff we're coming out with all the time...I want to focus on the practical side of building software, e.g. LINQ is fantastic...but how does it fit into a security model / n-tier architecture, should you abandon Web Forms (a.k.a., the classic ASP.NET pages) and use MVC instead (for some things frankly, yes...), where does Dynamic Data fit in. I'm not an evangelist and I recognize that some platforms are just better than ours right now for a lot of applications.

So, a question...what would you like to see me write about...what don't you know that you wish you did, what do other people write about that you just don't grok (I still remember a long night just not getting the ASP.NET page lifecycle for example). Tell me, if I don't know I work in the right place to find out the answers to the questions!

Anniversaries make me sad...to the last best chance

Scott Galloway — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:43:23 GMT

It's been ten years K...I know you still read this blog on occasion. This is for you...my last best chance...

My experimental blog...

Scott Galloway — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:04:46 GMT

UPDATE: I'm not moving to BlogEngine.net...I've spent a couple of days working through the code and to get the level of performance I want would take a significant amount of rework. The most serious issue is how BlogEngine loads in posts...it loads them all into memory at first page load and holds them there...great if you have 20 or so posts, but I have >800 with hundreds more comments...this is a significant issue IMHO! It's an elegant little engine but it just doesn't scale at a pretty fundamental level.
I'm now a proud member of Phil's SubText Project, vNext of Subtext addresses a lot of the concerns I had with the current SubText...and frankly I can use my time better helping with that than with BlogEngine.

My poor little server which lives under my desk at home is being put to use once more to host what will eventually replace this blog. It's currently a vanilla install of BlogEngine.net but I plan (and have already begun) to chop stuff around a bit to try out some ideas I'm playing with. One big thing will be to get a redirection engine working on it (most likely based on the WebFormRouting stuff which Phil put together). One of the big challenge is going to be making the changes I want whilst retaining the ability to use the existing Themes and Extensions which play a huge part in making BlogEngine.net so interesting. Anyway, that's the plan...my 'play' site will continue to be experimental until I can get something which allows current links to continue to work correctly. Priorities are:

Get a decent redirection engine plugged in and working to preserve my existing links
Scratch a few itches I've found in the Blogengine.net code; URL handling is pretty basic, clean up some Singleton handling, get rid of Viewstate, more agressive caching...
Get a design back on track, I've let this slip severely with the current blog site, I have a few ideas I'm playing with and can use it as an opportunity to brush up on my CSS skills...
Play with some more AJAX / Silverlight stuff...basically any client side interaction should never require postback...and this will help me clean up the look of the main page (AJAX Control Toolkit will help a LOT!)
If I get a chance, integrate some additional functionality ideas...

The state of the art...spelunking in the .NET Source

Scott Galloway — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:08:59 GMT

One of the nice things about being on the ASP.NET team is that I finally get to scratch the various itches (on that topic, Poison Oak...very itchy!) that have been bugging me for a few years. I finally get to play around with the source and see what effect changing various bits and bobs has on how stuff works. I really do recommend spending some time spelunking in the .NET Source code. You can actually get this source (in a very non-official and non-supported way) using .NET Mass Downloader. This is just such an awesome resource...want to see how a server control like the Repeater works...look at the source! Trying to figure out why Viewstate behaves in a weird way...well, you get the idea. Right now you can get the source for these .NET 3.5 assemblies...that is a LOT of source!

Mscorlib.DLL
System.DLL
System.Data.DLL
System.Drawing.DLL
System.Web.DLL
System.Web.Extensions.DLL
System.Windows.Forms.DLL
System.XML.DLL
WPF (UIAutomation.DLL, System.Windows.DLL, System.Printing.DLL, System.Speech.DLL, WindowsBase.DLL, WindowsFormsIntegration.DLL, Presentation.DLL, some others)
Microsoft.VisualBasic.DLL

I don't know the official word on this yet but I'd be surprised if we don't continue adding to this list in future. From my team you can of course get the ASP.NET MVC source already in Codeplex and we'll be adding even more projects to this site in the very near future...in fact we now operate a 'why can't we release the source policy'...

New and shiny...old and busted?

Scott Galloway — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:34:56 GMT

I had a comment on this blog the other day which I really got to thinking about following a discussion on a private list about how we market technologies. This is one area I'm really not qualified to talk about in any kind of 'semi-official' way but it's one of the things which bubbles under the surface of my day to day job.

It's a constant irritation working at MS...frankly some people hate us, with a passion. A fair number of the people I've talked to at work are confused by this...day to day we really do work hard to improve the working lives of the people who buy our software. But that's the thing, at it's heart MS is a business, it makes money by selling software...in the end it doesn't matter how user focused we are, if it doesn't shift boxes of Product X then it doesn't make it. The comment I was referring to earlier is an example of that dichotomy...yes, people still use VBScript based 'classic ASP', just as a huge number of people still use VB6 based windows applications and more recently WinForms apps. You wouldn't really think it though by looking at our marketing output...why? Simple, it doesn't sell new Windows licenses or Visual Studio 2008 SKUs...Microsoft is a business remember!
I'm not being down on Microsoft here (I choose to work there and I truly love the company!), it's a reality for every business and for software businesses especially. Book authors, consultants, trainers, almost everyone feeds off of the leading edge of new releases. The 'new and shiny' is where all the momentum exists, it's interesting to talk about and fun to learn. The issue (if there is one) is that just because a technology has become 'legacy' doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Some of the greatest programming books I have are for technologies I haven't written a line of code in for years. Nevertheless I spend time every year or so reading through those old books; as the saying goes 'Everything old is new again'

On the topic of books, just noticed this on the CodingHorror blog:Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should. I constantly find the lack of reading by developers a source of disdain...Jeff mentions ~~four~~ five (innumerate fool) books which are the absolute bare minimum you should read:

Code Complete 2	Don't Make Me Think	Peopleware	Pragmatic Programmer	Facts and Fallacies

Hopefully I don't have to add this any more for anyone who has ever read more than a couple of posts on this blog...but it's called 'mostlylucid' for a reason! Nothing here unless I explicitly say otherwise reflects any opinion except my own (and even then, lack of sleep and extreme moodiness has an impact). You can think what you like about me but none of these comments is in any way attributable back to my employer.

Somewhere along the way I lost my self confidence.

Scott Galloway — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:31:08 GMT

To A...it was great while it lasted.
I envy people with self confidence...there was a time when I had it but it slipped away over the years. Now I spend more and more time faking it; I'm sorry I couldn't keep up the pretense...

Ack Ack!

Scott Galloway — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:18:52 GMT

Well, it's the last day in my first week with the ASP.NET team (kind of, a few people are off to MIX) . It's been a pretty interesting week...lots to learn etc...I'm still getting used to the team dynamic and my place in that (I think everyone else is a senior...I'm not due to some dubious career choices over the years). Still, I have lots of responsibility and a lot of work to do over the next short while...mostly focused around releases and our process for some future work (I *did* come from Project remember ;-)). It has been a blast playing with all the latest and greatest features (many of which we just released new previews of) and getting a lot of insight as to where ASP.NET is going (and yes, having pangs for my old life where I got to use this stuff to build applications for customers). Still I have a ton to learn and it's going to be an interesting journey...whish me luck!