- What is really not understandable is that Amazon is not able to provide a lot of books NOT internationally because of greedy publishing companies. Ok, if more would be available I would buy more and maybe never read them … maybe that is not so bad at all But I hope now with more eBook readers available the pressure will increase (and no, the PEN club is on the wrong side)

I have bought the international version of the Kindle 2 last week. So these are my impressions:

• The E Ink display is as expected, as in all current eBook Readers. It has the size of the small paperback book, so nothing for large format publishing products.
• The design of the device itself is great, it is effortless to use because it is slim and the main buttons are on the correct position
• The Amazon Whispernet works as expected, the store is easy to use and the books are delivered in under 60 seconds
• Highlighting and annotations work nicely, the dictionary popup available for every word is very interesting for non-native speakers
• Text-to-Speech actually is a interesting gimmick. It actually sounds not bad, although I am not sure how often I will use it
• Playing MP3 also works, but this is certainly not the right device for this
• Converted unprotected ePub books actually work great on the Kindle, PDF converting is only usable for PDFs without graphics. Both formats are not supported directly>
• It is disappointing that RSS feeds are not available currently for the international version; I hope that Amazon will make a better deal with the European carriers in the near future.
• What is really not understandable is that Amazon is not able to provide a lot of books NOT internationally because of greedy publishing companies. Ok, if more would be available I would buy more and maybe never read them … maybe that is not so bad at all But I hope now with more eBook readers available the pressure will increase
• Most books in Kindle format or ePub are DRM protected. I hope that the publishing industry thinks twice about how the music industry has lost the senseless battle of useless copy protections

So after buying some books, trying out some converting tools, I am starting to use the Kindle. So far I think it will be valuable for me because for now on I have not to carry around a lot of books. But it will certainly not replace all of my monthly bought books …

Today Microsoft published one interesting part of the upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2: StreamInsight. This is Microsoft’s first step into the area of CEP. After a quick look it seems that is maybe the smallest set on features which you need for a useful stream processing engine. In its core it is a typed continues query engine which is utilizing LINQ for basic operations like projection, joins, ranking and some more. The query will be directly bound to an input and output adapter and then assigned to a named application which is managed by an embeddable execution engine. Event types are simple attributes to POCO object. All events are per definition assigned to a fixed model, like interval, edge (open interval) or point in time. All is assembled programmatically; there is (currently) no support in Visual Studio. Although there is a Offline Debugger which allows it to replay event log traces.
As mentioned, this is a simple engine but interesting because it is easily embeddable and easy to handle so it is ideal for integration into existing applications. Will be interesting to see how well the current runtime actually scales on multi-processor systems.
The second interesting development is that NEsper, the always one-step-behind .Net version of the Java CEP engine Esper, is also available in a new version and now not so far behind of the mature Java version. It provides a lot more on functionality as the small Microsoft engine, although because it is aligned to the Java version, the query language is based on a SQL-related language.
Both engines are interesting because now the .Net world has finally some nice ways to utilize CEP which is more and more becoming a commodity and is drifting out of its niche of expansive but not necessarily more useful commercial CEP application servers.
Would be interesting to test the actual performance of these two new(late)comers because a lot of home grown code can be removed in some applications by using CEP concepts …

Sometimes you have to love Bill Gates: With project Tuva the old recordings with Richard Feynman, The Messenger Series from 1964, is presented now online and extended with a lot of additional extras which are linked to the content of the lectures itself. Richard Feynman was one of the best known Scientists of the 20th century and famous for his very well written books and his humour. And yes, he also was one of the greatest physicists of the century.
If there ever was a reason to install Silverlight, this is one (if only it would also be available for Linux).

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is publically available and besides CLR/.Net 4.0 the IDE itself changes a bit:

• The Visual Studio Shell 2010 is based on WPF, the first time Microsoft actually is using this in one of its own product.
• Some features available in R# are now also directly supported by the IDE like symbol navigation and automatic implementation generation.
• Silverlight and F# are integrated out of the box.
• Historical debugging is an interesting new concept, the debugger now tracks certain events until you actually hit your break point.
• Some basic support for UML was added.

All in all the switch to WPF gives the Visual Studio Shell new important graphical possibilities. WPF has also a big downside: it needs a lot more resources as the old forms, so you need a bit more graphical and computational power as with the current version. At least you will know why 2 or 4 cores are useful … The Team Foundation Server functionality will be also extended but as it looks the knew version is no improvement to the current one, which is not worth the money and effort, so it will be easier to invest in a working issue tracker, a build server, a test case management tool and a usable wiki. Integration is overrated if it is not usable in real projects effectively …

Google presented the Wave project this week at its development conference Google I/O 09. A lot of blogs (ok, maybe nearly every one) covered Wave in the last days so I have also to write something about it after watching the presentation:

• The presentation of an conversation between several participants is very natural: people can enter and leave conversations, no matter if online or offline, add additional information and fork new ones. The features of Mail, IM and Wikis are finally merged.
• Updates of information snippets work in near real time. This is definitely possible today and will become a lot easier with the availability of Web workers.
• The conversation stream, called Wave, can be edited concurrently and they are versioned so they can play back in time.
• Participants in the conversation can not only be persons but also automatons like translation engines and automatic content enrichment. The presentation of Google’s spelling and grammar proofing Robot and the automatic translation engine was awesome.
• Wave will use important HTML 5 features and will push the evolution of the web browsers massively. Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera are leading here, not only on the desktop but more important on mobile clients (maybe also Palm Pre will be an important platform here?), Microsoft is a generation behind here and maybe will catch up with their completely new browser engine after IE 8.
• Wave can be federated. This means that you can have your own Wave servers active, participate in open Waves but keep your conversation private.
• The Wave project will be open sourced, not only the API and the protocol but also the reference implementation. With Google Maps they overlooked how fast and creative the community worldwide reacted now they plan to use this potential directly.

I really was surprised by this presentation; I think nobody has expected something like this. If Google gets this of the ground Wave will have the biggest impact in how we communicate and process information since search engines and Email itself. Because of the openness of the platform and the inherently possibility to federate the infrastructure this concept can work. Something remains me here of Gelernter’s ideas in Mirror Worlds …

Since two weeks I have besides my main workstation on Vista64 and my Sony TZ with Ubuntu 9.04 also a third system, a 3^rd generation Mac.mini. Besides OS X I’m interested in the iPhone development environment and sometimes Keynote is nice to have. I’ve sporadically used a Mac before but this time I can play a bit longer with it. After this short time, I had a mixed experience: On the positive side you get

• A really nice hardware design. If the thing gets in the future a HDMI port and an BluRay drive it will be the optimal living room system. And it is fast and quiet.
• The basic configuration is easy to handle for anyone, including WLAN. It just works
• Dashboard brings a real advantage, more usable than Vistas Sidebar
• You get the development environment for free (Xcode)
• You get a lot of good software, like Quicksilver, for OS X besides a lot of normal Linux applications are or can be ported. In general the support of software is better than on Linux.
• The development environment provides nice utilities like Instruments, all in all it seems that you have a good set of tools to develop software again without Virtual Machines.
• Thanks Steve, there is a Terminal!

On the down side some things are annoying

• Who ever has designed the keyboard and the and the “Mighty” mouse has never worked longer than 5 minutes with them
• The German keyboard layout is simply silly. The English one is better.
• Although OS X now has a VPN server out of the box, it does not work flawlessly if you use a German keyboard on the client side: as soon as you switch to some applications, like Xcode, the key mapping gets confused and for what ever reason, special characters work except the lower case “b”.
• Xcode is only a very basic IDE, like Windows Visual Studio before 2003 … really, Eclipse with CTD and KDevelop a bit more up to the task if only they can understand Objective-C.
• Sometimes configuration is to easy and dangerous: I wanted to share a directory via SMB, OS X shared it and all others on the disk too, But only my original target was protected by my user credentials… not what someone expects.
• Why the hell is the shell per default case insensitive?!?

May only problem which make the daily work a bit harder as needed is the key mapping problem with VPN and Xcode or better to find a replacement for Xcode (and yes, Emacs can do it but hey I’m a long term IntelliJ and Resharper user …)

Because I’m sometimes a bit lazy, I decided to use Twitter as my micro blog engine. My current tweets are visible on the left side. In the past I’ve never thought that Twitter is of any use for me but it is a useful way to post interesting information snippets quickly without the need to write a lengthy blog entry (as I told, I’m lazy).

The latest book of Craig Larman, Scaling Lean & Agile Development, written with Bas Vodde is a very well written guideline and collection of suggestions how Scrum can be scaled to larger teams (meaning more than 7 members). Instead of suggesting more organizational clutter like “Scrum-of-Scrums” it focus an really challenging topics like how to handle large backlogs without loosing the view for the big picture. Besides providing practical suggestions, the book does also a very well job in providing introductions to the values and ideas behind Scrum which are rooted in the Lean and Agile movement as well as in classical ones such as System Thinking. This is the first book I’ve seen which combines a long time of personal experience with all important values and ideas from the domains of Lean, Agile and Scrum (and their foundations) in a very compact form.
Highly recommended!

Presented on the PDC 2008, Microsoft has finally released the first version of the concurrency unit-testing tool CHESS. It was available already for Win32 applications but is now also available for managed Win32 code and integrated in Visual Studio 2008. Because CHESS is controlling all threads and their schedule while executing your code it will find “Heisenbugs”, means it is possible for the first time to build unit tests which are capable to test concurrency reliable.  This is a unique capability which I’ve not seen  in any other  test framework,  so it will be interesting to run it against some code of my own as well as from 3rd party libraries…
The only downside so far is that the Visual Studio version needed is the Team System one, because of the Microsoft unit test framework, which is not available to everyone. But Microsoft provides a trial version, valid until December 2009, as Virtual PC image so there is a way to use CHESS.

I have recently read a book about the last big cholera epidemic in London which leads to one of the first great data visualisations, Snow’s Map. He counted the number of deaths at every location so this is how he found the center of the epidemic at the Broad Street pump and discovered that the contaminated water was responsible. Currently cholera is back in Zimbabwe on large scale. The most important thing of the treatment is simply clean water, which seems not to be available any more in a country which was one of the highest developed ones before 1980 and destroyed by the criminal regime of Robert Mugabe. It is time that the neighbour countries take care of this mess.