Did you know that you could run a simple, effective home with your Web surfing, telephone calling, TV watching, machine backups, book writing, code editing, music listening, game playing life, all on Microsoft products and all for a reasonable price? Over the next several posts, I want to cover how my family is using Microsoft technology to make our lives better. Today, I want to give a brief description of the home network.

Just some random thoughts while reading the news over lunch. Nielsen Rating apparently released their numbers for websites for January 2008. According to the numbers reported at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/131937.asp, Google got the most eyeballs in January. What I find interesting is that the numbers for time spent on the web site implies a different ranking. I whipped out Excel for some simple analysis. The results? The top 4 companies in terms of eyeball hours are in the exact wrong order. Companies are presented in order of unique audience #s, measured in thousands (000). I added the 'Person Hours/1000 people' and 'Rank on Person Hours' columns.

Usually, FSB is entertaining. Today, the guy running the FSB blog is hilarious. The post isn't much until the last line. I won't spoil this for you but, if you have 30 seconds, go here now and read. Hilarious!

I don't think that buying Yahoo is a good thing for Microsoft. Instead, they should continue to out innovate their competition. One thing that has been a weakness for Microsoft recruiting has always been that they can't get many great developers. Really, really good developers can work wherever they like. If they prefer to live near family over Redmond, they typically tell Microsoft 'no' when asked to join the firm. Others, like me, say yes and then eventually decide to leave because one can't develop Microsoft product outside of their core development centers (Shanghai, China; Bangalore, India; Cambridge, England; Fargo, ND, USA; Silicon Valley; and Redmond, WA, USA). They avoid the many big cities that have first rate developers. My short list for new development centers in the USA is as follows:

I have had the pleasure of spending the last few days improving application performance. Specifically, my job is to improve the 'speed' dimension of the application. In doing this, I've been getting reacquainted with some well used tools: SQL Query Analyzer and dotTrace Profiler. (For those of you familiar with when SQL Query Analyzer was last available under that name, I'm working with a completely functional, happy, SQL Server 2000 installation.) It's been quite a few months since I last did this. Given that not many people get a chance to do performance analysis and improvement on a regular basis, I think that now might be a good time to rehash some common mistakes and the way to fix those mistakes.

I have a sickness. My illness causes me to skip sleep, to skip meals, and to allocate no time to play video games. Occasionally, enablers have given me money to encourage me to indulge in this illness. I have no interest in getting ‘help’. I am an author and I write about technology topics. ...

Tony Baer has an interesting post at http://www.onstrategies.com/blog/?p=251, 'SOA in a Recession?'. The question here is 'what will SOA investments look like during a recession?' Having been a part of the big client server moves of the mid to late 1990s, web deployments of 1997 to the present, and someone who has done training on SOA across the country for Wintellect, I have to say that SOA feels different from the previous two items. For client server, we had to start thinking about our applications differently. Bits of the application lived in different processes on different machines. Here, we had to rearchitect applications to deal with a new security model and to deal with the greater latencies involved in method and database calls.

My blog is back up and running. Expect lots of stuff on WCF, .NET, and other things that interest me.