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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Update - read the first two comments. I'm leaving the rest of the article as it is in order to avoid revisionism. The solution is in the first two comments though.
According to the Windows Vista feature page, Vista is going to be able to use external memory devices (USB flash drives and the like to you and me) to act as extra memory to save having to go to the hard disk. I've heard this mentioned at a few places, and it's always asserted that EMDs are slower than memory but "much, much faster" than disks. This has just been stated as a fact that everyone would just go along with. I've been a bit skeptical myself, so I thought I'd write a couple of very simple benchmarks. I emphasise the fact that they're very simple because it could well be that I'm missing something very important.
Here are three classes. Writer just writes out however many blocks of 1MB data you ask it to, to whichever file you ask it to. Reader simply reads a whole file in 1MB chunks. RandomReader reads however many 1MB chunks you ask it to, seeking randomly within the file between each read.
Writer
using System;
using System.IO;
public class Writer
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Random rng = new Random();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024*1024];
DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
using (FileStream stream = new FileStream (args[0], FileMode.Create))
{
for (int i=0; i < int.Parse(args[1]); i++)
{
rng.NextBytes(buffer);
Console.Write(".");
stream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
}
}
DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine (end-start);
}
}
|
Reader
using System;
using System.IO;
public class Reader
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024*1024];
DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
int total=0;
using (FileStream stream = new FileStream (args[0], FileMode.Open))
{
int read;
while ( (read=stream.Read (buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
total += read;
Console.Write(".");
}
}
DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine (end-start);
Console.WriteLine (total);
}
}
|
RandomReader
using System;
using System.IO;
public class RandomReader
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024*1024];
Random rng = new Random();
DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
int total=0;
using (FileStream stream = new FileStream (args[0], FileMode.Open))
{
int length = (int) stream.Length;
for (int i=0; i < int.Parse(args[1]); i++)
{
stream.Position = rng.Next(length-buffer.Length);
total += stream.Read (buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
Console.Write(".");
}
}
DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine (end-start);
Console.WriteLine (total);
}
}
|
I have five devices I can test: a 128MB Creative Muvo (USB), a 1GB PNY USB flash drive, a Viking 512MB SD card, my laptop hard disk (fairly standard 60GB Hitachi drive) and a LaCie 150GB USB hard disk. (All USB devices are USB 2.0.) The results are below. This is pretty rough and ready - I was more interested in the orders of magnitude than exact figures, hence the low precision given. All figures are in MB/s.
| Drive | Write | Stream read | Random read |
| Internal HDD |
17.8 |
24 |
22 |
| External HDD |
14 |
20 |
22 |
| SD card |
2.3 |
7 |
8.3 |
| 1GB USB stick |
3.3 |
10 |
10 |
| 128MB USB stick |
1.9 |
2.9 |
3.5 |
Where possible, I tried to reduce the effects of caching by mixing the tests up, so I never ran two tests on the same location in succession. Some of the random reads will almost certainly have overlapped each other within a test, which I assume is the reason for some of the tests showing faster seek+read than streaming reads.
So, what's wrong with this picture? Why does MS claim that flash memory is much faster than hard disks, when my flash drives appear to be much slower than my laptop and external drives? (Note that laptop disks aren't noted for their speed, and I don't have a particularly fancy one.) It doesn't appear to be the USB bus - the external hard disk is fine. The 1GB stick and the SD card are both pretty new, although admittedly cheap. I doubt that either of them are worse quality than the majority of flash drives in the hands of the general public now, and I don't expect the average speed to radically increase between now and the Vista launch, in terms of what people actually own.
I know my tests don't accurately mimic how data will be accessed by Vista - but how is it so far out? I don't believe MS would have invested what must have been a substantial amount of resource into this feature without conducting rather more accurate benchmarks than my crude ones. I'm sure I'm missing something big, but what is it? And if flash can genuinely work so much faster than hard disks, why do flash cards perform so badly in simple file copying etc?
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Wow. Kevin has been busy cutting and pasting URL's. He delivered an excellent Webcast the other day on Exchange Performance Tuning, and, stickler for detail that he is, has researched loads of URL's about how to tune Exchange Server to the n'th degree.
Well Kevin, you've saved me a bit of work, and got yourself onto Rui's Weekend reading list I'll expect :-) and with you and Rick giving out all of these good resources - I can retire and go and tend my garden...!
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Apple has released an update for iPods to allow users to set volume controls following concerns over hearing loss.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
From Martin Kearn ...
For me, one of the coolest new features of SharePoint Server 2007 is Content Types. In this article, I'll aim to give a brief overview of what they are and why you should be getting excited about them (especially if you are from a SharePoint 2003 background).
More
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
New sub query .......(read more)
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
New sub query .......(read more)
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
I didn’t know this: http://www.viemu.com/index.html
I believe some people think I’m a pervert because I sometimes use VIM on Windows and I actually know how to edit stuff with that thing. Even worse, I think it’s a great little editor. But… well, it looks as if there are a lot of people crazier than me – [...]
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
One model that was put up at Spark was Jeff Schneider's which tied together users and organizations really nicely:
http://schneider.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/CompetingInterests-729197.JPG
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
I've been blown away by just how good PowerPoint 2007 is. Since I got back from the Office System Developers Conference I've been using the various 2007 Office products more and more - in particular PowerPoint. I had 2 presentations to deliver yesterday and I decided to update both with PowerPoint 2007. Sample results below (click through for full size versions):
This is all done through the magic of "IGX Graphics" and is as simple as right clicking on the text box you want to convert and selecting "Convert to IGX Graphic". You then have a whole host of layout styles and colour schemes you can apply. The above conversion on each slide was done with literally 3 selections (IGX Graphics Type -> Apply Style -> Apply Colour Scheme).
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Here is a podcast of Dion at Spark
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
The main theme from Spark was putting the user (both inside and outside the organization) first. This was felt by all to be a fundamental tenet for the future of IT and architecture by the vast majority of participants, myself included. Interestingly it was something Bill said in his keynote at Mix too.
Dion has done a great article on this on ZDNET with a diagram.
His premise is that if organisations dont step up and put the user first then they will take control. One of the people from a Fortune 100 organisation at Spark commented that blogs and Wiki's were banned in the organisation and all that was happening was that employees were setting up private wiki's for work use outside the organisation.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
We are currently experiencing one of the strongest spells of sustained growth in our history. As such, we have some full time vacancies in the following areas:
5 x IT Pros – We are looking for experienced IT professionals with excellent written and verbal communications skills. MCSE certification or be able to demonstrate equivalent knowledge. Experience as a trainer with an MCT certification would be an added benefit. With experience in one or more of the following:
- BizTalk Server 2004/2006 capacity planning, infrastructure design, operations and support
- SharePoint Portal Server and/or Windows SharePoint Services capacity planning, infrastructure design, operations and support
- Content Management Server (CMS) 2002 capacity planning, infrastructure design and operations and support
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- Microsoft Systems Management Server
- Microsoft Operations Manager
- Microsoft Live Communications Server
- Microsoft Speech Server
- Windows Patch Management technologies
- Infrastructure security knowledge, particularly in the areas of regulatory compliance, identity and access management, cryptography, certificates and secure communications
5 x Developers – We are looking for experienced .NET developers with excellent written and verbal communications skills. MCSD.NET certification or be able to demonstrate equivalent knowledge. Experience as a trainer with an MCT certification would be an added benefit. With experience in one or more of the following:
- ASMX Web services
- C# programming
- Web Services Enhancements (WSE) version 3.0
- Knowledge of WS-* standards
- Microsoft solutions architecture and modelling
- Early experience of WinFx technologies including Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) would be an added advantage
- BizTalk Server 2004/2006 development
- SharePoint Portal Server and/or Windows SharePoint Services development
- Content Management Server (CMS) 2002 development experience
1 x lead MSTP editor - We are looking for experienced MSTP editor to join our team with experience of editing technical documentation to Microsoft standards.
If you're interested in any of these positions, please e-mail your CV to Steve Cox, our resourcing manager, together with details of your current position and required period of notice. Positions can be based in either the UK or the US.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Another topic that Nick talked about at Spark was the relationship between Trust and Centralisation, drawing them as two axis to make one of those infamous quadrant diagrams. You can then look at the characteristics of organisations that fit into each of those quadrants. I have seen a very thought provoking slide on this from Gartner which I cant publish alas as it was Gartner material but if you get a chance have a look at it.
Finally he mapped that to emergence and gave three criteria for emergence that he got from someone at the BBC (cant remeber who) based around value:
- Direct to the individual
- Indirect to other individuals
- To the organisation
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
So I just got the materials back from Spark and was going through them to make sure I had captured everything. One that attracted my attention was a definition of SOA and Web Oriented Arcitecture that Nick Gall from Gartner gave:
Service Oriented Architecture
Modular
Distributed
Loosely coupled
Web Oriented Architecture
Decentralized
Globally Linked
Dynamic
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Marcus and I each did a session yesterday in conjuntion with one of our partners, QBS Software. Marcus was talking VS2005 / Fx 2.0 productivity features and I was talking ASP.NET 2.0. Neither of us managed to sum things up in quite such a comprehensive and quirky way as 400+ Differences.
I particularly liked difference #144 and difference #212 (the videos that is). With 400+ differences I now know why it's so difficult to cover all that ground in only a couple of hours! Anyway, thanks to everyone in the audience for yesterday's session. You managed to stick it out through a long afternoon afternoon of Powerpoints and Demos.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
A new BBC website for overseas users is likely to carry adverts, the commercial arm of the corporation says.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Arrgh, yet again I have been drawn into the "what is an architect" discussion! I knew it was a mistake to give a definition of architecture.
Anyway I have been thinking about how to make this clearer because it seems to be such an area of confusion. There are multiple levels of architects who think about different problem spaces in different ways, the thing that they all have in common is the ability to think in terms of models (or structural designs) rather than real things.
So writing down a taxonomy of architects I came up with the following:
| Architectural Level |
Title |
Primary Focus |
Primary Knowledge |
| 6 |
Strategic Architect |
Organizational and Business Direction |
Leadership |
| 5 |
Enterprise Architect |
Cross Organizational Delivery |
Strategic |
| 4 |
Architect |
Business Delivery |
Organizational dynamics |
| 3 |
Software Architect |
Project Delivery |
Project Management |
| 2 |
Lead |
Non Functional Design |
Systems Technology |
| 1 |
Designer |
Functional Design |
UML / Use Cases |
| 0 |
Programmer |
Programs |
Programming Languages |
Clearly there is not a clear demarcation between these levels but a shading from one level to the next. Also you need to have a good understanding of the level or two below where you are working in order to be able to do your job, so for example designers need to be pretty good at programming and architects need to be good at project management.
Interestingly the knowledge areas map onto the MCA Criteria quite well, the area that is missing is communication which is needed at all levels but grows in scope as you go up the levels. Also interestingly the MCA is really targeting level 4 although they do look for some of the higher level aspects.
So what level do you think you are?
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
(via Chris Lanier)
Niveus have announced that they are bringing out a HD-DVD drive for there Media Center PC's
Check out my interview with Tim Cutting, CEO & Founder recorded at CES
I wonder if they will implement managed copies?
“While we may have additional announcements later this year regarding the Blu-Ray disc format, we are ready to announce that product development is well underway to deliver HD-DVD in the award-winning Niveus Media Center by mid-2006” said Tim Cutting, CEO & Founder, Niveus Media. “By combining our award winning ISF-certified Niveus Media Center, with HD-DVD and Intel Viiv technology, Niveus Authorized Dealers will have a powerful solution to bring their clients into the high definition DVD era. We’re looking forward to being one of the first to offer dealers an HD-DVD experience in a Intel Viiv technology based system. ”
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Of course they do!! Craig blogged about my architecture definition and said that my definition didn't do much for him as it didn't include design. He focused on the communicate and forecast rather than the modelling elements of my definition.
The issue here is what is a model. Webster defines model as Structural Design. So to rephrase for the designers out there
Architecting is designing complex structures.
The reason I don't like this is that it loses its generality and becomes specifically what a designer does. A designer tends to think at just one or two levels of model (or abstraction, I prefer abstraction but I know a lot of people have issues with what an abstraction is) whilst an architect thinks across multiple levels of model.
For example a software designer will be thinking about functional aspects of design and (in some cases) some of the non functional requirements. A software architect will be thinking about the design from both the functional, non functional, business, project, budgetary, skills availability and many other aspects.
Interestingly Craig's blog just talks about one level of model, functional design, not even the non functional aspects...
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Claire Ulrich has created a French voiceover version (.avi) of the my RSS 101 screencast. Bon apetit.
Claire Ulrich a créé une version française de commentaire (.avi) du mon screencast de RSS 101. Enjoy.
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Tags: RSS française screencast
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Following on from my post about being a Restafarian yesterday I thought this was amusing: http://bitworking.org/news/Hi_REST__Lo_REST_and_Everything_in_between_REST
I'm not a Roarchast-REST either, I am a stateful REST.
So would all these REST definitions be a SLEEP?
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
The EU writes to Microsoft to outline its anti-competition concerns about the US giant's forthcoming Vista software.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Brian Tucker is doing a great job of helping the IT PRO community to help itself by hosting your short video demonstrations of how to solve technical problems - otherwise known as blogcasts.
The beauty of blogcasts is that you can easily create them for yourself using freely available tools such as Windows Media Encoder. I know that most technical people know tricks, tips and shortcuts to getting results and therefore encourage you to share your experience with others.
Click here to view the blogcast repository for yourself and here to read the view of an Australian Evangelist.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
More people than ever are downloading music on their mobile phones, finds research.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
After a few woes over the past few days all seems well again.
First, my email died – re-sending old emails, which, even after deleting boatloads just seemed to keep filling up my inbox. In an attempt to keep better track of things and provide a far better service I’ve switched to a new (and separate) provider. I’m going to see how it goes for a month and go from there. I ended up choosing one in the UK to provide a snappier IMAP experience.
If that wasn’t enough, the hostserver my VPS is on hit a ‘kernel bug’ earlier this morning and wiped me out for an hour or so, just as well I don’t host my own email!
So, if you’ve been trying to download code, read posts or contact me, that’s why I’d ‘gone dark’, but the LEDs are back on and blinking now!
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
...that I've even watched television!
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Online auction house eBay is going to the US Supreme Court to prevent one of its key services being shutdown.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Serious bugs in Microsoft's web browser get patched by security firms.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
The top electronics firms will use Bluetooth to send video between home devices, say industry associations.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
If you get this error during installation of CF2 then you need to download the latest version of rhe framework that has a fix streamlined into it, ahead of SP1.
Details here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/markprenticems/archive/2006/03/28/563143.aspx
HTH
Ian
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Rob Relyea has answered my question about how XAML gets compiled; to get the full story, follow the links he includes to earlier posts. It is a tad confusing, particularly since some things have changed since the earliest previews. In summary: XAML does get compiled in some scenarios, but not to .NET intermediate language (IL); instead, it can be compiled to BAML (? Binary Application Markup Language), which is a tokenized version of the XML.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
I enjoyed John Dowdell's Report on Mix06 in which he makes the case for Microsoft to compile XAML to SWF, the Flash format, to support its cross-platform ambitions for the Windows Presentation Foundation.
Of course he would say that; but why reinvent the wheel? I can think of two reasons. One is really political and is to do with controlling the platform. Microsoft of all companies knows the value of that.
The other factor is that Microsoft could possibly come up with something better or at least something distinctive that is better in some scenarios. Flash is good and widely deployed, so it's a challenge, but there are advantages in starting with a clean sheet.
Personally I welcome the competition. Flash is not going away, but I'd guess that the threat from WPF will spur innovation from Adobe, in the same way that .NET is good for Java and FireFox is good for IE.
A differentiator is Microsoft's plan to include a Common Language Runtime in WPF/E. I have long thought that Flash should include an implementation of J2ME; now Microsoft will do this with the .NET equivalent.
At least, we think it will. It's been interesting to write about because until recently Microsoft had said that Javascript would be the means of programming WPF/E. For example, this is from Mono leader Miguel de Icaza:
When I spoke to the folks implementing WPF/E at the PDC about six months ago, the plan was to implement a system that would run a subset of WPF in a fine-tuned engine written in C++. The extension language was going to be JScript.
Javascript remains part of the plan, and the demos of WPF/E at Mix06 used Javascript running outside the WPF/E runtime to controll the applet. But Microsoft is now stating its intention to include a Common Language Runtime within WPF/E, to provide an additional means of programmatic control. Mike Harsh makes this clear in a blog post yesterday: (the emphasis is mine):
In this post I focused on our javascript programming model and didn't talk about the .NET programming model. We don't yet have the cross platform CLR integrated into our main builds so I can't show screenshots, but Joe's slide deck that I posted last week has some examples of how the model will work.
This chimes with what I was told by Forest Key and with Joe Stegman's slide deck from Mix. Presuming that Microsoft deliver, it will undoubtedly be a very cut-down CLR in its first release, but the long-term implications for .NET are pretty interesting.
Did Microsoft always intend to include a cross-platform CLR in WPF/E? Interesting question. It does seem to be coming together in rather a last-minute fashion; apparently the matter of JIT compilation is still not settled, for example. I'll be watching with keen interest for the first previews later this year.
Tags:
wpfe
flash
adobe
microsoft
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
More people than ever are asking to be buried or cremated with their mobile phones.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Ok, so it's clear marketing but I quite liked this site "400 Plus Differences" that MikeO pointed me to today.
I like the design of the site and some of the videos made me smile a lot. Good stuff :-)
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Today I opened my email to find a passionate plea for help from a web designer looking to find good books or articles on web design.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
uhh... trying to get this whole blog thing figured out at the moment
zsocket : Header | HTML
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
http://atlas.asp.net is the best place to visit to learn more and download the latest Atlas CTP Release (which now supports Go-Live deployments).
If you haven't had a chance to dive into Atlas yet, you might want to set aside 18 months to watch this "How do I" video on the Atlas home-page that walks through how to build a Todo Task List using Atlas from scratch (I type everything in from scratch - including creating the database, building a DAL layer using typed tableadapters, then creating a filtered, sortable, pagable, inline editable task list UI w/ Ajax updates). It shows off the power of ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas in building smooth, user-friendly, web experiences -- as well as how easy it is.
I also have an intro to Atlas presentation w/ samples that I posted a few weeks ago here. This provides a really easy way to master the core concepts of Atlas.
Brad Abrams (who is the GPM for the team that builds ASP.NET and Atlas) recently published his slides+samples from his Atlas talk at the MIX06 conference, including his cool interactive Atlas Dice application.
You can download Brad's presentation + samples here.
Nikhil (who is a key Atlas architect) also just posted the slides+demos from his MIX talk. He built a cool online music library ("musicMix") that integrates RSS feeds from iTunes, SOAP services with MSN Search, REST services from Amazon, and the new Live Clipboard concept to share information across applications. It is a really awesome sample.
You can download Nikhil's talk + sample here.
Bertrand (who is a key Atlas dev) just posted a cool post about the accordian control he built to help Brad's Dice demo above. You can read about it and download it here.
Jonathan Hawkins (who is a key PM on the Atlas team) recently posted a great tutorial on building a map-mashup using Atlas.
You can read and download the code here.
Scott Issacs (who is a Windows Live Architect) just posted his slides from MIX where he shared his "Lessons from the Trenches" talk where he talked about the real world Ajax developer experiences and lessons learned from building Live.com. You can read and download it here.
Hopefully lots of fun stuff to check out and enjoy!
Scott
P.S. Shanku is going to post his Atlas slides+demos shortly. He will include a sample that shows how to use Atlas against a PHP backend -- which the MIX crowd really loved.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Soon to have good VB & VB.NET stuff here.
Randy
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
I am Mark, the Great and Powerful1, revered and feared throughout the great blue nowhere.
I am Mark Gordon, 17 years old, and currently attending Churchill High School in Michigan. I am part of the Math, Science, and Computers program that my school runs which makes everyday... uh... interesting. Whether it be hopscotch on the desks2 in the computers room, or dancing to moskau3 (projecting the movie on a wall of course), we try to have fun.
As far as programming goes, I started on VB6, then moved to C++ and Java. I kindof know how to use VB.Net. I love working with WinAPI and sockets and geometry. Alot of the code I post will likely be on those subjects. I also like to write algorithms, so I try to participate on TopCoder4 as often as I can. (which hasn't been often lately, but I plan on doing the one tommorow)
Most of the code you will see on my blog will either be in C++ or VB, or maybe even Java. (or in the case of Aaform, a whole lot of languages)
Side Notes5
1. I prefer to go my “Mark, the Great and Powerful“ in order to avoid confussion with the other Mark (drydo)
2. This was quite the incident, a certain individual was jumping around on the desks when he slammed his head into the metal projector mount hung from the ceiling. Before getting a paper towel to cover his head, he managed to bleed quite a bit. I believe the story was that he accidentily fell and hit his head on the corner of a desk.
3. This resulted in some detensions when the teacher walked in.
4. You can check out my profile here
5. I like side notes
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
I would be grateful if reader could spend a few minutes filling in Bevelery’s questionnaire…here.
Please and thanks!
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
Browse here to view Michael Kleef's post linking to some excellent security webcasts for both developers and IT Pros.
The webcasts include sessions on network isolation/protection and identity management - they are well worth taking a few minutes to view for yourself.
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
The slides for this evening’s presentation at the Bristol VBUG meeting on Automating Builds Using MSBuild are here.Enjoy....
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Published on 29 Mar 2006 from
One of the downsides of this whole AJAX malarky seems to be that when you're looking at a web page that's going to do some kind of asynchronous post back to a server you don't always get any notification that the web page is actually busy doing something.
If I'm on a slow connection (I'm not, but sometimes I'm through a proxy server that makes it slow) then I find that quite often I click an "AJAXed" hyperlink and nothing at all seems to happen so, I wait a while, and then I click it again just to be sure. And again.
If you're builidng an AJAX application then don't forget that when the user clicks on something it'd be really nice to give them some kind of visual clue that you're off doing something on their behalf unless you're just deliberately out to frustrate them :-)
