This now famous picture of Bill Gates dates from 1977 following an incident when he was arrested after being pulled over for speeding and driving without a license, allegedly, in his Porsche 911.

I was only 5 years old when Bill Gates founded Microsoft and looking back at those days (as best as I can remember), it was such a different world.  Today, largely by coincidence, many of my friends are younger than I; on average by between 8 to 10 years.  And I find myself having to play the 'old man' spinning the occasional yarn about the old days when we didn't have fax machines, cell phones or the Internet, much less voicemail or even the quaint answering machines that preceded them.  Those same younger friends shake their heads and chuckle at the concept of having to stand in lines at banks to get cash because ATMs were a decade in the future.  The reliance on conventional mail, instead of e-mail or text messages.  And the non-existence of the Internet, to which there was of course no "low-tech" analogy.  Bill Gates had a lot to do with changing the world so fundamentally and it's certainly right that we - particularly those of us involved in the technology industry - pause to reflect on the man and the times that he helped shape.

Microsoft created the BASIC operating system environment for the 8-bit TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) line.  I myself wrote my very first applications on a CoCo II, depicted above.

The CoCo 2 used a flavour of Microsoft BASIC called "Color BASIC".  BASIC was Microsoft's foundation product and was licensed by several entrants into the home computer market when it emerged in the late 1970s, including the earlier TRS-80 Model I, the very first PC I ever used.

My own introduction to Microsoft came from nearly the earliest days of me using a PC.  My father, who's interest in technology was kindled by his involvement with Amateur (or "Ham") Radio had a whole lot to do with getting me interested in computers.  As a high school teacher in the town I grew up in, he was often the fellow his peers turned to when the subject of technology arose, and he took on the role of an early computer science teacher when the personal computer became popular.  From the age of 4 or 5, I became used to a PC being around the house and was extremely fortunate to be immediately exposed to some of the latest gadgets on the market.  Mostly, this meant exposure to Tandy-Radio Shack's line of PCs, which included the TRS-80 Models I & III, and the TRS-80 Color Computer II (called the "CoCo 2").  Of course, Windows was yet to be even a glint in Bill Gates' eye.  But the operating system used by the CoCo 2 was a dialect of BASIC written by - you guessed it - Microsoft Corporation.  It was on this platform that I created my very first basic applications (at age 9 or 10).

The CoCo 2 was a platform that was very strong, but simply wasn't as popular as its two leading competitors, the Commodore 64 and the Apple ][e.  Consequently, the CoCo 2 was always suffering from never having the coolest game on the market, nor was the inventory of software written for it as large.  And if you thought the techno-bigotry between Linux and Windows was nasty, you couldn't keep a room hosting Commodore 64 users and CoCo 2 geeks quiet for long!  Still, because the CoCo 2's hardware support was based upon a more sophisticated Motorola 6809 CPU, its architecture offered a few bells and whistles its competitors couldn't match, not that this made one feel all that much better when one wanted to play Elite or Ultima III.  But it did help when it came time to expand the computer to do new things the base system wasn't designed for, and allowed greater flexibility than many of its competitors.  But again, the consumer typically didn't notice the difference (except perhaps in price) since the hardware applications available for the CoCo definitely existed for most of its competitors.

One common hardware expansion many PC owners undertook involved connecting to other computers using a modem to dial up a bulletin board system (BBS) through the phone line and converse with others by leaving messages on what would now be called a web forum.  Unfortunately, because a modem tied up a phone line, typically the BBS could only have one person logged in at once - yet they were surprisingly popular for all their obvious limitations.  The very first BBS systems offered connection speeds of only 300 bps or less - yes that's 0.3Kbps, if you're comparing it to the more modem modems.  You could literally see the text typing itself out on the screen!  To me, it demonstrated the real hunger people had to be connected to each other through computers.

The next generation of computers went from 8-bit to 16-bit.  (Note: It was common practice at this point in PC history to actually employ a 32-bit CPU, as was certainly the case for both the Amigas and Atari STs, but with 16-bit bus speeds blended into the architecture, a kind of performance bottleneck appeared internally, resulting in the characterization of this as an era of 16-bit processing.)  Enter the Macintosh, the Amiga, the Atari ST and IBM's 80286 (called the '286).  It was here that a thinning of the PC market really started to happen and the business model that would make Microsoft an industry leader would take shape.  Having endured the experience of chronically lacking software whilst being able to boast of superior hardware at the occasional geek-meet, I decided to sell out to Commodore and go with the Amiga 500 which boasted the best graphics and games of any system on the market at that time.  And I wasn't sorry.  This time, the operating system was provided by Commodore and became my first point-and-click OS, but even-so - Microsoft was still in there with AmigaBASIC which served as the default programming platform.  The days of being forced to use a command-line to operate one's PC were gone for good.  Modem speeds picked up, but there was still no Internet access.  Although Bill Gates was already a household name at this point thanks to getting MS-DOS to be the dominant operating system on every IBM-compatible PC.  I entered the Bachelor of Arts programme at the University of Manitoba armed with my Amiga and a simple word processing app complete with a dot matrix printer for the dozens of essays that would follow in my first two years as an academic.

By the time I graduated with my degree, the thinning of the market that began with the '286 was complete and Microsoft's MS-DOS had somehow defeated all the others; not by being the best user interface (UI).  (Far from it.)  Apparently, it, coupled with the introduction of Windows 3.0 had managed to become the dominant platform for business software in the market and as such started to draw more and more software development its way.  By the time 32-bit machines had entered the market, I was left with virtually no choice.  I could go with an Amiga 4000 - but I never forgot the lesson learned back from the days of owning that software-less CoCo 2 collecting dust in my closet.  I dove into Windows 3.1 and the world of the '386 (followed by an upgrade to a '486 not long after).  After 1st year I was

A short, but well-deserved tribute to my friend Brian Leclair of Winnipeg, MB who tragically passed away in August 2007.  Brian was one of only a few personalities in my life that nurtured my eventual decision to seek a career in technology.  He was an extremely bright and kind fellow to whom I'll be forever grateful.

able though a friend named Brian whom I knew at the University to manipulate circumstances and obtain a graduate student UNIX account along with access to the TSO mainframe which I used for print jobs when I wanted final copies of essays.  (These were free at the time; a bureaucratic oversight that wouldn't be corrected until after I graduated.)  Along with storage quota that was double a Comp. Sci. undergrad (a whopping 5MB), I had, for the first time, unrestricted Internet access!

Once I had my UNIX account, within a week I discovered (again through Brian) a tool called "Trumpet Winsock" which would allow one to connect via my 28.8Kbps modem to the University's network from home.  That didn't get me very much by itself, so along with Winsock, Brian explained I should toss on another app called "NCSA Mosaic" (v0.1c, if I recall correct).  I FTP'd to the server address he game me (not really knowing what FTP was or what I was doing), installed and ran the application I'd just downloaded.  In that very moment, when my very first web page loaded - I knew then and there I was looking at something very, very big indeed.  Something that was going to change the world forever.

I look back on that moment now and am pretty baffled at how there were others, supposedly brilliant people who couldn't see it.  And among them, of all people, was Bill Gates.  To my mind, it's not as if there were a whole lot of choices out there, but from what I've read and reflected upon it's my best guess that Gates and thus Microsoft didn't think the Internet as much more than a fad because it was dominated by academia at the time and he/they simply couldn't see how this would evolve into a commercial entity.  Even so, when and where I was at that point in my life, it wasn't so hard.  The academics I was surrounded by actually wanted to make the thing commercial, and the director of the project (called MBNet, whose assets were sold to an undisclosed party by the University's Computer Services department in 1999) at the U of M eventually cut off paid access for non-students and offered links to small ISP businesses which quickly adopted the model.  Having recently graduated with my B.A. had to decide to either go back to school and take a graduate degree or enter business for myself as one of the growing number of young, Internet entrepreneurs.

Within a year of forming a small Internet consulting business that designed web pages, mostly - I was hired by the largest of these small ISPs to do web design work.  Because Microsoft had stepped back from the Internet initially, there wasn't much evidence of Microsoft about.  There was a small Windows NT 3.5 server running the company LAN, but the main engine of the company was a Sun SparcStation which hosted the 2000+ active accounts the company had.  (Yes, I did say the largest...and it was.)  Web development started to grow in complexity with Sun's introduction of the Java programming language which was aimed at the web because its Applet architecture could allow Java-based software to run within a browser environment.  Applet runtimes were created for all the major browsers right off, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 when it finally got released some time later.  Microsoft was a late entrant into the market, to be sure - but there was plenty of growth to come and, fortunately for the software giant, a sizeable margin of error here.

This first ISP I worked for ran into serious financial trouble when its rudimentary accounting system buckled under the stress of poor organization, infighting between the partners and rising operational costs...too much to keep the business afloat.  It had to sell off to a larger investor, particularly after it ceased being the largest ISP in the city and the writing was on the wall.  Remaining a consistent sell-out, I sought and obtained employment at the new largest ISP.  But within 18 months, a similar story was written there too.  The small, independent ISPs were dying off thanks to Canadian federal government policy regarding telecom tariffs and a seeming preference for working with large, well-established telcos like the Manitoba Telephone System (MTS, now called MTS Allstream), which was doing its level best to gain a monopoly over dialup Internet access at this point.  Fortunately, I'd used my 18 months at the second ISP I worked for to become an expert with Microsoft web technology responding to increasing customer demand for services based on Microsoft's Internet Information Server 3.0.  Surrounded as I was with Linux and UNIX experts, and seeing that the role of the web designer was swiftly diverging into two career tracks: designer and programmer, I decided I was better-suited to the latter and tried to carve out a niche for myself as a Microsoft web technology expert.

The Windows DNA model finally gave a real, practical answer to a problem posed to standards bodies (esp. OMG) years earlier.  But to which others including IBM, Oracle and Sun had only responded with lukewarm support of the CORBA model.  Here again, Microsoft's approach commanded adherents and further cemented the role of Windows everywhere in business apps.

These efforts paid off and, still lacking a formal Computer Science degree or diploma was able to be hired as a web programmer for one of the largest and, certainly, most successful technology consulting firms in Winnipeg: SHL Systemhouse (now known as EDS Canada).  Systemhouse recognized form the beginning that I had strong web technology skills they lacked internally at that point and saw to it my weakness with formal programming training was remedied.  It was thanks to these folks I was sent to graduate studies at Red River College (the local community college) to get a solid understanding of Visual Basic 6.0.  Building on this I became a more capable ASP (Active Server Pages) developer and started to further those skills by gaining experience using COM and even dabbled with DCOM (Component Object Model and the Distributed flavour too).  Meanwhile, Microsoft was evolving in its own right, perfecting the Windows DNA (Distributed Network Applications) computing model.  It was during my tenure at Systemhouse that Microsoft seemed to "get it" with respect to the Internet's potential, finally establishing a formal interdependent strategy for all of its future application development with respect to the Internet.

At this point, everything in my career was going perfectly.  But then the very first serious hiccup came; and perhaps it was overdue.  There was a provincial election in Manitoba in 1999 which resulted in a change in government; the socialist New Democratic Party (which enjoys a long political history in provincial politics) had been elected and was not looking favourably on the province's contracts with Systemhouse.  Within a short period after the election, these were systematically canceled, resulting in the termination of over 400 staff, myself (still considered a junior developer at the time) included. Had I gained enough experience to continue on in my career?  My former boss who walked me to the elevator (teary-eyed as I left) seemed to think I'd "land on me feet".  But I was concerned that with my meager VB 6.0 / ASP skills I'd have a tough time in the job market.  Was throwing my lot in so completely with Microsoft a good decision?  Where would I go next?

(....more to follow in Part 2.)

All of us - for perhaps as long ago as 30,000 years (or longer) have been waiting for an answer to that question: are we alone.  This week, we seem to be edging tantalizingly close to a final answer to that question, which is leaning heavily in the direction of "no, there are others".

Above is an image of the galaxy NGC-1300, some 69 million light-years (ly) away.  It's a "barred-spiral" class galaxy, of the same type as our own.  (Some readers may need to be reminded that our Sun and its planets are part of such a larger construct, which is made of trillions of stars both smaller and larger than our own Sun, each star ringed with planets - some rock, gas or both.)

Early in the week, it was astronomers and cosmologists at MIT and other renowned institutions of higher learning revealed that the ongoing survey of nearby stars is starting to show evidence of smaller, rocky bodies approaching the size of Earth (or Venus which is 0.98 the mass and gravity of Earth - take your pick) have been located in our galactic neighborhood. 

• For Alien Life-Seekers, New Reason to Hope (New York Times)
• Astronomers on verge of finding Earth's twin* (Space.com)

By Thursday evening (EDT), there was more news that seemed to be upping the odds of finding alien life in the near-term.  The Phoenix Lander, recently landed on Mars, to the jubilation of folks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), had completed and transmitted back to Earth a series of soil analyses which indicated that the soil - at least that at the Martian arctic circle - very likely had all the basic elements required for plant life commonly found here on Earth.  Particularly interesting was the discovery of that key ingredient - water, late last week:

• Scientists Find Water Vapor, Key Nutrients in Mars Soil (New York Times)
• Martian soil appears able to support life (Reuters)
• Scientists believe Mars lander exposed ice (CBC.ca)

So with it seeming to be just a matter of time before scientists find a rocky, Earth-sized rock in a neighboring star's "green-zone" coupled with the discovery of Martian soil inundated with water and nutrients that favour plant growth: I think it's probably a safe bet that there is, indeed must be life elsewhere in the universe somewhere.  So-called "intelligent" life - or animal-like life that pursues tools and technology like us might yet be a rarity.  At the very least, the news seems to favour a future for humanity involving colonization of the galaxy with humans, provided we don't blast our civilization off the face of the Earth first.

* This is a great article which discusses (in relatively plain English) the processes and toils behind the search for Earth-sized planets around nearby stars.  The Internet is home to all kinds of lists of discovered planets around neighboring stars, although I'm still waiting for someone to point me in the direction of a Java-based (or using some like-minded technology) 3-D map of stars out to 100ly, 500ly, and 1000ly.  Would build such a thing myself using Microsoft's Direct3D API if I had time; might even take up the project when I'm on vacation this summer....

• DVICE: Astronomers find ‘Super-Earths’ orbiting another sun

  A star map of our local stellar nighborhood; stars within 14 light-years. (Click here to enlarge.)

I'd wondered when this was gonna happen. Of course, as usual, the "fluff" media out there didn't quite get it right.  Calling a chunk of rock 4 times larger than Earth orbiting (actually careens around) its parent star in 20 days  with absolutely no atmospheric analysis beyond refined guesswork doesn't really qualify a planet as a "Super-Earth". But finding objects that small around stars other than our own Sun is one pretty remarkable achievement.  The "glare" or "halo" that surrounds a star - even ones relatively close by, like Barnard's Star (@ 5.98 light-years [or ly] from Earth), Alpha Centauri (the nearest @ 4.2 ly), or 61 Cygni (@ 11.36 ly) - prevents anyone from directly observing objects within the star system.  This leaves scientists to deduce the existence and properties of planetary phenomena using gravitationally-derived data, such as the "wobble" observed when viewing the target star with a powerful telescope, which is actually the result of objects affecting the transmission of light and small variance in the star's position over time.

In the years ahead, NASA plans to launch an array of space telescopes in order to obtain observations so detailed that Earth-sized planets and smaller will become readily visible for the very first time in human history.  At that point, we may indeed finally get an answer to the burning question that's been asked since our species first realized there was such a thing as outer space: are we alone?  Now that we can detect planets around nearby stars, increasingly that question is becoming: "how alone are we?"  With so many planets, the probability that another Earth-like planet has evolved at some point in the past several billion years with life on it seems certain.  But such a planet might not be close.  Even if it is, there are many other questions to consider - did intelligent life evolve, did it evolve before us or are inhabitants less evolved?  What kinds of life are there in our stellar neighborhood?  We already know some of our stellar neighbors are much older than the Sun and if life did evolve on planets around those stars, it could easily play host to a civilization much older than ours...

It seems that finding another Earth-like planet will answer one question at the expense of getting a whole lot more.  Here's hoping it does, anyway.

I'm not ashamed to admit it.  I supported Stéphane DIon right from the beginning of the Liberal party leadership race back in 2007 and was delighted when he was able to pull it off and win.  It's not that I'd thought him to be amongst Canada's greatest leaders or anything; with the withdrawal of Paul Martin as leader, the fact was there was really no heir-apparent to head up the party and it was left in a terribly awkward situation.  So much so that hopefuls like Bob Rae (formerly an Ontario's only NDP premier) threw his hat into the ring and nearly won.  And Dion, like his competitors, was relatively inexperienced at the job of running a national political party - quite the reversal of fortunes for the Liberals who'd languished for years at the Conservatives being hobbled by this same disadvantage.  So I had modest expectations of Dion during his first few months in office and, honestly, he's performed about as I thought he would to this point.

But if he's going to be Prime Minister, and if the Liberal party is to win the next election (which is directly linked to Dion becoming PM), he's got to do better than my modest expectations for the early part of his term as leader - he's got to get a vision and sell it to the country.  It's not rocket science - everyone knows it, especially Dion himself.  So what does he choose to sell?  A complex tax scheme that's said to be environmentally sensitive and put Canada on a policy course to be one of the best stewards of the environment on Earth.  The media isn't quite sure what to make of the proposal; mostly because the proposal hasn't really been made yet.  (Details are to come later this week.)  But some of the high-level ideas must be getting canvassed about the party and it isn't a particularly encouraging omen that there's still (at this late date) apparent dissension in the ranks of the Liberal caucus.

My concern is twofold; first that too many people in the party are putting their own political careers ahead of the larger goal of beating the Conservatives who are making policies that are either mundane or rightist ideology that, on balance, is un-Canadian.  We're just not a country of Conservative voters, by nature as the history of Liberal election victories throughout our history will attest.  So coming up with legislation to crackdown on Internet piracy by forcing ISPs to police their users and fine college students $500 for visiting a torrent site if their college LAN admin catches them coupled with clinging to medieval drug policies that virtually every other nation on Earth outside of the United States has dismissed on the basis of overwhelming scientific evidence should invariably result in Liberal landslide electoral victory at any point in time.  Yet the polls state bluntly that the Liberals aren't in that position today, as they should be, all things considered.  And internal party discord presenting the image of weak leadership has a great deal to do with that.

The second point of concern is that while the Canadian electorate is well-educated and relatively intelligent, its attention span (and patience) for politics is extremely limited.  Complex policy change, particularly where taxation is concerned is, on balance, more likely simply to engender grave concern than galvanize some great pro-Liberal movement.  So unless Dion has some great hidden Obama-esque talent for turning tax reform and environmental conservationism into a topic that will get better ratings than Oprah, I just don't think he'll be able to engineer the kind of support needed to unseat Harper.  Far from it - I believe there's serious risk the Conservatives could actually form a majority government, which will lead Canada into an era of Bush-ish neocon policymaking that will make us all wish Diefenbaker was still around to save us.  *Shudder...*

So I'm in a real quandary.  It's simply political suicide for members of the Liberal caucus to oppose Dion (privately or publicly), yet Dion seems poised to pied-piper Liberal party fortunes for the next decade straight down the drain even were the party to suddenly unite and be as one as the Borg Collective.  Oh I doubt he'll Mulroney the party down to 2 seats or anything too disastrous, but he can't win with this tax/environment policy idea I don't think.  Now, I could be wrong - Lord knows it does happen from time to time.  (I thought Paul Martin was going to be a big disaster when Chrétien left, but he didn't do all that bad in the end.)  And for what it's worth, I really, really do feel he'd make a far better PM than Harper's been.

I guess there's not much left for me to do at this point but hope I am wrong about Dion and that the upcoming carbon tax proposal has a lot more to offer than I think it can.  Hoping I'm wrong.....if only I had a nickel for every time that happened!

It was out in fall 2007, but I didn't get to see it until just this past weekend.  But what a pleasant surprise was American Gangster!  Starring Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe, the movie portrays the life and times of former drug lord Frank Lucas and the remarkable career of Ritchie Roberts, the cop-turned-prosecutor who brought Lucas to justice.  The movie also documents the importation of heroin from Vietnam during the Vietnamese War and its near cataclysmic effect on the lives of many living in New York City during the early-to-mid 1970s.

The movie is a remarkable story left unto itself, but told with the exquisite talent of Washington and Crowe championing one through tale as dark and complex as this is, not only brings the story to life, but lifts it to the status of a truly great American epic.  And the characters being played - themselves alive and well today - comment on how closely their roles are portrayed in an MSNBC documentary just prior to the movie's release.  Of course, such a review by those whom the movie portrays only reinforces the realism that Hollywood's own "based on a true story" clichés detract from readily.

What critique I can only too humbly offer deals with the comments of the actors themselves in the follow-up interviews.  To anyone who has known or had their lives touched by drug addiction, the outright blaming of a drug dealer for the addictions of everyone else may seem gratuitous.  I can't blame the actors - neither Washington nor Crowe have dealt with addiction to heroin, but like so many others in the world have very strong opinions on the subject of drugs and drug addiction.  And I don't mean to say that addicts get what they deserve here either - but it must be acknowledged that deciding to use drugs to the point of addiction (opiates like heroin included) is almost always a mistake.  A mistake with many causes.  A mistake produced by human failings.  The lesson of this movie should be that no mistake - including those made by Frank Lucas - should be of a nature that bears permanent consequence (or at least without any opportunity of redemption).  And for the most part, I think that Ritchie Roberts, Frank Lucas, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington all share that view.

As reported here earlier (and updated here subsequently), I discovered a bug in the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset that prevented one from using references with the same name in a single WiX project.  This posed a bit of an inconvenience for those of us working with large solutions constituted of many development teams who could use a project name like "Common.csproj" and add it to a single solution, and then subsequently need to build an installer using the WiX toolset that would require a reference to both of these projects.  Well, I'm pleased to report that working with Rob Mensching and Jason Ginchereau of the WiX project, has resulted in a fix of this issue, released in the latest WiX build (v.3.0.4026).

I must add here that the turnaround time to getting this issue patched was remarkably fast!  My original identification of the bug was in mid-May, and I filed my bug report at Rob's urging on May 15th.  By June 6th, the bug was triaged and fixed - less than 3 weeks after it was originally discovered.  (Although we applied a workaround for the issue in the meantime.)  And this wasn't a high-priority bug either, so corrective action of this sort on an open source project certainly seems very quick indeed.

And thanks in part to my dealings with the WiX team, in addition to usage of the toolset itself - my overall opinion of it continues to be pretty favourable.  What deserves some critique is Windows Installer itself, which handles the basics of install management pretty well.  But when it comes to customizations (i.e custom actions), one can't help but feel there's room for improvement.  And WiX is a tool architected atop Windows Installer; which means it can't be expected to fix its shortcomings.

In the near future, I'm faced with tackling some challenges around custom actions and will be making reports of my discoveries here.  Hopefully, these will benefit other novice WiX users - as from what I'm reading thus far, there seems to be something of a learning curve involved.