Yes, I am still alive. Between a baby and work, don’t have time for much else. I did want to say Hello World. Will try and be more regular here.
Oct 02 2012
Writing a compiler using C#
I was cleaning out my old papers (finally!) and came across an old paper I had titled “Compiler Writing Tools using C#” which essentially shows how you can write a number of tools like lex and yacc but instead of C/C++ on Unix, you use C# and .NET.
This paper covers the tokenizer, grammar, DFA, NFA, etc. I think conflicts and precedence is one area it would need a little more work. But overall its a very interesting piece of work – especially for one to learn the ropes if a lot of this is new.
Of course, writing compilers with C, overall is not the most productive experience (it sure is fun though!); if you have never done it before Standard ML or Haskell would be a better place to start. If you want to stick to .NET and roll out your own language (or create extensions) then check out this paper on MSDN.
All of this brought back memories when I wrote my own C++ compilers mainly with those tools on Unix System V and also on Xenix. Most people did not know (or perhaps remember) that Microsoft had a Unix version called Xenix which was later bought over by SCO and eventually become part of SCO Unix. Back in the days I use to run a dual-boot machine with Xenix and DOS. 
Oct 01 2012
Can Microsoft win against this?
After seeing this, I think I also want the “Apple 5″; supposedly this lady is true and has been waiting in line for 2 days.
{Credit: wmpoweruser.com}
Aug 04 2012
Large collection of Free eBooks from MS
Microsoft folks have released a large collection of free eBooks including Visual Studio, WP, Win 8, Office 365, SQL, Azure, CRM, etc. You can get more details from the following two posts where not only you can browse the catalogue but also download them.
- First post with free books
- Second post with free books
Happy Leeching!
Jul 25 2012
Cloud thinking
I did a quick internal brown bag on Cloud computing yesterday. It is interesting to still get to meet folks who don’t have much ideas on Cloud and what the various types are, what they mean and their value. In any case, cloud is just full of hot air. 
I always found, most people can get it when they can relate to cloud usage as a consumer. And of course the CoIT and BYOD will just help accelerate that and bring the usage out in the front. I personally am a heavy cloud user and use it all the time. I also have a local copy of almost everything, I still don’t trust the broadband providers – lots of things that can go wrong.
If you are new, welcome to the ride.
Jul 12 2012
Redis on Windows 8 and VS 2012 RC?
I am trying to see if I can get Redis working on Windows 8 using Visual Studio 2012 RC bits – I have not had much success, but then I have not had much time to invest to try this out.
I am wanting to give a demo tomorrow and would be good to see if I can get this working. Curious to know if anyone else has got this?
If not Redis, then have you got some other implementation working on Windows 8? I was thinking of RavenDB.
Jul 07 2012
Creating Word Maps / Word Clouds
I am giving a presentation next week on NoSQL and as part of that I wanted to create a Word Map, similar to the ones I have seen in the Guardian over the years. After searching a little, I came across the following two sites which do an excellent job of this. Both of them allow a number of options to customise the output and I think are very cool!
The first one is Jason Davies, World Cloud that is open source and you can integrate online searches, twitter searches, etc. The word map below is an example output when I search “bahree” on twitter.
The second one is Wordle, which is equally impressive but is a closed Java applet with some portions of the code copyrighted by IBM. With Wordle, you can enter some text, use a RSS feed or enter a del.icio.us user name to see their tags. I use my blog’s RSS feed to create the word map below.
Jul 07 2012
Fallacies of Distributed Computing
I was reading something and came across these fallacies of Distributed Computing which all beginners (to distributed computing) have. Oh how we all learn.
- The network is reliable
- Latency is zero
- Bandwidth is infinite
- The network is secure
- Topology doesn’t change
- There is only one administrator
- Transport cost is zero
- The network is homogeneous
Jul 03 2012
WHS is back!
My WHS was dead for close to a year now with no automatic backups happening! I knew the issue was one of the HDD’s had failed, but I did not have time to take them out and plug them somewhere else to figure out the exact issue. I finally bought a couple of new disks and restored the WHS over the weekend and everything is running fine now. Also got about 101 GB backed up on S3, which is good.
Now, the question I have is which Add-ins do you recommend? I have the original WHS (v1) and not Vail (WHS 2011). I am already running Cloudberry. I would like something which can tweet the health status which I can monitor.
May 19 2012
Metro Apps in C++ anyone?
In Visual Studio “11” when I try and create a new C++ Metro app using the built-in template, I get the following error: “Can’t find localized resources”.
I wonder if anyone else has managed to get around this? I am running the Consumer Preview Build of Win 8 (Build 8250).
Apr 25 2012
SkyDrive, Windows 8 and Domain Account
I am running Windows 8 on my primary work machine now, which is domain joined. When I try and use the SkyDrive metro app (which ships with Windows 8), it does not like that fact I am domain joined and wants me to switch accounts, which is something I don’t want to do. This of course works great for those who are not domain joined and essentially are personal machines. For many of us who will be using this on ‘work’ machines, this seems like we will be ignored.
Of course I can install the desktop app, but that is not Metro and I am then in the ‘old’ world. Also the free 25 GB has now dropped to 7 GB, if you already have a Live account, I suggest you login and upgrade your account back to 25 GB for free!
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