Suddenly, after having been worthless/dormant since its inception, the Feedster Windows Longhorn Buzz Feed has begun spouting useful information. Subscribed.

When I was but a wee Windows lad, my heroes were Charles Petzold and Matt Pietrek. I learned Windows 3.1 programming from Petzold (along with everyone else) and learned to love what was going on underneath from Matt. Plus, not only did Matt write Windows Internals (the title and style of which would inspire my own Internals book), but he also wrote a monthly column for the Microsoft Systems Journal, which I would lovingly read cover-to-cover every month.

So, when I went to speak at my first conference and Matt wanted to talk to me about something, I was on cloud 9 (not to be confused with Channel9). I wondered what obscure technology that I’d most recently written about on the DCOM mailing list that had caught Matt’s eye. What deep COM or ATL issue did he want to take up with me? I had arrived!

The topic of Matt’s conversation? The x86 Prayer that he had posted on his site had moved and he wanted to know why all of the 404s were originating from my site (I was linking to it on my Fun page). I had not arrived… : )

We’ve become closer since then and now Matt’s got a blog. Wahoo!

Richard Turner, a PM on the Indigo team, answers some of the Indigo questions that came up as a result of his recent Channel9 interview, including:

• Will .NET Remoting go away any time soon? (no)
• Will Indigo Services require IIS? (no)
• We need to support Windows 2000 and XP. Can Indigo Services be hosted on these OSs? (it’s not supported) Will applications running on these OSs be able to act as clients to Indigo Services? (absolutely)
• We expose some of our remoting assemblies via HTTP and host at least one in IIS.  Will Indigo Services offer interoperability with these configurations? (yes) Will we be able to write an Indigo wrapper around a remoting DLL? (yes)

I’ve just realized that Richard has turned into my most favorite Indigo blogger. He straddles the fence nicely between what is available today and what’s going to be available tomorrow. Thanks, Richard. We need you. : )

For the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses various indicators of how well interviews actually work for screening job candidates (in a phrase: not very well). The discussion of how we make our decision about someone in the first 2 seconds after seeing them and then use our future interactions with them to either reinforce our initial reaction or forgive as an aberration is particularly telling.

Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, discusses his thoughts on interviewing, include:

• “In an interview you can tell if a person is a pleasant conversationalist, and you can give some technical questions to rule out the truly inept, but beyond that you might as well be rolling dice.”
• “I’d like to note that in an all-male work environment hiring an attractive female is probably good for morale.”
• “Even though work history doesn’t correlate with job performance, being a lying sack of shit almost certainly does.”

Fun. : )

Kids these days have it so easy. They expect to do a quick search and bam! the solution is revealed. Like this post from Raymond Chen where he describes the various memory allocators exposed by the shell and COM and how they’re related. When I was a boy, we had to figure these kinds of things out! And we liked it! : )

P.S. I really did used to walk to school in 3 feet of snow up hill, both ways. I didn’t like that at all…

Ashvil DCosta, a software professional in Bangalore writing a book on outsourcing software product development, posts his ideas about how Longhorn, particularly WinFS, will change the way we think about and develop applications.

“The Longhorn speech API offers baked-in functionality for voice commands inside the operating system (OS). This is a giant leap forward in the functionality provided by an OS. With the addition of an alternate user interface, products in the future may have a much different mode of interaction than currently used. Through the course of this article, the basics of voice input and output will be shown, as well as the construction of grammar, and how to act on recognition.”

[via Paul Lamere]