Powers Unfiltered

The San Francisco Chronicle is not exactly the planet’s leading source of technology news and analysis.  So many of you probably haven’t yet seen Deborah Gage’s excellent article today about Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s ambassador to Silicon Valley.  Dan’l is among our most important contacts (and favorite people) at Microsoft, and despite his high-visibility role, many […]

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As I wrote earlier this month, the Powers household is now generating some of its own electricity, via photovoltaic panels on the roof.  Soon after the installation, our local utility PG&E installed a spiffy new digital meter and certified the system for use.  I turned it on last Thursday afternoon.  Yesterday afternoon (one week later) […]

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The world is indeed getting smaller — and quicker, and better connected. And you might as well talk about what you’re doing, because smart well-connected people will figure everything out immediately anyway. Case in point: Marc Adler’s recent post about Velocity, in which he says: . . . It is no secret that the most […]

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I can’t believe I still haven’t had a chance to write about Velocity, Microsoft’s recently announced in-memory cache.  I think  this is just further proof that I have an endless backlog of topics about which I should be writing. In any case, Derrick Harris of Grid Today has done a great job of connecting the […]

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Digipede CTO Robert Anderson is blogging about a recent experiment we’ve conducted in our lab, assessing what it would take to get the Digipede Agent running on Mono. (For those of you who don’t know, Mono is a cross-platform implementation of .NET, developed as an open-source project led by Miguel de Icaza, and sponsored by […]

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Releasing software is hard. Sure, the individual steps like specifying, developing, testing, documenting, and planning support for new software features are difficult enough — but the discipline of knowing when to STOP adding features, and to focus instead on finishing a complete, polished, release-ready product is tougher than it sounds to those outside the industry. […]

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Late this winter, we had a whopper of a Pacific storm, and it became clear that the Powers Roof had reached the end of its useful life. (The weather inside may not have been as bad as the weather outside, but it was bad enough.) This wonderful opportunity led to the “while-we’re-at-it” syndrome that plagues […]

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Derek Furguson of Bear Stearns (now JPMorgan Chase) has a good article in .NET Developer Journal about how to apply genetic algorithms and grid computing to the problem of market timing in stock trading. I was pleased to see that he chose to implement his algorithms using the Digipede Network. His article is in two […]

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