SQL Server 2005 - Frustrated by a good feature

I guess that most people who have been using SQL 2005 for some time already know about this. I, for my part, have worked a lot with SQL 2000 in the past, but never had the chance to really work with SQL 2005 until recently. Now I needed to connect to a server on a remote machine and had this frustrating experience...

1. Scenario: trying to connect to a SQL 2005 server from a remote machine fails. It gives the following message: "Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Native Client: An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections."
2. After getting this message once or twice you take the time to actually *read* it, and start checking the settings for the SQL Server.
3. Like anyone with experience with SQL 2000 would do, I opened the SQL Server Management Studio. There I looked at the properties for the server instance and saw that the configuration seems fine and the server is configured to accept remote connections.
4. Back to square one. From this point I started looking for the culprit...
a. Maybe it's the FireWall? I configured the FW to trust my local network, but maybe it fucked up somehow? Disabling the FW quickly showed me that's not the problem.
b. Maybe there is some problem with the SQL version and I should upgrade? Seemed unlikely, yet I checked it out. Turned out to be irrelevant since I was already using the latest version (SP1).
c. Maybe I did something wrong with the connection string I used? Tried all possible variations - nothing worked...
5. In the back of my mind I started to rethink about this error message I got. It says that by default, SQL 2005 is configured not to allow remote connections. I don't remember having changed that - so how come it's configured to accept remote connections? Could there possibly be some other configuration parameter that has some impact on remote connections?
6. I went over all the configurable parameters for the server instance and for the database (from SQL Server Management Studio) - nada
7. Well then, I'm on the verge of throwing my computer out of the window. I'll give Google a last try. Then I found this: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=914277&SD=tech
8. It turns out that there is a much more elaborated way of configuring remote connections in SQL 2005. This is done through the "SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration". It is, of course, a good thing they have added this wealth of configuration options - but why couldn't it be accessible from the Management Studio? Couldn't they add an "Advanced" button on the remote server connections options that opens this Surface Area Configuration??? And if they didn't want to put too much things in the Management Studio - why did they give an option to configure remote connections there, when it can't work on its own anyway???

If you ever run into something similar - please remember this, it will save you some valuable time ...

Safely firing events in C# without locking

Long time no see…
I’ve been busy with plenty of stuff, and I don’t think this will change much in the next coming months – I’m trying to finish my thesis. So basically I put my blogging into (very) deep freezing state. I don’t promise it won’t remain that way until I finish with my thesis…
Anyway, yesterday I went to hear Juval Lowy at the C++/VB Users Group meeting. As usual, his talk was excellent and very informative. Also as usual, I learned as much from things he said on the side as I learned from the actual presentation. One of these side-things I learned really stunned me. It’s the simplicity in itself, but I never saw anything written on this, and even when I tried searching a bit about this on the Internet, I couldn’t find any concrete discussion.
Problem definition: How to properly handle events in a multi-threaded environment?
Just to get in sync, look at the following simple event-handling code:
public delegate void DummyEvent();
public class EventDemo
{
…
private event DummyEvent dummyEventRace;

public virtual event DummyEvent DummyEventRace
{
add
{
if (dummyEventRace != null)
dummyEventRace += value;
}
remove
{
if (dummyEventRace != null)
dummyEventRace -= value;
}
}

protected virtual void onDummyEventRace()
{
if (dummyEventRace != null)
dummyEventRace();
}
}

In a single-threaded world, this works fine. I make sure every access to the event first checks that it’s not null, and thus avoid the very annoying exception, and life is pretty cool.
However, in a multi-threaded environment, you could easily get into a race condition:
Thread A wants to fire an event and calls onDummyEventRace() . I manages to check whether dummyEventRace != null and then comes a context-switch.
Thread B gets the context and tries to remove an event handler – it fully removes it from dummyEventRace and since it’s the last handler, dummyEventRace becomes null .
Thread A gets the context again and – Ooops – exception!!!

So, to avoid this kind of problems, what most people would do (me inclusive) was to add a synchronization mechanism, that ensures each of the operations with dummyEventRace would be done atomically. It would look something like this:

public delegate void DummyEvent();
public class EventDemo
{
…
private object eventLocker = new object();
private event DummyEvent dummyEventLock;

public virtual event DummyEvent DummyEventLock
{
add
{
lock (eventLocker)
{
if (dummyEventLock != null)
dummyEventLock += value;
}
}
remove
{
lock (eventLocker)
{
if (dummyEventLock != null)
dummyEventLock -= value;
}
}
}

public virtual void onDummyEventLock()
{
if (dummyEventLock != null)
dummyEventLock();
}
}
This solution solves the race condition issue completely, but introduces a potential dead-lock issue. If the handler of the event must get hold of another resource inside its event handling method, and the same resource is being locked by the thread that tries to remove the event… In other words – it works, but could get nasty.
Anyway, until yesterday, not only did I think that was the proper way to do it – I thought it was the only way to do it.
I was WRONG!!!

Take a look at this:
public delegate void DummyEvent();
public class EventDemo
{
…
private event DummyEvent dummyEventNoLock = delegate {};
public virtual event DummyEvent DummyEventNoLock
{
add
{
dummyEventNoLock += value;
}
remove
{
dummyEventLock -= value;
}
}

public virtual void onDummyEventNoLock()
{
dummyEventNoLock();
}
}
Amazing, isn’t it? The dummyEventLock never turns back to null so there is no reason to check. Thus, no need to lock and you’re rid of both the race condition problem and the dead lock risk!!!
How come this is nowhere to be found in the MSDN documentation (to my knowledge) ???

Matlab, Memory Leaks, Dual-Core CPU and what's in between

[UPDATE: If you're searching for ways to better use your multiple cores, the R2007a release seems to support multithreaded computations. More on this on my recent post.]

I haven’t posted much recently. Well, I can say for my defense that I was sick (actually we were all three sick, each in turn) and shortly after that we went on vacation. Also, next week I have reserve duty, so I’m not going to post much in the near future either. I have still a pending SQL post I talked about a long time ago that is waiting for me to finish the last quarter of it. Shame on me…

Anyway, I wanted to share some performance problems I had to solve recently. They are all related to Matlab, so if you’re not into Matlab I guess it will be of little interest to you J

I recently purchased a very powerful machine with a dual-core CPU, 2GB DDR2 memory, etc. I’m using it to run some very extensive calculations, mostly in Matlab. However, I got very frustrated because:

1. After a few hours of intensive execution, Matlab throws me an “out of memory” exception. And, sure enough, it’s taking up more than 2GB of memory (note that I have 2GB ram + as much cache as I like).

2. I just couldn’t make the PC use all of the CPU. I didn’t expect it to use both CPU’s for a single Matlab process. I expected around 100% usage on one CPU (core actually) and close to 0% on the second. Instead, sometimes I got around 50% on both and most of the time it was around 20-30% for both CPU’s. So I was barely using ¼ of my processing capability (and only ½ of what I expected).

To tackle the first problem I tried everything, read a whole bunch of web pages but in the end I didn’t get anywhere. My first intuition was that for some reason Matlab is not releasing memory it has allocated, probably due to some error of mine, and I just couldn’t find the source of the problem. After some time I started to think that maybe the problem is with the SVM library I am using repeatedly in my process. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have started using a Matlab wrapper over SVMLight. After digging into both libraries, adding some code to track memory allocations, I managed to prove that both libraries don’t free all the memory that they allocate. While working on all this, I learned a bit about MEX-Files (C functions that can be called from Matlab), since the wrapper library is a MEX, of course. So I learned that there are various ways to allocate/free memory when you’re working with MEX-Files. One, of course, is the C malloc/free functions. Every memory block allocated with “malloc” must be freed (other wise you’re leaking), and if you’re using Windows, you must free it exactly once (more causes exceptions). Another problem with malloc/free in MEF-Files is that memory allocated by “malloc” should not be returned to Matlab. An alternative to malloc/free is using Matlab’s mxMalloc/mxFree pair. Memory allocated by mxMalloc can be returned to Matlab. Additionally, when the MEX-File is released (i.e. the function call is over), any memory allocated with mxMalloc that was not part of the returned variables is automatically released.

So, all I needed to do was make sure that BOTH library would perform ALL their memory allocations with mxMalloc, and then I wouldn’t need to take care of the freeing – Matlab would do it for me (as a side-note I must tell you that in my scripts, I call these libraries over and over again in a loop, so there are many short calls to the MEX-File). So I simply aliased malloc to mxMalloc and free to mxFree (remember the good old “#define malloc mxMalloc” ?) and voila – problem solved (“worked around” would be a better definition). I left my process running for 8 hours, and the memory used by Matlab increased only by a few small MBs! Yipee!!!

Once I had my memory problem resolved, I could start thinking about the CPU. So I changed my script files to separate the workload into 2 processes, instantiated 2 instances of Matlab – each running part of the job. At that point, the most incredible thing happened – once I started running the second process, the CPU turned flat (< 5% on both cores) and both processes got stuck with almost no progress at all!!! This drove me totally crazy! I tried changing the process affinity (i.e. define each process to run on a separate CPU), changed some system performance settings and even installed a hotfix that deals with performance problems on dual-core machine (you can download it from links in this thread) – but nada! Then I thought of trying something totally different. The code I was running was located on a remote computer. Actually, it was on a Disk-on-Key that was connected to my laptop (and the new PC has a network map to the DoK). I’m using this configuration because I take the DoK often with me and need to work on it from my laptop. So I connected the DoK directly to my workstation (the new PC with the dual-core CPU) and voila – both processes work marvelously, taking up 100% of both CPUs (cores)!!!

What have I learned from all this:

1. As always, the source of the problems is usually where it makes most sense. With the memory, the problem is with 3^rd party (non-commercial) code. This code was written for research purposes and I guess that as such there was little effort done to ensure no memory leaks. With the CPU – the problem with the issue of working on network mapped disks. I’m sure that once you’ve read everything above you’ve told yourself – “hey, but it’s so obvious!”. So as always, I should have followed my instincts in the first place…
2. My little aliasing trick with malloc-mxMalloc is something to keep in mind. It might not always be a good idea (especially for long-running code) because if there is a leak it remains until the MEX-File is unloaded, but I guess that in many cases it’s a really good and simple workaround with minimum risk to harm code you’re not familiar with.
3. Working from a network drive involves some hidden constraints that must be further investigated. It may be something that is specific to Matlab. Don’t know yet.

SVM Library in Matlab

For the past few weeks I’ve been using SVM as part of my research project. Until recently I used the SVM functions available in Piotr Dollar’s Image and Video Toolbox for Matlab. I am, however, constantly looking for alternatives. From what I saw on the Internet, it seems that one quite popular SVM implementation is SVM-Light by Thorsten Joachims. Add to it Tom Brigg’s MATLAB/MEX Interface to SVM-Light and you can run it from Matlab. The only thing you need is to put the Patch.exe utility in a folder that is in your system path and follow the installation instructions.

I’m still new with SVM-Light, so I don’t know exactly what all the parameters mean and how to tune them. A-priori it seems to work slightly better in terms of generalization accuracy and also run a little faster (with mostly default parameters and the same kernel function and parameters as Piotr Dollar’s implementation).

If you know of some other interesting SVM implementation, especially one that is available in Matlab, please drop me a line.

Windows XP Tweaks

While installing a new computer, I was trying to remember how to increase the number of simultaneous connections possible in Internet Explorer. So I stumbled on this site, which has an enormous amount of tweaks. Many are not interesting (to me) or already handled by PowerToy’s TweakUI, but I did find several new tweaks I really liked. Specifically I liked (and used) the one about how to add "Copy To Folder" and "Move To Folder" to Explorer context menu.

Another relevant site, with much much more options (although many are too basic to be interesting) can be found here.

I don't want the cellular companies to fry my brain!!!

Since the cellular companies have introduced their 3G solutions, the number of cellular antennae is increasing exponentially. Today I decided to do a little test. I counted the number of antennae on the highway between Caesarea interchange and Kfar Shmaryahu (it’s less than 35 km).

I only counted those antennae that are visible from the highway. I guess I’ve missed some, since I had to look at the road once in a while and also more and more antennae are hidden to the casual eye, to avoid protestations of people who live nearby.

I was able to count more than 40 antennae on this small piece of road!!!!!!

Need I say more?!?!?! Where does this stop???? When are there going to be laws that have the citizens' health and well-being in mind?

Just to set things straight - I'm NOT against cellular phones in general. I myself am using a cellular phone on a daily basis and understand its importance in today's life. I don't, however, like the idea of having antennae spread all around me, only to support 3G features, which frankly I feel are mostly superfluous.

Windows XP Performance tweaks

I’ve been trying to do some tweaks to my laptop’s performance. Found some very nice stuff here. The most interesting to me was how to speed up folder access – it makes a real difference with heavy folders.

In the same spirit – I recently got an incredible USB flash drive. It’s the 2GB Lexar JumpDrive Lightning. It’s an amazing piece of technology. It’s wrapped in a stylish stainless steel case, has a built-in support for password-protected secure area and is really lightning fast. I mean REALLY fast!!! It’s so much faster than a good hard-drive – even working in the secured area of the drive (which is where most of my stuff is stored). It’s got only one (rather small) liability, which is that you can only format it to FAT (no FAT32 and certainly no NTFS), which I detest. But the speed, the speed, the speed, the good software that comes with it, the lifetime warranty, the sustainable case and of course the speed covers for this annoyance.

So I was thinking – well, I could spare half a GB on my flash disk and use it for system paging, maybe this could give my OS a boost? Unfortunately, until now I haven’t been able to set this to work. For some reason, when I define a page file on the flash disk (fixed size), everything seems fine - I’m told to reboot for the changes to take effect, but when I do, the page file is not created on the flash disk (although according to the configuration it should be there). Go figure…

Seeking for help with the Google Image Search API

I’ve been asked for help implementing my Google Image Search API into a Mac “widget”. From what I understood, writing “widgets” is more or less like writing web pages (JavaScript, CSS, HTML, …). Also, most of the work is already in place, there is only the need to plug in the actual Image Search code. I guess this can be done by using the some kind of Regular Expression engine for JavaScript with the same regular expression I’m using in my C# code.

Is there anyone willing to help? I don’t have enough Web development experience to do it, or time to learn it.

Drop me a line if you’re interested.

Orange (color) soup

Yeah, well in Hebrew it sounds better, since there is a clear distinction between "orange" the color and "orange" the fruit. This post refers to the former ;-)

This is the soup I made last week-end. It's not the first time I've made it, but for some reason, this time it got a particularly great success. And it's so simple...

Ingredients:

• 3-4 Onions/leeks. I even use both sometimes
• Pumpkin (don’t ask me to give you quantities – I have no idea)
• 4-8 Carrots
• 3-4 Sweet Potatoes
• 3 Sliced Cloves of Garlic
• 1-2 liter of Chicken Bouillon
• Some olive oil (or yellow butter) to fry the onions/leeks
• Salt, Chili powder, Nutmeg

Directions

• Cut the onions (leek) in thin stripes.
• Fry the onions (leek) for at least 1 hour on a VERY LOW fire. They should NOT burn!
• Add the garlic. Stir well until you start feeling the smell of the garlic (just a few seconds - it shouldn’t burn!).
• Add the vegetables (pumpkin, carrots and sweet potatoes) and the bouillon. You may need to add some water to make sure all the vegetables are covered.
• Leave it cooking at boiling temperature for 1-2 hours.
• Once all the vegetables are really tender (almost melted), crush everything with a blender.
• Add the spices according to taste.
• As you must have noticed, the quantities for the ingredients are not very accurate. To get the best substance, the vegetables should be cut into rather small cubes (around 2x2x2 cm) and there should be just enough liquid (bouillon + water) to cover all the vegetables.
• When served, it’s nice to add some fresh Basil.

Windows Live - Microsoft's new search engine

[Update 09-Mar-2006] - The Image Search works. Or to put more accurately doesn't work. Just compare the search for "apple cake" with Google Image Search. I really don't see what they were thinking when they claimed to be a worthy competition...
[Update] - After playing a little more with Windows Live I noticed the following:
1. It seems that MSN Search and Windows Live return the same results for all queries. So my guess it they already started merging them into one.
2. There seems to be a significant improvement in the relevance of the results, as compared to MSN Search (in its previous version).
3. It's still too early for me to give an exact opinion and comparison with Google and Yahoo!

A Beta version of Microsoft's new search engine, Windows Live, is now available.
Like most people, I have a set of standard queries I like to try on new search engines, to which I know what to expect. Most of them are image queries, since this is strongly related to my thesis, but unfortunately they don't support image queries yet.
So I tried a web query I like a lot: "ariel shamir". Ariel Shamir is my thesis supervisor, and I like searching his name for the following reasons:
1. He has quite a few publications and should have some kind of footprint on the Internet.
2. His first name, Ariel, is the same as Ariel Sharon the prime minister, and thus many search engines are too much biased by that.
3. His last name, Shamir, is the same as one of our previous prime ministers, Yitzchak Shamir, which incurs yet another (wrong) bias.
4. He is sometimes referred to by his nickname, Arik, adding another level of confusion.

So all'n'all, it's a simple, but tricky query.
Well, here are some results for this simple search:
Google
Yahoo!
MSN
Windows Live

Some interesting notes about Windows Live's results:
1. Ariel Shamir's actual home page is nowhere to find in the results (at least in the few first tens).
2. Windows Live fell in both pitfalls - the first result is about Ariel Sharon and the second is about Yitzchak Shamir.
3. There are many links to Ariel Shamir's papers and to stuff related to him.
4. Maybe the most annoying of all is the similarity between the results in MSN and in Windows Live. Did they just give it a cool name and an even cooler GUI and leave the engine as is???

To sum up, this is by far not a thorough test, but still a dissapointing one. It leaves me with much less anticipation for the final release of Windows Live than I was before it.

Preventing violent crimes

There has been yet another high-rating violent crime last week-end. Inbal Amram, 20, was killed when she took the car for a few minutes to get her sister. The police has still no clue as to who might have done it nor why.

I’m sick of it! And frankly, I’m truly scared. I have a 2-year old daughter, and if these kinds of things happen so often today, what will it be when she reaches 16?

What drives me crazy even more is that there is a pretty efficient way to prevent this. We all had to endure, during all our school years, these stupid sports lessons. I call them stupid, because for those kids who are much into sports, the lessons were just a game and too easy for them. And for those kids who are really not into sports, it’s boring, tiresome and a waste of time altogether.

Why not use the time, energy and money, in teaching kids self-defense. I’m not talking about a crash-course of 3 lessons. I’m talking about seriously teaching a martial art, throughout all the childrens’ school years, that would teach them how to defend themselves. Make it part of the education program. To be more precise, I would make it obligatory for girls. After all, let’s face it – most violent crimes are performed by men against women.

I know that this is not a very orthodox solution. But I know what you can learn from practicing a martial art for years. You learn discipline, self-control and improve your self-confidence. When the moment comes, you know what to do and are not afraid of doing it. I know that if my girl will start practicing something like that from young age, I will sleep much better at night, when she’ll grow up.

Working on the first SQL For Developers Tips and Tricks post

I've started working on the first post in the series "SQL For Developers Tips and Tricks post". It will cover useful links, things you may not know about Query Analyzer, some guidelines about using SQL Profiler and will show you the 'bcp' utility, which is very helpful to transfer data accross databases.
I hope to post it in the next few days - stay tuned!

Getting information in Matlab

One of the things I really hate with Matlab is that when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you stand a good chance not to find it. Hmm, this doesn’t sound right, let me rephrase: when you don’t know how what you’re looking for is called in Matlab, you stand a good chance not to find it.
Today, for example, I wanted to retrieve the file that implements a specific function. Since I’m using several free toolboxes I downloaded from the internet, I wanted to know whether the function is part of the Matlab installation or of one of the toolboxes. I started by typing:

>> help pca

Which gave me a complete description for the 'pca' function. Yet, it didn’t provide its source. I couldn’t find any allusion to this function in the Help, which indicates there is a good chance that this method comes from an external toolbox. Note however that it’s not always the case – some functions that are part of the installation are not easy to locate in the Help window, even if you know their exact name.
After several minutes of frustration I discovered that the following line:

>> which pca

returns the full path of the file that implements the function ‘pca’ (and indeed it was from an external toolbox).

My frustration was – how the h… am I supposed to know that the function that provides this information is called ‘which’ ??? My situation was even better than most cases, because I vaguely remembered that there is such a function. Sometimes you don’t even know exactly how you can do what you actually want to do, and then looking it out in the Help becomes a real nightmare.

That’s all, just had to get this off my chest…

SQL for Developers Tips and Tricks: 1. Introduction

Lately I’ve been mostly working on research projects related to Machine Learning (both for my thesis and as a private contractor). Therefore, my ability to blog on development issues I’m encountering is somewhat limited. Therefore I have decided to start blogging about stuff I’ve learned and used along the years, both to keep it as a written memory and maybe to help some readers…

So for starter, I’ve decided to summarize various SQL issues I liked/learned/used. Some I got from fellow developers or DBA’s and some I had to learn on my own (sometimes at great personal risk to become completely crazy). I’ll try to do it in an organized fashion, each blog focusing on some other subject. The vantage point is that of a software developer not a DBA. I have seen many cases where a developer coming from C/C++ started using SQL. The first few days she invests in getting a good grip at the basic syntax (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, …). Then she starts writing stored procedures and learns some SQL programming concepts (like CURSORs). At some point, she starts getting acquainted with Views and Functions and learns various helpful built-in SQL functions. Then, slowly but surely, the problems start to arise, usually performance. Once the performance issues are more or less under control, there comes a time to design a new database. This new database inevitably includes many flaws, which will have to be dealt with at some point or another.

I have gone through this, and many good programmers I know have gone through a similar sequence. The purpose of this set of posts is to try and give the programmer a set of tools and knowledge base that can help her go through this ordeal with more ease and confidence. This is by no means a complete tutorial, but I still hope it will be of help. If there are any specific requests, please send a comment with the details. If I know the answer, I’ll try to asses it in the future posts.

One last thing before I present the list of issues I intend to cover – since I’m still too short in hands-on experience with SQL2005, most of the information will be provided with SQL2000 in mind. I guess that most of the issues are applicable to SQL2005 as well, although the new SQL version certainly brings a whole series of new issues (with the CLR and all) as well as additional and revised tools. Also, these posts will assume familiarity with the basic SQL syntax (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE).

Following is the list of issues I plan to asses. This is a preliminary list and may be altered along the way, but should give you some idea of what to expect.

1. Introduction
2. Basic tools you should keep at the ready
1. Helpful web sites
2. SQL Query Analyzer – things too many people learn too late
3. SQL Profiler
3. SQL Programming for Performance – basic programming tips that can help reduce future performance problems
1. Similar code that runs faster
2. Cursors
3. Temporary tables
4. Use of indexes
4. Locks and Deadlocks – using and troubleshooting
1. Locking in SQL 2000 and isolation levels
2. Simple deadlock scenario
3. Troubleshooting locks and deadlocks
5. Troubleshooting performance problems
1. SQL Profiler to the rescue – how to configure, what to look at
2. SQL Query Analyzer - reading the Execution Plan
3. SQL Server configuration
4. Analyzing index behavior
5. Partitioned tables
6. Some advanced Tips and Tricks
1. TBD

Things I do not plan to discuss at this point:

• Accessing SQL objects programmatically (SQL DMO)
• Using ADO/ADO.NET
• OLAP
• XML Integration
• Reporting and Notification
• Scheduled tasks
• Roles and Permissions

Volunteering in Israel

A few months ago I was asked whether I would be willing to volunteer giving free Math lessons to school students. I accepted willingly and am enjoying it a lot. Since then, my wife has started volunteering giving English lessons as well.
I believe it is important both for society and for the person himself to do some kind of volunteering job once in a while.
In that spirit, if you live in Israel and are looking for a place where your skills might be needed, I suggest you check out this volunteering search engine.

C# Code Snippet Library for Visual Studio 2005

I got this tip from reading Scott Dockendorf’s blog (right here).
It’s been some time that the VB people kept laughing at us C#-ers that they have much more code snippets for VB within VS 2005 than we have for C#. Well, not anymore - check this out.
I guess it’s going to take me some time to get to know all the shortcuts, but I’m sure going to enjoy it a lot

Quaero - where are you???

Almost a year ago (April 2005), French President Jacques Chirac announced his backing of a new Euro-centric search engine called Quaero (which means ‘I am looking for' in Latin). The idea is to build a new search engine which should be capable to compete with MSN, Yahoo! and even Google. Tons of very important European companies are involved in this project, as well as the French and German governments.

Mid January 2006, there was some loud buzz in the air about this project. So loud, in fact, that they decided to get into hiding: the small and unconvincing beta website they had in place has been removed and they came with a statement that around the end of January 2006 they will come out with a new statement (actually a release was expected). Look here for a summary of the latest news.

Today is the 15^th of February and I’m still waiting for such a statement…

As a side note, I’m a little ambivalent about such projects. I don’t like the idea of geologically differentiating core web parts such as search engines. I mean, come on! The past decade has seen such an improvement in accessing data by means of the Internet. Why go back? Also, I don’t like the idea of having governments messing with my searches. We’ve seen what they are capable of (see the China-Google story lately). On the other hand, I’m not sure that having companies being responsible for such an important asset being a much better solution. After all, if my interests as customers will not comply with their interests as profit-thirsty company, we all know what they will opt for (see the China-Google story again…).

IMHO there is an urgent need for international legislation of the search engines issue. I have no idea how this can be done (I don’t know much in international law), but that should be the direction. There should be a set of international laws to which each globally-available search engine should comply. Then, an international committee (with concrete punishment capabilities), would be responsible to make sure all companies/governments managing search engines would abide to these laws.

Build a Data Access Layer in less than 15 minutes

To be honest, I still haven’t decided whether I’m an ORM-guy or a traditional DAL kind of person. Until now I have always worked with regular DAL, and due to various organizational constraints, haven’t had the opportunity to thoroughly check out using ORMs in real-life projects. My heart tends to go towards ORMs due to the OO appeal, but my experience with SQL performance issues forces me to remain skeptical until I’ve seen it work.

Anyways, it seems that if you’re still on the traditional DAL side of the map, CodeSmith has a very interesting solution for building strongly-typed DALs in a very fast and easy manner. I’ll surely try this one out next time I have a new DAL to work on!

An extension to Matlab's Image & Video Toolbox

Piotr Dollar (I swear that’s his name) has written a very nice set of extensions for Matlab’s Image & Video Toolbox.
It includes a whole bunch of existing algorithms with serious performance optimizations, as well as some that are missing in Matlab’s toolbox.

Thanks man, it’s really helpful for my MSc research project!

AllOfMP3

[UPDATE: It's not that simple. Apparently, although they are legal strictly speaking, they don't seem to be very fair. Bottom line is - there is a very big chance that the artist you're downloading songs of will not see a dime from it.
I was a little skeptical, so I started Googling with "AllOfMp3 scam". Take a look at one of the results... Look also at this...
I personally intend to liquidate the remaining 10$ or so I have left in my account and I doubt I will renew it. I really don't like the way the music companies extort us with their prices, but that doesn't mean I want to steal the music. I think that a more reasonable pricing should be available. I know some companies have started with new approaches (such as Napster), but they all sell protected files, which is not practical to me.

So I'm back to square one - looking for a good, reliable, legal, not too expensive (and fair) source of digitally available music...]

I’ve discovered this amazing site yesterday. It’s a legal songs download site, and it’s awesome!!! Their pricing makes so much more sense than all the other sites. They charge you by the byte – the larger the file you download, the more you pay. In addition, for most songs you can choose the exact encoding parameters: encoder, bitrate, other encoder-specific parameters. In the end, you end up paying much much less for your songs. You can roughly count on 10 cent/song with 192kbps encoding. Ah, I almost forgot, the download rate I get is over 160KB/s on average.

Did I mention I liked it, A LOT ?!?!

[Update: One thing I think they should improve is their search capabilities. Currently you can only search by artist, album or song. With such an extensive amount of data, I would expect much more flexible and advanced searching options. Hope this will improve over time...]