As my life is insignificant and just plain boring these days, I’ve uninstalled beta2 of SP2 and am in the process of installing the RC1… To be honest, I’ve been waiting for about 4 hours now, and I’m still nowhere near the end, with a very high CPU usage… Thanks god for my laptop!

I’m not willing to disclose any spoiler, but I have a phone interview with an international company on Monday. I’m absolutely thrilled. Their teams are the top of the top in XP development and good in .net. To be honest, I’ve learned that there are some psychometric tests over there, and after nearly a year working exclusively on psychometric tests, I know that I can’t properly be evaluated by these, as it seems I’m a 3d thinker... Or so told me one of the Doctors in psychology that I’ve been working with. Well, we’ll see. I won’t say more about it before I get some kind of answer, but I’m really excited J

As a side note… I’m back on the Microsoft newsgroups answering where I can help.

Please note this post was a few days old but I just discovered it never got published. So here it is.

Stefano asks in this post, why is Microsoft working on its own on a separate and new search engine. Is the competition really absurd? I think on the contrary that providing some serious competition to google is the best thing that can happen to this search engine. Google is seriously flawed with the new collaborative approach of the web content (yes you read right, blogging):

1.      Relevance by linking: The relevance in incoming link increase the reliability of the author on a specific subject, not on anything he says, nor on a specific content. I’m the first for marketing bullshit, if that’s not being broken I don’t know what is.

2.      What to do about blogs: well, seems google is trying stuff but didn’t come up yet with any solution. Why? Because they absolutely rule the search engine world (although Scoble tries to push feedster as a potential replacement here). Without some competition there’s absolutely no reason for them to rush something new out in the market.

Let me tell you a small story. A very very long time ago, when compuserve had more content than the internet, google didn’t exist and the search engine that ruled them all was altavista. Who still use it? It’s usage has dropped tremendously. Why? Because they had no serious competition for so long that they never really got anything new out, not because they didn’t collaborate with google.

And as a final note, the human factor here is the most important in that kind of decision. If you came up with a great algorithm, and think you can create your own search engine, rule them all and take over the whole market, generating billions on the way, would you really go and share it with someone, let them grab half of it, just for the sake of technology? Nope. Competition is natural, and is helpful. That’s what open source and the bazaar model is all about. That’s what Microsoft is all about. This is nearly the only common factor across the whole industry. And it is a good thing^TM.

I am very happy to say that I went over the 4K+ messages in my backlog in only 3 days of relatively painful reading, and my backlog stopped at 317 entries to think about or blog about. I’ll be back to serious blogging soon. And hopefully, more reactive as well! 

As a side note, I’m now officially open to suggestions for new development / architecture positions in London in the next few weeks/months. You know where to contact me. (psssssssssst, look at the mail icon, lower right of the web site!)