Upgraded to CS 2007

Well I bit the bullet and upgraded the blog to run on CS 2007 RTM – yes contrary to what I had said earlier. Initial indications look good so far and I only had to make a couple of changes.

There are still a few things which I have not tried like the Google CS plugin, and I suppose the CAPTCHA control will stop working. I would need to look at those over the next few days.

Meanwhile, if you find something that is not working drop me a note.

Time and Space Bend

In case you have not been following the news lately, NASA and Stanford University’s joint effort – Gravity Probe B after 17-odd months of launch and collecting data has proved one of the two not-as-yet-proven aspect’s of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Simply put (and it will be simple as I only have a fairly basic grasp on Physics – it was one of my favorite subjects in School, but that was many moons ago Smile), Isaac Newton believed (as shown by NASA’s image below) that both time and space were fixed entities and gravity was the force which acted between the object. So, in Newton’s world a perfect gyroscope orbiting the Earth would remain forever fixed to relative space.

Einstein on the other hand more than 90 years ago said both space and time are relative entities which are interwoven into a “fabric” that he called space-time. In Einstein’s world an object like Earth distorts the fabric of time and space (as shown in NASA’s image on the right) and gravity is not a force as Isaac Newton discovered, but rather is a consequence of the distortion of both space and time. The bigger the object, the greater this distortion. It is both matter and energy that distort space-time, by curving it around themselves.

So in Einstein’s world the spin of the same perfect gyroscope orbiting Earth will precess i.e. change to the direction of the axis on which it is rotating in relation to relative space.

I liked the analogy used by the Guardian to describe this time-space:

Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time – a phenomenon known as the geodetic effect. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.

Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are traveling.

The second as-yet unproven part part of the theory is called frame-dragging and states that as the object such as Earth in the aforementioned example, spins, it drags the the fabric of the universe behind it. This is still not proved and will be another few months until enough data is collected.

MSDN Webcast: Hosting Options, COM+ Integration & Peer to Peer model

One of the MSDN Webcasts that I along with Shawn, Dennis, and Chris did on the following topics with some samples from the WCF Pro book. This is a Level 300 Webcast, and there is a lot of material to cover! If you would like us to do a Webcast on any specific topic from WCF let us know – we will see what we can do.

  1. Hosting Options
  2. COM+ Integration
  3. Peer to Peer Model

If you are interested you can see the recording for this session.

Community Server 2007 RC1 available

RC1 for Community Server 2007 (the thing that runs this blog) is available now and you can get it from here. If all goes well then the RTM version is supposed to come out on the 16th of this month – in other words in four days. I will wait for the RTM before I try and update the blog to the new bits.

%d bloggers like this: