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Wow, these last few weeks have been a blur. Quite a bit has happened.

Intern at Microsoft

3 weeks ago I was finishing up the last week of my internship at Microsoft Research in the External Research group. It was a fantastic summer — I had the opportunity to work with a lot of great people and contribute to an exciting project.  They certainly kept me busy.

Some highlights:

• Getting to shake Steve Ballmer’s hand after the intern-only Q&A session before the Product Fair
• "Wall-e-ballers" coming in 2nd place at the company picnic volleyball tournament (which was incredible — they could only fit in 25,000 people per day so they needed 3 days for it)
• Being there for Bill Gates’ last day
• Seeing Bill Gates’ house from the vantage point of a Lake Washington cruise ship
• Meeting Rick Rashid, senior VP of research (worldwide)
• Meeting Rico Malvar, director of my building at MSR Redmond
• Attending the Faculty Summit and seeing all sorts of cool stuff first-hand like the Surface Sphere and LucidTouch

What project was I working on? the Trident scientific workflow workbench.  And, no, Trident isn’t a code name — it’s the actual name of the project.   Trident recognizes the fact that scientists need to accomplish a myriad of computational-intensive tasks (e.g. data processing) but don’t necessarily want to learn all of the IT- or computer-related steps to do so.  Most researchers would much rather focus on the science they are trying to accomplish than the details of how they accomplish that task. Trident addresses this in a clean manner by allowing common procedures to be encapsulated into "activities" which are reusable code modules with well-defined inputs and outputs.  Scientists can then create workflows (programs) from these activities by specifying the sequence in which they execute (control flow) as well as the data connections between activities (data flow).  This type of thing really has the potential to completely change how scientists and researchers look at computing, allowing them to become more productive and lower the "time-to-insight".

Trident is built on top of .NET 3.0, heavily utilizing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as the activity/workflow model and execution runtime, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the graphical workflow designer, and Windows Communication Foundation for the inter-machine communication.

Jon Udell interviewed Roger Barga, the principle architect of Trident (and my boss/colleague this summer) about Trident here and here. I’m really looking forward to see how this project turns out.

Coming Home

2 weeks ago I was making my way from Seattle, WA back home to Ohio.  Thankfully the plane ride was rather uneventful.  I had a layover in O’Hare and immediately recognized it from the movie Home Alone It was only 3 hours of time difference, so the jet lag wasn’t too bad, but I sure had a lot to catch up on.  Needless to say, my wife was glad that I am back.

Remnants of Ike

Last Sunday afternoon the remnants of Ike came roaring through Ohio with 75mph winds, causing widespread power outages. While nothing compared to what happened in Texas, it was still pretty rattling.  I think some 450,000 residents in central Ohio were without power at one point, and it was 4 days before our power came back on. American Electric Power (AEP) confessed that they were short-handed since they’d sent most of their repair force to Texas to help, only to bring them right back.

Despite the inconvenience, it was actually nice to have a chance (though forced) to "unplug" for a day or two — to stop rushing around, slave to every electronic distraction (did I get an email? What’s on TV?) and actually talk to people. I even learned how to play cribbage (by candlelight).

Anyway, now that things are "back to normal", my posts will return to the regularly-scheduled technical programming influenced by whatever coding project I’m currently working on

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