Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet for category 'spout' via ATOM 1.0 csells on twitter

You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.



Sunday, Feb 1, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout

On Behalf of Software Engineers, I'm Sorry

Sunday, February 1st, 2004

I just got off the phone with my step-mother and boy are my arms tired. She way trying to do a mail merge. I told her about a month ago put data into an Excel spreadsheet in a data-like format (and I sent her an example spreadsheet to start from). Then, after entering the data into her spreadsheet, I recommended to her that she choose Mail Merge from the Tools menu in Word and she'd be home free.

Of course, she wasn't. For example, after choosing her Excel spreadsheet, she was asked if she wanted to use first name, Sheet1$, Sheet2$ or Sheet3$ as her data. Having zero idea what SheetN$ was, she chose something vaguely human-sounding, which was exactly what she didn't want, then was frustrated when her data didn't come up. Later, after going away to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books (none of them telling her how to do Mail Merge using words that she could understand, btw), she opened up her document and was presented with a dialog box asking whether it was OK to run an SQL statement. "What's SQL?" she asked. "Nothing that any normal human should ever have to see," I replied, growing more embarrassed about the state of the output of my industry by the minute.

Later, when we got the data working with the merge (Remote Assistance, even over a slow phone line to Fargo, ND, works *very* well, once I figured out how to take control of her computer [answer: Take Control in the upper left]), she turned her attention to reformatting her letter. For example, she'd pasted some text from the web, which, by default, left this weird web formatting instead of making it look like the rest of her letter, so the styles were very different. Luckily, selecting the text and turning off the bold was enough, otherwise I'd have either had to reformat her entire letter or talk her through doing it. And how did I tell her to turn off the bold? By selecting the text and pressing Ctrl+B? Why did I tell her that? Because Word had taken the Bold toolbar icon off the toolbar and I couldn't imagine describing to her what the little chevron was for so that she could get it back.

I've listed only a small percentage of issues I worked through with her, but lest you think otherwise, my step-mom is no idiot. She's a nurse anesthetist, so has to keep tons of details in her head all day long or people die. Also, she's trained her dogs to win first place obstacle courses in competitions around the country, one of whom was said to be untrainable. But when it came to Mail Merge, she worked for three weekends straight before giving up and calling me. It's clear to me that for anything but the simplest of tasks that computers are not even close to ready for normal humans. On behalf of the software engineers everywhere, I'd like to apologize to Charlene (my step-mom) and the rest of the normal humans everything who are merely trying to make computers actually work. Hopefully Longhorn will fix this problem, but until then, I recommended that she return her computer to the manufacturer and get herself a Nintendo. After working through this with her for over an hour, I was only half kidding.

Discuss

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Saturday, Jan 31, 2004, 9:39 AM in The Spout

What Would You Save If Your House Was On Fire?

Here. The one where I spend a peaceful Saturday morning contemplating my life's possessions.

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Saturday, Jan 31, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout

What Would You Save If Your House Was On Fire?

Saturday, January 31, 2004

On a recent thread on my favorite mailing list ever, Jon Kale answers the question "what would you save if your house was on fire," which triggered my own thoughts along this line.

Assuming I've already made sure that the humans and the pets were out of the house, I'd make sure to grab my Omega X-33 (purchased during the bubble, of course), but since I go almost nowhere without it, it's not likely to be burned up w/o its owner.

Also assuming I had a set of back-up CDs/DVDs for the last year in my safety deposit box (which I don't have right now... please excuse the pause while I purchase a DVD burner... OK, $155 got me a top-reviewed DVD+R/DVD+RW drive with 30 blank DVD+RW disks delivered), the thing I would most miss is my book collection. The computer books could be replaced on demand, but my collection of just-for-fun books has literally taken a lifetime to collect and cull down to just things that I really love (click on the picture to get a closer look).

Often, when I want something comfortable to read, I'll scan the shelves 'til something pops out at me and re-read it. Also, when friends & family come to town, I often take them to Powell's City of Books and we play the "Top 5 Books of All Time" game, purchasing what they point out for me and writing their name in the book so that when I read it, I can talk about it with the recommender (man, I've gotten some wacky books that way...). Losing those books, especially the ones I haven't gotten to yet, would really hurt.

On the other hand, because you never know when you're going to need to jam, my goal is to fit my entire set of positions on a memory hypercube (or whatever). But how do I back up the books when the atoms themselves are so satisfying? I mean, how can I recapture the feel of my leather-bound The Complete Frank Miller Batman, the back-pocket-worn The Silicon Mage, my copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings signed by my mother when I received my Master's Degree because she read them to me when I was 10 or the ancient copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes given to me by my father and to him by his father?

But even if I wanted a lossy digital backup of my books, how do I do it? I mean, I can scan all of my books and graphic novels, but only by destroying them. Why haven't books, which are produced in digital form, made the transition to electronic availability? Are we waiting for the Tablet PC to get to a point of ubiquity?

So, in summary:

Discuss

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Friday, Jan 30, 2004, 9:26 PM in The Spout

MS Blogging About Longhorn 14% of the Time

Here. Just following up again on When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn to point out an interesting survey of MS bloggers by David Weller. Apparently, out of 56 recent blog entries by Microsoft employees, 8 were related to Longhorn. That's about 14%, which is a little higher than the 10% that I argued for, but I bet if you took out the ones from me (whose job it is to talk about Longhorn), we'd be closer. : )

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Friday, Jan 30, 2004, 11:55 AM in The Spout

Betting on Longhorn-Only?

Here. The one where I address some specifics about what amout of effort you should be putting into Longhorn right now.

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Friday, Jan 30, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout

Betting on Longhorn-Only?

Friday, January 30th, 2004

In response to my post yesterday (When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn), Shaun asked whether he should be targeting Longhorn-only right now:

[ed: the following has been edited to remove identifying remarks at Shaun's request]

Thanks for all the great posts and community participation over the past year. Your recent 'Ignore Longhorn' post alarmed me a bit. I hope that was not born from some aspect of it being pushed past 2006.

Anyway, I know you are busy, so I will get to the point. We are mid-sized, established s/w company, and a Microsoft shop to the core (SQL Server, Analysis Services, VB, we embed VBA etc...). I am facing a huge decision regarding building our next gen app architecture. We need to ship in 1H 2006, and (IMO) we need to target rich and reach, so Longhorn is on my list of possible directions along with some ASP.NET 2.0 / ClickOnce combination.

I am enjoying working with Longhorn (XAML in particular), but I'm having a hard time shaking the feeling that I am taking too much of a gamble if I go Longhorn-Only, but some of the aspects are just so compelling. On the other hand, I'd hate to make a huge 2-3 year dev investment in ASP.NET only to ship something in 2006 that is not revolutionary/differentiated. I firmly believe our existing 3 million lines of solid COM code has plenty of life in it too.

Any insight or advice you might have would be greatly appreciated. I know it is probably difficult without understanding our company or market, but maybe some general advice to someone who is targeting a 2006 release. I guess my other worry surrounds the Longhorn adoption rate, but obviously none of us can predict that!

Here was my answer:

Shaun, if you think that Longhorn is going to help you build a differentiated product that'll help you be more successful, then great! That's why we're building it.

On the other hand, if I were you, I wouldn't put all my money into a single investment. Instead, I'd use some diversification strategies like you would with your financial portfolio. At this point, the ship date of Longhorn, along with the list of features it will support when it ships, is merely speculative. I won't put more than 10% of my available investment time/money/staff into it, leaving the rest of my portfolio for getting the most I can from my existing and/or near future technologies.

Specifically, you ask about ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows Forms/ClickOnce. Both of those technologies rock. ASP.NET is going to be the way to build web sites and services for the next decade at least, even after Longhorn's been out for years, since it has the reach across our existing OSes and competing OSes. Plus, ASP.NET 2.0 has a dizzying list of new features that people will spend years just taking full advantage of. For reach, you can't make a better investment than ASP.NET.

For rich, on the other hand, Windows Forms + ClickOnce is a killer combo. The updated Windows Forms in Whidbey along provides some amazing new capabilities, not the least of which is the new GridView, which you can read about in Michael's new Wonders of Windows Forms piece. Also, look for a "What's New in Whidbey Windows Forms" piece in MSDN Magazine RSN. ClickOnce (which you can learn more about in Duncan's ClickOnce piece and in Jamie's ClickOnce talk) is the way to deploy rich clients in Whidbey and in Longhorn, so digging into that technology is a very good idea.

As time goes on and Longhorn becomes a more solid development investment, you should put more of your portfolio into it. If you've got plenty of time/money/staff, than 10% now could mean an entire pilot project in Longhorn, which would be a good thing. But if you've got limited amounts of time/money/staff that you really need to yield a dividend now, Longhorn is dangerous for you and should only be something you dabble with at this point.

For you specifically, a mid-sized company, you should carve off a chunk of your dev. staff to build a pilot in Longhorn. This lets you dabble while the rest of your staff is busy with existing and near future technologies. And as you dabble and notice things that don't work at all as you expect or need, let us know! Operators are standing by to take your calls! We're at a stage in our development process where we're able to give much more attention to the fundamentals than we will be at beta, so the 10% you put into Longhorn now could yield large dividends in the future.

And as to your follow up comment, I'm happy that you enjoyed my response, but I'm pretty sure an autograph from Sting would be cooler. : )

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Thursday, Jan 29, 2004, 7:22 PM in The Spout

When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn

Here.

The one where I list my favorite sources of information for development with today's shipping .NET Framework.

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Thursday, Jan 29, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout

When In Doubt, Ignore Longhorn

Thursday, January 29th, 2004

A guy walks into an exotic car dealer and asks the salesman the price of the fancy new Ferrari in the corner. The salesman looks at him with a sad look on his face, shakes his head and says, "I'm afraid, sir, that if you have to ask, you won't be able to afford it."

If you're wondering whether you should be paying attention to the information on Longhorn that has appeared on the web and in the news lately, then you shouldn't be. Longhorn RTM is years away. This is the most lead time we've given on any Windows operating system ever. The reason we did it was so that we could get super early adopters to give us meaningful feedback while we still had enough of the development cycle left to make meaningful changes. If you're not a super early adopter, than Longhorn is just going to be noise that you should ignore 'til the beta hits.

For day-to-day development, you should pay attention to .NET 1.1 news sources. For the near future, you'll want to listen for Whidbey, the next version of the .NET Framework, which should work on all supported OSes when it ships. Here are a list of my favorite news sources for current information and near future information:

.NET Framework 1.x Information Sources:

That's not to say that Microsoft is going to stop talking about Longhorn in the WinFX newsgroups, on the Longhorn Developer Center and in blogs of all kinds. We do this so that those folks that can think about the distant future today have a chance to make their voices heard at a time when we can most take advantage of what they're saying.

However, there continues to be more information than any human can consume on current Microsoft technologies, so don't be alarmed when you see something go by with Longhorn in the title; just ignore it until you think that Longhorn can help make your business more successful. That's why we're building it after all. : )

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Thursday, Jan 15, 2004, 4:54 PM in The Spout

Bush: Get Your Own Dream!

Here.

It bugs me that Bush would steal JFK's dream of getting off of our planet, especially after we've already done it. Why not reach for getting America off of foreign oil by developing alternative energy sources, freeing us from the need to screw around with other countries and making us targets for terrorism? That's a cool dream. But noooo, you can't do that one, because you're just a shill for US big oil!

Sorry about that... I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Friday, Jan 9, 2004, 3:43 PM in The Spout

Surprised by Microsoft's Openness

Here. The one where even I'm surprised at how open Microsoft is willing to be.

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Friday, Jan 9, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout

Surprised by Microsoft's Openness

Friday, January 9th, 2004

I get a lot of emails from folks surprised about how open Microsoft is being lately, mostly due to all of the blogging we've been doing lately (some of us started long before we ever became employees). However, even I was surprised in an internal blogging meeting today filled with a bunch of MS bloggers. During the meeting, we talked about a bunch of the benefits to MS and to our customers. Sara talked about how blogs are driving more traffic to MSDN than our own headlines. Robert described his "green, yellow, red" scale for determining whether to blog about something (believe it or not, he does decide not to sometimes : ).

And then Adam Sohn from marketing talked about the need to police ourselves, describing some of the downsides in regards to blowing some group's launch plans or unconstructively criticizing another group. He preached caution when approaching the line between what was good for the customer and what was good for Microsoft. After listening to what I began to interpret as a message of self-censorship, I asked Adam a warm up, "Isn't it true that a lot of the stuff close to the 'line' is what our customers find most valuable?" He agreed that it was. And then I asked Adam my real question, "So, when we get close to that line, do we err on the side of our customer or ourselves?"

Now, you have to remember that I've been a contributing member of the Windows development community for a lot of years. I've seen how aggressive Microsoft is in everything it does to always be on top. So when I asked on what side of the line I should come down, I fully expected to be told to keep the shareholders in mind.

Of course, you know what his answer was or this story wouldn't have made it into my blog until after my tenure at MS was complete (or just before : ). He said, without hesitation, "Err on the side of the customer."

That blew me away. Of course, I've been doing just that since before I became an MS employee and Robert rides the ragged edge all day long, but it was *very* nice to hear that guy with the PR and legal battle scars tell me to keep the customer first and foremost in my mind.

Thanks, Adam. You've confirmed my decision to work at Microsoft.

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Saturday, Jan 3, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout

On Genghis, WinForms and How to Move Towards Avalon

Saturday, January 3rd, 2004

Inspired by my pending interview of Don Box, Paolo Severini sent along an interview for me.

Paul: Being a faithful reader of your books, articles and of your blog, I'd like to ask you a few questions about LH, Avalon and the future of WinForms. Before all, let me say that I'm really fascinated by Longhorn, and especially by Avalon. I installed the PDC stuff as soon as I received it through my MSDN subscription and I've begun exploring it with "pure geek" enthusiasm. Everything is extremely interesting, but I'm now not sure what to do with it.

Chris: I know what you mean, Paul. I'm going through that myself. Suddenly having so many fewer barriers tends to throw off the engineer in me. I'm working through it by begging the Longhorn User Experience team for guidance, learning Adobe Illustrator, reading graphic design books and trying to open my mind to the graphic designer inside us all (I hope : ).

Paul: Paraphrasing one of the questions you proposed to Don Box: what should a WinForms programmer *really* do today to prepare for Avalon?

Chris: If you want to write code today that'll work well on Longhorn tomorrow, write WinForms today. WinForms in Whidbey gets tons more features and I expect they'll be some cool new Longhorn-specific stuff when the time is right. If, when you're preparing a Longhorn version of your application, you'd like to host Avalon controls from your WinForms app or even build Avalon apps that host your WinForms controls, you'll be able to do that in Longhorn via WinForms/Avalon interop.

For maximum flexibility in the code you write now, be very thorough about separating the data from the view of the data so that you can write a 100% Avalon front end to replace your WinForms front end if such is your need. Likewise, be very thorough about separating the data from the storage of the data is that you can take advantage of WinFS.

Paul: I'm very grateful to MS for having disclosed their future technologies so soon, and more generally, to have become so "opened" to outsider's eyes, with so many devs and PMs now blogging about their work.

Chris: Me, too. Without this openness, I'd get into lots more trouble. : )

Paul: But I somehow also think that maybe LH was presented a bit too soon. Since it's not planned to be released before 2006, chances are that the shipped version could be significantly different. (Will it? Is it already? Can you write anything about that? :-).

Chris: I used to think that we were unveiling Longhorn too soon, too. However, the later in the development process we get it out to reviewers, the fewer major changes we'll be able to make based of your feedback. What that means, of course, is that some major things are going to change between now and release, but those changes will be based on decisions that include feedback from you. The downside is that you'll have to relearn some of the things you learn with these bits. Hopefully, the upside is that most of what you have to unlearn will be replaced with something significantly better.

Paul: Furthermore, even when the new presentation subsystem will ship, it seems like it won't be easy to write code that supports both the new and the old platforms, being they so different, and that could slow down its widespread acceptance even more. So I'm afraid that we'll all have a difficult time writing user interfaces, having to decide whether to take advantage of the new features or simply stay with the old portable libraries. After all, there are today still (too many) people running Windows 9x. And Windows XP is such a great OS that won't universally be replaced so soon.

Chris: I've already mentioned how well WinForms will work under Longhorn, so I think I've answered part of your question. However, you're asking something deeper here, i.e. when do I give up the old "way" that has more ubiquitous support for the new "way?" In this case, you're talking about .NET and Longhorn, but you could as easily be talking about DOS and Windows or Win32 and .NET. This is the eternal struggle and the reason that we need software engineers in the first place. As with all such questions, the answer is "it depends."

My general purpose answer is to always pick the newest thing that meets my requirements. The newer the technology you pick, the longer the shelf life. Can I build cool, scalable apps that take advantage of the high resolution monitors and GPUs of tomorrow in DOS? Absolutely. Do I want to? Hell no. Can I do it in WinForms? Yes, although it'll still be harder than doing it on Avalon. Will I increase my available market by targeting DOS today? The answer used to be "yes," but for a while now it's been "no." What about WinForms? The answer is definitely "yes" today and will be for a while yet, even after Longhorn ships.

The answer to the question of when to adopt new technology has too many variables for me to provide any general advice better than "as soon as possible." Of course, Microsoft wants the answer to that question to be "sooner rather than later," and we're working to make Longhorn kick-ass for developers, business users and consumers so that ubiquity is taken out of the equation as soon as possible. Please use all channels of communication you have into the company to help us make sure we're doing that. The WinFX newsgroups are one good place for such feedback. They are heavily monitored by all of the WinFX teams and the Longhorn User Experience (Aero) Team.

Paul: I found out that the PDC build of Avalon doesn't really work in kernel mode but simply uses two (unmanaged) DLLs, milcore and milrender built upon the old GDI APIs (to the point that it is actually possible to run Avalon on XP). Of course, that's bound to change, as Chris Anderson wrote, with the new video driver model and when the desktop composition stuff will get turned on. But wouldn't it be nice if a subset of Avalon ran on XP? After all, not every app will take advantage of its more advanced features.

Chris: Before I answer this question, I just wanted to point out that GDI is not part of the Avalon rendering path. Instead, Avalon is built on DirectX, which is built directly on the drivers. GDI is still supported, of course, but it's a parallel rending path to Avalon's.

The answer to the core question, i.e. why not ship Avalon on XP, is one of resources. Chris Anderson once told me that something like a man millennia has gone into the development of Avalon thus far. Even if Chris was exaggerating for effect, that's still one hell of a lot of work. That work has gone into building an architecture that allows application developers to take advantage of features present all the way down to the hardware level, including changes at every point in the presentation stack. What kind of work do you think it would take to make a subset of that available under Windows XP? Or Windows 2000? Or Windows 98? What kind of work do you think it would take to support those features on those down-level operating systems in their subsetted states? If we're looking at a release years into the future already, how many more years are we willing to wait to release Avalon in a form that works in a subsetted form on those OSes? And what will we ship to our customers expected a new OS in the meantime?

It may be that you could come up with answers that you love to these questions. Would our other customers answer them the same way? Would our shareholders answer them the same way? Would your answers best position us against our competitors?

Even if you got a subset of Avalon that works across .NET platforms today, would it really enable you to be more successful at your business or is it an engineering "gosh that'd be neat?"

I know that our product teams really listen to our customers these days, so if you've got specific scenarios that you need enabled to be successful, please let them know.

Paul: Furthermore, if XAML is, in the end, only a way to glue together a graph of CLR objects, why don't use it also to build WinForms UI? Both these options would make the transition much easier.

Now that's a question I can provide a more satisfactory answer to, I think (sorry about that last answer : ). In the Longhorn PDC bits today, you can generate WinForms apps using XAML for the very reason you state. Likewise, if you'd like to try a subset of XAML in today's version of the .NET Framework, there are not one, but two 3rd parties providing early access to projects to allow this to happen. Given the amount of work that has gone into, and will go into, getting Avalon out the door, I doubt very much that their versions of XAML will be full-featured, but it may help ease the transition, as you say.

Paul: That brings me to ask you about the future of WinForms (about which I'm now reading your book and really enjoying it). In the near future I will surely have to write WinForms code. But is it still worthwhile to spend time studying and trying to improve it? (I personally think so). Or should I rather concentrate my interest learning everything about the new LH technologies? So I'm back on the question about how to prepare for Avalon...

Chris: I'd say that it absolutely makes sense to continue to write WinForms applications for years to come. Not only in WinForms a great platform for client applications today, but in Whidbey, it about doubles in size and capability. Plus, WinForms applications will continue to work great under Longhorn and will form the core of an application that needs to take advantage of Longhorn features under Longhorn but continue to work on the rest of the .NET platform. Unless you are planning to target only Longhorn, WinForms is absolutely where you should be spending your client development effort today and for years to come.

Paul: Speaking of WinForms, one of the things I've never liked is the absence of windowless controls. It has been said that windowed and windowless controls are difficult to make live together, and that's true. But windowless controls are sometimes very useful (and cool! just think to the Windows Media Player UI). I found in your Genghis page that the "Windowless control architecture" feature is still "opened" and I'd like to try to work on it. (In the past, I wrote an ActiveX control container that supported windowless controls, so I wouldn't start from zero).

Chris: Windowless controls were meant mostly as an optimization when creating thousands of Window handles brought the platform to its knees. Some folks also used windowless controls as a good way to fake non-rectangular controls. In modern implementations of User32, neither is much of an issue, so windowless controls provide a service that is no longer required in most cases. In the specialized cases where it is still necessary, I find that building an aggregate control that does the drawing of multiple controls that you would have made windowless in the past solves most of my needs in this area, although your mileage may vary. Given that Genghis has most of the rest of the features that I wanted for it, but no windowless control architecture, I'd say that folks seem to agree with me that windowless controls are no longer as important as they once were.

Paul: But I also noticed that the Genghis project has been still for a few months, so I'm now wondering if it is still alive and if my project still makes sense now that Avalon is on its way. May you give me an advice?

Chris: I was waiting for a wizard that would generate MDI, SDI and multi-SDI applications before shipping the next drop of Genghis, but there are enough new things and fixes that we should have another version of Genghis out in a week or so. If you or anyone would like to build the wizard (or just send Scott Densmore email begging him to finish the one he already started and has promised to me several times) that'd be great.

Thanks for your wonderful job and for the time you dedicated to this mail. I just hope my English was understandable... :-)

Best regards from Italy,
Have a wonderful new year!
--Paolo Severini

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Wednesday, Dec 24, 2003, 7:27 AM in The Spout

Lending a Helping Hand

Here. Normally I wouldn't pass along something like this, but this is from my uncle and therefore genuine. If you can lend a hand to his brother who's financially destitute after a liver and kidney transplant, I'd appreciate it. Even prayers would help. Thanks!

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Tuesday, Dec 23, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout

Lending a Helping Hand

I know this sounds like spam, but it's not -- it's from my Uncle Mark, who's also my godfather and the nicest man I've even known:

Chris, I'm writing you to ask your help. My brother Tom was gravely ill. Tom is 55 years old, married with two grown sons. He needed both a liver and a kidney transplant. He just received his transplants. It was by the grace of God just in time as he was within 2 to 3 days of death. He is doing well with no signs of rejection and just some minor complications. Unfortunately, he is nearly bankrupt from all his medical bills. Tom's life has been marked by several challenges, many overcome through hard work and determination. He is a man of immense spirit and we all love him dearly. This is a challenge he can't face alone. As you can imagine, our family is very concerned. We pray a lot. We have also undertaken a benefit and raffles for him to help him with his expenses. Right now we're just trying to help him pay his mortgage and put food on his table. He hasn't been able to work for three months. He also faces a tremendous bill from the transplant that his health insurance won't pay.

There are five courses of action I'd like you to consider. First of course is I'd appreciate your prayers for my brother Tom that he continue to recover his health and his finances. The next four things I am asking for is your support of our raffles and benefit.

I would like you to consider purchasing a ticket for what we call the "Big Money Raffle". There will be a limit of 110 tickets sold. First prize is $2000. Second prize is $1250. Third prize is $750. There will be an additional ten $100 winners. Odds of winning some prize are 13 in 110. 3 in 110 chance of bettering your bet. 1 in 110 of winning the top prize. Tickets cost $135 apiece. Much better odds than the lottery. Drawing 1/11/04.

Also available are Quilt tickets at $1 apiece. My sister made the Queen size quilt. Value is somewhere between $1000 and $1500. Drawing 1/11/04.

The third thing I'd like you to consider is if you know anyone among your connections in the computer world who might also like the opportunity to purchase "Big Money" and "Quilt" raffle tickets. I know you know a lot of people and some of them might be generous of spirit and/or gamblers. I think this time of year people yearn to be of help and service but aren't often sure what they can do. This is one such opportunity.

The fourth thing I'd like you to consider is helping with the benefit dinner. It will be January 11th. There will be a silent auction. I thought with your connections at Microsoft you might be able to get them to donate something for the silent auction like some software or ?. Mr. Gates has such a wonderful legacy of philanthropy and I'm hoping that may reach down the organization for individuals in need.

Thank you Chris for your consideration. If all you can offer is your prayers I will understand and greatly appreciate them. If you or anyone you pass this on to wish to purchase tickets, checks can be made out to "TOM NEEDHAM LIVER TRANSPLANT FUND". Anyone wishing more details can contact me, Mark Needham at 952-226-1769 or e-mail me at emkayen@aol.com. I will be happy to fill out the tickets and return the stubs to them. The information needed is name, address & phone number for both the Big Money and Quilt raffles. The Minnesota lawful gambling exempt permit # is X-34753-04-001.

While I don't know my uncle's brother (his part of the family never really mixed with mine for some reason), because it's important to my uncle, I'll be purchasing one of each of the two kinds of raffle tickets, publicizing my uncle's plea on my web site, investigating Microsoft's matching for charity and, of course, sending my prayers. If any of you is interested in participating in the raffles, let Mark know directly. If you wanted to publicize this on your own web sites or donate something for the silent auction, let Mark know about that, too. Of course, all prayers are warming accepted.

Thank you very much and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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Sunday, Nov 30, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout

Learning to Learn, Part II

Tony R. Kuphaldt, an instructor at Bellingham Technical College in Washington recently emailed me that my Learning to Learn piece spoke to him and pointed me to his web site where he provides a wonderful look at his own experiences in self-teaching. In this paper, Tony describes his insights, starting with an amazing look into my own previous field of employ:

"Industry training, at least in its popular form, is roughly based on the model of a fire hydrant: sit in front of it, open the valve, and take a big drink. Due to time limitations, trainers present information at a rapid pace, with participants retaining only a fraction of what they see and hear. What knowledge they do gain seldom passes on to co-workers after the training session, and is forgotten almost as rapidly as it is presented, necessitating continual re-training. ... [Students] often leave with the impression of the instructor being something of a genius for being able to present so much information so quickly, and instilling within their own minds a sense of inferiority for not grasping all of it at the delivered pace."
Further, Tony describes the technique I use to really learn something:
"What did I do to learn? Simple: I would challenge my existing knowledge of a subject by trying to apply it to real-world conditions and/or thought experiments. If I didn't know enough about a topic to successfully apply it to a realistic problem, I would research and study until I did. If ever I was completely baffled by a problem, I could determine my own conceptual weaknesses by incrementally simplifying the problem until I could solve it. Whatever complexity I eliminated from the problem that enabled me to solve it was where my understanding was weak. Once I knew what I didn't know, I not only knew where to focus my study efforts, but I also felt more motivated to study because I could perceive my own needs."
Tony characterizes his (and my) self-teaching technique as an internal feedback loop, where the student knows what he doesn't know. This is as opposed to an external feedback loop in an instructional setting, where the instructor knows what the student doesn't know, but the feedback loop is broken between the student and the instructor.

And as if that weren't enough, Tony takes his goals on the road, as it were, testing a self-teaching-based curriculum on his students and reporting on his results. I find his work especially interesting not because I feel the need to teach the world to teach themselves; I'm perfectly happy to encourage folks to learn to learn, but to have them choose other techniques. However, I do feel very strongly that the Sells brothers learn to learn. I can't imagine sending them out into the world without a firm grasp of the ability to teach themselves. I don't know how to do that, though, unless I start home schooling them. That wouldn't be out of the question except for this unhealthy addiction I have to a steady income stream...

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