Poetry

I was walking down the seashore this night and remembered a poetry from an old Russian book (this book was released in the middle of 20th century). I decided to translate this to English, so here is my humble attempt (I spent only about half an hour):



Swift sword's blow,
The arrow's prick, the shine of axe -
And world has disappeared in your eyes:
There is no sea, there are no friends,
You are alone.

But you are alone just for a while:
Valhalla's beam runs down to you.
The road to heaven:
It is strong, it is true,
Like Viking's arm, like solid sword.

And mighty steed flies by this road:
It is white as snow, it is pure as light.
Valkyrie rides this steed
With Wotan's wills and greetings:
He waits, he waits for you.

And you have got the place in heroes hall.
Then you take off like weightless smoke,
Like light steam, like pure clouds -
You and the messenger of heaven.

Autographed CD + t-shirt

About one month ago I had pre-ordered and recently received a new album of Fran Healy (http://www.franhealy.com/). He is the lead singer and main songwriter of Travis band (I like their music very much). A couple of months ago I found some information about his upcoming solo album "Wreckorder" and decided to buy it.


So last week I found a small box on the doorstep of my flat. This box contained autographed CD and a t-shirt (see the photo below).

I listened to this album and may say only "Amazing!". Good half of these songs can pull my strings, like these songs were written about me (in my past).

In my opinion these songs are just stunning:

1) Anything

2) Buttercups

3) Holiday

Ebook reader

I had read many cheerful reviews of new Amazon Kindle Reading Device (see sidebar image, description is available on Amazon web site) and ordered it.
So, now I'm looking forward to playing with it.
P.S. It will be shipped after 27th of August...

Listening and understanding

Last week my Aikido teacher told me very interesting phrase: "If you are listening to someone carefully you will understand this person even if you don't know the language".
That time we were discussing a question of why I understand him better than my Russian teacher. And he told me that he is able to understand his japanese teacher even if my teacher don't have sufficient experince in Japanese.
So, to sum up: it is enought to listen carefully to understand anyone you want to understand.

Another exam passed

I've just passed another MS Exam: 70-561 - ADO.NET Application Development
I passed it with score 895 out of 1000, which is good (in my opinion), because I haven't had even one REAL project with Entity Framework (only a couple of testing ones), and there were many Entity Framework questions.

Exam preparation materials

Here is the list of materials I used for preparation for my last exam:

1) books:

• MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-503) - Microsoft Framework 3.5 - Windows Communication Foundation
• "Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Step by Step" by John Sharp
• "Programming WCF Services, Second Edition" by Juval Lowy

2) screencasts:

• http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/screencasts/presenter/11/Mike-Taulty.aspx (see screencasts about WCF, all other ones are also useful, I'll have a look on them on next exams preparation)
• http://www.dasblonde.net/2007/06/24/WCFWebcastSeries.aspx (webcasts by Michele Bustamante)

Especially important was to watch and study thoroughly these topics:

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 04 of 15): Exceptions and Faults

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 08 of 15): Instancing Modes

Transactions in Distributed Solutions with Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 09 of 15): Concurrency, Throughput, and Throttling

From my point of view, all topics related to concurrency, instances are not too simple.

MS Exam 70-503 PASSED!

Another step passed:
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development (70-503)

I managed to pass this exam with score 916 out of 1000.

Now I'm an MCTS (MS Certified Technology Specialist) in Windows Communication Foundation.

Currently I'm preparing for exam 70-561 (ADO.NET)...

Running unmanaged code on Windows Azure

Yesterday night I had a speech on Wellington .NET User group and presented "Running unmanaged code on Windows Azure".

Later I'm going to publish some findings and interesting tricks from this project.

Here are the slides:

Native code on ms azure platform

View more presentations from lysunkin.

First step to MCPD

Here is my first step to MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer):

https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx

Transcript ID (901837)

Access Code (slava1976)

Currently I passed only Exam 70-536, but...

I plan to sit and pass these exams:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development (70-503)

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Forms Application Development (70-505)

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ADO.NET Application Development (70-561)

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development (70-562)

Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (70-565)

Wish me good luck!

Old school T-shirt

Last Wednesday (on Wellington .NET User Group meeting) I received pretty nice T-shirt, you may have a look on it here, for example:
http://dev.null.org/blog/item/200812081001_softbymic

It looks pretty old-style and only "true" desktop programmers are able to recognize the logo and remember "old good times" when most programs were single-threaded and have less then 640k of memory :)