Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

An I thought the Fiddler name was a metaphor for the bow going back an forth like HTTP messages.

via http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4073.html

Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has been at Microsoft for the last nine years. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. Her interests include digital archiving and long-term retrieval; how people use and share encountered information; how people read, annotate, navigate through, and interact with eBooks and other electronic publications; and spatial hypertext. She holds provocative views on topics like the Semantic Web and social tagging. Before coming to Microsoft, she was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues.

• http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/chrono.html

PowerMeter will take data from smart meters and process it into the PowerMeter interface, enabling consumers to see their energy consumption over time. Since smart meters are being rolled out by utilities, the tool will largely rely on utility deals. But Google has also said it is looking at ways to use energy data without smart meters, as well as working with third-party device and application makers.

Hohm is a tool that will enable consumers to see their energy consumption over time and recommend ways to save energy. If Microsoft hasn’t hooked up with your utility yet, you can still enter some basic information into Hohm about location and home, and it will use predictive algorithms to predict your energy consumption. If Microsoft has partnered with your utility, Hohm will integrate your historical energy use, and you will eventually see data from smart meters once they have been rolled out. Hohm will eventually be integrated with applications built by third parties.

concur with Lu’s findings. Since projecting our electricity usage in real time on the web, in an easily readable, annotated visualization format, it’s become very clear to us both when the peaks in our usage occur, and what is causing them, without sweating the small stuff. The simple visualization of high-energy devices - dryers, dishwashers - seems, from a simple behavioral modification standpoint, to get the job done. Appliance-based monitoring systems, furthermore, inject a complexity that means they’ll take awhile to achieve ubiquity. Although we yearn for a future in which all appliances are “smart,” the number of smart plugs, smart sockets, and upgraded appliances that would need to be integrated into our households to make an appliance-based system effective, as well as the data gaps that would accompany a necessarily piecemeal application, make the idea of a whole-house, appliance-based monitoring system seem, to us, a misplaced focus right now.

via http://parleys.com/display/PARLEYS/Home#slide=8;title=REST%20-%20The%20Better%20Web%20Services%20Model;talk=6451 "So, in order to prove the point that SOAP should not be compared against REST, I decided to do some coding. Since I had just finished the implementation of WS-Transfer for PlumbworkOrange, I thought that it would be a great idea to use it to build a RESTful application. And of course, what's the most well-known application out there? The Web of course. WS-Web The idea is based on the following: * Follow the REST principles for building the WWW but using SOAP and without assuming HTTP. * The uniform application semantics of WS-Transfer are assumed. * Each resource is still associated with its own URI although now the URI can be application/transport-protocol independent (e.g. urn:uuid:bla-bla-bla-bla). This has the advantage that the name or identifier of a resource is not coupled with the technology used to access it."

This inverview assumes a level of knowledge of the Microsoft's Oslo Inititiative that I don't have. Lots of acronyms I'm not familiar with. They frequently mention Smalltalk. Facilitating the creation of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) seems to be part of it.

"This document provides a high level introduction to MGrammar, a language for writing textual, domain-specific languages. This document begins by covering the basics of grammar development using MGrammar before diving into specific features for input and output processing, and programming against compiled grammars. There is also coverage of modularity, and advanced grammar techniques, including parameterization and recursion. Note: As an accompaniment to this document, you might like to read the MGrammar Language Specification, which is installed with the Microsoft Oslo SDK to the following location: documentsMGrammar Language Specification.docx. MGrammar Basics Consider the following simple set of rules for composing a song: • The song must begin with a header, represented by the characters, Song. • A song is divided into one or more bars. • Each bar contains four values. • Each value can either be a note or a rest. • A note is represented by a character between A and G. • Each note can be flat or sharp, represented by the b and # characters, respectively. • A rest is represented by the dash character, -. • The song can be formatted using whitespace characters (spaces, carriage-returns, and line-"

"All three services use the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model, which Wikipedia describes as: [A] data model that is used in circumstances where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that can be used to describe a thing (an "entity" or "object") is potentially very vast, but the number that will actually apply to a given entity is relatively modest. "

"It enables clean separation of concerns, testability, and TDD by default. All core contracts within the MVC framework are interface based and easily mockable (it includes interface based IHttpRequest/IHttpResponse intrinsics). You can unit test the application without having to run the Controllers within an ASP.NET process (making unit testing fast). You can use any unit testing framework you want to-do this testing (including NUnit, MBUnit, MS Test, etc)."