USGS officials are holding a news conference right now, and have just announced an explosive event on Mt St Helens is possible, and the alert level has just been raised by the USGS for the mountain. The lava dome in the crater has apparently moved a measurable amount, and seismic activity has taken a noticible upturn.

They are now seeing quakes at the rate of 4 a minute. They are larger quakes, 2 to 2.5 in magnitude. Describing the seismic activity, they say it is definitely ramping up and plateauing in phases, not falling back down. Explosion and ash are the risks. This behavior is similar to what was observed on the mountain in 1986: Big increases in seismic energy over past 8 hours.

I'm at the airport flying out to Reno at 12:45, mobile posting from my handheld device. I hope it keeps its top on.

Update: USGS Advisories and information about the mountain activity available here.

Dexter-Southfield Schools via NB

SpaceShipOne, piloted by Michael Melvill, just completed the first of a series of two flights into space with an equivalent load of three people. One more flight within the next two weeks (sounds like they will try for Monday next week) would net them the coveted X-Prize.

The goal behind the contest is to build a private, reusable space transport technology that can be licensed and used in business. The design for SpaceShipOne is pretty darn cool - it's wings fold back about 45 degrees to act as brakes for re-entry. Already people are signing up and buying tickets to fly into space, and one Las Vegas businessman is looking for someone who can build an orbital "hotel destination" for four.

More and more amazing, every day. Wow.

The other day I mentioned about how I heard a rather popular blogger from Seattle on the radio, and essentially had a "wow what a 'big small world' this is" moment. The Internet has done that - effectively shrunk the world as we know it, while maintaining its true non-virtual size and mass.

Yesterday a co-worker, Steve, saw me in the elevator along with another co-worker, Scott. He said that he had just been communicating with someone he knows who lives in Alaska, and was talking about something interesting, when the friend asked him if the Corillian he works at is the same Corillian that employs the guy who tore apart his MP3 player for the hard drive inside. Steve was surprised and had a good story to tell. I bet that kind of thing almost never happened 40 years ago. Again, it's "big small world" we live in.

Today I'm leaving on a trip that will help turn the tables again and make my world just a little smaller again. Let's call it the "small big world" trip (it's subtle, take you time, heh). I'll be meeting people I've never had a chance to speak to face to face, and I am looking forward to it. There are people for whom I have great respect but have never met in person. I see this as a great opportunity.

If you think about how much technology (specifically electronics and the Internet and everything you can do with them) has changed the world in the past 10 years, it's pretty darn incredible. It makes me wonder what the next really big thing will be. I guess we'll just have to hang on and see.

I've neglected myself three times over the past few years by not attending Gnomedex - which was both my mistake and my loss. This year I am going, and it's looking to me like this may be one of the best conferences I've ever attended from the total-geek-fest standpoint. I'm flying to Reno tomorrow and making the quick drive over to Lake Tahoe, where the conference is being held at Harrah's.

Probably the thing that I am most looking forward to is meeting people that I have conversed with on the Internet (mostly through the blogosphere, as they say) face-to-face. There are a number of people for whom I have great professional respect that will be in attendance, and that alone will make this more than worth the while.

Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome is the power being this conference. I am sure it will be fun, interesting and memorable.

Below is some info ripped from the Gnomedex FAQ, and yes, I will blog from the conference when something stands out to me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go do some laundry so I can pack clean clothes.

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Q: Will there be Internet access?

A: Is the sun a mass of incandescent gas?

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Q: Who's Gnomedex 4: Geeks Gone Wild! for?

A: Technology enthusiasts, professionals, and folks who just love hanging out with geeks. In past years, we've had fantastic presentations, vendors, and sponsors - and expect this year to be no different in that respect.

---

Q: Is this conference family-friendly?

A: It's recommended that anybody below the age of 18 go to Disneyland instead.

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Q: Can I bring a friend?

A: Only if s/he likes to have fun, too.

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Q: Why is yours better than other conventions?

A: Because it is.

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Q: Do people really read FAQs?

A: No.

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Q: How many people do you expect to be there this year?

A: Including you? A lot. Close to 1,000, according to our estimates.

---

Q: Where's Gnomedex 4: Geeks Gone Wild! being held?

A: Harrah's.

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Q: Is this a place for me to make business contacts?

A: Yes, and to make them life-long friends as well.

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Q: Can I blog this event?

A: If you don't, the gods will be angered and virgins will (most likely) be sacrificed.

---

Q: What is a blog?

A: Nobody really seems to know.

Great software announcements today... Nick Bradbury has announced that FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 1 is available.

Why is this a big deal? There's a great new addition to the mix:

“Starting with version 1.5, FeedDemon users can create a Bloglines Channel Group from their Bloglines subscriptions. When viewing a Bloglines Channel Group, items you read in Bloglines won't show up in FeedDemon, and items you download in FeedDemon won't show up as unread in Bloglines. It's very easy to synchronize with your Bloglines subscriptions so that FeedDemon reflects feeds you add or remove from Bloglines.”

Looks like I may need to go back and try BlogLines again. This is what was missing for me - synchronized integration with my feed reader.

And just in time - Blackberry has announced (but not released) BES 4.0, which will (finally) get some much-needed changes in place!

For example (my filtered feature list of what really stood out):

• COMPLETE WIRELESS SYNCHRONIZATION - Yes!!!
• View pictures on the device
• Better graphical browser with Javascript and some CSS support
• More wireless calendar features (accept tentative, add comments, notification of conflicts)
• Global search (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, across the whole thing)
• Wireless management of Out of Office message, email filters, signatures, etc.
• Lots of back-end wireless security and management improvements

More detailed info is on the Blackberry web site - click the links below.

The latest release of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution will feature:

• Simplified Device Deployment for IT
• Improved Wireless Security
• Simplified Management and Tracking
• Improved Corporate Data Access
• Completely Wireless User Experience
• Application Enhancements
• General Improvements

Nice, nice nice! Time to go renew that TSupport subscription that's about to come due...

Blackberry customers running a BES can sign up for possible inclusion in a BES 4.0 preview if interested. Done.

A good introduction to using RSS on the Internet is available in both quick-video-tutorial format as well as a more detailed, yet easy-to-absorb text format at c|net.

If you are not familiar with RSS, and you work in the high-tech industry, I do hereby declare you to be old skool, out of touch, and truly negligent in your professional career path - and it won't be long before you're declared incompetent, so watch out. I mean, can you imagine what you would think of someone who did not know what email is? Trust me, it's a lot like that. I know there's a lot to learn, but don't get caught behind the eight-ball, people...

When you need a RSS feed to subscribe to, so you can learn without hurting yourself, just start with this one:

There - now if that doesn't motivate you, nothing will. Now go learn something fast!

By the way, a couple of interesting (to me, at least) things:

• NewsGator (if you're an everything-in-Outlook fan) and FeedDemon (my own personal choice in RSS readers) are both featured in the video (and the product reviews). Either one sells for about $29, and is money well-spent.
• Misplaced noun of the year: I wish the freakin' emphasis on "news" when talking about RSS would just go away - It's not a news reader people, it's a feed reader. News is just one type of content you can get in an RSS feed format.

(shamelessly plucked from Scoble and others)

Addy Santo has updated BlogWave and released the first beta version. He released a pre-beta version back in July, and has since updated the software.

Say hello to BlogWave Beta 1 - Download and what's new info is available here.

What is it? what does it do? Answers to your questions ripped straight from Addy's web site:

Q. What is BlogWave?
A. BlogWave is an "RSS Generator": a tool which can pull information from a variety of sources and publish it as RSS.  This process is very easy to configure and can be scheduled to run automatically.  For example, using BlogWave you can create an RSS feed from Sharepoint announcements on your company's internal site.  Or you can publish event logs as RSS.  Or even merge multiple sources into one feed (aggregation) and/or publish a feed to multiple destinations (cross posting).

Q. What content sources does BlogWave support?
A. BlogWave currently supports the following sources
   • RSS Feeds
   • Google Searches (new)
   • Event Logs
   • WSS Lists and Document Libraries
   • SPS Searches
   • NNTP newsgroups
   • Custom sources can be added through a pluggable architecture and a simple .Net programming interface.

Q. Which destinations can BlogWave post to?
A. BlogWave supports the following destinations:
   • .Text based blogs 
   • FTP sites
   • Local or Network URNs
   • Any WebDAV compliant website (such as Sharepoint or WSS)
   • Custom destinations can be added through a pluggable architecture and a simple .Net programming interface.

Ahhhh, now here's some cool news. FlexWiki is being released to shared source. From David Orenstein's blog:

FlexWiki posted to SourceForge.net

This evening FlexWiki took the next step in its life and has been made available at SourceForge.net under the Common Public License. With this step, the developer community will have the latest source (including all the WikiTalk features), better access, better tools, and a better legal environment.  The FlexWiki developer community has kinda stalled out a bit over the past few months as I've worked to get FlexWiki to this point.  Now we can really get going again!

FlexWiki is based on WikiWiki, and has a lot of nifty features.

Not to spark a war of words or anything, but for those who are interested in the "Windows will or will not scale" debate, here is some info definitely worth talking about.

I work at a company called Corillian Corporation (as the corporate IT team's manager). Microsoft just released a case study they did with Corillian, and it's worth taking note of. Scott Hanselman, our Chief Architect, posted these facts and figures on his blog earlier today, which illustrate the numbers quite well. They are, frankly, pretty darn amazing numbers:

• Currently, more than 19 million end users—or about 25 percent of U.S. online banking customers—use Corillian technology when they use their institution's online services for transactions such as checking balances, paying bills, and transferring funds between accounts. (Not bad for a Microsoft-based platform, eh? .NET works.)
• Voyager 3.1 was able to support 70,000 concurrent users across multiple lines of business.
• Voyager 3.1 was able to support a sustained throughput rate of more than 1,268 transactions per second — about 4.5 million successful transactions per hour—and a sustained session creation rate of more than 208 new sessions per second.
• Voyager 3.1 supported more than 129,000 concurrent sessions across the system at peak load. This includes both active sessions, in which a user is executing transactions, and inactive sessions.
• Voyager 3.1 supported a ramp-up from 0 to 70,000 users in only 15 minutes—without any adverse impact on performance—demonstrating that Voyager can sustain a large burst of users accessing information in a short time period without overwhelming the system.
• Voyager 3.1 surpassed its previous benchmark of 30,000 concurrent users by 133 percent, with only a 32-percent increase in overall hardware cost.

Another interesting note comes from some questions I asked of a Corillian employee involved in the testing. He told me that the bottleneck that stopped the test from going into higher numbers was not Windows, nor was it Voyager (our online banking application); It was the hardware (which is amazing hardware by the way). The test simply used up all the hardware resources available in the lab. In other words, both Voyager and Windows Server 2003 had more room to spare and would have kept scaling, had the hardware allowed. When you consider the test systems are some of the biggest and best in the industry, that's saying a lot. That just doesn't typically happen.

From the case study, this quote sums it all up:

Hugh Wade, one of the Microsoft engineers who spent time analyzing the Corillian code and recommending some changes to the company, notes that "Voyager was the best-performing non-Microsoft application" he had seen in the lab.

This is pretty amazing stuff, and it says TONS about Windows Server 2003, as well as Corillian Voyager - and the people who are involved in developing both products.

The Business Journal Online reports on an Annenberg survey that finds people who watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy.

"In recent years ... traditional journalists have been voicing increasing concern that if young people are receiving political information from late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show, they may not be adequately informed on the issues of the day. This data suggests that these fears may be unsubstantiated. We find no differences in campaign knowledge between young people who watch Leno and Letterman – programs with a lot of political humor in their opening monologues -- and those who do not watch late-night. But when looking at young people who watch The Daily Show, we find they score higher on campaign knowledge than young people who do not watch the show, even when education, following politics, party identification, gender, viewing network news, reading the newspaper, watching cable news and getting campaign information on-line are taken into account."

While this does not mean the Daily Show makes people more politically aware, it shows the sample audience is more aware of the pertinent issues and facts. So for me, the full results of the survey and Annenberg's review of the content of each night-time comedy show were very interesting to read, especially when you compare and contrast the actual content of different shows, such as The Tonight Show and Late Night.

This helps explain why, even for someone like me who does not necessarily agree with Jon Stewart's political positions or leanings, The Daily Show is a program I look forward to watching - I TiVo it every day. It's funny and in fact does address the issues in its own way. It's comedy, so you have to take all of it with a grain of salt, but if nothing else, it's one more place for intelligent people to process the vast amounts of information (both relevant and irrelevant) that makes up this never-ending election cycle.

Note: You can view the actual Annenberg Center news release, which contains the full survey questions, results and analysis here. [PDF]

The Annenberg Public Policy Center also operates FactCheck.org, I site I mentioned recently here, which does an excellent job of non-partisan review of the advertisements and other messages put out by the political campaigns, with the tag-line, "Holding Politicians Accountable."

Survey Excerpts:

"Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming."

"Young people who watched The Daily Show scored 48% correct on the campaign knowledge test while young people who did not watch any late-night comedy scored 39% correct. Meanwhile, young people who watched four of more days of network news scored 40% correct, equally frequent cable news viewers 48% correct and newspaper readers 46% correct."

"Of the 83 political jokes made by Stewart, only 9 specifically targeted Bush. That was 11 percent of his political jokes. The same number targeted Kerry."

"The Daily Show segments are less likely than a Leno or Letterman joke to use a quick punch-line to make fun of a candidate ... Instead, Stewart’s lengthier segments employ irony to explore policy issues, news events, and even the media’s coverage of the campaign."

I swear to God, I just heard Robert Scoble schooling Michael Savage on his talk radio show about what blogs are and why people write web logs. So cool!

And here I am driving down the road at 70 ... Uh I mean 60 55 miles an hour blogging about it Blackberry-style, heh. Moblog yo!

Cool stuff, Robert. Amazing new world we live in - You read on someone's web site that they listen to talk radio. It's a web site I read in order to learn and stay up-to-date in my field. A couple days later, I'm driving home and I hear (what I think was) the author (Scoble) on talk radio, talking about blogging. Nice.

Tonight I had the privilege of watching two very smart people speak about a technology I barely grasp at the PADNUG meeting, with a few good laughs thrown in. The requisite pizza never showed up, but dinner afterwards was a fun time and I had a chance to talk to some people I otherwise would never get to meet.

The speakers were Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman. Scott is a friend and co-worker of mine, an accomplished technical presenter and regional MSDN director. He played code-monkey while Rory, a rather infamous blogger and all around good guy who recently started work at Microsoft as a MSDN Presenter^**, demonstrated the beta of Visual Studio .NET 2005 (aka "Whidbey"), showing off many new capabilities in developing ASP.net application web sites with membership capabilities (almost all without writing any code).

Thee guys are both crazy freakin' smart. Much smarter than I. I'm one of those guys who deals with lots of hardware and software, manages a group of fine employees, deals with a wide variety of people and their needs, and generally does his best to make sure things work. These two guys are in a higher league. They're amazing when it comes to coding and building things out of thin air. I wish I was half as smart.

Rory and Scott presented things in a way that I - a simple IT jock - was able to follow and pretty much completely understand. That's the mark of a good presenter and teacher: When you can impart and transfer some portion of your knowledge and to someone truly outside your profession.

By the time they were done, I had a good picture of what kinds of things Visual Studio 2005 will be able to do for the developer crowd. Understand that I am a guy who tends to get lost in developer presentations, so the fact that I actually followed along the whole time and was able to use words like "cool" and "ahhhh" with actual meaning and understanding proves these guys can teach as well as present.

Rory will also be presenting in Portland (Hillsboro actually) at the local MSDN event scheduled to be held on Thursday November 18th at the "Movies on TV" theaters. The target audience for those presentation sessions is developers interested or working with Visual Studio and .NET technologies. If you're in a different city and want to attend an MSDN event, check the schedule of all upcoming events and locations here.

^** Note that Rory's title is really something like "Pacific Northwest Microsoft Developer Community Champion," but "MSDN Presenter" is much easier to use in a sentence.

According to Microsoft, 23 percent of Windows computers in the United States are running bogus versions of Windows. The new program installs an Active-X control (users can opt out, at least at this point) that examines a system accessing certain files on Microsoft's Download Center to see if the copy of Windows that is installed on the machine is legitimate. At this time a number of Windows Media files are flagged for the check, along with several others. Files that will prompt the user to validate his or her copy of Windows are marked in the file listings with a small gold arrow on a blue circle background (see above).

No doubt Microsoft is legitimately interested in making sure its updates are getting into the hands of those who have purchased the products the company produces, while at the same time providing software thieves with a reason and incentive to pay for the operating system they use. It should not come as a surprise that Microsoft is doing this now, nor that they will likely expand this capability in the future. Ultimately, it takes people spending money on software to allow a company, regardless of how big that company may be, to continue to build new and better software products. No matter what your philisophical position with regard to Microsoft, the one core rule of business always applies: If you're not making money, you shouldn't be in business.