Team Individualism

We all have questions about the economy...

Over the coming weeks, Microsoft will help power the conversations between Australian politicians and their constituents through ‘Ask a pollie’. This week, federal and state politicians including the Minister for Finance Lindsay Tanner, National Senator Fiona Nash and Family First Senator Steve Fielding have expressed their views on the economy. We all have questions, it’s time for answers. Have your say at www.microsoft.com.au/askapollie

Free HP Mini Netbook with Win 7 for TechEd attendees

These HP Mini 2140 Notebook devices look excellent, and will be free (!) for attendees of TechEd 2009, Sep 8-11 2009 on the Gold Coast

http://www.msteched.com/australia/Public/windows-7-experience.aspx

Deep Zoom Tiled Picture Mosaic

After the Amplify09 expo I thought I would take the Augmented Reality (with Twitter, Live Mesh and Multi Touch) pictures and add them as a mosaic. This article made it all sound very easy,  Deep Zoom from experience would create a good experience whilst optimising bandwidth.

With 350 pictures between 1 and 4Mb (converted from PNG to JPG using Imagicon) the mosiac I created using AndreaMosiac (free!) was almost 60Mb. Sending a 60Mb file wouldn’t be well received or accepted so the 20k window for Deep Zoom makes perfect sense.

So, do I use DeepZoomPix or Silverlight Streaming as the Deep Zoom Composer allows for both?

What I found was that as the Deep Zoom Composer had changed over time – something that is evident if you follow this simple DeepZoom host setup steps article.

In short Silverlight Streaming offer more flexibility on hosting Silverlight applications in general. DeepZoomPix does much of the effort but has a finite lifespan  (that will be available until December 31st, 2009)

When I finally used www.deepzoompix.com it told me I had the wrong plug in but the redirected site said I was up to date.

Although I started to see errors on my publication such as

---------------------------
This copy of the Silverlight plug-in has expired.
---------------------------
The version of the Silverlight plug-in installed on your system is no longer valid. Please go to http://go2.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128377 for the latest version.

Then redirecting me to get the latest Silverlight code, the Silverlight install site kept telling me

The latest version of Silverlight 2 is installed:

version Silverlight 2 GDR 1 (2.0.40115.0)

I did reinstall the Silverlight client again but I found that the error was a publication error (ie. I was simply submitting too many images/size or my upload  did not complete on time). After a few attempts I have my mosaic up here as well as lots of the single pictures zoomable here  (to be grouped).

Avril Henry – What will you remembered for from the Global Financial Crisis?

Great article in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning by Avril Henry.

Essentially it played to my recent management studies - her general comments were that as companies become cost focused, the impact of people is felt as they trend towards 1950’s style direct management. Command and control, and a tight micro managed task worker may result in employee dissatisfaction. Since in ten years time 40% of the workforce will be Gen Y in Australia (interestingly this group and women <30 constitute our most progressive industries), Avril argues, with effect, that people will remember and may lash out on social networking sites.  Commentary about companies bad management and managers will out.

I’d push this further and state that as social networking is now not only prevalent it is also becoming semi-permanent. You can search and find, track events and mark incidents as they happened. Short term strategy can leave an indelible mark.

However a questionable positive side effect might be the maturing of the GenY’s as Avril pointed out in her 2007 article on commitment.

Playing with HP Multi-Touch on Win7 for Amplify09

Today I have been having fun with the HP IQ528 – thanks HP! We are planning to use at the Amplify09 event this Friday. I installed the Windows 7 touch pack and added a beta multi-touch driver (thanks to Windows 7 TechNet forums) and a few games such as Airhockey from IdentityMine who did some great apps for Surface. Check out these great videos showcasing their work.

Much like Gizmodo demonstrated in Video in February:

Tap and multi tap (pitched sounds). tap and hold brings up right click functionality

Flick: page up and down

Zoom:pinch and stretch to enhance

Rotate: single hold and gesture on second point

Draw: multiple touch points for painting

What we found most disturbing, on a related note, was the HP Touch Smart Web camera avatars. Some people just look odd as a dog!

Also there are a number of Office Labs projects being updated for Multi-Touch touch as:

PPT Flex

Canvas for OneNote

Remix Sydney 11th June – Late Notice of Offer

Yep, Remix is tomorrow! (keep up to date with Australia dev events here)

I have just been made aware of an offer that will be made available to attendees thanks to Microsoft Partner and Remix sponsor Wacom. They are set to offer a limited number of heavily discounted professional graphics tablets exclusively for Remix attendees.

The Intuos3 professional graphics tablet (as used during the Lord Of The Rings production) perfectly integrates with Microsoft’s Expression products delivering 1024 levels of pressure sensitive control to the vector art creation components of Expression Design. As a ReMIX attendee don’t miss out on this opportunity! You can find more on the Intuos3 product here. Also ask Wacom about the free Expression Studio 2 availability.

See you there!

Blind searching – the taste test

Good on Michael Kordahi making a home-grown blind search taste test. In a matter of days his search mash up  had 100,000+ votes and 1.2 million hits promoted only through a viral twitter and blog links.

You can find it located here.

Results are shown without branding and then after you select your preferred results “winner” you see the search engine you selected. Yahoo, Bing or Google.

What I found really fascinating was that if you follow #blindsearch (twitter hashtag) or speak to Michael you will hear about various attempts to skew data and some of the sophistication people have put into it. Michael refers to this to gaming.

Pre-gaming the results I saw showed marginal difference between the three. Of the few searches I did, I received matches on all three ironically enough.

I really haven't figured out why people would but its never-the-less intriguing. I’d recommend following Michael on twitter alias delic8genius to find out more and to hear about some of his great/zany ideas.

Is Twitter significant?

If you read James Gardner’s post about Twitter then you might come to the conclusion that Twitter is of little use for banks to be concerned about because it only touches 0.5% of its user base. My friend, Roger Lawrence, makes a fine point that many people thought mobile phones would never take off – yet over 15 years they took the world by storm and are a critical communications device. At one point in time they too only held 0.5% of the financial services user base. So what's the tipping point? Is it a better UI or some universal integration point? I doubt anyone knows for sure but I’d argue that:

The change in twitters use has been unexpected (personal rants, to celebrity followings and social commentary)

If the medium gets limited to one channel then Twitter as it is now known will disappear (SMS survived due to low cost and its universality)

Enter another perspective “How Twitter will change the way we live” which makes key opening and closing points. Twitter makes a bad first impression though it can help build a a case, in small 140 character messages, that addresses a wider audience than would otherwise be possible.

So, is twitter a must have media for all users?

In its current format I’d say no however it is wider reaching than traditional media, such as newspaper and television. Exposing information and fast is where it excels. Thanks to Twitter few people can be counted out of the six degrees of separations. If you know someone who twitters or even reads twitter (like me) you can know more information that you would find out from simply reading a report or versus the local news.

In financial services terms, twitter helps provide time-correlated but ongoing conversations about otherwise private information. Much like the wisdom of crowds it can help point at a trend as was evident in the Szechuan earthquakes.

It'll be interesting to watch the true value of social networks change over time.

[Addendum from Chris Allison:

15 yrs after the mobile went from 0.5% very few banks have grasped it (despite US smart phone sales being 40%)..

Even SMS banking services are rare...]

Creating a Windows 7 RC x64 VHD

I’ve recently spent of bit of time building a Windows 7 VHD for some custom development. I thought I’d take the time to document my experiences:

1) Download ISO. I used a tool called MagicISO to extract the install.wim file.

2) Create a VHD from WIM using script downloaded from here

3) Install the Windows® Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows® 7 RC

4) Mount the ISO (using something like Magic Disc)

(As you have probably gathered by now I'm against burning media for the sake of it)

Use script (e.g. for X drive):

CSCRIPT WIM2VHD.WSF /WIM:X:\sources\install.wim /SKU:ULTIMATE /TRACE:TRUE

But then if you are as silly as me you may have forgotten that Virtual PC doesnt load x64 images. Don’t fret though, this video will guide you through making your x64 VHD bootable.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Toolkit

I would love to play with this, but I doubt Ill have time….

http://blogs.msdn.com/wmoz/archive/2009/06/04/windows-mobile-6-5-developer-tool-kit-now-available.aspx

.... it includes the Gestures API & doc, as well as emulators so developers can start writing apps for the new 6.5 UI with better touch support.

Microsoft introduces new XBox 360 features, including controller-less gaming

As reported in multiple sources yesterday there were a number of Microsoft announcements on new video game controllers, HD video streaming, and joined up social networking.   An example is the addition of Twitter to Xbox online.

A video of the E3 2009 briefing can be found on Wired.

Project Natal I read via GeekBrief TV and BBC Technology, releases a new model of XBox 360 Controller.

Its based on 3DV Systems' technology as discussed in this engadget article

And the BBC picked up on the general availability of previously exclusive games of which The Beatles was reported in the local press.

“Playstation games Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid would also now be available on the Xbox 360”

At the same time more devices were being revealed such as the SpeakerCom 360 being reported at GizModo

Just when you were thinking Touch was pretty cool

Some guy in a lab coat had to add the X factor to it…

IEEE Spectrum: Engineers add texture to touch-screen devices

Visual Studio 2008 Free e-Books & .Net Services

Vey handy!

Also some new white papers just came out for the .NET Services…..

The whitepapers can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5057e2b3-c8e5-4b26-a601-ff9621589ce3&DisplayLang=en

Beginnings of Office 2010 info

Links

Some nice screen shots and history

External sites with previews

Office 2010 the movie

preview testers begin work in July?

I know that our solution specialist Allyson Skene and Technical Specialist Alistair Speirs are spinning it up on Windows 7. I think I will probably VHD boot an image to play around with – perhaps one of them will be so kind as to create me one!

If you fancy testing it yourself. You can signup here

If successful, Microsoft Office 2010 will redefine how people will work, not just add new features.

Going Green on TechNet and The Architecture Journal

For Earth Day 2009 the TechNet team created a special Green issue of TechNet Magazine.  This edition is  only available online and is dedicated to green IT and sustainable computing.  Check some of the content below:

• Green IT: Framework for Building a “Hyper-Green” Virtual Server System
• Green IT: Planning Your Power Management and Virtualization Strategies
• Green IT: Essential Tools for Planning Your Virtual Infrastructure
• Green IT: Build a Green Datacenter

Also worth a look is The Architecture Journal and it’s recent green edition