Geek In Disguise

What can I say…he works for the enemy but he’s a legend. Bummed I didn’t get to see him talk and I suspect he’s not likely to be a visitor on the Microsoft Campus speaker circuit. Damn.

Oh well….Rory gives us a bit of an insight in to one of the worlds finest designers. Mr Jonathan Ive

Sadly for my employer it’s stuff like Feedly that will keep Firefox installed on my machine (albeit IE8 remains my default).

My pal Jas pointed me to Feely today and I thought I’d seen it before but I hadn’t…it just has one of those familiar Web 2.0 style names. Whatever, it’s a super cool add-on for Firefox that I was so interested in that I just spent 30 minutes reorganising, culling and categorizing my Google Reader feeds. Now when I load up Feely I get newspaper style interface with my favourite stuff at the top…different to the river of news I’ve become used to with Reader so I’m going to try it for a few days and see how I fare.

I noticed my pal Jason just blogged this too the Citroën GT has made an impressive move off the screen from the Playstation to the road. Citroen designer Takumi Yamamoto and the boss of Polyphony Digital  who make Gran Turismo,  – Kazunori Yamauchi decided it was time to put this beast on the real road.

The car in the game uses a fuel cell, but this roadgoing model features a race-derived 560bhp V8 engine. Sweet :)

Hat tip to AutoExpress

I love stuff like this….smart, innovative use of technology to make people’s lives easier. The essence of Blue Monster.

Our Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC) released Microsoft Maren today – a Windows extension that allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script. I’ve spent a good while today playing with this and having IM conversations translated on the fly to Arabic. Wonderful stuff. It integrates seamlessly with Windows and works in most Windows applications and websites.

You can download and install Maren for free right now from: www.GetMaren.com

Email or IM a friend. Comment on a photo. Search the web. Write a document. Blog. Keep a to do list. Maren makes it easier to complete many day to day tasks in Arabic and using the applications you use today for accomplishing these tasks.

I’m going to update my Microsoft & Innovation presentation that I’ve given a few times recently to include this. It’s starting to become quite a bumper set of demos…and I’ll be showing them again in Liverpool next month at a soon to be announced event :)

Enjoy and share!

Very cool - TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft :)

http://tweetcraft.codeplex.com/

Larry Larsen just posted about a Facebook contest from the Bing team that gives you the opportunity to have your photo used as the backdrop on our new search service.

The beautiful backgrounds have gotten a lot of attention since launch and seem to be very popular. Serial blogger, Long Zheng, has even come up with a catalogue of the backgrounds.

From now til July 16th you can submit a photograph to be considered for Bing fame and millions of view.

Nice move by the Bing team – they’ve started to index Twitter, albeit a small corner of the chattersphere by indexing some prominent folks like Danny Sullivan and Kara Swisher. I can see the fallout now – Jason Calacanis will be offering up cold hard $$ to get on the index list :) Speaking of which, I assume I’m on the watch list…..errr, nope ;)

Regardless, it’s great to see the speed of innovation from Bing and finally we get the jump on Google (and Yahoo). John Battelle, Scoble, Techcrunch and others seemed pretty impressed.

In related news, it seems @microsoft has kicked in to life on Twitter with 4 folks from our corporate communications team at the helm. I’ll be watching closely to see how it develops.

How’s this for a CV/resume? Brilliant….hat tip to @IA

COBOL - Common Business-Oriented Language was the only programming I was ever any good at…even then because you tended to just copy someone else’s code and just change variables and such. Oh and my Dad and brother both did Cobol programming as a day job so that sorta helped my school project :)

Well Cobol celebrated its fiftieth birthday yesterday – and new research released to coincide with the anniversary suggests that it is still widely used throughout the world. I’m off to chat with the Azure team to make sure we support Cobol in the cloud :)

Courtesy of LimitedHype….absolutely brilliant…apart from the missing finger of Steve of course :)

The dude who was first to hit a million followers on Twitter is a Bing fan. Ashton Kutcher….gracias. Bring the millions with you.

hat tip to Brian Gorbett

Now that pretty much all the news is out there in terms of Windows 7 availability and pricing it’s good to see that Windows.com is leading with 7. I’m not sure when the change happened but until recently it was still very much a Vista site with details of 7 sprinkled here and there.

As expected, the Windows Live and Windows Mobile brand also get prominent placement.

As you step further in to the Windows 7 part of the site the makeover is consistent…I like the fact there is much more whitespace on the site, fonts are pretty uniform and there is some bold photography.

Just before publishing this I noticed that the Engadget had posted a piece on the Windows 7 videos that just got released. Interesting to note that the videos seem to use a newer desktop wallpaper than the RC that has been seen in some leaked builds.

Final evidence in video format of my recent 250 mile ride from St Malo to Ile De Re. Back on the bike soon and thanks again for all the sponsorship….you helped raise over £1500 for Agatha’s Appeal

Our Global Foundation Services team posted on their blog yesterday about two more mega data centers coming online next month:

July marks the launch of our two newest mega data centers in Chicago and Dublin. Our Dublin facility will go live on July 1, followed by our Chicago facility on July 20 to support our growing Online, Live, and Cloud services.

These are whoppers. Dublin covers 303,000 sq feet and has 5.4 mega watts of power available now...though it'll expand to 22.2 mega watts over time and with customer demand. One notable factor about this data center is its use of outside air cooling which is significantly more energy efficient than using cooling units.

The Chicago data center is even bigger at 700,000 sq ft (16 football fields) and a max power of 60 mega watts. This is the data center that makes significant use of containers which do a lot to help conserve energy. Each container houses somewhere between 1800 and 2500 servers and are sort of like big Lego blocks.

On a related topic, we now also have a Cloud Computing Futures group in MSR - a sure sign of the strategic importance of these data factories to Microsoft. What's their mission?

treat the data center as an integrated system—a holistic entity—and optimize all aspects of hardware and software

Should be fun to watch. Oh and a final bonus for those who missed it is the whitepaper we released back in may titled Securing Microsoft's Cloud Infrastructure. 

Cool graphic from the team at IA – with a blog post to soon follow I’m sure. Click the image for the hi-res version and follow them on Twitter