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Tulip Pics - Photoshop ExpressSimultaneously showing off some of my tulip photos I took a few weeks ago at the annual Tulip Festival an hour or so north of Seattle, and testing Photoshop Express's embeddable slideshow :-)
The default size of the object, 322 x 300 pixels, was really tiny and not useful, so I hacked the parameters to 644 x 600 pixels. Seems to be ok!
May 09 Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook = my life in 2008These days, Facebook is the 'hub' of my online life. Some people don't get into it, but more than any other mechanism, Facebook is now THE way I find out what is going on in the lives of people in my social and professional circles all around the world. I check it about as often as I check my personalized homepage on my.live.com. If there's a birthday party in Singapore, I know about it. If one of my coworkers is a part-time actor and jazz musician, I know about it. But I was thinking about how I could most effectively project what's going on in my life or what I'm thinking about at any given moment.
I used to update my Facebook "status" message quite often, sometimes twice a day or so. And I often update this blog, depending on when I have something longer than a status message to say. In order to surface my blogging on Facebook, I installed an app which let me list my recent blog entries. But this is somewhat inefficient. So now I use Twitter, FriendFeed's excellent Facebook application, and another Facebook application called Twittersync to pretty much automate everything.
So what's happening here? In the screenshot above of my Facebook Mini-Feed on my profile page, you can see FriendFeed activity and Facebook status message updates. But I didn't need to touch anything in Facebook to make this happen. Every time I "twitter" - write a status update on twitter.com, the Twittersync application automatically updates my Facebook status message. In addition, FriendFeed picks up my twitter and lists this activity, which create a duplicate entry in my Mini-Feed. This is somewhat annoying but not FriendFeed's fault. The bonus is that it also picks up my replies to other people's twitters and publishes them as well. Also, if I had updated my blog or posted pictures on Flickr or elsewhere, or recommended an article on Digg, or a myriad of other activities I might have done on the web, those would also be recorded by FriendFeed and published on Facebook for all of my friends to see.
Of course, I can choose what to twitter, and I can choose what activities I want to share on my FriendFeed - right now it's just Twitter and this blog - but there are a couple of things which make this almost-40-year-old curious. You need to give some thought to what you want to share, both for reasons of privacy and just general annoyance level for others.
This trend in social networking where almost everything is public. how dangerous is it? Do people know that things are being shared? To give one example, a good friend of mine recently discovered that I'd put a photo up on Facebook which included her. I even tagger her. The photo is several years old (6 to 8 years I think). She commented on this photo, not entirely happy that I'd put a photo of her up on Facebook without her permission. However, in doing so, her comment and the photo itself was broadcast to every friend as part of the news feed. So now every friend on Facebook knew about the photo and knew she wasn't entirely happy with it. I could weakly argue that she should have noticed the fact that I'd posted pictures and that I'd tagged her had been broadcast in her news feed, but obviously she wasn't paying attention :-)
The other thing I wonder is just general annoyance level that constant updating of profile causes others. Yesterday I embarked on a Father Ted twitter-spree. Father Ted is an old British-produced, Irish-made TV show about three Catholic priests living on a small island off the west coast of Ireland. It's probably the single most hilarious TV show ever made, but that's just my opinion. However, my constant twittering of arcane quotes from this TV series were broadcast mostly to American and Asian friends. I was fully aware that most of them would have absolutely NO idea what the hell I was talking about in my status messages on Facebook. I may well have filled their news feeds with a bunch of mostly garbage. Hopefully a few friends who saw the TV series would have at least got a chuckle out of it - I myself was absolutely in stitches while finding quotes to use! But my point is, how much are services like Twitter and FriendFeed useful, or how much do they just increase the noise level of things you really just don't care about? I suspect it's mostly noise. Another friend of mine just commented on a bunch of photos on Facebook, and now my news feed is full of photos of people I don't know and comments that are not relevant to me in any way.
However, I do plan to continue my adventures with Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and so on. This is all "cutting-edge" web 2.0 stuff, even though I know most of my friends outside the high-tech industry - and probably several within the high-tech industry - have never even heard of Twitter :-)
What do you think? Is this all just annoying? Am I spamming you all to death? Is it something only teenagers will "grok"? Let me know in the comments. May 06 Mildred and Richard Loving - thank you
Today it seems inconceivable that I could be arrested for being married to my wife. Yet Mildred and Richard Loving were arrested for just that.
In 1967, just one year before I was born, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states could not prohibit mixed-race marriages. At that time, approximately 17 states banned mixed-race marriages. Mildren and Richard were arrested and sent to jail by the state of Virginia, only to be released on condition that they leave the state. They did leave, and finally brought the case against racial discrimination to the federal courts.
As I am in a mixed-race marriage myself, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mildred, who died on Friday aged 68. Rest in peace. A lot can change in 40 years. May 04 How low will YHOO go?Now that MSFT has pulled it's offer to take over YHOO, I wonder just how low YHOO stock will go on Monday morning... it will be fun to watch.
 I hope you sold all your YHOO stock on Friday! ;-) April 28 Tulip Festival Photos Hi all, I've posted a new collection of photos from this year's Skagit Valley Tulip Festival - no people pics, just arty pictures of flowers! I think some of them are pretty nice.I'm trying out SmugMug as a photo storage/gallery site. So far I do like it - I found a 50% off discount too, which certainly might help me decide to keep using SmugMug once the trial period expires. Meshify!I keep talking about the Mesh being a platform, not just a user experience.
If you’re having trouble understanding what Mesh can do, and you have a spare 53 minutes, I strongly recommend this video up on Channel 9. (Silverlight runtime required.)
A quote from on10.net:
Live Mesh Group Program Manager Ori Amiga, with some help from Jeremy Mazner, explains how Mesh works as a platform, and shows a number of demos showing: · native Mesh feeds rendered in XML, in JSON and in RSS · querying the Mesh feeds using Iron Python · a network-unaware WPF client application using Mesh (meshify!) · a Silverlight photo-zoom application running on top of Mesh · a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh · taking photos on a Mac and on a mobile phone and having them sync with the Mesh · accessing the Mesh over DAV from the DOS prompt and then opening the photo in mspaint.exe and having the edits sync back to all devices · new .Net 3.5 LINQ queries over Mesh objects including code snippets from the Mesh SDK which show up automatically in Visual Studio
Awesome stuff! Live Mesh - invites and more!The blogosphere continues to talk about the Live Mesh and it's potential. Here's another collection of topics that I've come across over the weekend:
Stay tuned for one more post from me about the Live Mesh, after which I might shut up about it for a while, until the PDC excitement hits :-) April 23 Live Mesh - more coverage More coverage of the Live Mesh Tech Preview announcement in this morning's blogs:ars technica:
Liveside.net:
CNet:
Direct from Microsoft, Abolade Gbadegesin is up on Channel 9 talking about the Mesh. Live MeshFinally I can tell everyone what I'm working on at Microsoft these days! Today at the Web 2.0 Conference, we announced the Live Mesh Tech Preview. This is a pre-Beta release limited to 10,000 users. What is Live Mesh? Well, it's a tough thing to explain in one sentence. It's too big in scope to summarize easily. The important thing is to realize that it's a platform which anyone - other Microsoft teams and third-parties - will be able to develop applications upon. We are shipping some applications in today's tech preview, and it would be easy to mistake that experience as the main point of Live Mesh. That would be a mistake. Think of the appications as an experience enabled by the platform.
I'm embedding a Live Mesh demo below, which does a great job of explaining Live Mesh (Silverlight runtime required). I wanted to embed two demos here, but they both start automatically, so both played at the same time. I'm showing you the general introduction here. If you're a developer, you'll want to check out http://www.mesh.com/Welcome/TourDeveloper.aspx.
More Information:
Live Mesh Demo:
For Developers:
The reviews and opinion pieces are rolling in:
Robert Scoble: Mary-Jo Foley: John Markoff (New York Times): Liveside.net: TechCrunch: GigaOM: CNet: ReadWriteWeb: If it’s possible to summarize the general tone of opinion – I’d say they understand it’s the platform that is important, which means we must have done a pretty good job of explaining and driving the point home. Overall some definite interest and cautious optimism, with most people looking forward to hearing a lot more at the PDC in October. The TechCrunch title was unfortunately misleading - Live Mesh's future is most definitely cross-platform and cross-device.
Mesh and the whole cloud-computing space are really interesting and hot these days. It's very cool for me to be a part of that. April 14 The Unfortunate Toilet Laptop Encounter Today will go down in history as the day I encountered the toilet laptop user. There I was in a stall mining my own business, (so to speak), when I heard rapid tapping from the adjacent stall. The tapping was easily identifiable as the sound of someone typing on a laptop computer. And not the surreptitious, hesitant typing of someone who knew he was committing a major faux pas. Oh no. This was loud, agressive typing regardless of how quiet the toilet room was. And just to add insult to injury, he was using the handicapped stall.So, to the man in Microsoft REDWEST E, 2nd floor toilets, on the afternoon of Monday, April 14th 2008. The man using the handicapped toilet as his own personal office. Please know that I, and I am sure several other people who must have heard you using your laptop in there, are HORRIFIED!
Ew. Ew. Ew. April 10 MyMicroHoogleOnlinespace?One of the silliest things AOL ever did was naming itself "America Online", pretty much shooting itself in the foot for any expansion outside America. Of course it tried with AOL UK, AOL Japan and so on, pretending "AOL" was just an innocent combination of three letters. How many Swiss people want to use a product named "America Online Switzerland" or "America Online Australia"? Well, I am too lazy to find out, but come on, the name is hardly appealing to non-Americans.
With all the rumors about Microsoft's attempt to take over Yahoo!, my head is spinning on the possible name changes.
Microhoo!, Yahsoft! or, knowing Microsoft's branding team "Yahoo!™ powered by Microsoft™ Windows Live®".
Of course then there was yesterday's rumor of an AOL Time Warner + Yahoo! + an ad deal with Google, in an attempt to spurn Microsoft:
YahooOL!, Ahoo! Yahoogle!
And then today, the possible tie in of News Corp with its MySpace site possibly joining Microsoft to jointly take over Yahoo!
MicrohooSpace! MyYahSoft! ...
The possibilities are endless, and my head is spinning. I'm going to go lie down now - wake me up when the acquisition's over! April 09 Bill Of Rights versus Monique Davis?
As someone who is a US permanent resident alien currently in the process of applying for citizenship, one of the things expected of me is that I have a reasonable familiarity with US government, the judicial system and US history. I am not a political person, in general - I don't label myself as either left- or right-wing, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Today, however, I am forced to wonder if all of our democratically elected leaders (AKA politicians) have either the awareness or the slightest respect for the principles on which this country was founded.
Yes, Representative Monique Davis of Illinois, Democrat, I am referring to you. To you, I want to remind you there is a rule book which you must abide by if you want to be in government.
The Constitution The Bill Of Rights I reprint here the transcript of an exchange between Rep. Davis and one Rob Sherman, which took place Wednesday afternoon in the General Assembly as Sherman testified before the House State Government Administration Committee on the issue of the state giving $1 million in public funds to a church. I also link to an audio version of the same exchange. I do hope the good folks at BoingBoing and the Chicago Tribune don't mind me lifting the content from them in the interests of greater exposure. Here is the Audio (MP3).
I do not wish to get into a debate on this subject, but I am forced to wonder if Rep. Davis has ever heard of terms like bigotry, discrimination or hate speech? Considering she is African-American, I think she should be somewhat aware of the importance of civil liberties. I don't often take a firm stance on politics, but I do know right from wrong. An elected official cannot prohibit someone from testifying because she disagrees with his religious beliefs. I can't vote (yet) but nevertheless, in my feeble voice, I call on Rep. Davis to apologize and resign. Should she fail to do so, I call on the State Government of Illinois to censure Rep. Davis and remove her from committees of influence.
The fact is, the same rules apply whether you're Christian, Jew, Muslim or Atheist. Rep. Davis can have whatever opinions she wants as a private citizen, but her views are alternately scary, disgusting and downright dangerous in a governmental representative's hands. April 08 Sakura@UWOne of my favorite things to do in Spring is to go to the University of Washington's Liberal Arts Quad to see the Sakura in bloom. I love how the blossoms grow not just from the ends of the branches, but on little outgrowths along the tree branches too.
I also wanted to play a little with Adobe's new Photoshop Express website. It's a Flash based photo editing website, and it gives 2Gb of free space to store your photos and display them as galleries, in addition to the relatively rich editing experience. It's still in beta and English only, but it's definitely worth checking out! Click the image below to go to a small Sakura gallery that I created.
The photos were all taken on Sunday, April 6th 2008. We didn't have the best weater this spring and I wasn't able to find a sunny day on a weekend to go take pictures, but I think these still came out ok :-)
There are a lot more pics, but this small collection just focuses on the little clumps of blossoms growing on the thick branches. Enjoy! April 03 Hello World revisited - referring URL how-toSomeone asked me recently how to see where people coming to your Space have come from. Or to put it another way, the referring URL - the web page they were last at, and where they clicked a link to arrive at your Space.
It's really quite simple, although as with everything in life, there are some aspects which don't quite work as you would like them to :-)
To see the referring URL, go you your Spaces home page - the one where you get to see the activities of your friends, recent comments, etc. At the top of that page you will see a link with the text "Views Today" and a number coming after it. This number indicates how many page views your Space has had since midnight US Pacific Time (GMT - 8 hours). Click that link.
You are now at the statistics page for your Space. It will look something like this:
 As you can see, one of the columns is "Referring address". Bingo! This is the column which tells you where the visitor came from.
In the example above, someone did a search on Google UK for the term "xbox live account suspension". You can see the search term in the query string part of the URL. One of the search results that Google provided was a link to my Space - a link directly to one of my blog posts talking about when my account got suspended.
OK, wonderful! Now you know where the person came from and what they were looking for. But now for the caveats. Look at the second line of the statistics - this visitor to my Space has no referring address! How can that be? Well, it simply means that they did not click a link on a page to lead them to my Space. They may have entered the URL to my Space directly into the browser, or have it as a bookmark/favorite, etc. To get a referring URL, the visitor must have clicked a link on a web page. There are a few other caveats - if a visitor originally comes in to one page and then starts clicking around within your Space, those are all counted as separate page views, and you will see the referring URL as a page within your own Space. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but we don't have the ability to track that this was a single visitor or whether perhaps it was somebody else. Also, some referring URLs don't provide much information to identify the visitor. Obviously visitors coming from Google's search results page are strangers. But if one of my friends visits my Space via the Friends page or via their homepage (or via Messenger), I don't always see a useful referring URL to know which friend it was. Sometimes the Spaces URLs are pretty cryptic. Also, I don't think I can necessarily know whether the visitor from Friend X's Space was Friend X, or someone else visiting Friend X's Space and then clicking through to my Space.
Fun, eh? Well, I'm afraid it is what it is - a sometimes revealing or interesting piece of information. It doesn't tell you a lot, but the few facts that can be gleamed can be quite interesting nonetheless. Without seeing the referring URL, for example, I would have no idea just how often my Space shows up in Google's search engine. And even better, I can click on the referring URL directly from my Stats page and go right to the Google search results page and see just where my Space is listed - occasionally making me smile when I see that Google listed my Space higher than some other more official sources of information! :-)
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