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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! :-) March 30 Oregon Snow EscapeWe headed to Oregon for the weekend, and I'm glad we did - it looks like Seattle got a bunch of snow while we were away. I took Friday off work and it was snowing at the house - we live at about 750 feet elevation - as we hit the road south. Fortunately it wasn't (yet) snowing at lower elevations and we drove to Portland without any snow to make the driving difficult.
We based ourselves in Portland, and the weather wasn't great there either, but at least it wasn't snowing. We arrived around lunchtime, so after checking into the hotel (the Vintage Plaza), we had lunch at Pioneer Square Mall's food court and did a little tax-free shopping in the Mall, and the new Macy's. After that we got a little rest in the hotel room (we stayed in the 'Starlight' room on the top floor, pictured). We had originally booked a standard room but after checking in we enquired about the availability of the Starlight and found out there was one left, so we took it. The hotel ended up upgrading us for free, so we didn't complain! :-)
 After that, we headed to Kell's Irish Pub for dinner and a drink. Yes, there is one in Seattle too, which I have only been to twice or three times in the 10 years I've lived here, but we thought we should give the Portland branch a try, especially since we were on a trip, staying within walking distance, and Paew had never before set foot in an Irish pub. The food was incredibly flavored - everything hit you full force with zero subtelty, but I didn't mind too much. The biggest surprise of the night? Paew tried Guinness for the first time and liked it! My dad would be so happy... :-)
On Saturday we drove down to Eugene, OR and explored the town and the university. Being a bit further south, the weather was quite nice and warm, and the cherry blossoms were in full glory. We got some nice pics of those and ended up having lunch in P.F. Chang's which was just OK - not one of my favorite restaurants but there wasn't a whole lot to choose from that we could see, and we didn't want to end up in some McDonald's... As we made our way back up I-5 to Portland, we stopped at an outlet mall in Woodburn, OR called Woodburn Company Stores. We dropped some serious coin there since everything was outlet-priced and tax-free to boot! Finally back in Portland, we barely had the energy to make it out of the hotel again for dinner and just got a quick bite at some dodgy-looking Japanese restaurant (the kind where nobody is actually Japanese, as far as I could tell).
 Sunday, we headed out to see Multnomah Falls on the Columbia River Highway. It's difficult to believe it now, but this was the first major paved highway in the entire Pacific Northwest, less than 100 years ago, back in 1916. But it sure is pretty, with great views of the river and cliffs along the way. The weather was dry but cloudy, and cold. We stopped at Wahkeenah Falls first, which was pretty impressive by itself at 242 feet high, and we hiked up to the bridge for a better look. The spray off the falls got us pretty wet and my hands were numb trying to hold the camera to get some pics. After that we headed over a short distance to Multnomah Falls (pictured), which at 620 feet (189 meters) is the second-highest waterfall in the US.While 620 feet is impressive, it pales into insignificance when compared to the highest waterfall in the US - Yosemite Falls, a massive 2425 feet (739 meters) high! But what the heck, Multnomah Falls is the highest waterfall I've personally seen :-)
After we were done hiking and getting cold and wet, we headed back to Troutdale outlets for yet more shopping before returning home to Seattle. After passing back into Washington State, we passed through a few really scary hailstorms where the car took a real beating and visibility got down to next to nothing! A few scary moments but we survived...
We stopped at Kelso for a bite at McDonald's. Take my advice, don't. It was the worst burger I've ever had, totally cold and gross. It had never even been hot since the cheese wasn't melted. I took two bites and couldn't take another... I probably should have stopped after the first bite but oh well... Anyway, Kelso McDonald's should be avoided at all costs.
We made it back to Issaquah finally and the temperature inside the house was 56F. We turned on the heat back on and escaped back out for dinner while the house got warm.
And that pretty much wraps up a fun, busy and adventurous weekend trip! March 23 Easter Ecards with a TwistOK, so I'm blatantly this story from LifeHacker, but I couldn't resist - I was in the mood for just the right Easter story after today's Easter rain-out, so here goes: SomeEcards.com has a few Easter gems for those of you with a slightly twisted sense of humor (that includes me) - feel free to email these to all your friends, just click the image to go to the page on SomeEcards.com's site to send them :-)
  March 14 Hello World!I just looked at the referring URLs of the last 20 visitors to this Space (all within today). Wow - what an international bunch!
I'm delighted to have such a global audience! :-) March 04 Full Comcast HD lineup for Seattle areaSince Comcast just added a few new HD channels today (Discovery Channel, Sci Fi Channel, HGTV, Food Network and TLC), I thought it might be worth pulling together the full list of Comcast’s HD channels for the Seattle area. Since it’s tough to remember all those numbers, I recommend making them favorite channels in your Comcast set-top box/DVR. You might also consider disabling/hiding the standard definition versions of many of these channels in case you inadvertenty end up watching the lower-resolution channel when “less aware” (cough, cough) people in your household are in control of the clicker.
* requires purchase of additional packages (movies, sports) March 03 Coat Hanger wire = Audio Bliss?If you're just about to spend some serious cash on fancy speaker cable, Gizmodo has very interesting results of a blind A/B test between Monster 1000 speaker cables and some soldered-together coat hangers. That's right, good old fashioned wire coat hangers!
I'd love to see Monster's response to this one ;-)
At the very least it's a fun addition to the lengthy debate on whether spending lots of money on cables makes any difference to the sound you get. Caveat emptor! February 24 Random weekend musingsStream-of-consciousness on a Sunday morning:
February 22 Star Trekkin
Star Trek: The Tour - 250 tons of sets, props, models and costumes from all of the TV shows and movies. Oh man, I totally want to go to this if and when it comes to Seattle!
It's in LA (Long Beach) right now until March 2nd. They're planning to visit 40 cities around the US over the next 5 years - no details yet on which cities or when.
Read more at MSN City Guides and the official tour site. Check back with the tour site for the 2008 tour schedule.
Pictured: Kirk's chair from ST:TOS
(from startrek.com) IM Spam mystery solvedUpdate on my article a few days ago about people receiving IM spam from me. Do not trust sites which offer to show you who's blocking you on Messenger.
First the good news - all 5 of my computers were not compromised in any way. No virus, malware, spyware, trojan, keylogger or rootkit.
Now the bad news - I was stupid enough to give my ID and password to a site that I shouldn't have trusted.
There are - so I discovered - sites out there which claim to be able to show you who has blocked you or deleted you on Messenger. Of course, you have to give your ID and password to them, and then they show you your list of buddies. This is similar to how Facebook invites you to find your friends - you give Facebook your ID and password and then see the list of your buddies. The difference is Facebook can (in theory) be trusted not to abuse your trust. Other sites, however... well, the good old Latin phrase caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) was never more applicable.
Here's how the scam went down: About two weeks ago, I received an IM from one of my friends telling me about this site which would show me who was blocking me. Well, I trusted my friend - maybe moreso because I had just been chatting with her earlier in the day - so I clicked the link and gave my ID and password to the site. I noticed that the results were not very reliable - the site told me that I was blocking myself (one of my other IDs) which I knew not to be true. After that, nothing happened for about a week, when I noticed a large uptick in the volume of spam I was receiving in my email account, and then on Friday when these IM spams started happening.
To be honest I never thought about this Messenger blocking site that I had given my ID and password to. I started scanning my machines, furiously looking for the malware which didn't exist. After making some inquiries to some knowledgeable sources, it became clear that it was this website that was the source of the spam.
So I'm writing this in the hope that when someone sends you a link to a Messenger blocking info website, you'll be smarter than I was. Don't give them your ID and password! February 19 Flickr in your context menuFor those of you who use Flickr, I found a handy-dandy little tool which adds a Flickr upload option to your "Send To" context menu - In other words, when you are browsing your photos on your machine, just right-click on one and choose "Send To Flickr" and it will upload the photo for you. No muss, no fuss :-)
You can read about it here on Microsoft's on10 blog. |
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