Tao of Paul

The world's best places to live 2008

Who designs this stuff?!?

MBA graduation

For the parents of baby Ava

World's most peaceful country?

Dogsitting

Worldwide Telescope

Unicode on the Web

Testing SmugMug slideshow embed code

Tulip Pics - Photoshop Express

Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook = my life in 2008

Mildred and Richard Loving - thank you

How low will YHOO go?

Tulip Festival Photos

Meshify!

Live Mesh - invites and more!

Live Mesh - more coverage

Live Mesh

The Unfortunate Toilet Laptop Encounter

MyMicroHoogleOnlinespace?

Photo Album: Snowy November 2006

Photo Album: Sakura @ UW, 2007

Photo Album: Tulip Festival 2007

Custom List: Paul's Gadgets

Blog list: Tech Blogs

Movie List: Five Geek Flicks

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:33:14 GMT

MSN and BusinessWeek recently published the results of a survey on the best places to live in the world.

Switzerland took the #1 and #3 spots with Zurich and Geneva respectively. Vienna, Austria took the #2 spot.

Quite an endorsement! I have to agree, Zurich made a great impression on me both times I visited there.

Closer to (my) home, Vancouver, Canada took 4th place! It's a really nice city - very liveable and wonderful Chinese food!

Anyway, worth a look if you're considering relocating or need a change in your life! Follow this link for the entire list!

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:42:02 GMT

On Sunday morning before heading out to the Mariners game, I had to do a little video editing and dvd creation on my PC. During my wife's graduation ceremony on Saturday, I took my video camera along. In total I recorded 12 short scenes to the video camera's hard disc. Fine. So on Sunday morning I had to copy those files to my PC, using Sony's software that came with the video camera. My video camera is high-definition, using the AVCHD codec, and it can record audio in dolby digital 5.1 (surround sound). Fine. Or so you might think.

By the time I had finished copying the video files from my video camera to my PC, a process which involves not just copying but also analyzing the files, my 12 scenes had been saved to disc as 36 files. For each scene, I had a foo.m2ts file, which was the actual AVCHD video file. The filename was a user-friendly year-month-day-hour-minute-second.m2ts. Each of those 12 *.m2ts files came with an accompanying *.modd file and a *.moff file. Who knows what they are for, possibly the result of the "analysis" the Sony software had performed. Anyway, it's pretty annoying to have all these files cluttering up my filesystem instead of just having the actual video files.

But wait, there's more. I was doing this video editing to make a DVD containing the scenes I'd taken, to give to two friends of ours who had also graduated with my wife. Of course, I couldn't just give them the video "as-is". The AVCHD video codec can be used for blu-ray discs, which is logical since they are both Sony creations. I don't have a blu-ray disc burner in my PC, and I don't even know if they have a blu-ray player or not. So I had to convert the video to the DVD-Video standard codec, MPEG-2. Naturally, I made a copy rather than replacing the HD versions. The re-coding process took forever even on my dual-core machine, both cores pretty much maxed out. When it had finally finished, I was astonished to find my 12-scene, 36-file HD folder had a new 12-scene, 60-file SD folder alongside it. 60 files! The *.m2ts files had been replaced by *.mpg files, which I expected. But even the SD video files each had their *.modd and *.moff files, and now I also had a *.mpg.stk01 and *.mpg.stk02 file for each video file. Whatever. That's 5 files on disc for every time I pushed my thumb on the "record" button of my video camera!

Taking the high- and standard-definition files together, I was now up to 96 files. And I hadn't even started to make a DVD yet! This is just total BS!

And the frustrations with video editing on the PC just continued from there. By the time I was done - miraculously done just in time to make it to the Mariners game on time - I was pretty fed up with the PC experience and ready to go use a Mac. Next time I'll talk about my adventures with some video and dvd creation software that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

Word to the wise, never try doing home movie editing against the clock

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:35:06 GMT

Today was Paew's MBA graduation ceremony at Key Arena. Of course, photos are online. Plenty of Paew and the rest of the Thai CityU gang!

Click on through our blog posting to the gallery here.

Mon, 26 May 2008 23:06:20 GMT

In honor of our friends who just had a baby girl on Saturday, this video should be just what the doctor ordered!

Sun, 25 May 2008 16:01:16 GMT

What's the world's 'most peaceful' country? Iceland. The least peaceful? Iraq.

The USA came in at 97th place out of 140.

This is all according to the "Global Peace Index" report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, which I found on Reuters. But it's not just about living in the country - it also factors in that country's activities around the world - U.N. deployments overseas and levels of violent crime, respect for human rights, the number of soldiers killed overseas and arms sales.

The G8 came in all over the place: Japan was fifth most peaceful. Canada 11th, Germany 14th, Italy 28th, France 36th and Britain 49th. Russia was in 131st place!

So congratulaions to Iceland. I've never been there, and this news still doesn't make me want to go there, to be honest. Probably something to do with the word 'ice' in its name... On the other hand, now I know I really don't want to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Sudan and Somalia - the bottom 5 on the list.

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:01:45 GMT

A friend of ours is in the hospital today, giving birth. So, we're dogsitting a little chihuahua (AKA alien rat dog). It's actually kind of fun having a dog around the house and he doesn't seem to be too lonely or worried about his temporary home. Mind you, we've been planning for this for quite a while, with plenty of visits in advance so he could get used to us and to our home.

Let's see if the dog will let us sleep tonight...

We're still waiting to hear the news from the hospital. Everything is going to plan so far, so I'm not worried, however, having visited the delivery room this morning, I can only imagine how freaked out I would be if I was the daddy-to-be. I was nervous enough just being there.

Tue, 13 May 2008 05:05:58 GMT

Yes, the project that can bring Robert Scoble to tears, has now been released by Microsoft Research.

WorldwideTelescope.org

Update: Long has posted an article on his blog on how to get great screenshots from the Worldwide Telescope software.

Mon, 12 May 2008 06:53:25 GMT

Mark Davis posts on the official Google blog - based on analysis of the pages that Google's search engine indexes, the use of Unicode on the web just surpassed that of ASCII and Western European encodings for the first time.

Having ~25% of the world's web pages using a Unicode encoding should not be confused with the actual content on the pages - don't assume that the % of non-Western language content has increased at this rate. A large number of English websites now use UTF-8 encoding only because it's the default encoding for many development tools and data types (XML, JSON, etc) and doesn't cost them anything in terms of bytes used. But at least all those sites now have the ability to support non-Western scripts - a big step in the right direction :-)

Sun, 11 May 2008 01:53:24 GMT

More tulips. Sorry. I found a way to embed SmugMug flash slideshows into blogs, etc, and I want to see how it looks.

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:31:54 GMT

Simultaneously 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!

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:17:15 GMT

These 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.

Tue, 06 May 2008 07:27:54 GMT

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.

Sun, 04 May 2008 13:56:13 GMT

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! ;-)

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:25:56 GMT

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.

Click here for a slideshow.

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.

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:48:12 GMT

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:

An "Elevator Pitch" is the art of being able to explain your product in the time it takes to ride up an elevator with someone.

But how do you explain something as utterly complex as Live Mesh in that short of time? Well, you don't really, which is why there are some who think Live Mesh is a souped up FolderShare or 'just another service'. Live Mesh is a platform,,one that spans devices and operating systems. To really get a sense of what Live Mesh is, you should watch this video. If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, at least watch the second half.

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!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:39:14 GMT

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:

The Tech Preview had a 10,000 person limit, but people who managed to get in are getting the ability to invite others to shared folders. This essentially gives another chance to people who didn't sign up in time. To help those who have invites, Long Zheng has set up a site called ShareMesh, hoping to bring together those with invites and those who need them.
Users of the Tech Preview outside of the USA may have noticed that the Windows client has a (lame) restriction built in, preventing use on versions of Windows which are not set to English (United States). There is of course a workaround, where you change your System Locale. Since this may not be intuitive to all, once again Long, being Australian, comes to the rescue and documents exactly how to change the system locale.
The folks over at LiveSide.net have been all over Live Mesh since the announcement, and they haven't let up steam. They have an interview up with David Treadwell, the Corporate VP overseeing the Live Mesh effort. The video is up on Soapbox, but I've embedded it here for your convenience. The LiveSide guys also go in-depth on the Mesh user experience, with a series of posts. Parts one and two are live, with a 3rd part on the way. They also talk about how to try and get in on all the excitement.

Speaking of interviews with David Treadwell, The Gillmor Gang also had a conversation with him on Friday. It's available as a podcast and a full transcript.

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 :-)

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:31:43 GMT

More coverage of the Live Mesh Tech Preview announcement in this morning's blogs:

ars technica:

Microsoft goes after cloud storage with Live Mesh preview

Liveside.net:

CNet:

Direct from Microsoft, Abolade Gbadegesin is up on Channel 9 talking about the Mesh.

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:14:15 GMT

Finally 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:

For general info: https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/LearnMore.aspx
For developers: https://www.mesh.com/web/developer.aspx
The Live Mesh official blog is now live: http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/
Ray Ozzie interview on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=399578

Live Mesh Demo:

For Developers:

Use the Live Mesh sync service to synchronize files, data, and applications across all the devices in a user's mesh—even in scenarios where devices are only occasionally connected to the service.

Use the Live Mesh member service to provide file- and data-sharing experiences to anyone.

Extend the Live Desktop experience to deliver applications that are accessible from anywhere.

Plug in to the Live Mesh news feed system to generate notifications for key activities in your application.

The reviews and opinion pieces are rolling in:

Robert Scoble:

Ray Ozzie delivers with Live Mesh

Mary-Jo Foley:

Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh

John Markoff (New York Times):

Microsoft Reveals a Web-Based Software System

Liveside.net:

TechCrunch:

Microsoft’s Mesh Revealed—Sync All Apps And All Files To All Devices (As Long As They’re Windows)

GigaOM:

Microsoft Dreams of a Live Mesh

CNet:

ReadWriteWeb:

Live Mesh: First Look at Microsoft's New Platform

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.

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:00:19 GMT

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.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:49:06 GMT

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!

Sun, 20 May 2007 06:52:39 GMT

Snowy November 2006

More Photos...

Sun, 20 May 2007 06:43:41 GMT

Sakura @ UW, 2007

Sun, 20 May 2007 06:39:56 GMT

Tulip Festival 2007

More Photos...

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:09:45 GMT

Paul's Gadgets

Nikon D80
Digital SLR
iPod 30Gb
5th Generation
Xbox360 (hdmi)
Game Console
Panasonic DMP-BD30K
Blu Ray Player (profile 1.1)
Denon AVR-3808CI
AV Receiver
Pioneer Elite PRO-150FD
60" 1080p Plasma TV

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:10:55 GMT

Tech Blogs

I like snow on bare trees

snowman starting to melt

brr... that's cold

day off for kids and adults!

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:54:26 GMT

Five Geek Flicks