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Jennifer Ritzinger and I have started a new show called Countdown to PDC2008 , and we just published our first episode on Channel 9. We’ve been recording an internal video series (of the same name) for about ten episodes now, and some fellow employees suggested that the format might also work for an external audience. So, we decided to try it, and we’d love your feedback! Specifically, if you have any questions about the conference, or if you’d like to hear about a particular topic on a future show, please add your comment to the post. We’ll do our best to address them. To keep things short, tight, and packed with information, we use an old skool analog kitchen timer. Yes, we know that it runs a bit fast, but you know what? We will abide, and “at the ding, we’re done”…even if we’re in the middle of a word. That way, even if we suck, we won’t suck for long. For astute viewers, the fact that we’re standing up and using a kitchen timer might even make this an Agile show. Okay…I’m just rambling Read More...
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[You can skip to the last two paragraphs if you’d like to offer suggestions] Here we are…one month later with the second post in a series about the PDC2008 Content Owner role. If you don’t know what a Content Owner does, I’d recommend reading PDC2008: A Day in the Life #1 for context. As mentioned in the prior post, one of my responsibilities is to coordinate and drive two meetings each week with many representatives from across Microsoft. The members of this team are critical thinkers who help define, create, and shape the content we’ll present at PDC2008 in October . But how do we select our content? How do we know which sessions make sense and which ones don’t? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that many Microsoft employees have an engineering mind-set, and we tend to want everything defined in terms of an algorithm (yes, I’m guilty too ). But when it comes to content, though we do have many measures and metrics, a bunch of smart people talking and arguing about what makes the Read More...
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If you read my What Do I Do post, you'll know that I'm the Content Owner for this year's PDC 2008 in Los Angeles. MIX08 is behind us, and I've just recently transitioned away from my Web GO role. This means that I can now focus 100% of my time and attention on our October event. It's going to be fantastic! One of the many responsibilities I have as Content Owner is to create the master schedule for the event. This is the schedule that tells you which session is in which room and at what time. For PDC 2005, we delivered over 200 sessions at the conference, not including repeats (we run repeats of popular sessions that are filled to capacity). Because PDC is where we talk about the future of Microsoft's platform, all of the content relates in some way to our overall strategy (which is typically delivered during big keynotes and general sessions). This means that some sessions need to be scheduled ahead of others to provide foundational and prerequisite knowledge. For example, a 200-level Read More...
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It's hard to believe that MIX08 is over. I was involved in so many aspects of the event that it seems like I attended in some parallel universe! At least I got to see many of you there. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry for Show Off . Thomas and I weeded out the less inspiring entries and ended up with the 16 videos we showed on Thursday night. The room wasn't completely packed, but we had strong attendance, and our audience was pumped-up and supportive. It was great to hear applause after each video. We tallied up the results, and here are the top five submissions (as voted by the audience): Crayon Physics Deluxe - like many of the comments on the voting forms, I want this game now! Real Time Physics in Silverlight - a very cool open source physics library for Silverlight hosted on CodePlex Wii Data Visualization and Multipoint Nonsense - using the Wii for some Minority Report fun 40 - My Life in Silverlight 2 - probably the only computer application that's ever caused me to have Read More...
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Well, I had good intentions. Ever since my first post about SEAMonster in October, 2007, I've wanted to refactor and clean-up the code for release. In the meantime, I've received many, many e-mails asking when that would happen. To everyone who has patiently waited, today's the day. SEAMonster is now hosted on CodePlex . Before you get too excited, know that I haven't had the time to do any clean-up (at all). I finally realized that I just had to let it loose. This is one of those "20 lines of code" test projects that evolved into an unarchitected proof-of-concept with a load of TODOs. There's no doubt that it could use a lot of help from the community. If you'd like to contribute to the project, please drop me a line . Here's a sample image that ships with Windows Vista that I've resized using both SEAMonster and Photoshop. Notice the "squashed" and distorted look of the bicubic resize as compared to the seam carved version. The seam carved version looks like it could be a real photo, Read More...
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A few days ago, I received the following e-mail: Help me out here. I've been reading your blog off and on for years and I can't figure out what it is you do. Your obviously involved with the PDC and MIX conferences, you send a lifesize cardboard cutout of yourself as your resume, you've made a plug-in for Illustrator and a converter for Flash files (which rock BTW), you take amazing photos, you implement seam carving in your "spare time", you write Tivo gadgets, you taught me about continuous integration with your orb article, your article on code review was mandatory reading in one of my classes, you read quite an collection of books, you seem to be pretty good at design considering you claim to be a geek, you build small arcade machines, you counted to a freakin' million, you worked with Tom Skerrit, you write music, you build medical software, and who knows what else. Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. :) I just read through your old posts cuz I couldn't remember all of this! Just what Read More...
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I tend to read a lot of books , and most of them have a technical focus. Every once and awhile, I run across a gem that is timely, coherent, unique, and well written. Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran is one of those books. If you've ever wanted to understand how search engines perform their magic, how a site like Amazon.com knows what products to recommend, how spam detection works, and how dating sites predict good matches (among others), this book is for you. Check out Toby's Web 2.0 Berlin slides for a quick overview. Many of the algorithms and methods that Toby describes are very complex, but he doesn't assume that you have any special knowledge of data analysis, machine learning, or statistics. Toby does a fantastic job explaining mathematical concepts in a remarkably straightforward and simple fashion. If you have a programmers understanding of math, you should do just fine. The book is full of real-world examples that pull live Read More...
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I made a very minor update to my TiVo Now Playing gadget that allows you to download recorded shows to your computer. While viewing the show details window, simply click on the title to begin the download. Because the video files are protected, you'll be prompted for a user name and password. The user name is always tivo , and the password is your media access key (check the Remember my password checkbox if you get tired of re-entering this information). If you need help configuring your gadget or finding your media access key, be sure to read my earlier TiVo Gadget for Vista post. Download the TiVo Now Playing v1.0.2 gadget (182KB). Read More...
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Our friends at Vertigo have created a free application for Silverlight 1.0 called Slide.Show . If you have Silverlight installed , you should see a slide show of my photos within the body of this blog post. Most of them are from my collection of wallpaper images , and a few are from a cruise to Italy and Croatia this past summer. To incorporate the photos in the body of this post, I followed the instructions in the Quick Start Guide and had my slide show up and running within about 10 minutes. I borrowed some of the style settings from the guide and from Vertigo's own sample, and I tweaked them from there. I know there are more settings available ("hundreds of color, font, size, position, and behavior options" according to their feature list), and I can't wait to read the forthcoming user guide for the details. To embed the Slide.Show application in this blog post, I used the following IFRAME tag: <iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" src="http://www.mikeswanson.com/Slide.Show/default.htm" Read More...
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For awhile, I've wanted to try my hands at writing a gadget for the Windows Sidebar in Vista, but I could never come up with a project idea that was small enough to accomplish and useful enough to justify. Since we recently added two TiVo HD units to our home network, I thought it'd be handy to expose their Now Playing lists. I knew the data was available over our home network, because the TiVo Desktop software displays a lot of it. Turns out, the TiVo Developer Resources section of their site contains just enough to get going. Without going into too many details, recent versions of the TiVo software on certain units (TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 HD, I think) contain a small web server that can be issued requests. These requests are passed via the query string and return their results as XML. For example, our downstairs TiVo unit has an IP address of 192.168.1.104 (you can find the IP address of your TiVo by navigating to Messages & Settings , then Settings , then Phone & Network ). Read More...
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Before you read my post, you should watch the short 4 1/2 minute video that demonstrates an image resizing technique called seam carving . The technique was presented at this year's SIGGRAPH 2007 conference by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. If you want to know all of the details, check out the paper they presented called Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing (20MB PDF). Shai and Ariel outline a relatively simple algorithm for finding a "seam" of pixels that is least likely to be missed when it's removed from an image. The algorithm looks for connected pixels of low energy, where energy refers to a measure of visual detail. By iterating the algorithm, an image can be resized while maintaining its general structure. Unlike a typical stretch operation in your favorite graphics application, the seam carving technique resists squashing or distorting the image. When I first saw their video, I thought it was magic. Not only do they demonstrate resizing, but they also show how their algorithm Read More...
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This past week, we had an offsite brainstorming session at the new Novelty Hill • Januik winery in Woodinville to discuss our upcoming MIX08 event in Las Vegas. Jennifer Ritzinger (who still doesn't have a blog for some reason) challenged each speaker to come up with a creative way to present their topic using a single slide. Never ones to take a creative challenge lightly, my co-presenter, Thomas Lewis, and I asked ourselves: "what have we never seen in a PowerPoint presentation?" A few minutes of brainstorming later, we decided to make our slides in 3D. Not your average everyday 3D, mind you, but the kin of 3D that would require everyone to wear cheesy red and cyan anaglyphic cardboard glasses ! Like so many of the ideas that Thomas and I come up with, we never let trifles like feasibility get in the way. What fun would that be!? So, we split up our tasks, and I volunteered to figure out how to actually make the 3D idea work. Okay, I thought...first thing's first: search the internet Read More...
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We're announcing our first surface computing product today at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California. The product is called Microsoft Surface , and it's a table that integrates a 30-inch display that allows one or more simultaneous users to interact directly with images on the screen. Users can paint with their fingers, move and resize items like photographs, and manipulate content—all without touching a mouse or a keyboard. Watch the 18-minute interview with Mark Bolger on Channel 10 to see a great demonstration. I love the object recognition features. I recently upgraded my cell phone and can identify with the phone configuration scenario in the video. Although I've seen versions of this technology in my seven years at Microsoft (my anniversary is this week), the fact that I will actually be able to use this at retail locations in the coming months makes it even more real. If you want to know more, check out the press release and executive Q&A Read More...
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It's been awhile since my last post! The group I'm in, Developer and Platform Evangelism (otherwise known as DPE), is responsible for both MIX and PDC. If you hadn't heard, our sold out MIX07 event took place earlier this week in Las Vegas, and the weeks leading up to it were hectic for many of us. The event itself was a blast, and Silverlight stole the show. If you weren't able to attend in person, or if you couldn't make all of the sessions, there's good news. All of the keynotes, breakout sessions, and panels were recorded, and many of them (I just counted around 80) are already available for viewing and downloading online . Traffic to the site has been very heavy, so please be patient if it takes a few moments to load. To "up our game" this year, we decided to see if we could publish a rough version of each session within 24 hours. By rough , I mean a version that contains whatever was displayed on the screen in each breakout room with audio from the presenter. On average, we were able Read More...
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To kick things off, Actipro recently released their WPF Actipro Ribbon control which is based on the new Office 2007 UI . According to the site, their control "implements all of the core required parts of the Microsoft Ribbon UI Guidelines along with many optional parts as well." If you'd like to take it for a spin, fire-up their Live XBAP Demo and try it right inside your browser (funny...I happened to have Word 2007 running in the background, and for just a moment, I was confused). Have I mentioned how much I love XBAPs !? And if you hadn't noticed, they also make a WPF Actipro Wizard control. Have some 3D models that you'd like to convert to XAML? Right Hemisphere released version 5 of their Deep Exploration product. Most notably (at least to me) is the addition of XAML export support. This means that you can open a file from over 40 supported 3D formats and export out to XAML for use in your WPF application. Download a 30-day trial and see what I mean. For other conversion formats, Read More...
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