|
|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » MIX (RSS)
-
As the Content Owner for PDC2008, I'm now a member of the Tier 1 Events Council at Microsoft. This is a group that meets a few times a year to share ideas and best practices around our largest events (like Tech·Ed , MIX, and PDC). We met all day today and covered a number of great topics. One of our sessions was titled Environmentally Sustainable Events Initiative , and it was presented by Gina Broel and Jessica Ludders. We discussed what it means to be a "green" event based on the Green Meeting Industry Council . According to the council, a green meeting incorporates environmental considerations to: Achieve economic and strategic business goals Minimize or eliminate environmental impacts Positively contribute to the environment and host communities We love to measure, benchmark, and assign metrics to just about everything we do at this company, and environmental sustainability is no different. We've looked at things like the amount of waste generated by our events, the amount Read More...
|
-
In the two weeks since our MIX08 event in Las Vegas, I've been asked many times about Steve Wiebe's attempt to re-claim the Donkey Kong world record at our TAO attendee party on March 5th, 2008. So, I thought I'd document what happened "behind the scenes" for those of you who may be curious. The story really began back in September, 2007 when a few of us at Microsoft had dinner with Steve at a local restaurant here in Washington. We're all fans of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters , and our only motives were to eat some good food and meet Steve Wiebe. It honestly didn't go any deeper than that. Some time passed, and as we started to think about entertainment for our MIX08 event, Steve's name came up again. I was a member of our MIX08 core team (the group of people who organized and ran MIX08), and we reasoned that our audience—which consists of a lot of people who grew up playing classic arcade games—would love the opportunity to play some classic games and meet Read More...
|
-
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...
|
-
You’ve probably heard that next week’s MIX08 conference in Las Vegas is sold out. But do you know what that actually means? Does it mean that we decided months ago to cap registrations at an arbitrary number of attendees? Or perhaps we picked a mystical date? Or a financial target? Or the cynical among you might believe that “sold out” is just a way for us to create buzz around the conference. It might surprise you to learn that it’s none of these. When we organize a conference like MIX08, one of the first tasks is finding a city that can accommodate thousands of attendees and the large support staff that it takes to run a big event. This is more challenging than you might think, because we have to consider things like meeting room layout, space to accommodate large sessions, the number of people we can fit into the ballroom for lunch, how many hotel rooms are available, opportunities for evening events and activities, weather, transportation, etc. After applying Read More...
|
-
We're only one month away from MIX08 in Las Vegas , and I hope you've already registered! In addition to our new MIX UX track for designers , we have a lot of great sessions on the schedule. But MIX isn't just about pumping your brain full of raw content. It's about networking, inspiration, and good fun too. So, to kick off the event, we've invited Steve Wiebe, Ed Cunningham, and Walter Day (of Twin Galaxies ) to Las Vegas to give us a special screening of their movie, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters . Even if you've never played Donkey Kong, this is a fantastic documentary. Don't take my word for it...check out the 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes . The movie will be shown the evening of Tuesday, March 4th around 7:30pm, and Steve, Ed, and Walter will be on hand after the show for questions and answers. Note that this is the night before the opening keynote, so be sure to plan accordingly. But that's not all. During the attendee party on Wednesday, March 5th at TAO , Steve will attempt Read More...
|
-
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...
|
-
I ran across Jeff Atwood 's blog post, Typography: Where Engineers and Designers Meet , about a week ago. Like Jeff, I've been interested in fonts and typography for a long time. As a matter of fact, I used to create bitmap fonts for the TI-99/4a, Commodore 64 , and Atari 400/800. I'm sure if I dug through enough boxes I could find a pile of old graph paper with 8 pixel x 8 pixel character sets on them! Those were the days. :-) Until Jeff's post, I hadn't heard about the Helvetica film by Gary Hustwit. I immediately ordered the DVD (it's only $20), it arrived a few days later, and I watched it this morning. What a great movie! It was obvious from the moment I pressed play that this was made by someone who is passionate about the subject. From the beautiful photography to the perfect music, this film reflects the cleanliness and simplicity that is Helvetica. You do not have to be a font geek to appreciate this documentary. The film traces the history of the typeface from the 1950s when it Read More...
|
-
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...
|
-
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...
|
-
Let's kick off the new year with a post about our upcoming MIX08 event in Las Vegas . This is the third year for this annual conference, and we've found ourselves with a unique problem: we have so much great content that we've had to say "no" to a lot of really good sessions just to fit everything into the schedule. Truly insane! We're back at the fabulous Venetian Resort Hotel Casino from March 5-7, 2008. I'll be there the whole time, and if you're planning to attend, drop me a line so we can hook-up. After we've heard Steve Ballmer , Guy Kawasaki , and Scott Guthrie speak, maybe we can go see Big Elvis . I'm almost not kidding. Anyway, you're probably reading this because of the "Contests" tease in the title (or maybe you Googled "Big Elvis"...I don't know), so let's get to it. There are three fun ways to win cool stuff around MIX08, and I want to make sure you're aware of them: ReStyle , formerly known as the REMIX contest, challenges anyone to redesign the look and feel of the MIX08 Read More...
|
-
You may have seen people on the subway or bus reading the New York Times on a tablet PC. You might even use the reader yourself. The reader has gotten some really impressive adoption since launching not long ago. But you probably haven't seen anyone enjoying this amazing online/offline reading experience on a Macintosh. Macintosh users aren't shy about pulling out their machines in public places, but the New York Times Reader hasn't been available for Mac. Now that Silverlight is coming to the Mac, things are beginning to change. Take a look at this demo of the New York Times Reader running in Safari on a Macintosh! A video interview of Kevin Gjerstad and I demonstrating a prototype of the Times Reader using Silverlight just got posted yesterday on the VisitMix front page, check it out . -Chris Han Read More...
|
-
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...
|
-
I hope some of you who are attending MIX were able to attend this talk this morning. If not, here's a short summary of the chat along with some screen shots of the Silverlight Times Reader prototype that was demo'ed during the talk. Kevin Gjerstad, Group Program Manager of WPF , walked through some of the history of typography, the problems with reading today on screen, and how WPF aims to address those problems with features like multi-column layout, pagination, dynamic hyphenation, and optimal paragraph. Robert Larson, VP of Product Development at the New York Times , walked through the WPF based Times Reader and the business model that they're employing with it. Also, the most exciting part -- at least for me -- was hearing about their user metrics. The most staggering statistic is that there's a average 7x increase in user page views when compared to the web site! Warrick Fitzgerald, CTO at LiveTechnology , demonstrated WPF adaptive ads produced from their LiveAdMaker system. This system Read More...
|
-
Do you consider yourself a CSS master? If so, how would you like to use your skills to redesign the MIX home page ? We recently announced the REMIX contest , and if you submit one of the top three designs, you'll receive paid registration to the MIX07 conference, three nights at The Venetian hotel, and $1,000 USD. Ka-ching! That's over $3,000 USD of Total Vegas Value. Oh...did I mention the Tourneau store near The Venetian? Just saying...you can get a nice watch for $1,000. And if you need help picking one out...I mean...I do like watches. I'd be happy to help. :-) Here are only a few of the 100+ REMIX entries from last year's MIX06 event: If you're looking for more inspiration, here are some places to check out: The original css Zen Garden , an amazing demonstration of the power of CSS. The Mixtify site which contains a lot of great graphics and bling to get you started. Smashing Magazine's 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006 , 30 Dark Designs You Should’ve Seen , and 45 Fresh, Read More...
|
-
You're probably familiar with our big Tech·Ed and PDC events, but do you know about MIX ? We had our first MIX conference in 2006, and it was a big success. Like any good movie (and some bad ones, I suppose), the sequel was being planned- and budgeted-for almost before the credits rolled on the first one. MIX07 is being held at The Venetian in Las Vegas from April 30th - May 2, 2007. I know that many of you have to be picky about which conference you attend each year, so let me break it down in simple terms that are sure to get me in trouble from someone around here: Tech·Ed is the conference to attend to get training on shipping products and be productive as soon as you get home. PDC is where you learn about future technologies and come back with early bits that won't ship for awhile. MIX is the event to attend if you build consumer-facing web sites and applications. Of course, my summaries don't do the conferences full justice, and before you drop some coin, you should visit the sites Read More...
|
|
|
|