Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Miscellany - not security'

Windows 7 – what it’s missing

alunj — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be aware that today was the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system version, Windows 7.

So, everyone else has their own ideas of what’s missing in Windows 7, here’s my list, and it’s not the same petty focus that everyone else seems to have. Mine is based on what I want, rather than what’s remotely close to being reasonably achievable.

Media Center devices to provide support for DirecTV.
Trimmable transparent screen overlays supporting multi-touch input.
IPv6 support from my home ISP.
A web browser that opens quickly enough that I don’t forget what I was about to browse to.
A tool to answer “why is the system so slow right now?” – especially on those occasions when the CPU is not being over-taxed.
A free Zune HD. (Why not, since I’m dreaming here.)
Simple facilities to allow electronic commerce to operate on ‘zero knowledge’ principles, so that I would share my credit card account number only with my credit card provider, rather than with every merchant I might do business with. (Maybe Infocard or something like it could come close to fulfilling this wish)
An “Expert” mode, where menus are visible, files and file extensions are not hidden in Explorer. (For that matter, file extensions should not be hidden in Explorer. Ever.)
MSN – excuse me – Windows Live Messenger that works in a somewhat rational way, back in the system tray, rather than as a minimised icon.

So, what are the things in your twisted imaginings that would turn Windows 7 from this kind of Seven:

into this kind?

[Note: Having said all of this, it should be clear by now that I think Windows Seven is well worth having. But I still want more!]

Google bans MVP

alunj — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Google certainly sounds like it’s a nice place to work. Table football, free lunches, that whole “don’t be evil” mantra, and the requirement to spend 20% of your time on projects that aren’t specifically to do with any particular company goal (with the obvious intent that some of those projects will result in interesting discoveries and/or personal development that the company can use).

But I can’t say that I’ll be applying there, at least until they publicly state that they are permanently reversing a decision they made in the last few weeks.

What did Google do that was, to my mind, so very close to evil?

Google told Jon Skeet that he shouldn’t accept the Microsoft MVP Award that was offered to him, despite the fact that he’s been awarded for the sixth year in a row.

Remember, this is a retrospective award – it is a recognition of what you have done for the community of Microsoft’s users, not a request or obligation to do anything in the future or act in a particular way.

Jon’s award stems from his frequent, continued and voluntary assistance to other C# developers.

As far as I can tell, Google has not told Jon to stop helping C# developers, and certainly his blog is still up, his support pages and FAQs are still up, and he’s still posting helpful advice on C#.

I could even understand if they said “don’t go to the annual MVP Summit”, or “don’t advocate Microsoft products” (although that’s not expected of MVPs, who bristle at the slightest suggestion of being ‘evangelists’).

So, Google’s not angry with his behaviour – they are angry with his being recognised and rewarded, by Microsoft, for that helpful volunteer behaviour.

My own C# projects have benefitted on numerous occasions from finding an article Jon has posted on the Internet. I’d like to thank him for that, and I hope he isn’t required by Google to reject my gratitude as well.

Thanks, Jon Skeet, for all you do for the C# developer community.

Thanks, Google, for reminding us that there’s a line that divides “evil” from simply “really, really bad”.

[Note: Please feel free to pass this posting on. I’d like to see Google feel very very ashamed for this, and to recant. If only because Jon will be eligible every quarter for the MVP award, and he’s going to get awfully tired of refusing it over and over. News coverage would be great, but I don’t see any at the time of writing on Bing’s News search.]

Zune HD – but not mine

alunj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

A friend of mine ordered a Platinum Zune HD recently (that’s the 32GB model), and because he was unable to receive the shipment, asked for me to open it for him and check on its functionality to make sure he hadn’t been shipped a lemon.

Since I’ve previously commented on the Zune 30 that my wife bought for my birthday, I thought I’d have a quick look and see what I like about it.

The demonstration video is stunning, and shows off the display impressively. The display is wonderfully bright, and fulfils every bit of the promise of OLED technology. Light-weight, thin, amazingly bright and detailed.

Installing the new Zune software from http://www.zune.net/setup went smoothly, although when the player was plugged in, the Zune software immediately insisted on a Player update. The Zune needs to be updated from 4.0 to 4.1 already.

This may come as a surprise, but really it’s not too shocking. There’s a considerable gap between preparing a bunch of hardware for simultaneous shipping and the actual delivery, during which time there may be some interesting bugs discovered. Possibly this time, the bug is that the charge indicator doesn’t light in version 4.0, but does light up in version 4.1. At least, that’s a change I noticed.

So, have any of my previous complaints been addressed? Given the timing of my last post, close to the end of the Zune HD’s development, I doubt that Microsoft had a chance to fix the problems I noted, and I seem to be correct about that.

You can still put MP3 files into your Podcast folder and give them a genre of “Podcast” in order to make them work like Podcasts (i.e. remembering their position while you go do other things), but the images tied into the MP3 files are still not displayed along with those podcasted MP3s. And they still don't play ordered by track number, preferring instead to use some bizarre combination of date and textual sort, with some apparent randomness thrown in.

It appears so far that all of the other issues I’ve encountered are still there, so I’m still waiting for someone at Microsoft to address those and deliver a Zune (updated firmware, software, or hardware) that is absolutely perfect. If they could make it cheaper, too, it would be easier to justify a purchase.

But man, I love that bright display on the new Zune HD. I just wish I didn’t have to part with this one so soon. I guess I’d better save my Amazon gift cards…

Nice support from Lenovo

alunj — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I’ve been wanting to post this comment for some time, but never seemed to get around to it.

I’ve been through a number of different laptops over the last decade or so – Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and Toshiba – and each time, I’ve found that they just don’t seem to last. I can’t point to anything in particular – it’s never the same thing twice, but for one reason or another, I don’t get more than a couple of years’ life out of a laptop. Sometimes it’s physical failure – the screen breaks, the drive fails, the battery stops holding a charge – and sometimes it’s simply that the machine is too slow and impossible to upgrade to support me as new software is needed.

Unless I buy a ThinkPad.

It’s not that the ThinkPad doesn’t have its problems – it’s more that IBM support always made things right. When the CD-R drive on my first ThinkPad started failing, I called them up, and they quickly sent me a replacement (taking, as usual, my credit card number as guarantee in case I didn’t send them the drive back). The replacement turned out to be a DVD-R drive, so I was ahead on that deal – particularly since the failure happened right at the end of the warranty period.

So my more recent ThinkPad concerned me, coming as it did with a Lenovo sticker instead of IBM.

As usual, problems with the laptop happened once in a while. About six months in, the laptop battery stopped retaining its charge. I’m used to companies telling me that the battery is only warranted for 90 days, and that when batteries stop holding their charge, it’s because of my usage patterns (whatever that means – isn’t a battery supposed to be used when you’re on the bus or train, or in a meeting?)

Not these guys, no, they sent me a replacement battery (after the ritual exchange of credit card numbers).

One persistent problem stayed with me from the first few months of the purchase of the laptop – the sound stuttered. Now, I should note here what I mean by “stuttered”, because I gather others have sound stuttering that isn’t the same problem as mine.

Imagine, if you will, that the speakers can handle sounds only “so” loud. Pass any sounds louder than that to them, and the sound ceases until the sound is back to a good volume. So, the timing of the sound is unaffected, it’s just as if someone’s repeatedly hammering the ‘mute’ button. Not a problem if everything’s normalised to below 70%, say, but then that’s difficult to listen to because it’s so quiet.

That’s the problem I had – the other sort of problem appears to be where the processing of the sound signal is held up, so the timing of the sound is affected, as if someone is hammering a ‘pause’ button repeatedly on and off.

I called Lenovo a couple of times about this, and assumed it was simply not going to be fixed, as they kept suggesting new drivers, or that I take it to a service centre where they would decide if it could be fixed there or had to be sent away. I wasn’t keen on the service centres they were suggesting.

Finally I reached the end of my warranty, and also the end of my patience with the problem – I was playing more and more stuff from BBC Radio (see a theme here?), and they were coming through normalised properly, rather than dead quiet. So, I either had to re-normalise everything myself, or get the problem fixed.

I called Lenovo, spoke to a nice man in North Carolina, and was told they’d have to look at the system. I’d have to send it in.

I hate being without my laptop – all the more so because I had to send in my hard drive as well. So, it’s make-a-backup time, plus delete-all-the-secrets. A box arrived, with paid shipping, I stuck the laptop in the box, and sent it back. Over Thanksgiving, so that “5 business days” became naturally closer to two weeks, and because it eventually took a while to fix the problem, closer to three weeks.

When I received the system back, I noticed a few things:

The sound problem had been fixed.
The mainboard had been replaced.
These repairs had all been done for free despite the fact that I was a couple of weeks past warranty expiration when I first called.

You’ll often hear people bad-mouthing non-US companies for having poor technical support that doesn’t speak English and can’t often help – and though this may be true for Lenovo’s online support ‘chat’ (where you type into a browser window), it’s not true for their phone support, and I really can’t argue with the quality of the warranty work they’ve done for me (and how comfortable they were stretching the warranty in the instance that I had been complaining for a while before the warranty expired).

Perhaps it’s a little sad that I have to post a glowing review like this of support that matches roughly what I would expect. But I think Lenovo deserves a pat on the back for this support, and I can only apologise that it has taken me so long to get around to doing so.

I will likely be buying another Lenovo ThinkPad when I finally need to dispose of this one.

Dreaming of the future...

alunj — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Here are some technologies I just can't wait for:

OLEDs:
- for room lighting - ambient light from ceiling-tile sized light panels [those of us that suffer migraines want an alternative to fluorescent lights, compact or otherwise]
- for either back-lighting of LCD screens, or for the screen itself - I didn't know until after I bought it that my laptop uses a fluorescent bulb for the backlight. When the battery gets low, I can see it flicker, and I have to turn it off or risk another migraine.
- Are they green? They're any colour you want, baby!
- Oh, you mean are they ecologically sound? Far more so than incandescent, fluorescent, effervescent, evanescent or putrescent. Incandescent bulbs burn way more power; fluorescent bulbs have mercury - and, surprisingly, burn way more power for the amount of light they put out than equivalent LEDs or OLEDs.
- OLEDs are cool to the touch - perhaps in some climates this means you'll have to run your heater more, but really, you don't think a light-bulb is an efficient heat generator, do you?
Multi-touch support, including fingertip and stylus support.
- Windows 7 (which I thought would be called "Viista") will feature multi-touch support, where users will grab objects with a couple of fingers, to more naturally twist and scale them.
- Stylus support would allow drawing and writing - I wish I had an excuse to get a Tablet PC, but I just can't afford to sacrifice power in order to get that capability. Maybe I'll buy a cheap USB tablet to plug in at the side.
Single sign-on through the use of federated identity.
- Okay, that one probably needs some explanation.
- I'm tired - so tired - of one password here, a different password there, here I'm "alunj", there I'm "aljones", another place I'm ma7amj, yet another place AMJ10.
- I want to enter one user name, one password, and be able to authenticate to everywhere.
- Of course, that would mean everywhere would have to trust the one user name and one password - and if that isn't carefully monitored, you'll see people tying their bank accounts and nuclear secrets to a one character password. This requires some thought.
Transflective displays.
- Tra-wha?
- Put simply, if it's light enough to read a piece of paper, I want to be able to use my laptop. And if it's really, really bright, I want to be able to use my laptop.
- No backlights - I want the screen to be like coloured paper, reflecting ambient light.
- That'll cut down on weight, battery consumption, and probably also frame rate in games. Can't have everything :)
Wi-tricity
- Wireless electricity.
- Sure, it's going to bombard me with electrons, but only if I'm resonant. Otherwise, it'll power my technology without requiring that it all be tethered to the wall.
Wide-spread adoption of IPv6
- Heck, even though Microsoft installs IPv6 by default in Vista and Server 2008, there still isn't an IPv6-based Microsoft "front page".
- www.ipv6.microsoft.com has been dead for months.
- Akamai, which hosts www.microsoft.com, doesn't appear to know about IPv6.
- IPv6 brings us back to the way that nature intended the Internet to be - everyone's a peer node; everyone can be a server. Firewalls are firewalls, and NATs are non-existent.

Stupid Outlook 2007 RSS Feed Workaround

alunj — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I was starting to wonder why other people were getting news stories before me.

Then I realised I just wasn’t getting news at all.

Looking at my Unread RSS Feeds search folder in Outlook 2007, I noticed that I hadn’t received a single post since June 10th 2009. Coincidentally, this is when I installed a number of updates:

None of these updates had any “Known Issues” listed in the Knowledge Base articles associated with them that would stop feeds from updating, so I went searching.

First I went searching at Microsoft’s support page (a supported fix or workaround is generally so much safer and more reliable than an unsupported one), and found that this problem had indeed been fixed in the February 2009 Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007 (“RSS feeds become dormant and do not reactivate.”), which was incorporated into Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2. I’ve already installed those.

Great. They’re obviously talking about a completely different problem cause.

Next I go searching the web in general – I use Bing, simply because it’s easy to get to, and Google when I think the answer is more likely to be in the Usenet newsgroups (is it too much to ask Microsoft to maintain their own Usenet archive and search there from Bing?)

In this case, the web had sporadic references to people deleting “~last~.sharing.xml.obi” and “Outlook.sharing.xml.obi” – I would generally avoid doing this sort of change without a backup and a box of tissues to cry into when things go wrong. Deleting temporary files and hoping they get rebuilt is sometimes a miracle, and sometimes more of a magic trick, making things disappear without a trace. So I continued looking.

One question that was asked – and that I should have asked myself – is what kind of “feeds not updating” issue I was having. There are several kinds:

Feed data present, connection attempted, mismatch in dates
Feed data present, connection attempted, some other error
Feed data present, connection not attempted
Feed data not present

I was in the latter category – when I opened the Tools menu and selected Account Settings, the RSS Feeds tab contained only a few items, rather than the several dozen I was expecting to see. This is what I was expecting:

As it turns out, there is a simple and stupid workaround for this issue, which requires no deletion of files.

Navigate to the RSS Feeds folder (mine is under an RSS Feeds PST file, but if you selected the default, it’ll still be in your Personal Folders file), and for each feed that you’re missing, simply select the feed’s folder, as shown to the right.

For each folder you select, Outlook will display the downloaded items from that feed – and will slyly go behind the scenes to make sure that the feed is in the RSS Feeds tab.

For my several dozen feeds, this took a while, but wasn’t too bad.

[Note: Don’t try to navigate back through the folder history by holding down the ‘back’ key on your keyboard or Alt-Left Arrow – when I did this, Outlook crashed after zipping through a few folders.]

As you can see from my later screenshot of the “RSS Feeds” tab above, all my feeds are re-added, and a new sync caused them to be updated with new content.

It’d be really nice if this process could be automated for a number of folders at a time, to “refresh feeds from RSS Folders” – but for now, this is at least a workaround when you notice that you’re just not as well-informed as you used to be.

Zune – So Nearly Perfect, it Hurts

alunj — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

For a while now, I’ve been listening to the BBC radio on my MP3 player – even wrote a program to download the audio of various programmes and convert them from RealAudio to MP3 so that I can listen to them on the bus or in my car on the way to and from work. First it was a 512MB Creative Muvo, then a Sandisk Sansa at 2GB.

Then on my birthday, my wife surprised me with a 30GB Zune, just what I wanted. I know there are other more recent models, but I can’t justify the expense of a 120GB model, and the others are too small of a display to be interesting. The Zune HD seems like it would be perfect, but I bet it’ll be too expensive for me to justify.

I really enjoy the Zune, and it solves many of the problems I’ve hated about the Sansa – the biggest being, as I described before, that it requires me to install (and carefully watch for sneaky encroachment) Quicktime, and to run the video/photo converter as an administrator.

So, now that the Zune solves the big problems, I’m starting to become aware of the less horrifying aspects of media player ownership.

Here are the first few little problems (note that this isn’t entirely insurmountable):

Playing a video, or a podcast, kills off the “Now Playing” list.
While you can resume a video, or a podcast, you can’t resume a playlist.
You can’t create a playlist on the device – although you can add Music selections to “Now Playing”, you can’t rename the list, and “Now Playing” gets killed off so easily.
You can’t resume a music item after you’ve paused it and played another. This makes the music folders useless for my radio programmes.
When playing an MP3 file in the music folder, if the MP3 file has a picture (in the ID3 Picture tag), the picture is cropped to fit the display – I’d rather see it shrunk.
Pictures from MP3 files are not displayed individually – one of them is selected as the “Album Art”, and is then displayed for all subsequent MP3s with the same ID3 Album tag. I’d rather see the pictures from the individual MP3s (who knows, maybe they’re important?)
MP3 files from the music folder appear in the “social” under your tag, and the system tries to guess what you’re listening to. Usually appallingly badly. For instance, I play “The Eureka Years”, a radio programme from the BBC, recorded as an MP3 file with appropriate Author and AlbumTitle tags – it lists as the song “Eureka” by “Jim O’Rourke”. I haven’t found where you can correct this, or delete it – goodness only knows how you cope with embarrassing selections made by this guessing algorithm.
You can’t delete a music MP3 file from the device without using the PC. Not much use when I’m on the bus and want to say “yep, I’ve heard that, now delete it”.

Like I said, those are the first few problems I’ve encountered.

Most of these problems seem to be solved by turning my recorded radio programmes into podcasts. Apparently you do this by moving the MP3 files into the podcast directory prior to syncing, and by changing the ID3 Genre tag to “Podcast”. That’s certainly far better, but there are still more problems I’ve encountered with that:

Podcasts without an accompanying XML RSS feed don’t sort right. They should sort primarily by the MP3’s ID3 track #, then by date and time, and finally by name. It appears that the Zune is sorting them primarily by date (ignoring the time!) and then by name, and totally ignoring the track number.
When sorting the tracks in a podcast by name, the sort is alphabetical, with no consideration given to numerical sorting, so my recording of “Journey into Space, World In Peril” plays in the order 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2, 20, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And remember, that’s even with the track numbers present and correct (although maybe it is sorting by track number, but doing it alphabetically rather than numerically!)
I’d rather that podcasts were picked up properly without my having to change the Genre tag – I like my Genre tags to read “Comedy”, or “Drama/SciFi & Fantasy” – and it’d be nice if the podcast tool allowed me to sub-sort the podcasts based on the genre, too!
You can’t “queue up” the podcasts into a “now playing” list, or any other kind of playlist.
Podcasts don’t display the Picture stored in the ID3 tag of the MP3 file – not even as “album art”. The only time images are displayed for podcasts is when the image is referenced in an accompanying XML RSS feed.

So, the next solution set would be to publish an RSS feed.

Unfortunately, this leads to the next failure.

You can’t subscribe to a “file://” based URL – podcast feeds must all start “http://”, which means putting a web server to work even if you’re building a personal podcast feed that exists only between your computer and its associated Zune.

Other problems I’ve experienced are DRM-like, and we all know that I find DRM to be hugely objectionable. Specifically, I can’t transfer any IFC programmes onto my Zune from my Windows Vista Media Center PC, because apparently they’re all tagged as “copyright”. Note that’s my Media Center PC, transferring to my Zune so that I can watch programming recorded from my DirecTV subscription – no theft involved there, I paid for that content, but can not watch it in my chosen locale or medium.

I can only hope that someone at Microsoft reads this post, and reassures me that they’re going to do better with the release of the ZuneHD – and, because I almost certainly can’t afford a ZuneHD (although anyone who knows me will tell you how excited I’ve been about OLEDs for the last year or so), I hope that many of these improvements are back-ported to my lowly Zune 30. I’d be happy to expound on any of these points to get them addressed.

Oh, and if you ask – I would definitely and whole-heartedly recommend getting a Zune. I know that I’m going to be buying one for my wife as soon as I can find it at the right price (I’m hoping for a Woot-off or perhaps a bag of crap containing a Zune]. All the problems I’ve outlined above are really minor and piddly, but it’s these kind of tweaks that turn a merely good product into a great product. I only complain about them because the Zune is so close to perfection for me, it can be fixed with relatively little effort. The Sansa and its software were so far from perfection that it seems likely that the development team totally don’t “get it”. [The Creative Muvo was actually pretty much perfect for what was achievable at the time.]

So, am I missing any obvious tricks for my Zune? Can I get the BBC programmes on it in a better way? [Yes, I know about the BBC podcasts, but there are shows that the BBC just don’t podcast.]

Microsoft TechFest

alunj — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Last week, I went to Microsoft’s TechFest as part of their “Public Day”. This is the first time MVPs as a group have been invited to this event, and although it’s clear we missed some of the demonstrations that are not public-ready, this is something that I hope can be extended to us in future, even if only to Washington-state MVPs

For general news links on MS TechFest 2009, you can search news.google.com for “TechFest”. Here’s a couple of samples:

http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=335707 – I didn’t see these guys there.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/feb/25/microsoft-software - I bumped into this guy.

I also saw Chris Pirillo there from LockerGnome and Chris.Pirillo, but he hasn’t written anything yet. I only mention him because it’s about time that I thanked him for being one of the earliest online writers (they were called “e-Zines” back then, apparently) to mention WFTPD in his column. Sadly, I don’t have a copy to remember what it is that he said :(

Apologies to anyone who expected to reach me by email that day – the usual computers spread around the Microsoft Conference Centre for email and web browsing were missing, possibly because the Press were there, and they’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down, before coming back with crowbars.

So, here’s some description of the things I saw, ranging from the exciting and relevant to the “why is Microsoft spending money on that?” [Note that this is not meant to be disrespectful of ‘pure research’ – often, today’s “useless meanderings” become tomorrows product – WFTPD itself started from a momentary “how hard can it really be?” lapse in my own judgement, followed by a little research and a lot of effort.]

Specification Inference for Security: To improve focus on potential security faults in static analysis tools, this is a toolset whose approach is to divide functions into Sources, Sinks and Sanitizers (although that alliteration is liable to lead to confusion) – Sources generate untrustworthy data from input, Sinks consume data that they trust will fit their expectations, and Sanitizers transform the data along the way, ideally making sure that it goes from untrustworthy to trusted. Thinking in terms of a SQL injection, the Source would be a web server receiving input from a user containing a SQL command, the Sink would be the SQL server, and the Sanitizer would be whatever code packages the input and determines whether to pass it to the SQL server, and what changes to make (such as requiring proper quoting, or using a stored proc or parameterized query). Once these categorizations have been made, the static analysis tool can check that Sanitizers actually do sanitize – rather than having to try and analyse every function for possible sanitization. http://research.microsoft.com/merlin
Concurrency Analysis Platform and Tools: Enhances your test tool set by allowing tests to run with multiple permutations of concurrency. Race conditions are usually caught by users, or in production environments, because the environments cause different threads or processes to run at different speeds – with this toolkit, you get to try out multiple combinations of execution sequence, so that you are more likely to trigger the race condition. Of course, you still have to write tests that consider the prospect of doing more than one thing at a time, and because there are a large number of concurrency permutations, it’s not a turn-key solution, but it does allow you to debug concurrency issues more methodically, and catch those that appear more frequently. http://research.microsoft.com/chess - and this one’s available for download as an add-on to Visual Studio!
Lightweight Software Transactions for Games: Not just for games, the ORCS platform (Object-based Runtime for Concurrent Systems) makes coding multi-threaded applications easier and more problem-free. http://research.microsoft.com/orcs
Closed-Loop Control Systems for the Data Center: Power consumption monitoring and control allows for servers to be brought online or offline as computing demands change, so that as usage ramps up, more servers are turned on, and as usage declines, servers are turned off. I don’t think this is entirely original.
Algorithms and Cryptography: Cryptographic solutions with leakage. Unfortunately, the lady who came up with this wasn’t on hand to discuss her work, and her husband standing in for her didn’t seem to understand much about it either. The poster claimed an algorithm whereby you could leak some of your key to an attacker without reducing the strength of the key. I’m not sure how this works, or where it differs from having redundant information in the keys, or something like M of N crypto, but maybe it’ll be something that will affect our field in the years to come.
Opinion Search: Full of marketing jargon and too dense for me to penetrate, this is something that we could potentially use in the business side of Expedia, making use of customer opinions to allow search results to match the user’s opinion against the opinions of others with whom they have consistently agreed in the past, and can be expected to do so in the future.
Low-Power Processors in the Data Center: Using Netbook processors for data processing in a parallel environment allows for significant power savings.
Audio Spatialisation and AEC for Teleconferencing: Relying on the rise of computer-phone integration, and the fact that most computers have stereo speakers, this is a system for teleconferencing where different parties are given a different spot in the stereo spatialisation. Makes it much easier to tell who’s talking.
SecondLight: Surface computing taken to another level, literally. The surface on which images are projected is usually a light diffuser, so that the image effectively “stays” on the surface. In this implementation, the surface is rapidly switched between diffuse and transparent, so that you can use a secondary diffuser surface on top, which shows a different image. You have to see a demonstration to understand it - mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/research/projects/secondlight-cambridge/secondlight.wmv - it’s a little flickery, in real-life too, but the team assured me that it can be made less so.
Commute UX – Dialog System for In-Car Infotainment: Will this stop executives requesting shorter passwords for unlocking their phone while driving? Probably not.
Back-of-Device Touch Input: Anyone using an iPhone or similar touch-based device will be familiar with the issue that your fingers are covering the image you’re trying to manipulate. By putting a sensor panel on the back of the device, you can reduce the size of the display without making it impossible to read while you select.
Augmented Reality: Combining GPS location with stock footage of the place you’re in, this is all about placing extra information into a view (such as a cell-phone with a video camera, or maybe eventually a heads-up display in glasses / goggles) of the world around you, by recognising where you are. Can be used for games, directions, advertising, city guides, or post-it notes without the paper.
Recognizing characters written in the Air: Entertaining just to watch people dragging an apple around to make letters on a screen in front of them. Probably more useful in the mode where the lid of an OHP pen is the “bright spot of strong solid colour” being tracked in mid-air.
Colour-structured Image Search: Draw a rough colour picture of the image you want to see, and get a page of search results from around the web. The demonstrations consisted of drawing pictures of flowers, or flags, or a sunset. I foresee widespread abuse once deployed, although it will mean that people who usually draw on bathroom walls will be moving their talents online.

MVP Summit 2009 is here!

alunj — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

I snapped this picture last week at Microsoft' Research’s Tech-Fest event.

Microsoft always makes the visiting MVPs feel welcome at Global Summit time, when all MVP awardees are invited to visit Microsoft’s campus, and engage in face-to-face conversations with various Microsoft Product Groups about the feedback they’re seeing from the users they talk to in their various forums, whether that’s Usenet newsgroups, web forums, user groups, or book and magazine readers.

This year, in large part thanks to the efforts of one of the other Security MVPs, Dana Epps, we have a fantastic schedule of in-depth sessions on identity frameworks, threat modeling, Microsoft’s internal security, and a number of other topics that I should perhaps keep quiet about.

The other benefit to me, as an MVP, from these sessions is that I get to network with other MVPs – all of whom are intelligent, driven individuals with expertise in a wide variety of fields, not just my own area of Enterprise Security.

Already I’ve spoken to a number of people in conversations that I intend to continue long after the Summit is over. I’ve made some new friends, met plenty of old friends, and expanded and strengthened existing social connections.

It’s a little sad that the worsening economic climate has caused a number of MVPs from outside the US to not attend this year’s Summit, and even some from inside the country. But it does appear that the MVP programme is still strong, as around 1500 MVPs from around the world are in attendance.

For those wondering about the swag bag, we got a cloth bag, stickers, a pen, and a water bottle. The shirts will be arriving on Wednesday (thank you, US Customs!). The benefit is more in the programme of technical sessions than the bag, unlike some technical conferences, where your $2500 entrance fee gets you a rather spectacular bag of ‘freebies’ and a number of sessions scheduled such that all the ones you want to see are in the same time slot.

I have to say, I love the stickers. Being a part of the MVP programme is a really nice thing that Microsoft does to say ‘thank you’ to people who are assisting Microsoft’s customers in newsgroups, user groups, etc, and who would continue to do so anyway, even if Microsoft ended the MVP programme. As such, I think it’s an excellent recognition, and I’m proud of the fact that I was awarded – so I like to show it off, mainly by plastering stickers on my various technology items like laptops and PDAs.

Sad notes – passed over Christmas.

alunj — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

I’m very sad to note that Eartha Kitt has died – even in her eighties, the woman simply embodied sexiness. Truly the best Catwoman ever. And as the voice of Kaa, in The Jungle Book, purely hypnotic. [To those of you who are saying “huh? Winnie the Pooh played Kaa, just before he testified to the HUAC”, wait for the radio series to repeat on BBC 7. Remember – the pictures are far better on the radio.]

As for Harold Pinter, I think it’s possible that he isn’t dead. Just … pausing.