NEP - Animated YYZ video
This is a cool animated fan tribute video for the Rush song, "A Digital Man".
Man I wish I could do stuff like this...
(via Full of I.T. - Cool Rush Fan Tribute Video)
Channel9 Wiki: PDCTheGoods
"Summary: Here's a list of issues, helpful notes, known problems and workarounds for the PDC "The Goods" beta discs. Please feel free to annotate these notes with your own thoughts. "
This is another resource for those installing "The Goods"...
Also one thing that some have found confusing is that "The Goods" contains TWO builds of Vista. DVD 1 is Vista Beta 1 (Build 5112) and DVD 5 has Vista PDC05 CTP (Build 5219).
Most developers will be need DVD 5...
Here's a nice TOC for the all "The Goods" DVDs.
Related Past Post X-Ref:
PDC "The Goods" Install Issues (Vista, WinFX September CTP, .NET Framework 2.0, VS 2005, Max)
Fly With Me
"I captured some audio from the Jet Blue emergency landing at LAX yesterday. Listen as the Captain discusses his options with maintenance and his dispatcher. "
You might have seen this jetBlue plane land on the news, but you have to check out this podcast/audio capture of the cockpit-tower discussion...
After seeing the landing and hearing this conversation, I SO want this pilot to fly any plane I'm ever on...
(via Robert's Blog - Landing gear stuck - listen to the audio from the cockpit)
Microsoft Excel
"... Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.” Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV. ..."
OMG... Excel is already the bane of any EDD vendor's existence. This is just going to make it insane.
Actually it might push the industry faster toward native file delivery... Still there are so many unanswered questions on native file delivery (redaction, etc, etc). At least we have a couple years to think about it.
(via Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise - 17 billion cells)
Sql Server 2005 Partitioning
"A very interesting an powerful feature of Sql Server 2005 is called Partitioning. In a few word this means that you can horizontally partition the data in your table, thus deciding in which filegroup each rows must be placed.
This allows you to operate on a partition even with performance critical operation, such as reindexing, without affecting the others. In addition, during restore, as soon a partition is available, all the data in that partition are available for quering, even if the restore is not yet fully completed."
While not nearly as glitzy as some of the other SQL2K5 features, the new partitioning is pretty nifty.
Think about the ability to move an entire set of data (say day/week/month/quarter/yearly data for example) out of a primary/active/transactional table and into an archive table with a couple lines of TSQL. All without taking either table off line (and NOT having to write/execute UPDATE/DELETE DDL).
Anyone who has had to deal with archiving of "old" data will be pretty excited by the new partitioning...
Google Desktop, .NET Style!: New Plug-in: Simple Time...
"I threw together a fairly simple Time Display plugin. Ability to show the time digitally (or basic), which you can provided your own 0-9 images. Show's date, day of week label and even has a high-resolution timer built in (down to the microsecond).
A few things:
1. I have a pretty generic Settings class which uses XML Serialization which can be re-used for any plugin
2. I'm using the "InPlaceActivateHack"
3. Demonstrates how to create your plug-in using the designer (the default plugin.cs class will just need to derive from your UserControl)
4. Custom digital images need to be placed: PluginPath+@"\Images\0.jpg" (0 to 9).jpg
5. Of course it is all C#, I don't plan on doing any in VB.NET
6. Comes will all the goop for the installer project as well (COM Registration and actual project installer)
..."
Interesting in writing a Google Desktop Sidebar Plug-in? Then check out Rob Chartier's cool Simple Time project.
While your there make sure you also check out his cool WinAmp, WMP and X10 plug-in's...
Aaron Stebner's WebLog : Install issues with various products given out at PDC (Vista, WinFX September CTP, .NET Framework 2.0, VS 2005, Max)
"Starting approximately this past weekend, I've started hearing from a few folks who have had questions or problems installing some of the various versions of the products given out to attendees at PDC 2005 last week. Rob Relyea did a really nice job of outlining how to configure a WinFX development machine using the DVDs given out at PDC or using bits available for download from the web.
I wanted to emphasize the key points that I've gathered by looking at the various packages given out at PDC, reading Rob's notes, and talking to some customers who have run into problems so far ..."
Some good install minefield notes in this post...
I kind of doubt I'll be able to play with much of this prior to the RTM of VS2005/.Net 2.0 (which will change much of this story, I hope) but it's good info to have just in case I get bitten by the beta bug...
Coding Horror: Everything you always wanted to know about Task Manager but were afraid to ask
This is a great post about the ever popular Windows Task Manager.
Have you ever wondered what "Commit Change" means? And what it means to you and your PC's performance? Or "Kernel Memory"? Or the Network tab? Or the keyboard shortcuts to launch it?
This post has all that info and more...
Getting Started with My.Blogs
"My.Blogs is a collection of sample code that will show you how you can easily provide programmatic access to weblogs in the applications you build. Full source code is provided along with Windows Forms, ASP.NET 2.0, and a Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Outlook Add-In.
...
Moving forward, it makes sense that we as Visual Basic developers will want to add this type of communication and community support to our own Microsoft Windows Forms, Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft Office 2003, and mobile applications. The .NET Framework 2.0 makes writing code based on networking (like HTTP) and XML schemas (like RSS 2.0) incredibly straightforward. Visual Basic 2005 makes creating and accessing this code in other projects incredibly easy by leveraging the My namespace.
My.Blogs is a collection of sample code that will show you how you can easily provide programmatic access to weblogs in the applications you build. The My.Blogs sample code supports reading from blogs feeds (including RSS 2.0, ATOM 1.0, and RDF 1.0) as well as posting entries to blog servers (using the MetaWebLog API). ...."
Sounds cool, but I wonder how far we really need to go in the "My" space? How much is too much (i.e. does this really need to be in the "My" namespace?)?
My."project stuff" (references/forms/resources/etc) makes sense. My."environment" (files/disks/system/running app/etc) stuff also makes sense. But in my gut, My.Blogs just feels a little misplaced.
Still I think it's pretty cool seeing a RSS feed hooked to the DataSource of a grid in three lines of code...
Chris_Pratley's OneNote WebLog : Unifying the analog and the digital with OneNote
"... Screen clippings: When you use the screen clippings feature in OneNote (Windows-S shortcut), you can insert a screenshot of an area of the screen you choose. This image is then OCR'd just like those other images. In fact, we're including about four different OCR engines in OneNote, each one optimized for different types of images that contain text. We sniff the type of image and use the appropriate one automatically. ..."
"...Audio/Video: Audio and Video you have recorded or placed in OneNote will also get indexed (Video is indexed by the audio stream). This is some cool MSR technology from our lab in Beijing that we're quite pleased to have. The way this works is pretty cool. The audio is converted from waveforms to phonetic equivalents, and those are indexed. You can type your search term, then this is converted by OneNote into a phonetic equivalent which searches against the phonetic index of the audio...."
I've yet to really been bitten by the OneNote bug yet... But I see the bug crawling toward me.
I've recently allowed the OneNote system tray item to load and am trying to get into using it. Seeing the stuff coming in v12 has increased my interest in OneNote. I think auto OCR of screenshots would be pretty darn cool. Also they are doing some nifty stuff with audio/video indexing.
As it is, I don't know 10% of what you can do with the current version of OneNote. For example, I didn't know that if you grab a screenshot with OneNote of a web page, the URL of the page is included on the OneNote page! That's cool!
Here's an OneNote captured screenshot example from Dennis Kennedy's blog that resparked my interest in OneNote. See the URL at the bottom? That was just there automagically. Very cool...
I guess it's time to play with OneNote a little more (and maybe stop creating all those txt files with misc notes on my desktop, folders of screenshots, draft emails of thoughts, etc, etc, Dogh! ... ;)
(Via DennisKennedy.blog - Getting a Glimpse at What's Coming in OneNote
Question-Answering in Role-Playing Games
"In this paper, we give a general description of the issues associated with performing basic Question-Answering (QA) tasks against non-player characters (NPCs) within a simple role-playing game (RPG) or virtual world environment. We describe the aspects of this kind of QA system and provide an overview of our initial explorations into the implementation and evaluation of a QA system that is appropriate for RPG environments. We also introduce Keystone, a simple RPG environment that provides a small virtual world that allows different NPC controller backends to be plugged in thus allowing these systems to be evaluated in a more realistic game environment."
While a little dry, I still thing this kind of interesting (mostly in the fact the MSRC is doing research into Human/NPC interaction... Working toward "Super Bob"? ;)
I just wish I could find out where to get the Keystone app that is mentioned...
Personal Training, Fitness, Diet, Nutrition
Duncan's quote from The Blog Herald post says it all, "Lazy Trainer is a blog all about getting fit and staying healthy BUT in the laziest way possible."
Since I have a serious case of Dunlaps disease (i.e. my belly is "dun lappin" over my belt ;) and am pretty lazy, this site seems just right for me...
Subscribed.
(via the cool 100 blogs in 100 days series from The Blog Herald)
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