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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Oh heck. I've just taken the Personal Productivity Challenge - just for fun. The blurb seemed easy enough...
Ever wonder if you are as productive as you could be? In just a few minutes you can gauge how well you are managing your time and priorities. Take our 16-question productivity assessment. Based on your answers, you will receive:
A baseline indication of your general productivity: high; admirable; average; or room for improvement
Suggested areas of potential improvement
So let me set the scene then. I'm using the 2007 Office System beta (which is fantastic by the way) but my results showed that I'm still using Office in the same way that I used to work with Office 97. I mean, I scored only 30 for my "Managing Information" section. 30! Heck I work for Microsoft, I've taken all of the online courses, and have access to all of these fantastic internal resources and I scored 30. I'm ashamed of myself. And my overall score was 52. Shameful. I hardly dared sign in to compare myself to anyone else... and when I did, the only place I was better than the average was in the "Staying connected" section.
Dreadful. Go on make me feel better - did you get a score lower than 30 anywhere?...
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Trinity Expert Systems has today announced a partnership with the Microsoft partner and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) specialist 80-20 Software to deliver extra records management functionality to SharePoint clients in the UK.
80-20's Retention Server allows organisations to index, link, store, search, access and ultimately dispose of records declared from SharePoint Portal Server. It can play an essential role in creating and finding records to respond to regulatory requests.
More
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Following on from Ray Ossies excellent cut and paste demo at Etech last week I have been thinking about the architectural implications of the demo and there appear to be two; the first is how to have and extensible script add in engine within the browser which is pretty easy actually and the other is the data format or schema. His demo showed using a Hcard Microformat but clearly we need many other microformats too which Ray actually pulled out in his call to action.
I am a great believer in standard metadata and schemas the snag I have always had about them is that in practice they never seem to work very well. I was looking through Wikipedia today and found this great link which I think covers many of the issues with meta data.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Met a few more interesting people, including Marc Canter at the free beer tent. I went off to the Google blogger, and met a few more people. The food was all gone when I got there, so I went for Mexican food, and sat with Holland Hofma Brown, one of the panelists I saw earlier.
I walked from the hotel this morning, which took just under an hour. I went to an interesting panel about what technology will be appearing in cars automobiles in the future. They were talking about wireless USB, which I hadn't heard of before. Something else to look into.
Oh, and I've just seen Mark Lamarr on the escalator.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Taking a momentary breather from the joys of Windows Presentation Foundation, I wanted to point to this excellent MSDN article on testing applications for compatibility with Windows Vista.
Some of you may remember that at the PDC in 2003 one of the first "Longhorn" demos we did was of a twenty-year old DOS application (Visicalc, if memory serves correctly), so it should be clear that maintaining compatibility is important to us. Nevertheless, the introduction of security features such as User Account Control, IE Protected Mode and User Interface Privilege Isolation are definitely the kind of things that can break unwary applications, let alone other obvious changes such as updated version numbers and the need to support 64-bit editions of Windows that are becoming increasingly prevalent. This white paper has a suggestion for a thirty minute compatibility check, as well as overviews of each of the major changes that could potentially break applications and links to further information. Well worth a quick read if you're in the business of shipping quality software.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
You read it here first (well, you didn’t really – it’s Visual Studio Magazine that’s making the rather grandiose assertion in this article).
A message was posted to the XP mailing list earlier today that thanked the article for not calling it Test-Driven Development (due to the last fiasco where Microsoft seemed to have bungled their intepretation of test driven development with regard to their integrated testing tools).
However, in the first paragraph of the article is the following nugget:
“To be fair, it isn’t just the Visual Studio IDE that lacked integrated unit testing. None of the major development environments—and this includes Java IDEs—have integrated unit testing directly into the development IDEs. The Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) edition of Visual Studio 2005 corrects this …”
Now, admittedly my exposure to other IDEs is pretty limited (I’m primarily a .NET developer) but both Eclipse and IDEA when I used them had JUnit integrated nicely. Victor Goldberg followed up later mentioning a Smalltalk IDE that had a TDD framework built-in. So there are definitely other IDEs that have unit testing integrated.
Now, it’s true that this is the first time unit testing has been directly integrated into Visual Studio by Microsoft, but there have been add-ins for doing the same thing for some time (TestDriven.NET is the shining example). So part of the assertion is true. But, it’s just plain wrong to state that “[none] of the major development environments—and this includes Java IDEs—have integrated unit testing”.
Of course it’s possible my interpretation is a little different to what was intended, but I’m not sure it is. A more realistic explanation is that the language is a little looser than it should be and that Visual Studio is the first to provide an integrated, out o the box unit testing framework, which, is still something I’m a little unsure is true – my recollection is both IDEA and Eclipse had it out-of-the-both, but maybe that’s just my memory?
Either way, it’s this definition of integration that bothers me. Why is it so much better that it’s provided by Microsoft straight away? It doesn’t take much to install the add-ins for the various IDEs, and more importantly, they appear to be far better (at least in Visual Studio’s case anyway). Visual Studio’s integrated unit testing appears to be entirely inadequate for those wanting to work test first with Test Driven Development, so I think I’ll stick with the free tools that work better thanks!
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
If you want a map on your website of where your visitors come from, check out zipwise.com. You just add a simple graphic to your website that links back to them to show the map. The default looks like this, but you can use your own image:
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
If you want a map on your website of where your visitors come from, check out zipwise.com. You just add a simple graphic to your website that links back to them to show the map. The default looks like this, but you can use your own image:
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
The Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006 (or MOS Dev Con for short) will begin on March 21st and signifies the start of a very busy conference season for SharePoint Products and Technologies this year. Although the SharePoint Product Management Group will be very busy with the Microsoft hosted conferences, we will be speaking at a couple of key 3rd party conferences, which are:
Although there will be plenty of SharePoint related content that will be presented at MOS Dev Con, it’s an invitation only event geared towards our Developer audience. Similarly, the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2006 on May 15-18 will also be invitation only though it will be geared towards our IT Pro audience and will be 100% focused on SharePoint Products and Technologies. So, if you are not invited to or cannot attend the MOS Dev Con or the SharePoint Conference, I’d strongly encourage you to consider either SharePoint Connections or Advisor Summit for SharePoint in April. Register soon because time is running out!
The big coming out party for Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 as well as the rest of the 2007 Office system products will be Tech·Ed 2006 on June 11-16 in Boston, MA. So, if you were to attend just one major conference this year, make it Tech·Ed, which will be held in various major locations worldwide from June through November.
Lawrence Liu – Senior Product Manager and Community Lead
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
More than 10% of teenagers are bullied online as school bullying spreads outside the classroom, a survey suggests.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Sony is expected to reveal more details about the PlayStation 3 at a Tokyo meeting on Wednesday.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
A team of software students is to represent the UK in a global software competition sponsored by Microsoft.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
VS2005 won't install on Vista Feb CTP direct from the DVD, you will need to copy the files locally.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Today's trance mix was recorded in December 1999 and contains a track by Lost
Tribe and a few other Hooj Choons works. It ends with another Perfecto favourite -
"Sun" by Virus.
Now playing: James Snape - MiniDisc
Mix 12 (62.6 MB)
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
South Africa's national broadcast company warns of chaos at the 2010 World Cup if its 30-year old equipment is not renewed.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Last weeks puzzle was:
"You have four matches arranged in a square like this.
You have three more matches. Arrange these to form a cube (without bending or breaking any of them)."
Click here to see the answer
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Fascinating post from Microsoft's Mike Zintel on internal competition and dealing with legacy code. The post morphs into the topic of "cross-group" work, when Zintel talks about running .NET on Xbox 360:
I know that my team and the XNA team within Xbox, have been burning the midnight oil to allow us to demonstrate the feasibility of games written in managed code running on a .NET CLR on a final 360 dev kit. And I know that we've demonstrated the same game binary (almost the same; oh so close) running on the 360 kit, Windows and on Windows Mobile. In HD. Fast.
Good to see that Microsoft is doing cross-platform work with .NET - XBox 360 runs on PowerPC from IBM. Unfortunately we can't (yet) run our own stuff on the 360 as the code must be digitally signed.
Tags:
dotnet
xbox
microsoft
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
The much hyped Wimax technology may struggle to succeed says a report by the economic group, the OECD.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
There's a really cool post on Sahil Malik's blog about how to pass parameters to a user control's constructor when you use LoadControl() to create it.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Blind hamsters have their sight restored using nanotechnology, according to new research.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Google is to take on the US government in court as the web giant fights demands to hand over data.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Amazon has been up to some interesting things of late. Its most recent play is the Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3), launched just a couple of hours ago. TechCrunch has the details
It's not free, but it seems like pretty good value. Any data format can be stored and is paid for on a use-basis. No limits of the amount of data. Individual S3 objects can range in size from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes.
From the S3 FAQ:
"Until now, a sophisticated and scalable data storage infrastructure like Amazon's has been beyond the reach of small developers. Amazon S3 enables any developer to leverage Amazon's own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure their data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure."
Right off the bat there are REST and SOAP web services to hook into. Here's the Library for REST API in C# and here it is for SOAP in C#. Of course, the API libraries are available in Ruby, Perl, Python and other flavours too...
No word yet from Amazon's web services evangelist Jeff Barr. I suspect he'll have something to say on the morning...
All looking pretty cool. Congrats to Jeff and team!
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
I caught this story on Samsung bringing its High-Def CRT TVs to the UK.
It was pretty interesting to me. I’ve been monitoring the price of LCD TV’s for quite a while with a view to trying to get hold of a 32–40” screen that’ll do at least 720p but I really don’t want to pay anything like the current £1800 or £2000 that you’ve got to pay to get a 37–40” screen right now.
I’m patient so I can quite happily wait :-) I’ve also glanced at DLP TV’s in the past but the words “rainbow effect” and “nausea” seem to crop up in the reviews far too often.
Then along comes Samsung with a high def screen that’ll presumably give better picture quality than an LCD. Also, for a 32” screen this article is quoting a price that would be about half what an LCD would cost and, whilst it’s deeper than an LCD, it still doesn’t look like your conventional CRT monster.
Looks like the LCD prices are set for another big drop with products like this competing against them.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Keystroke loggers take the form of hardware or software that record the keyboard activity of the target system. There's an interesting article discussing both hardware and software keystroke loggers on the InternetSecurityOnline blog.
Reading the article led me to conduct a little ad hoc research to grasp the prevalence on keystroke loggers. I browsed to a popular software download site (download.com) and searched for "keystroke logger" - thanks to the site for the following titles and download statistics
Note: I am NOT suggesting that either the site or software described below has malicious intent.
| Brief Description |
Total Downloads |
| Monitor keystrokes on your computer and have the information privately sent to your e-mail address |
324,984 |
| Monitor and record all activities on your computer in stealth mode |
309,497 |
| Log every keystroke of your keyboard while you're away from your computer |
265,697 |
| Record activities on your PC and have the log sent via LAN or e-mail |
204,418 |
Note: The vast majority of keylogging software was available for download free of charge.
Incidentally hardware keyloggers are available for less than £100 per unit from many legitimate online retailers - each has sufficient storage capacity to capture many thousands of key presses.
The statistics suggest that there are a great number of people who don't trust the users of their PCs! IMHO the right to privacy is a fundamental human right.
Generally speaking I worry more about keyloggers that are installed by unknown malicious third parties than those installed by authorised users. It's worth considering that the PC you use to pick up your email and conduct your banking and shopping activities may have been compromised by keylogging hardware or software.
Network security technologies including the padlock you see in your web browser (signifying encryption and server authentication via Secure Socket Layer) may be rendered useless if your keyboard input is captured by a keylogger.
Personally I only enter sensitive information into computers that meet the following requirements:
- I trust the author(s) of the software running on the system
- I trust the administrator(s) of the system to ensure it is appropriately configured
I do not read my corporate or personal email from kiosk computers as I am unable to assert that these conditions are met.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
That's right, 500. That's how many mashups John Musser has listed at his ProgrammableWeb site.
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Microsoft Watch is now keeping its beady eye on, er, Microsoft, via a weekly podcast.
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Tags: Microsoft, podcast
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Here's a prediction by Charlie Wood:
"As more enterprise applications become RSS-enabled, I predict that an RSS reader that doesn't support Simple List Extensions will become as retrograde as a web browser that doesn't support tables."
Charlie, let me see what I can do re: your request at the end of your post.
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Tags: Microsoft, RSS, web
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Published on 14 Mar 2006 from
Seattle PI's Todd Bishop has written up good story on Microsoft Research's Brain Computer Interface (BCI) project:
"Many computer scientists around the world are involved in the same field, commonly known as brain computer interfaces, or direct neural interfaces. But many other projects are focused instead on the concept of directly controlling the computer with brain waves, such as an alternative method of moving the cursor on the screen.
With its approach, the Microsoft project is aiming for something that could be adopted on a larger scale, Tan said. For example, the researchers are designing the system to work with brain-wave detection devices that would cost less than $100."
BCI is one of a number of projects run by the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment (Vibe),- you can check out these other Vibe projects here.
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Tags: Microsoft, tech
