frankarr - an aussie microsoft blogger

PDC : Ask The Brain

Head over to Ask The Brain, meet Brianna and have intelligent converations, such as the one I just had

Hello, I'm Brianna.

I am a physical manifestation of the collective intelligence known as the developer community.

I'm here to answer your questions, and question your answers, about the Microsoft® Professional Developers Conference.

What can I help you with?

You say:
what do you do

Brianna says:
I cogitate, pontificate, ruminate, contemplate, deliberate, cerebrate, deliberate, and occasionally ratiocinate. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm playing Bejeweled on XBL 24/7.

Back into the Fray

I’m back in the office today after a short 3 week break.

During the time off, I passed my 12 month in America anniversary, and celebrated the birthdays of 2 of my boys – Billy on the 11th and Rigo on the 19th.

While I was gone, my email traffic dropped off

as did my tweeting

I did, however, see a bunch of movies with the kids, including The Dark Knight : THE IMAX EXPERIENCE, and we ate out a bit, including going to Shultzy’s, our new favorite place

All in all, a nice break.

Did you miss me?

12 months down – wow!

I’m on holidays (let’s call it a staycation) at the moment, having a quiet little break, enjoying the Seattle summer and the Olympic games from Beijing, but I couldn’t let today go by without making some noise.

Today is the 1 year anniversary that we packed up our life in Australia and made the move to the US. A lot has happened since, and I am sure lots of stuff will continue to happen – that’s just the way it is.

Anyways, time to catchup up on Australia’s gold medal performances. I’ve been keeping an eye on the Aussie team’s progress with the nifty Beijing 2008 Olympics Medal Count Gadget

NYT: In Online Musical, the Mad Doctor Is In

Excerpt from New York Times Article:

In Online Musical, the Mad Doctor Is In
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/arts/television/02horr.html

It should come as no surprise that “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” Joss Whedon’s 42-minute online musical, has been greeted like the second coming of, well, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” From the moment it was announced that Mr. Whedon had used his downtime during the writers’ strike to work on a Web-only (at least at first) serial starring Neil Patrick Harris as an aspiring supervillain, geek culture quivered in anticipation of this gift from two of its favorite entertainers.

MY COMMENT:

NPH rocks!

http://drhorrible.com/

To download the Times Reader, click here.

Sam Ramji - history.forward()

We are hosting a confab in Seattle this week with fellow evangelists from around the world.

We kicked the day off with a keynote from Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy.

He was pumped from all the announcements from OSCON on Friday July 25th.

In summary, he covered :

PHP on IIS + SQL:  Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications.  The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team.  ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD.  This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last. 

We have tested over 100 community PHP applications and found them to run on IIS with no changes required.  Hank Janssen and Garrett Serack of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have been championing this work from the beginning, and I thank them for it.

Open Specification Promise:  Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP).  This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols. 

We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use.

I am grateful to Andy Oliver, the creator and maintainer of Apache POI, for contacting me back in June with a hope that Microsoft could supply the necessary rights for POI.  These include: rights for Office Binary document formats; Open XML; and the right to intentionally subset, have partial implementations, or defects in implementation of these specification.  Andy offered his thoughts here.

Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

More details on the Port25 Blog : history.forward()

Techmeme has a lot of coverage

Pretty cool!

An Evening with Mary-Jo Foley

Last night, I headed out to Malt and Vine to listen to Mary-Jo Foley speak about her new book Microsoft 2.0.

She was interviewed by Todd Bishop, the Microsoft watcher at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Todd has Audio: Mary Jo Foley on 'Microsoft 2.0'

I was very fortunate to get the copy of my book signed by the author.

It was a nice turnout, and I bumped into a bunch of familiar faces (Hi Lili and Kip!)

Mary Jo was asked which blogs she reads and she called out Steve Clayton and Long Zheng – cool, I know both of them. My brush with fame!

Speaking of fame, Dan Fernandez does a good job of listing the Microsoft folks mentioned in the book, which I will repeat for my own nefarious purposes.

1. Abolade Gbadegesin
2. Adam Barr
3. Alexander Gounares
4. Amitabh Srivastava
5. Bill Buxton
6. Bill Gates
7. Bill Hilf
8. Bill Veghte
9. Bob Muglia
10. Brad Goldberg
11. Brad Silverberg
12. Brian Arbogast
13. Brian McAndrews
14. Chris Jones
15. Cori Hartje
16. Craig Mundie
17. Dan Fernandez
18. Dan Kasun
19. Dare Obasanjo
20. Dave Cutler
21. David Treadwell
22. David Vaskevitch
23. Don Ferguson
24. Don Mattrick
25. Eric Rudder
26. Grant George
27. Horacio Gutierrez
28. Iain McDonald
29. J Allard
30. J.D. Meier
31. James Hamilton
32. Jason Zions
33. Jim Allchin
34. Jon DeVaan
35. Jon Rosenberg
36. Julie Larson-Green
37. Kathleen Hogan
38. Kevin Johnson
39. Kevin Turner
40. Kurt DelBene
41. Lewis Levin
42. Lili Cheng
43. Mark Lucovsky
44. Marshall Phelps
45. Martin Taylor
46. Mike Sievert
47. Mike Walker
48. Mini-Microsoft
49. Pat Helland
50. Randy Granovetter
51. Ray Ozzie
52. Robbie Bach
53. Robert Herbold
54. Robert Scoble
55. Sam Ramji
56. Satya Nadella
57. Scott Di Valerio
58. Scott Guthrie
59. Soma Somasegar
60. Stephen Chapman
61. Stephen Elop
62. Steve Ballmer
63. Steve Berkowitz
64. Steve Guggenheimer
65. Steve Liffick
66. Steven Sinofsky
67. Tami Reller
68. Ted Kummert
69. Tom Gibbons
70. Yusuf Medhi

I was going to add how many of these people I know, but that’s a bit too self indulgent.

Happy Pi Approximation Day

It’s that time of the year again - Pi Approximation Day (π).

I’m wearing my special PI t-shirt to celebrate

I love the spiffy design

For my American friends wondering what I am on about, it’s to do with the way the date is written – 22/7 – LOL!

Today Is The day We Take Our Daughters & Sons To Work

Today is “Take Our Daughters & Sons To Work Day 2008”

I brought Emma along to spend the day with me

She took in her laptop to keep herself busy

We’ve gone to meetings together, played Rock Band and participated in a raffle (and lost)

She even drew mushrooms on my whiteboard

As the day ends, I asked her if she can describe what I do.

She says I type a lot, talk a lot and drink lots of water.

Yup – that about sums it up!

11 Months = 48 Weeks = 335 Days = Time Here !

I looked up and realized that today is 11 months that we arrived in the US of A.

11 months!

It’s also Bastille Day – so here’s a special song to celebrate

The week ahead : ATL in the summer

I have a trip to Atlanta this week and the weather forecast looks ominous

Let’s hope it improves during the week

Take Our Daughters & Sons To Work Day 2008

I’ve registered my kids for the annual “Microsoft Take Our Daughters & Sons To Work Day 2008”, to be held on Monday, July 21 2008.

Yes, I’m getting flashbacks of the Arrested Development episode about Take Your Daughter To Work Day

The goal of the day – let them see what it is I actually do and hopefully I can convince them to write a story about the experience.

I am going to have them shadow me during the day, attending meetings and other stuff like that. (Hmmm  maybe I can get them to tidy my office ……)

I’m even getting them their own Microsoft ID card. How fun!

NYT: Whichever Screen, People Are Watching

Excerpt from New York Times Article:

Whichever Screen, People Are Watching
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/business/media/08adco.html

SOMEHOW, despite more distractions than ever, we’re finding even more time to plant ourselves in front of screens.

The first in a series of new “three-screen” reports by the Nielsen Company shows an emerging shift toward a more video-centric use of the Internet, but not at the expense of television viewing. The report, an initial effort by Nielsen to “follow the video” as consumer viewing habits shift, is scheduled to be released Tuesday.

The average American spent 127 hours of time with TV in May, up from 121 hours in May 2007; and 26 hours on the Internet, up from 24 hours last year. More than 282 million people watch television in a given month and nearly 162 million use the Internet.

MY COMMENT:

No argument from me!
Right now, my TV addiction is Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on The Food Network http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/show_dv

To download the Times Reader, click here.

Team SOAK!

Team SOAK takes first place in the Software Design category at the Imagine Cup!

Congrats to the boys -  Dave, Dimaz, Ed and Long

Project Overview:
SOAK is an integrated software and hardware platform with the aspiration of helping farmers achieve sustainable use of their land. This is achieved through the integrated use of environmental sensing, rich visual front ends to display the information to the farmer, and a subsystem which controls farm equipment such as sprinkler systems.

Technology/software used:

• .NET Framework 3.5
• .NET Compact Framework 3.5
• LINQ (Language Integrated Query)
• XML WebService using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation)
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1
• Windows Live Map (Virtual Earth) v6
• Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite
• British Telecom SDK for .NET v5.2.2
• Mobile Device
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005

More news

• Winners of 2008 Imagine Cup Announced!!!!
• Microsoft Announces Imagine Cup 2008 Winners
• Imagine Cup : Team SOAK : Students saving the world for a rainy day

NYT: Tracking the Olympics Audience Across the NBC Media Universe

Excerpt from New York Times Article:

Tracking the Olympics Audience Across the NBC Media Universe
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/sports/olympics/07tami.html

The exhaustive coverage of the Summer Olympics from Beijing next month — 3,600 hours on television and online — presents NBC Universal with a problem: how to give advertisers a portrait of viewership on seven networks, the Internet (both computers and cellphones) and video-on-demand downloads.

MY COMMENT:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/ full of Silverlight goodness!

To download the Times Reader, click here.

Food, Fireworks, Festivities – It must be the 4th of July!

We’re getting ready to celebrate the 4th of July, aka Independence Day

In the United States, Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. Independence Day is commonly associated with fireworks, parades, barbecues, carnivals, picnics, baseball games, and various other public and private events celebrating the history, government, and traditions of the United States, but is often also viewed as simply a summer festival, apart from its patriotic overtones.

Brice got into the spirit of things and built a special lego contraption, which he called an “americamobile”