Jim O'Neil's Blog : Fun

MySynths on Facebook

joneil — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:06:49 GMT

Got some great pictures from summer vacation? or a family reunion? Here’s a cool way to share them with all your Facebook friends: the folks at speakTech have created a Facebook application called MySynths that lets you upload PhotoSynth creations right to your wall.

If you haven’t heard of PhotoSynth (which just celebrated it’s first birthday!), it’s an application that accepts a series of two-dimensional digital images - snapshots from your digital camera - analyzes them, and then creates an interactive 3-d experience capturing the subject of your photos. All you have to do is snap the pictures (there’s a few simple rules for the best results), upload them, and it does the rest. Once you’ve published your ‘synth’, you can then include it on your Facebook page via the MySynths application.

I’ve put a couple up – the Old North Bridge and the Minute Man Statue - that I did in Minute Man National Historic Park about a year ago. It’s an awesome way to share your experiences with all your on-line buddies!

Maximus Geekus

joneil — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:16:41 GMT

Well, it’s that time of the year again… For the last 31 years (yikes!), starting when I was a freshman in High School, I’ve been part of the National Junior Classical League (NJCL), and tomorrow I’m off to attend the 56th Annual NJCL Convention at the University of California – Davis.

NJCL is an extracurricular middle-school and high-school organization (about 50,000 strong) for students studying Latin, Greek, and the classics. I happened to be fortunate enough to grow up in Clarksville, Tennessee, which (ironically?) is a bastion for classical studies – my Latin teachers (still teaching by the way) were, and are, married, and two of my friends that I graduated with have since become Latin teachers in Clarksville (and are likewise married!). Many of us have people in our past that have inspired us like no other, and these are “my people.”

Last year, I retired from eleven years on the National Committee – as Technology Chair (what else?) - but continue to renew old friendships as well as manage the ‘contest office’, where results of academic, olympics, creative, and graphic arts contests are tabulated. It’s a week of exhausting fun, and how I spend my summer vacation.

I now return you to my regularly scheduled blog.

Microsoft Tag API Released

joneil — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:11:11 GMT

If you’ve been at one of my presentations, including the most recent one I did on Mobile Development at the Greater Buffalo IT/Dev Day, you’ll know I’m a big fan of Microsoft Tag – the colorful (and creative) 2d-barcode technology from Microsoft Research that you can read from just about any mobile device equipped with a camera and a small application available at http://gettag.mobi. My contact information, for instance, is encoded in the tag to the right.

Today, Microsoft announced the release of a Web Services-based API to enable the creation of tags. So now you don’t have to visit the Tag site to generate your tag, and you can do it programmatically from Visual Basic and C#.

Visit the Tag Development Center to get started, and have fun!

By the way, the tag above is a custom tag; the default one looks more like the one on the right, but you can really get creative and build your own distinctive designs as long as you follow a few rules. Earlier this summer there was a contest for the best custom tag – you can check out the finalists in this Deep Zoom experience. (The winner is in the upper right)

More Microsoft Research Releases

joneil — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:08:36 GMT

Those of you that attended our Winter Roadshow might recall we did a rapid fire lunch time session covering a number of projects kicking around in the labs at Microsoft Research.

Earlier this month Chris announced that Kodu (which was then called Boku), a friendly game programming environment, was available on XBOX Live Marketplace. Now, just this week at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, two other projects we covered in the Roadshow were also made available for download.

Project Trident, a scientific workflow workbench is available as a Customer Technology Preview. If you recall, it’s a set of tools leveraging Windows Workflow and Silverlight/WPF to help scientists analyze extremely large data sets (such as those produced by the sea floor sensors deployed as part of Project NEPTUNE).
Dryad, available as an academic release, is a distributed computing engine that enables the massive parallelization of applications across a cluster of Windows HPC Server 2008 machines. It’s designed to solve problems similar to those targeted by Google’s MapReduce, but provides an abstraction via DyradLINQ that makes writing programs for Dryad not much different than the ones you’re writing now.

Matthew Podwysocki has a great post offering more insight into these two releases.

It’s cool to see this stuff come out of the lab into the light of day, and to think you heard it from us first!

Summer of Silverlight – Win $10K

joneil — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:00:00 GMT

I missed the mark on this one, but thanks to a recent posting from Dino Esposito, I just became aware of ComponentArt’s 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition.

The best application (as selected by the panel and community votes) will win $10,000, and two-runners up will receive ComponentArt licenses. Use of ComponentArt products is NOT required. Applications will start appearing for community voting today, but you have through September 22 to submit your entries.

Atta Boy, Andy

joneil — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:31:30 GMT

Congrats to the Northeast’s own Andy Beaulieu (MVP and leader of the Central New York .NET Developer Group) for winning the ServerQuest II Silverlight game competition, with his entry Boss Launch

And from the “great timing department”, my colleague, Glen Gordon, and I had the privilege of chatting with Andy just yesterday about Silverlight gaming on GeekSpeak; you can download the recorded session here.

You can check out other bits of Andy’s work at http://www.spritehand.com… but don’t let the boss catch you!

Well, Slap my Tag and Color Me Cool

joneil — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:29:35 GMT

You’ve probably seen Microsoft Tag at one point or another. I’ve been using it in presentations as pointers to my contact information, slides, and demos, and I understand that WalMart is (or will be) using it on some of their merchandise. With your mobile phone (yes, even an iPhone), download the simple app from http://gettag.mobi, and you can easily snap tags such as the following (which will add my info to your mobile contacts list).

Of course, you can create your own tags too, but now you can also craft what are known as custom tags, or I might even say vanity tags. A custom tag is pretty similar but starts out as a dotted pattern like:

If you save this generated image (created on-line at microsoft.com/tag) as a WMF, then with a quick bit of PowerPoint magic, you can superimpose it on a clip-art (or any other) image to generate something like this:

But, if you’re artistically inclined, you can do even more. The salient features of the tag are obviously the dots, their placement, and their color. Actually, it’s the hue that matters, and there’s some leeway you have in modifying things to your liking – basically anything in the 60-100% range on brightness and saturation for the hues of yellow, cyan, and magenta. The ‘white space’ in the original (with the exception of that on the borders) can be anything.

Here’s my feeble attempt at something a bit more abstract courtesy of some fumbling around in Paint.NET. It’s clear that Rorschach has nothing on me!

Think you can do better? You probably can, but to sweeten the pot Microsoft is running a Tag Slaps Design Contest beginning May 4th, with submissions accepted through June 12th. Get creative!

Dear Friend

joneil — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:10:00 GMT

I can’t help but think how much more successful Mrs Allen R Baker might be if she got herself a copy of Microsoft Word (and a clue in terms of period placement). Just look at the spelling and grammar issues that were flagged! Come to think of it, her young (and only) son is probably eligible for the academic discount, if not DreamSpark! Perhaps I should let her know?

PowerPoint Tidbit

joneil — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:42:36 GMT

I’m in presentation-building mode once again, ~~stealing~~ researching materials for the upcoming Northeast Roadhshow, and I’ve been reusing a cool feature in PowerPoint that (apparently) isn’t all that well known.

You know those slides you’ve seen with typically non-white backgrounds that someone’s pulled an image into, but the image is floating in a white rectangle because that’s the original background? Something like this…

Kind of jarring, huh? I suppose you could always opt for a white background, but how boring is that?! Or you might be thinking, well, I’ll pull the image into a drawing tool, convert to GIF or PNG, set the transparent color, save a new copy, re-import into PowerPoint and be on my way. Yeah, that works, but after the 29th time doing it you start thinking there’s got to be a better way. And there is…

In PowerPoint 2007 (you can do this in 2003 too, but I’m so used to the fluent Ribbon UI in 2007, I’ve lost all recollection of how! If you’re on 2003 and want to fill in the blanks, please feel free to post the steps in a comment to this post):

Select the image
Go to the Picture Tools > Format tab on the Ribbon
On the left, select the Recolor drop down
Select the Set Transparent Color option
Use the crayon-ish looking cursor (hotspot in the bottom left corner) to select the color on the image you want to be transparent.

So, you’ll go from this…

to this…

Keep in mind, every pixel of that color will become transparent, so be sure to check that you didn’t introduce any holes! As you can see above, I actually did toward the top, center of the sun, where the glare gradient ventured into pure white (R=255, G=255, B=255).

The way I fix that is to make a copy of the original image and crop it small enough so I can just ‘patch’ over the hole. [The ‘crop’ option is on the far right of the same Picture Tools > Format tab, by the way]. Then I group the transparent-ed image and whatever patches (by selecting each piece and pressing Ctrl+G), and I’m good to go – resize, move around, whatever.

If the original picture’s background color is too prevalent within parts of the image that I want to retain, I’ll generally opt for using something like SnagIt to change the background color to something not already on the palette (something hideous, like lime green or fuschia, usually works). Then I’ll use the same steps above and pick my ‘new’ background color as the transparent one.

How good the result looks also depends on how well-defined a clipping path the object has. The more ‘anti-aliased’ it is, the more jagged it will look on something other than the original background.

Something Cool for the CRS crowd

joneil — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:14:57 GMT

Do you suffer from CRS syndrome, you know ‘Can’t Remember Stuff’ (or something like that…). Well, Microsoft Recite may be just what you need. Recite is a Windows Mobile 6-based application that you can use to record notes to yourself on your mobile device. Ok, so that’s not all that revolutionary in itself. What makes Recite cool is its use of voice-recognition technology to catalogue your clips and allow you to search for them based on words or phrases you’ve used in the recordings.

How’s it work?

Microsoft Recite analyzes speech features using an ensemble of supervised and unsupervised classifiers and employs a noise robust approximate and scoring of generic symbol streams for matching.

Say what???? Here’s an English translation:

I can record “Grocery Store, pick up milk” in the morning. When my wife calls at lunch time and says we need bread, I can record another note, “Need bread from grocery store”. Now on my ride home, when I stop at the store, I can do a verbal search using Recite by uttering “grocery store” to bring up the two clips I recorded earlier.

It’s as simple as Remember (record), Search, and Play. Note the clips are ranked via the blue bars (circled in the Play column below) to give you an idea of how well the clip matches with the verbalized search criteria.

Remember	Search	Play

Microsoft Recite is currently in a Technology Preview stage and is a free download. Give it a try and use the Feedback link to let us know what you think.

Are You Game to Win $5000?

joneil — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:06:43 GMT

Check out this new Silverlight developer competition in which you could pocket $5000 for showcasing your Silverlight skills. The contest rules aren’t that apparent from the site unless you register (or spot the tiny link in the footer), so I’m copying below what you’ll see on the Submit Game page, post-registration. The contest ends April 30th, with winners to be announced on May 25th.

It’s time to submit your finished game to Microsoft. When your game is placed in the gallery, everyone will have a chance to vote on it. The games with the highest amount of votes will be presented to a panel of Celebrity Geek Judges so they can vote on the best game. The winner’s game will be featured in Server Quest 2 and they will receive $5000.

When submitting an entry to the Server Quest 2 Silverlight contest, you must supply an archive (zip file) containing:

The main game XAP file named game.xap in the top level of the archive.

Your game should be formatted to fit a field of 800 px by 430 px.

In addition, you must supply a screenshot of your game, it must be in JPG format and should be sized for 200 px by 150 px.

The contest and its organizers are not responsible for games that are disqualified because of submissions which are of the wrong size, format, or file structure.

For a full list of rules and regulations, click here.

If you need a little help “getting your game on”, here’s a great post from Andy Beaulieu on some resources to get you started.

Who's On First - Microsoft Style

joneil — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:32:23 GMT

I suspect this is one of those things a lot of you may already have seen, leading you to wonder if I've been under a rock, but I just got wind of it today and, as an avid watcher of old Abbott and Costello movies as a kid, just had to pass it on. I'm not sure who came up with this, but I received it on an internal Microsoft distribution list, and I see it certainly had a lot of exposure on the Web already. Enjoy!

ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: Thanks. I'm setting up an office in my den and I'm thinking about buying a computer.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: No, the name's Lou.
ABBOTT: Your computer?
COSTELLO: I don't own a computer. I want to buy one.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: I told you, my name's Lou.
ABBOTT: What about Windows?
COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here?
ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows?
COSTELLO: I don't know. What will I see when I look at the windows?
ABBOTT: Wallpaper.
COSTELLO: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software.
ABBOTT: Software for Windows?
COSTELLO: No. On the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track expenses and run my business. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?
ABBOTT: I just did.
COSTELLO: You just did what?
ABBOTT: Recommend something.
COSTELLO: You recommended something?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: For my office?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: OK, what did you recommend for my office?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yes, for my office!
ABBOTT: I recommend Office with Windows
COSTELLO: I already have an office with windows! OK, let's just say I'm sitting at my computer and I want to type a proposal. What do I need?
ABBOTT: Word.
COSTELLO: What word?
ABBOTT: Word in Office.
COSTELLO: The only word in office is office.
ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.
COSTELLO: Which word in office for windows?
ABBOTT: The Word you get when you click the blue 'W'.
COSTELLO: I'm going to click your blue 'w' if you don't start with some straight answers. What about financial bookkeeping? You have anything I can track my money with?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: That's right. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: I need money to track my money?
ABBOTT: It comes bundled with your computer.
COSTELLO: What's bundled with my computer?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: Money comes with my computer?
ABBOTT: Yes. No extra charge.
COSTELLO: I get a bundle of money with my computer? How much?
ABBOTT: One copy.
COSTELLO: Isn't it illegal to copy money?
ABBOTT: Microsoft gave us a license to copy Money.
COSTELLO: They can give you a license to copy money?
ABBOTT: Why not? THEY OWN IT!
(A few days later)
ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: How do I turn my computer off?
ABBOTT: Click on 'START'.............

(Microsoft) Research In Motion

joneil — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:44:52 GMT

While the Windows 7 beta announcement is one of the bigger stories coming out this week, there's a number of other cool developments that nicely complement the Microsoft Research (MSR) presentation that Chris and I paired up on during the Northeast Roadshow series in December.

Remember the engaging Xbox game programming environment called Boku, that Chris talked about? It's been renamed Kodu (get it, "code, do"), and was featured at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Kodu will be available this spring on the Xbox LIVE Community Games channel, and you'll be able to build and share your own games with just an Xbox controller! Check out coverage of Kodu and other Microsoft presentations at CES.

Also recently released from MSR is Microsoft Songsmith, the perfect application to unleash your inner American Idol. Songsmith provides musical accompaniment to match the singer's voice - sort of Karaoke in reverse. All you need is a microphone (and friends to make it more fun of course). You can buy Songsmith now from the Microsoft store for $29.95, or download a free trial that gives you six hours of usage time (use it for six hours one day, or one hour for six days).

Lastly, the work that MSR has been doing on high capacity barcode technology also made some news at CES as Microsoft Tag. Here's how it works:

1. Download the application to your camera-enabled mobile phone - lots of devices are supported, not just Windows Mobile!

2. Aim the viewing frame at the tag of interest.

3. Whatever actions are encoded in the tag take place. On a product brochure, for instance, this might trigger a link to bring up a site with more information, whereas a tag on a business card might add that person to your contact list, as a Facebook friend, or someone to follow on Twitter.

Here's a couple I came up with... have fun. Note, if you're having trouble getting the application to read the image, try different angles, reducing glare, etc.

I Suru, Do You?

joneil — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:38:46 GMT

photoSuru that is... photoSuru is a WPF photo viewer application that was featured as part of Scott Guthrie's keynote at the Microsoft PDC this past October.

While it's a wicked pissah app just to play with, the real value in my mind is that the source code is all there on WindowsClient.NET, so those of you as user-experienced challenged as I can get a leg up on building an app that isn't all '90's'

...but that's not all. This app as well as a few other examples were built on the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit (try saying that three times fast!) This beta kit and SDK provide building blocks for you to create your own Syndicated Client Experiences (SCEs), which are basically applications that leverage RSS and the Microsoft Sync Framework to bring content to the local computer, where the application itself can take control of the presentation of that content.

You can download the SCE Starter Kit Beta 2; a number of videos and articles are also available there to give your insight into how the framework was used to build photoSuru.

Fat-free, Vegetarian Turkey Recipe

joneil — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 01:09:32 GMT

While the other folks are piling on the calories this weekend, here's a way to buck the trend! Happy Thanksgiving all!