John Lawrence (MSFT) : Misc

Seismographic information via RSS

johnlawr — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 18:31:00 GMT

The recent earthquake tragedies must have been on my wife's mind heavily, because last night she woke me up at 4am because she was convinced she had been woken up by a tremor which had lasted for several minutes.

I spent the next 15 minutes in a semi-comatose state trying to determine whether there had been any significant events in the Seattle area. Fortunately, I was able to convince my wife that there hadn't been anything and she thankfully returned to sleep again, whilst I contemplated just how fortunate we've been during a time when deeply saddening events have been happening across the world.

However, first thing this morning we were a bit more awake and checked out the USGS web site for any news. It turns out that there is all sorts of live worldwide seismographic information available - such as Recent Earthquake Activity in the USA or Recent Earthquake Activity in the World

But better still, there are RSS feeds available too - so next time my wife wakes me up I'll be able to refresh my feeds in Newsgator and tell her instantly. These links from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/rss.html

M2.5+ earthquakes, past day RSS 2.0
M2.5+ earthquakes, past 7 days RSS 2.0
M5+ earthquakes, past 7 days RSS 2.0

All the cool kids are talking about AJAX

johnlawr — Wed, 25 May 2005 03:18:00 GMT

It seems that everywhere I look today people are talking about AJAX. For a variety of reasons, web apps with highly responsive UIs have been of interest to a few of us on the Team Foundation team on and off for a while. When Google Suggest came out we were all over it, trying to work out how it was done. Last night BryanMac, one of my leads, told me that it had a name "AJAX" and the pattern was described in some detail here at adaptivepath.com

Well, today Scoble blogged about a Microsoft use of AJAX he's seen internally recently Virtual Earth: MSN's answer to Google Maps and I've seen a bunch of other posts like this one - a Greasymonkey script which can be used to sniff into AJAX applications.

Because Google is all over AJAX, some folks seem to think we've been left behind. Actually, that's not true. Bryan found me this cool article from August 2004 on MSDN: Script Callbacks in ASP.NET. It might not be called AJAX, and it's not quite identical, but the fundamental principles are the same - responsive UI using asynchronous events without having to wait for full server postbacks. Pretty cool stuff. Actually the SpeechControls we used for Microsoft Speech Server also did something very similar for controlling the flow of spoken dialog with the user - but in this case the XML packets with recognition results in were sent back as asynchronous events from the Speech Server, rather than the web server.

Very cute kid's blog template - virtual fridge

johnlawr — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 20:54:00 GMT

[definitely not Team System related]

Some our best friends, Mike and Hester Higton, have just switched their daughter’s blog from Movable Type to Wordpress (largely to help manage the comment spam they were getting) and they’ve taken the opportunity to update the template.

Now it’s a virtual fridge, and it’s probably the cutest blog I’ve ever seen. The fridge magnet photos even change every time you refresh the page. Check it out here.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trailer looking good...

johnlawr — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 01:28:00 GMT

As a British geek, it's inevitable that I grew up loving Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy Series. One of the many other British geeks just sent around a link to a new Hitchhiker's Movie Trailer

I must admit I was ready for a Hollywood butchering, but it's looking like it could be very funny indeed. The other British Geeks seem to approve too, and right now they're in the middle of a long mail thread demonstrating their unlimited knowledge of Hitchhiker's trivia...

Michael Creasy has a blog

johnlawr — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 17:52:00 GMT

Until recently Michael was one of the most prolific testers that the Speech group ever had (and consequently the bane of developers' lives...). Unfortunately for us, he recently moved to the Media Center group where he is playing with lots of cool toys.

He just started a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/mcreasy where you can read about his exploits, and the sorts of things you can do with the Media Center APIs. He promises me that he's going to be speech-enabling his Media Center PC at home so I look forward to see what he comes up with.

You snooze, you lose!

johnlawr — Sat, 18 Oct 2003 01:03:00 GMT

A very amusing message went on our newsgroup today. One of our Test Leads, Tom Faber, had been trying to help a customer work through some issues with the SpeechControls. Unfortunately Tom didn't follow up on one of the customer's replies, and so this was posted to the newsgroup!

"I still have no reply from Mr Faber and am wondering if he is a real Microsoft engineer or a spammer trying to sound like one"

:-) It's great to help out customers, and I really enjoy it - but sometimes the jobs we actually get paid for get in the way... this kind of thing reminds me that it's important to follow through if we're going to create the right kind of impression with our customers.

Needless to say, Tom really does exist and is a jolly nice bloke.

Position filled!

johnlawr — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 21:56:00 GMT

Finally I've managed to fill the open position on my team - I'm extremely happy :-)

It seems like it has been open for a ridiculously long time, and I had been starting to despair. If positions stay open for too long, there is always a risk that the open position could be transferred to another team.

Amazingly, it seems to have been tough to find high quality candidates with the sort of skills we're looking for. I've seen plenty of people who looked great on paper, but the interview process here is extremely rigorous, and it tends to weed out all but the very best of candidates - and if a candidate just has a bad day, or is extremely nervous, or something like that then it's hard for them to make it through the whole interview loop successfully.

Still it's actually been quite a fun process in some respects. I've chatted a bunch of really great people, and found out about some of the other cool projects they've been working on - and meeting people who want to find out about the position on my team always gives me an opportunity to wax lyrical about our group and the projects we're doing, which is something that always gets me very passionate. I'll probably miss it, but it will be very nice to concentrate on 'real' work instead of spending so much time doing recruiting.

Having a blast

johnlawr — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 06:18:00 GMT

I've just got back from spending the afternoon and evening working the phones at Microsoft Technical Support providing volunteer cover to help people with virus problems.

This week the MSBlast and Sobig viruses seem to have completely taken over. Even on uninfected computers, access to web pages is slow and inboxes are swamped with e-mails with dangerous payloads. Blaster is particularly nasty - it sits on machines watching out for new machines to appear on the Internet and immediately sends out an RPC call to make them shut themselves down again.

It's hard for us at Microsoft to keep up with the enormous demand for technical support, so everyone in Redmond has been encouraged to consider helping out. It was a great atmosphere. We had 45 minutes of training from a Support Engineer (who was very funny - he ought to consider doing stand-up) and then were launched on an unsuspecting public.

It was a tremendously rewarding experience. It's been a while since I've been able to have such direct customer contact - it was something I loved at SADiE. Somehow you feel like you're actually managing to have an impact on someone's life in a very practical way. The people I spoke to were extremely grateful - especially when they realized we were volunteers. My calls were lasting about 45 minutes on average and in that time you get to chat about all sorts of things - hopefully we can do something to make people think of Microsoft as a caring company (which in my opinion it is) rather than an evil monster.

Actually, no-one seemed to blame us at all, and every person I talked to could not comprehend why someone would ever want create anything like the Blaster virus - and I have to say I agree with them. There's nothing particularly clever about it; if the vulnerability is well known it is scarily simple to put something together which exploits it. One blog I read likened it to kids who go round throwing bricks through windows just to prove to their friends how cool and tough they are. This guy through one heck of a lot of bricks.

Most of the people I come into contact with during the course of my working life - and personal life too - are reasonably computer literate and confident. Most of them have broadband connections, and are savvy enough to go to windowsupdate.com and make sure their machines are patched. However, the sorts of people I was talking to this afternoon haven't turned their computer on all week. All they wanted to do is visit priceline.com to look at airline ticket prices.

What scares me most is the thought that these people will just turn their computers on, find that they don't work any more and then just stop bothering to use them. I can really see this happening - people just don't care as much about using their PCs as much as geeks like me would like to think. If these sorts of problems keep coming up we're going to have to work hard to encourage the average person to keep investing in home PCs.

Perks of the job

johnlawr — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 04:24:00 GMT

One of the great things about working here at Microsoft is that I have the opportunity to get involved with lots of cool stuff beyond my own project. I don't know if there is anywhere else where I could be working on speech technology, but then be able to take a couple of hours of an afternoon out to go and help play test a game....

... which is exactly what I did yesterday. The guys in the games group needed a bunch of non-gamers to play test the multiplayer aspects of an upcoming XBox title. I went over there with Harry, one of my team and we had a great time playing and then were able to give some constructive feedback on ways to improve the experience. I'm happy to say that I didn't completely embarrass myself with my poor gaming abilities and I am so looking forward to seeing this game hit the shelves later this year.

Disappointing news

johnlawr — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 00:18:00 GMT

I just found out that Vocalis, another speech recognition in Cambridge is in trouble (see Talks on Vocalis sale ).

Vocalis were obviously local rivals for us at Entropic when were still in Cambridge. At the time Entropic was acquired I had an old friend working there, and it looked as if Vocalis were going to do really well - they had some good business partnerships going including trialing speech access to Britain's leading ISP at the time (Freeserve).

It's sobering to see that the dot com crash is still taking its toll even now. I hope the guys there find some way to continue the work they were doing.

What it is to be popular

johnlawr — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 03:43:00 GMT

Someone on the team today discovered that Beta 3 of the Speech Application SDK has risen from being ranked #5,539 most popular download from microsoft.com to a new peak of #209 today.

When you consider that the download is 211MB this is pretty cool - we're even more popular than the Rallisport Challenge trial edition at #211!

If you want to check it out you can download it here or if you can't face waiting for the download you can order a CD.

About me

johnlawr — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 03:34:00 GMT

I think it's appropriate to start this blog off with a bit of backround about me: what I do, how I got here, and why I'm blogging.

What I do

I'm a Dev Lead working on the Speech Application SDK. We're responsible for the tools that are used to author, debug and tune speech enabled ASP.NET web applications designed to run on the forthcoming Microsoft Speech Server.

How I got here

I used to work in the pro-audio industry as a dev lead on a Windows based digital audio workstation product called SADiE. Music is one of my passions, so I had great fun doing this for a number of years. All good things come to an end though, so eventually I moved to Entropic, a startup in Cambridge working on speech recognition.

Entropic were acquired by Microsoft at the end of 1999. I've continued to work on basically the same thing since starting at Entropic, but it has morphed a number of times along the way to become the Speech Application SDK.

Why I'm Blogging

We've just launched the first beta of the Microsoft Speech Server, and Speech Application SDK beta 3, and people are really starting to explore the technology. There are lots of really exciting things happening here as we move towards launching a v1 product, and I'm hoping to chronicle some of that here as well as provide a place where I can talk about some of the cool things you can do with speech and the Speech Application SDK.

Go ahead... mingle!

johnlawr — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 03:25:00 GMT

When I started investigating the idea of launching my own blog here I was hoping I'd have plenty of time to compose my thoughts and come up with some thought provoking or entertaining opening comments.

Clearly this has not proved to be the case - it has all been so quick and painless to set up that my blog has appeared faster than I can think of something to say. But nature abhors a vacuum so I'm filling it up quickly :-)