I saw this over at Craig's blog. Made me laugh out loud. I actually enjoyed Indy 4 quite a bit, but this was still hilarious.

Sorry for radio silence on work related posts. I promise to come back to it when there's something new for me to talk about.

In the meantime, Slashfilm has a nice write-up on some super-cool retro poster-art that Eric Tan did for the new Pixar movie WALL-E. Check it out.

I was scrolling through shelterrific this afternoon and came across a post to some new 2008 stamp designs from the postal service, including this one, honoring Charles & Ray Eames. Nice!

...and I'm catching up on my blogroll. Two things that popped for me this evening are Brand New, which has a guest editorial write-up about how the brand of American Gladiators was updated for the return to television, and Jan's review of the updated Zune client. I had a chance to work with Jan for a while in the early days of Longhorn. Jan has one of the strongest senses of empathy when it comes to UI design I've seen in many years. It really comes through in his blog, as well as his latest professional efforts.

Finally, Businessweek had a great write-up about the newest technology object of my desire, the Lenovo X300.

Microsoft, Dell and (RED) announced a partnership to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. All the details are over on the Windows Vista blog. There's also some coverage of it over on Engadget.

If you have code that implements a deskband for the Windows Taskbar in Windows Vista, you may have noticed that it causes the taskbar to appear opaque when there is not a maximized window open, instead of being transparent, but darkly tinted which is the normal state of the taskbar.

You can get around this by implementing the IDeskBand2 interface and responding to the associated methods appropriately.

Someone at work forwarded me a link to this video on the New York Times site about the clutter around us.

I saw this over on one of the home server blogs I read.

One of the features we added in Windows Vista was a platform to support for decoding camera raw images in Windows Photo Gallery (and later Windows Live Gallery), Windows Explorer, and Win32 & WPF applications. The camera IHV community has done a great job supporting this effort by creating codecs that enable raw files for various cameras. The Microsoft Professional Photography website just posted a page where you can download Codecs for Windows for your camera.

 Updated: a couple folks pointed out that the link I posted was broken. That is fixed now.

As you may have noticed, I've taken a bit of a hiatus form blogging for a while. Hopefully you haven't unsubscribed because I'll be picking up the blog again in coming weeks and months.

Does anyone out there have any experience with the Intensity Pro from Blackmagic Design? I'm looking for info on what kind of metadata gets captured along with the video stream through HDMI from a camera like a Sony HDR-HC3. If you have some experience with this, please let me know via the contact link on the blog.

Thanks!

I recently discovered this project over on codeplex. It's a virtual desktop manager for Windows Vista that uses the live thumbnail preview API's exposed by the Desktop Window Manager. It's still very beta, but a great example of some of the innovation that can be built on the platform that the DWM provides.

This evening, I'm watching a recording of "Shark Weekend HD" on Discovery HD. The first frame of the program has a big blue screen that reads:

"WARNING

Diving with great white sharks without the protection of a cage is extremely dangerous.

The scenes you are about to see were conducted by professional shark divers with years of experience.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!"

Upon reading this, I have to ask:

1. Is diving with great white's with the protection of a cage not extremely dangerous?
2. Are there people watching who have great white's at home that are thinking of diving with them without the protection of the cage?

It's a mind-boggling to me that people would take a television show like this as an invitation…

I ran into an interesting foible using the Ribbon in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 today. I'm generally a big fan of the Ribbon in Office, but today it got the best of me. Hopefully this post will help you avoid this pitfall if you use it the same way I do.

The "gotcha" stems from the fact that I tend to use the Ribbon in "minimized" mode. I like this mode because it lets me reserve the vast majority of my screen real-estate for my content in my window, and I can still get at all the Ribbon stuff in a single click.

You see, one of my favorite features in Office is a thing called "format painter". It's a little paintbrush icon on the home tab. When you click on it after selecting some text, it will let you "paint" the formatting of the selected text on the next block of text you select. The thing I really like is that you can make it sticky by double-clicking. When you double click, you can paint multiple selections in a row, and then tap the <ESC> key to exit format-painting mode. This is useful if you like to type a bunch of stuff and then fix the formatting after the fact.

So here's the "gotcha". Normally, when you click a button on the Ribbon in minimized mode, it dismisses the ribbon back to minimized mode and lets you go on about your business. Unfortunately, this behavior doesn't seem to understand the concept of a "double-click". This issue conspires with the unfortunate placement of the format painter icon in Outlook – which overlaps the "Send" button in minimized mode. The result of these two things is that when you double-click format painter to make it sticky, the first click of the double-click selects format painter (in non-sticky mode) and dismisses the ribbon, and the second click gets sent to "Send", which in turn sends your incomplete email message.

Luckily, the workaround is simple – you can add format painter to the "quick access toolbar" using the Quick Customize Menu, and then you're free to format-paint in safety!

I got a question from a colleague about this recently, and thought I should share the answer with everyone. Windows Vista has some special functionality for running on very high DPI displays (greater than 120 DPI). When you set your system DPI to a size larger than 120 in the control panel, the operating system will perform additional actions to scale the output of Windows that are not DPI aware.

The operating system virtualizes the system DPI for non-DPI aware applications, telling them that they are running at 96 DPI. The applications then get rendered to an off-screen surface and then the desktop composition system scales that surface up to a more appropriate size based on your DPI settings.

If you're using an application that doesn't scale well even at 120 DPI, you can also invoke this style of scaling at smaller sizes (between 96 and 120).

Here are instructions on how to do this:

1. Open control panel from the start menu
2. Type “dpi” in the search box to the right of the breadcrumb bar
3. Select “adjust font size (DPI)”
4. Select “allow” when User Account Control pops up
5. The DPI scaling property sheet will pop up, click the “custom DPI…” button above “Apply” in the bottom right corner
6. Uncheck the checkbox labeled “Use Windows XP style DPI scaling” to the left of the “OK” button.
7. Click OK.
8. Keep clicking OK until it tells you to reboot – then reboot.

This gets set automatically when you set your system DPI to a value larger than 120. Later on, if you set the value back to 96 or 120, the checkbox remains checked, so if you want to revert the default (XP-sytle) scaling, you need to manually uncheck the box.