PodCamp Ireland is taking place tomorrow, September 27th in Kilkenny at the Hotel Kilkenny. This looks like a fun day with around 125 folks registered at the moment, plus at least 16 talks listed on the site covering everything from robot competitions, twittering, blog advice, avoiding painful posture, data portability and a lot more.
I am excited to be presenting a session called “Podcasting Inside the Evil Empire.” In this talk I’ll discuss a successful internal project designed to help employees educate and sometimes entertain each other. Microsoft’s Podcast-In-A-Box program promises employees free tools and software in exchange for uploading their knowledge to share with others. As a member of this program, I’ve found it exceptional, and I want to show other organizations and companies how they can do something similar.
Whether you can make it to PodCamp Ireland or not, why not join in the conversation? Krishna De wrote a blog post on the PodCamp Ireland blog a couple of weeks ago mentioning the #pci hashtag for Twitter, and I noticed there’s also a jaiku channel here: http://jaiku.com/channel/podcamp Last but not least, there is a PodCamp Ireland group on pix.ie for all your PodCamp pictures. Go here to join the group & add your photos: http://pix.ie/group/podcamp-ireland
Here’s a quick teaser I made for my talk – see you on Saturday.
By now you’ve probably heard the big news that Microsoft’s PDC (Professional Developer Conference) will be unveiling Windows 7. This is big news, especially since they’re not just showing it off, but actually building a lot on top of it, as demonstrated by the 20+ sessions around Windows 7 content. Not only that, but they also recently announced that PDC attendees will get to walk away with a Windows 7 pre-beta build.
Surely PDC isn’t just about Windows 7, though. Check out all the sessions and topics which will be covered at PDC in great detail:
The other huge area of focus for PDC is Live Mesh. I’ve blogged a bit about Mesh and how much I like it, but what’s there now is not the full story.
The sessions shown give an idea about the types of scenarios developers will be able 
to create with Live Mesh. Ray Ozzie’s keynote should also be a great introduction to the current and future capabilities of Mesh.
Speaking of keynotes, Ray Ozzie is joined by a super list of impressive speakers including Scott Guthrie, Bob Muglia, Rick Rashid, Steven Sinofsky and David Treadwell, all of whom will be making exciting announcements for their respective groups and products.
Another new announcement which came out this week is that of the two symposia. There is one symposium on parallel computing, described as “A detailed look at how multi-core architecture will unleash computing power and enable innovation.” The second symposium is around cloud computing and software plus services. The title is “Head in the cloud, feet on the ground – a practical look at architectural challenges and opportunities with identity, management, data and interoperability in the cloud.”
Lastly because everyone loves swag, they also just announced that attendees at the 2008 PDC will receive a 160GB USB2 hard drive with all the bits. That is a very sweet takeaway.
For those who like bling as well (come on, you know you do), you can find badges and wallpapers here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Social/Bling.aspx
I received excellent news late Friday of last week. Josh Holmes, RIA (Rich Internet/Interactive Application) Architect Extraordinaire, is coming to visit us in Dublin in early October. He will be speaking on the topic of “Developing RIAs with Silverlight 2.”
This is an excellent opportunity, as Josh is a great speaker and a true leader in the RIA space. I am really 
looking forward to meeting him and hearing him talk about Silverlight. I already have a lot of time for Josh, as he e-mailed me and let me know that in his very short time here, he’s interested in meeting with lots of different developers and architects in Dublin, everyone from Silverlight to ASP to Ruby to PHP to Python and everything in between. We’ll be doing some fun podcasts while he’s here as well, so it should be a great event.
Come along to the Morrison Hotel on Thursday, October 9th to meet Josh and kick off another year of Microsoft Technology User Group Talks. If you’re not a member, membership is free and gives you access to great events like this one as well as kick-off events where we give away attendance prizes, software and more.
For more information and to register for the free event, click here.
I created a ton of Photosynths yesterday and I forgot to mention a neat tip I discovered. I previously haven’t been that familiar with Windows Live Photo Gallery. I fired up the new Photo Gallery Beta to navigate through my pictures of the Artbots and noticed a new menu in the gallery called “Extras.”
The first option in “Extras” (provided you have installed Photosynth) is “Create a Photosynth.” So you can simply navigate through your photo collections, select groups of photos inside Photo Gallery & create your Synth from there. Nifty trick.
It’s been a couple of months since I’ve gotten the chance to write any new programs for my Lego Mindstorms robot. The Artbots were in town this weekend, and I thought that would be the perfect place to get some excellent inspiration.
Artbots is an international art exhibition for robotic art & art-making robots. It was held at the Science Gallery in Trinity College, and if you’ve never been to the Science Gallery you should make it over for their next exhibition. It’s a great space on Pearse Street (with a nice cafe, too) where they hold cool events like this and TechnoThreads, a wearable technology show they had earlier this year.
I was glad I brought my camera along. There were a lot of cool robots to check out. I held this device, called Momo, which sits in your hands to help you find a location. It leans toward your destination, vibrates and helps move you to where you want to go. I shook hands with an eerily attentive alien-looking baby. I played improv drums via computer.
There were lots of art-creating robots as well. This one, called Gossamer-1, picks up sound via a microphone, analyzes it with a digital sound processor, and 
generates an abstract painting.
Another artistic robot makes a statement by creating a physical manifestation of kills during the play of a video game (Counterstrike). It detects when players kill each other and communicates with various valves containing fake blood, instructing them to discharge a portion of it. That one was a bit freaky, especially since the fake blood containers really did look a bit like real blood donor bags.
One of the really fun robots was the Rubot II, a scary-faced robot which turned out to just 
want to solve your Rubiks Cube. Rubot has a built-in efficient algorithm for solving Rubiks Cubes. He uses cameras in his eyes to scan the Cube first to determine its initial state, and then solves it in an average of 35 seconds.
But my favorite robot has to be IC Hexapod, a spidery-looking hexapod which can detect people’s faces and study them. You know how when you look at a dog, and the dog sometimes follows your face as you move around a room? IC Hexapod does that perfectly. It will lock onto a face and appear to study it. What it’s really doing is tracking the face and taking a picture of it, which it uploads to its website. IC Hexapod is really a beautiful-looking robot, and it’s the movements that really got me, as it does seem to move like a real insect or spider.
I created a few Photosynths of some of the exhibits. You can click on the images below to go to the 3D versions. You can also search for the “artbots” tag in Photosynth to find them.
Hope you enjoy – they were fun to photograph. The rest of my photos from the event are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martharotter/sets/72157607418493068/
Earlier today Chris Jones posted a new entry on the Windows Live Wire blog (http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com) informing everyone that the latest version of Windows Live Beta, Wave 3, was now available. Included in this release are new beta versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Office Outlook Connector, Toolbar and Family Safety.
You can go to http://download.live.com to download any or all of the new beta applications.
I installed everything right away, and I’m happy to let you know that I am currently writing this using the new version of Windows Live Writer. Writer now includes cool features for editing photos, images and videos, and it also got a slick upgrade in terms of look and feel. And one of the nicest surprises came when I carelessly uninstalled Writer without backing up my Drafts folder. I was happy to discover that all my weblogs, account settings and (thankfully) my drafts were intact and unaffected by the upgrade.
Office Outlook Connector is nice. It lets you use your Outlook client to sync and manage your Windows Live or other accounts. It’s handy to have them in one client, but to be honest I like keeping mine separate. And with the nice, updated Windows Live Mail client, I will probably not use the Connector much. Having offline access to my Windows Live mail is great, but the best new part of the client is the smooth integration with Windows Live Calendar, a feature several people have asked me about. I’ve kept my mouth shut until now, but now you can try it out for yourself. It’s great for sharing calendars with friends and family, for managing calendars or organizing events with other people, and for importing publicly shared calendars like public holidays or your events feed from http://last.fm.
The Toolbar has a couple of nice features like instant translation of pages and jump to your Windows Live sites such as Photos and Mail. It also has a built-in signin for Windows Live. To me, the search box is a bit redundant since I already have it in my browser, but I suppose it would be nice if you used a different default search in your browser and wanted this to have some search options. The new Toolbar does let you narrow down your search results more easily, though, by selecting image, RSS feeds, news, or whatever you’re looking for in the dropdown. Lastly, there is another button for adding additional Toolbar buttons like Wikipedia, Office Live, and more.
The last product I tried out today is Messenger. Lots of people still think of Messenger as just a chat client, but with games, photo sharing, phone calls and contact updates, it’s quite a bit more than that these days. Messenger got a great facelift, allowing users to do a lot of customization of the application. It has a new feature for sharing pictures while inside a chat which looks cool, as well as a “What’s new” section at the bottom to update you on changes in your contacts including new blog posts, photos, their current status, and more. The last thing in Messenger that I’m hoping to try out soon is the video calling, so I’ll give that a shot with my family over the weekend.
I haven’t had time to mess around with anything else, but I am looking forward to seeing the updates in both Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. I am hoping to get into those and try them out tomorrow.
To get the latest and greatest from Windows Live, go to http://download.live.com
Have you heard of Zignals yet?
If you have, I’m not surprised given the great visibility and publicity they’ve received for their unique, innovative application and beautiful set of controls, all done in Silverlight. They also do a great job informing customers through their actively updated blog and recently started sending updates via Twitter as well.
If you haven’t heard about Zignals, you need to check out their site here: http://zignals.com Their tagline is “Transforming Investing” and that’s a very accurate description of what their application does. Zignals provides tools and customized services for investors to democratize online trading. Users can log on to create their own easy-to-use alerts, build custom charts using the intuitive charting application, and do deep technical analysis on their stocks and portfolios.
In short, Zignals levels the playing field for investors, giving them the tools and knowledge they need.
Recently Zignals upgraded their application to Silverlight 2 Beta 2, and yesterday it was added to the prestigious Silverlight.net Showcase – the platform for showing off brand new, shiny Silverlight applications.
When you go to http://zignals.com, you can create an account to test out the charting and alert functionality. In the screenshot below, I selected Microsoft, and then adjusted the time range to show me a particular few months. Then I used the Magnifier control to zoom to get a closer look at the rise and fall.
Cooler still, however, are the Indicators, Trend Lines and other functions you can overlay on your stock to help you with your analysis, research and predictions.
There’s a lot more functionality there than I can show here, so I urge you to check it out for yourself.
With alerts, you have a lot of options around alert conditions, advanced alerts, historical tests and more: 
You can also customize how you want alerts delivered:
There are also step-by-step instructions for the various functions, so it’s pretty easy to follow along if you’re not yet an expert investor.
Zignals blog: http://zignals.com/main/stockalertsblog.aspx
Follow Zignals on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zignals
Every couple of weeks I send out a newsletter to developers in
Ireland and Northern Ireland about upcoming events, new announcements, news and various tips and tricks.
I’m really interested in hearing what folks are interested in seeing in the upcoming newsletters. So I created a poll (thanks PollDaddy.com!) to find out what you would like to read about. Please indicate your interest below or feel free to e-mail me with additional thoughts at martharo <at> microsoft.com.
If you’re not receiving it and you’d like to, you can click here to get connected: http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/techconnection/default.mspx
UPDATE: Almost forgot to mention – our next newsletter will contain a new surprise from MS Press Books. Make sure you’re registered so you can take advantage of huge book discounts in the upcoming newsletters!
At this point, everyone has heard about Jerry Seinfeld and the new Microsoft ads. Here is the second one where Bill & Jerry go to live with a random family. I like this one because I just think it’s funny. Especially Bill reading the bedtime story about object-oriented programming and design patterns. And of course the Robot.
p.s. Wondering what these ads are about anyway? Check out the post on the Windows Vista blog for a pretty good overview of the ads and their background: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/09/11/what-s-up-with-those-ads.aspx
Now there’s a new option for mobile devices and other gadgets.
I used to love T9. Then I got a phone with a slide-out keyboard (HTC TyTN) and my world changed. E-mail on my phone actually became usable compared to my previous experience of terse replies and T9-agrams (as my friends and I called common T9 misspellings). Now I find myself constantly bashing crappy phone UIs for input because they’re often clunky and nonintuitive, and I wait in high anticipation for my new Xperia X1 phone from Sony Ericsson (complete with slidey-outey keyboard).
But here’s something I would never have thought of: the idea of “swiping” at the keyboard to combine keystrokes and T9. The swiping action along with T9-style intuition approximate your word selection in an amazing way. Take a look below at this video from T9 developer Cliff Kushler:
Fun Fact: Did you know T9 has been installed on about 2.5 billion mobile devices?
I know, I know, you haven’t heard my melodic voice this week and you miss it. I’m happy to let you know we have a few more podcasts scheduled and coming up over the next month and a half around topics like IE 8, the DLR, the upcoming PDC and more. As always, if there are particular things you’re interested in hearing about, let me know.
However just to help you get through the week, I thought I would let you know that I’ve been a guest on a few podcasts with some lovely individuals lately:
Last week I met up with Joe Drumgoole and George Hook on The Right Hook with George Hook to talk about the new Photosynth application as well as Silverlight. I had a lot of fun with Joe and George and we got some great live questions from the listeners during the show. George has RSS feeds for his podcasts here: http://www.newstalk.ie/newstalk/podcasts.html. (It looks like they’re a couple of weeks behind with the podcast posts, but I know they just moved studios so I’m sure they’ll be updated shortly.)
Every few months I get the opportunity to meet up with Dusty Rhodes and Niall Kitson from the PC Live Radio Podcast here: http://www.pcliveradio.ie/ Dusty and Niall are brilliant and have excellent debates on recent tech news, gadgets and web sites. They even let me talk about Lolcats once! I always look forward to chatting with them and really enjoy their weekly podcast.
With my Zune out of commission, I thought it was a good time to look for some additional podcasts and other content for my ears. I mentioned I had recently joined Audible.com, and one reason was because a friend recommended it so highly, and other reason is because I got a discount from a tech podcast I listen to (see TWIT below – 2 free books when you join Audible.com via the TWIT code).
So I have some books to hear now, but I am constantly trying out new podcasts and sources of information. It wouldn’t shock anyone who knows me to find out that the vast majority of my podcasts are techie-oriented. I am listing a few below – if you have any other recommendations please let me know!
| TWIT (This Week in Tech) | My new favourite tech podcast. Leo Laporte and an always entertaining group discuss the hottest tech topics of the week. I usually only make it through a handful of podcasts longer than an hour; this is always one of them. Their analysis of the new Microsoft churro commercial this week was hilarious |
| Slashdot Review (AKA SDR News) | This is another recent add, and I don’t even remember how I found it. It’s updated every weekday with the highlights from Slashdot, Digg & Reddit, and if you’ve been heads-down all day, it’s a great way to get caught up on any big announcements or developments that day. Also has some interesting science news sometimes and product reviews. |
| GeekBrief TV | Cali Lewis takes just a few minutes of your day to show you cool gadgets, announce tech launches and go through highlights of events and conferences. It’s a fun and short video podcast and Cali is actually fun and not annoying like lots of video podcasters |
| Windows Weekly (also part of the twit.tv network) | Paul Thurrott, “Windows Guy”, talks every week with Leo Laporte about all things Windows related including competitive announcements, things that work and don’t work, and software updates and improvements. Paul’s weekly tip is also usually quite good. |
| The Alt.net podcast | I had never heard of alt.net before I moved to Ireland, but now I really like the community around it (if you’re interested, you should come by OpenCoffee Dublin this Saturday in the NYG where we’ll be discussing upcoming alt.net activities in Ireland). The podcast hasn’t been around too long, but the author covers some interesting topics and has had great guests on the show. |
| .Net Rocks | DNR to its fans, Dot Net Rocks has been around for a long time and they are still cranking out enjoyable and really useful podcasts for .Net developers. I should mention that last week our very own Martin Woodward was on talking about Team Foundation Server 2008! |
| ReadWriteTalk | ReadWriteTalk call themselves “The People Behind the Web.” On this podcast, they talk regularly about things like new products, the Semantic Web, Data Portability, events and interesting topics like alternative search engines. |
| TED Talks | TED is an annual conference for movers and shakers of the technology, design and entertainment worlds. The conference is one of the most exclusive in the world, and they publish their best talks weekly for the rest of us to enjoy. Eye-opening and never boring, the talks will broaden your horizons and challenge your mind |
| Web Dev Radio | Michael Kimsal does regular interviews with people in the web development world regarding new frameworks, dev tools, upcoming events, and new products |
There are several more that I subscribe to, but the above are the ones I listen to on a regular basis. Channel 9 on MSDN, for example, has lots of good ones that are updated regularly like “This Week on Channel 9” and the new one by Adam Kinney, “Continuum.” Craig Murphy also does some great podcasts with developers in the UK, and closer to home PC Live and The Right Hook do great tech podcasts here in Dublin.
If a third of my mp3 player is taken up by music (which I also love to talk about) and a third of it is taken up by tech podcasts, then what is on the rest of it? It might be surprising to you that most of them are language podcasts. I am a complete linguophile and love studying languages and learning new words and phrases. Here are a few of the ones I love – again, if you have any recommendations I’m all ears.
| The “One Minute” Series by Radio Lingua Network (they have Russian, Norwegian, lots of languages to learn in daily, 1-minute lessons) | Radio Lingua’s “One Minute” languages even come in Luxembourgish. The lessons are well-designed and straight-forward as well as fun. |
| Learn French by Podcast | When I moved to Ireland, I was convinced this podcast was actually created by Tom Raftery, because he sounded, to me, exactly like the main speaker. It turns out I had just never heard a Cork accent before. Anyway, Hugh and Amelie do great regular lessons on specific topics, and they have a variety of levels for listeners as well |
| CoffeeBreak French (also by Radio Lingua) | It’s possible that I love Radio Lingua mostly because the speakers have the best Scottish accents, but it doesn’t matter – CoffeeBreak French starts from the ground up to teach thoughtful and useful French lessons that are great for people new to French and those coming back to it |
| Notes in Spanish | Notes in Spanish comes in Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. I listen to the Advanced podcast because they focus on interesting and specific topics, and I generally get lots of new vocabulary and phrases from it. Marina and Ben take suggestions from the forums for their topics, and their open attitudes and appreciation of all cultures is great. They also have transcripts and worksheets for over-achievers. |
| Just Vocabulary | Just Vocabulary is produced in Cape Town and targets ESL students. However I’ve found it useful as a native English speaker because they cover words I don’t often use and lots of uncommon and tricky words (recent words included tawdry, lugubrious, and halcyon). |
| Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips | Grammar Girl creates short and sweet podcasts around certain tricky grammar, punctuation and word choice guidelines. She always has excellent examples and mnemonics to help you remember her tips. Warning: Grammar Girl is American, and I’m not sure all her tips always translate to Irish & UK English (Since I moved to Ireland, I’ve discovered they are *quite* different). |
| A Spoonful of Russian | Natalia recently discontinued her regular Russian lessons due to her own studies, but subscribe and start from the beginning to hear her teach Russian from the ground up, little-by-little. She also throws in Russian songs and things to make it fun. |
| Cantonese Pod | I tried learning some Cantonese while in Hong Kong and found the symbols difficult. Listening to it and trying it is fun, though, and Cantonese-specific ones are hard to find; this is one of the only free ones I found. |
If you have any recommendations or suggestions regarding podcasts you like, let me know – my new Zune 120GB will have plenty of room.
Do you ever wonder how long things typically take you? Or where the day went? I have always been obsessed with productivity and tracking my tasks, even since I was a little kid. Sometimes I forget that I spent an afternoon helping someone with a newsletter or encoding a video, and I get to the end of the day and feel like I’ve done nothing because the things I had set out to do that morning are untouched due to some crisis, phonecall or more time-critical thing.
So I am always on the lookout for better ways to track how I spend my time during the day. A lot of time trackers are designed for consultants or freelancers who need to measure billable hours. I don’t need that level of granularity, I just want to watch how long things take me so that I can better estimate them in the future.
In other words, when I have to say “No” to people because I’m too busy, I want numbers to back me up.
I found this gadget yesterday called “Activity Tracker.” It is breathtakingly simple and as it is just a Sidebar Gadget, it’s easy and fast to install. I can simply add a few simple tasks to it, things I intend to finish during the day, and then click “In” or “Out” depending on whether I’m working on it currently or not. If I need to help someone with something that I didn’t anticipate, it’s a snap to add another task to the list and switch it on. At the end of the day, I have a pretty good idea of where all my time went and can better prioritize my tomorrow.
I love my Zune. It goes everywhere that I go. It gets me up-to-speed on tech news on the way to work, helps me ignore weirdos on the Luas, keeps me motivated at the gym, and drowns out annoying cell phone rings & electronic games on trains (honestly I would pay extra for silent train cars).
However this week when I turned on my Zune I found a message saying “Contact Support.” I did and it’s really busted. I don’t know what happened, but my best guess is that it is protesting all the George Michael I’ve been listening to lately. I have to send it to the States for some TLC. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I *just* signed up to Audible.com for some e-books, and I have a bunch of travel coming up.
So I thought, just in case, I might go looking for a new one. I found this excellent blog: http://www.zunerama.com. The author has been quite busy reporting the last few days on the new Zunes getting ready to arrive! I was unaware of all the news and learned a lot about the upcoming announcements.
Here’s what’s coming: Zune Software 3.0 to be released next week on 16/9 (older Zunes will also get the software and firmware updates). New features include:
- Device to Cloud: Lets you buy music or share with friends via wireless hotspots
- Channels: Seems to be like a Last.fm “play me artists like Goldfrapp” type of functionality- I use that all the time on Last.fm, so I am delighted
- Games: I have blogged before about using XNA Game Studio 3 to deploy games easily to Zunes, now you can try it out without installing Visual Studio. New Zunes come free with Texas Hold ‘em (yes!) and Hexic.
The new Zunes are also to be available in new sizes & colours, including up to 120GB for $249.99 (which I’ll be pre-ordering from Amazon.com). I also love the slick blue 8GB one on the right, and I hear they’re also available in black as well as silver. Hope it doesn’t take too long until it arrives. Until then I’ll be in complete withdrawal.
I recently had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft Ireland’s new team of 
Student Partners. They were incredibly enthusiastic, and I’m looking forward to the great things they’re planning on doing over the next school year.
I talked to the students about as much as I could cram into a little over an hour. So we did a brief overview of Silverlight (they even got a sneak preview of the Silverlight NBC Olympics application!), talked about XNA and game development and lastly walked through a bit about Popfly.
I promised everyone I would post links and slides, and so here they are.
If there is any other information anyone needs about topics we covered, please let me know. See you all soon, and don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail if there’s anything I can do to help you this year.
