basketweaving for the mind : opensource

Hyper-immersion and Character Weaknesses

nhodge — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:02:46 GMT

Long, long time now posts.

Twitter captures my immediate thoughts; and time is captured by other pursuits.

The Netbooks at Australian TechEd pioneered the way for the PDC 2009 Acer handout. And quite frankly drained me completely. After being hyper-immersed in a project I find it somewhat difficult to find a new direction. I call this a character weakness.

The Microsoft world is revamping again: Windows 7, Office 2010 + ecosystem, Silverlight 4, Windows Azure + ecosystem. Contributing to open source projects such as MahTweets.

Open source related projects come to fruition; new buds appear and the season starts its cycle again.

Working at Microsoft as an open source/web evangelist is tough when you have ADHD. With so much change and new bits it sometimes becomes difficult to focus. To concentrate on what is important when all is important to someone, somewhere.

So, I welcome you back to my professional geek ramblings.

For those who want the more immediate, personal journey, please visit http://www.nickhodge.com/

Oh, and Movember rocks. Donate to battle Men’s Depression and Prostate Cancer.

The long search for the perfect WPF Twitter Client. Over.

nhodge — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 04:44:40 GMT

Twitter; Facebook and friends is the place where I spend most of my day. For work and play.

Separating work and play is difficult in single-column twitter clients. Enter mutliple columns, filtering as base requirements for my perfect twitter client.

Stuck in closed-source TweetDeck; or moving through a myriad of AIR based applications. Subjecting myself to unknown security issues, slow performance – and no ability to contribute – has frustrated me no end.

Then @aeoth create MahTweets. It’s MS-PL. It’s extensible (via MEF). It has IronRuby for scriptable extensibility.

It is awesome.

Use it. Contribute. Let’s make the world’s best WPF Twitter Client.

Open Source Goodness Comes in Threes

nhodge — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:24:30 GMT

Hyper-V Instrumentation via Linux driver, source code contribution (GPLv2)
Microsoft Live@EDU integration for Moodle via a plug in, PHP source code contribution (GPLv2)
Gestalt. <script language=”ruby | python”> client-side scripting (MsPL)

Unintended Consequences

nhodge — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:26:35 GMT

Two unintended consequences of Microsoft open sourcing:

1. Google Chrome (on Windows) uses the Windows Template Library (WTL) published under the Ms-PL

2. Mono outpaces Java for Linux desktop application adoption. An interesting quotation from the article:

“It is an interesting irony that Microsoft's sponsored technology, which is open source, is allowing developers to be more productive on Linux than other tools for Java and C++ development”

Irony, indeed.

Open Source Developer Conference, Sydney, 2008

nhodge — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 01:52:26 GMT

During the 30 minutes of presentation, I demonstrated the following bits and pieces of open source and or free Microsoft bits.

Demo set 1: Open source licensing and giving back

ASP.NET MVC on Stackoverflow.com: licensed via MS-PL
Codeplex.com; the main, but not only, Microsoft repository of our open source bits and source
Oomph: Microformats toolkit (source on codeplex.com) incorporating:
- LiveWriter; hCard plugin; publish; show IE plugin, same site with Firefox Tail for that other browser.

Demo set 2: PHP, SQLServer 2008 & Frameworks

Demo set 3: Dynamic Language Runtime, IronPython, IronRuby

IronPython; ipy hello world winforms and as 'code behind' in ASP.NET
Photoviewer; using local Chiron, browser, ruby in browser doing HTML/DOM
Silverlight Toolkit: MS-PL controls and data visualisation tools. MS-PL
Mono team's Moonlight. Silverlight for Linux

Demos and Links from Edge of the Web, Nov’08 Perth

nhodge — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:08:11 GMT

During the 50 minutes of presentation (including at least 9 ICHC images), I demonstrated the following bits and pieces of open source and or free Microsoft bits.

Demo set 1: Web Standards

Live Mesh Mobile : take photo to mesh on laptop

MacOS X 10.5 client available too [not demo’d]

DataModelBrowser to apis.mesh.com; showing REST/JSON/APP [part of Live Framework SDK]
Oomph: Microformats toolkit (source on codeplex.com) incorporating:

LiveWriter; hCard plugin; publish; show IE plugin, same site with Firefox Tail

Demo set 2: PHP, SQLServer 2008 & IIS7

Demo set 3: IronPython

IronPython; ipy hello world winforms
using as aspx as "code behind" and ASP.NET
F# integration with via .NET compiled .dll (calling from IronPython)

Demo set 4: IronRuby

IronRuby; flickr.net example from John Lam’s PDC2008 session
Photoviewer; using local Chiron, browser, ruby in browser doing HTML/DOM

Demo set 5: Silverlight

Silverlight 2 tools for Visual Studio now support Visual Studio Express

Silverlight 2 also supporting Eclipse (see, competition is a good thing)

Silverlight Toolkit, run from chrome-less Google Chrome (contains Microsoft Windows Template Lib)

Hidden in the Mists of the Forest

nhodge — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:01:27 GMT

Hidden in the mists of the autumnal forests (northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere it is springtime!) Microsoft opened a new door to interesting Opensource-web things:

http://www.microsoft.com/web/content.aspx?id=microsoft-introduces-installers-for-open-source-apps

http://www.microsoft.com/web is bookmark worthy.

The world has dramatically changed, and Microsoft moves along with the times.

Seasons change.

Microsoft, Open Source and IronRuby

nhodge — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:02:29 GMT

John Lam is interviewed by James Turner at OSCON 2008.

To understand the interface between Microsoft and Open source, this is an excellent overview. With some Ruby stuff duck-typed in there, too