Geek In Disguise

Ferrari 599 China edition

stevecla01 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:39:00 GMT

The one-off 599 was hand painted by Chinese artist Lu Hao with a classic porcelain pattern of the Song Dynasty and has been auctioned off for $1.77 million.

Wonder what happens when it crashes? Does it fall in to a million pieces to be put back together with Superglue?

Microsoft demonstrates eye tracking software

stevecla01 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:19:26 GMT

The future isn’t so far away! Craig Mundie showed this on his recent Microsoft College Tour. I’ve never really seen eye tracking but with big high res screens and a lot of data it begins to make a huge amount of sense.

I just added this to my stack of demo videos alongside the Microsoft 2019 video.

Voting is open in the Computer Weekly 2009 blog awards

stevecla01 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:39:55 GMT

The 2009 Computer Weekly blog awards are open for voting and I’m delighted to have been shortlisted. There are plenty of other great blogs/bloggers in that list but if you like my blog and think it’s worthy of your vote I’d appreciate 30 seconds of your time to cast a vote.

I’m listed under Individual IT professional male

thanks in advance and good luck to everyone shortlisted!

Adamo XPS finally breaks cover

stevecla01 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:07:53 GMT

As 9.99mm thin (though Dell’s own headline on the official site says 9.99m which is pretty thick) the Dell Adamo XPS finally breaks cover. I actually saw some shots of it about 3 weeks ago with it’s unique folding design but had to keep mum. A day too late aswell as I finally ordered my Vaio X yesterday. I’m happy as despite the looks of the Dell it’s just a little too gimmicky for me and it weighs almost twice as much as the Vaio X and costs more.

C|Net has some of the best shots as the official site is still low on info which I find kind of ridiculous now

(Credit: Gizmodo)

(Credit: Dan Ackerman/CNET)

Google dashboard

stevecla01 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:11:09 GMT

A short video that I think is designed to be instructional but also shows you just how much Google stores about you.

Happy Guy Fawkes from Bing

stevecla01 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:07:50 GMT

MSN hits refresh button

stevecla01 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:35:12 GMT

Wow…I love the look of the new MSN homepage. You can check out the preview now. Very cool to see Twitter and Facebook integration and a clean, new logo.

The MSN blog looks back at MSN homepages through the ages…scary that I can remember each and every iteration. Remember these two? Wow….how times have changed

I was back working at Zeneca (now AstraZeneca) when these two pages first came out and I remember the battle about whether the web was the new de-facto interface and the OS was going away. Heady days.

Hey Jude, flowchart style

stevecla01 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:46:00 GMT

from LoveAllThis via SwissMiss

Nicholas will like this

The digital music wave

stevecla01 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:01:00 GMT

Most surprising for me was CDBaby and FYE.com spending per transaction compared to iTunes. Click the image for full size

via mint.com

Google, now in printers

stevecla01 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:27:00 GMT

Google is of course a very big competitor of Microsoft so whilst I don’t go out of my way promoting their products, I do watch their evolution closely. Fascinating to see them embedded in an HP printer…software really is the magic sauce.

Scottish Government and Silverlight

stevecla01 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:12:45 GMT

Some very cool Silverlight work by the guys at colaab to create SIMD – a portal for viewing Scottish Government statistics across income, employment, health and more.

hat tip to Tim Heuer

Microsoft Online, price changes & more countries

stevecla01 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:07:02 GMT

Stephen Elop, the president of Microsoft’s Business Division today announced a tonne of news around Microsoft Online – our cloud services that comprise Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communicator and Live Meeting.

The services that are collectively known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) will be available in 15 additional countries and regions later this week. Elop also announced new customers including Aviva here in the UK, McDonald’s Rexel and Swedish Red Cross. Companies like GlaxoSmithkline are already saving around 30% of operational IT costs by replacing Lotus Notes, Domino, and Postini services with BPOS.

Elop also announced a series of price reductions for BPOS with the suite now down to only $10 per user per month whilst mailbox size goes up to 25GB.

Later this week we’ll be commercially available in Singapore with trials in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan; commercial availability in India is also expected later this year. This will bring availability to a total of 36 countries and regions as the Online train keeps rolling.

This is where I spend probably 60% of my time at the moment so good to see the momentum and the hard work of friends and colleagues in Redmond starting to pay off.

Engineering BPOS

stevecla01 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:17:00 GMT

I was fortunate enough to find myself in a meeting with Dave Thomson whilst in Redmond last week – a near on 20 year veteran of Windows, Exchange and now Microsoft Online. Dave talks about the evolution of his world and Microsoft’s world to online service and the engineering mindset changes that go along with it.

Dave also admits to getting 18 new emails between the hours of 6 and 7am. Just 18 Dave?? :)

Windows 7 - Listening to customers

stevecla01 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:14:00 GMT

Windows 7 has been a big team effort and our customer service and support guys are a big part of this. They explain all in this video and have also posted a funky Silverlight demo to show how Customer Support has evolved.

Jonathan Ive on Apple design

stevecla01 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:35:00 GMT

Jony talks design. His passion for the product shines through and I love his philosophy of getting design out of the way.

funny to see him take his iPhone out of his pocket and wipe the screen with his t-shirt. Design flaw? :)