Level 3 - Tony Yuhas' Blog

My friends and I gathered about the HDTV this weekend to watch the awesome display of muscle that are the most expensive ad slots available today. At the conclusion of past superbowls, we would debate long into the night. Intoxicated on Henry Weinhard's Root Beer, we would become cavemen arguing over which animal sold beer better: clydesdales, frogs, or Bob Uecker. Never before could we arrive on an objective victor. That was, until we used our mad nerd skillz to quantify the debate.

This year, we gathered a naggle of nerds and their spouses for an informal, if not entirely insufficiently sample sized, poll. Our unstated hope was that the spouses, being mostly normal, (evidenced by how little each of our spouses like the nerds they aren't married to), would add some credence to the proceedings.

The rules for our dataset were:

1. Commercials are rated on a 0-10 scale; zero being the least 'good' ad and ten being the most 'good' ad.
2. 'Good' is subjectively defined by anyone however they want to define it. That is, if someone defines good to be 'most humorous' or 'most effective', that's they're perogative.
3. You can not alter previous votes based on how bad or good the subsequent commercials are. If you gave the first commerical a 10 and something better comes along, you're stuck giving both a 10. Similarly, if you give some god-awful IZOD nonsense a zero, you can not later change it to a one because some later Sheryl Crow nonsense was more god-awfulish.
4. The 'winner' and 'loser' ad will be decided by a simple average of all votes.

There is some bias in this 'study' in that people had to vote aloud after each commercial break. Next year we plan to remove this condition by placing each nerd in a "My Little Pony" themed deprivation tank, (yes, it will be inside of a Faraday cage to prevent WiFi access).

This morning, I took all of our compiled data and used it to create a comparison to 'normal' by matching it against the USAToday Ad Meter stats.

Without further attempts at lame British humuor, here's some notable observations:

1. Nerds (and their spouses) are harsh critics. On average we rated everything 2.5 lower than normal people.
2. Nobody likes telemarketers - lowest ad in both our data and USAToday's. (I'm not going to mention them - See #25 here.)
3. Normal people love animal ads (7.9 avg), nerds don't (4.6 avg).
4. Not unexpected, but nerds like to watch women partying (the GoDaddy ad got a 5.2) and their spouses don't (1.0).
5. Nerds laugh at absurdist Godzilla inspired nonsense (the Garmin GPS ad got a 6) and normal people don't (4.3)
6. Normal men can grow facial hair and nerds are jealous. (Schick ad got a 6.9 from normal people and a 1.5 from the naggle)

I've included our full dataset below for the two people who are interested.

Next year, I think we need to include a couple nerdettes - both so we can get the female nerd vote AND the male spouse vote, (and, honestly, so that those guys can explain football to us. It'd be nice to watch a game and know what the hell a nickel package is... sounds drug related to me...)

 - Tony

 DATA TABLE (Names removed to protect the innocent, (but some linked in to identify the follied)):

Tony (That's Me!) - Spouse Z - Nerd A - Nerd B - Nerd C - Spouse D - Nerd D - Spouse C

END OF DATA

I was watching Cheaper By the Dozen 2 yesterday. OK. I was *forced* to watch CBTD2 yesterday by my >9 month pregnant wife.

In it, a very pregnant Piper Perabo has her water break while competing in the final event for the Camp Crystal Lake cup or something. (Oh, I forgot - ***SPOILER ALERT*** - if you don't want to know how CBTD2 turns out you should stop reading. I know I wish I didn't know how it turned out.) Within minutes she's carried to the camp hospital and her baby is out and looking three months old in about an hour.

My lovely wife has been having contractions off and on for a month. It's a bit of a sore subject when TV/movie women give birth minutes after their first contraction. Just wanted to give all of you the real info: it doesn't happen like that. At all.

It's much more like the story of Sisyphus than anything else.

So, there's this new thing in Vista called DVD Maker. If you shoot some HD footage of baby Tyler stuffing Cheetos up his nose and want to send a video DVD to Grandma with easy to navigate menus and a little menu eye candy - DVD Maker does a good job of that out of the box.

But if you're reading this then you're probably a geek who's interested in some of the cool behind the scenes things you can do with DVD Maker (or you're Eric Fleischman). In either case, you might be interested to know that you can create new custom menu styles in DVD Maker with very little effort. Keep in mind that while you can create new menu styles with little effort, I make no promise that they will be pretty or easy to navigate.

In keeping with the second grandest tradition in all of software, let's talk about how to write 'Hello World' using the DVD Maker menu style extensibility SDK. If you've used the Movie Maker filters and effects extensibility model this will seem very familar. If you haven't, don't worry.  All you need is a little XML and faith.

A complete menu style in DVD Maker requires you to define three menus and up to three transitions. This creates a rough navigation scheme like so:

For this entry, we're only going to discuss the main menu page. To make things really easy we'll use a copy of an existing style and just change the parts we want to. To do this you'll need a copy of Vista.  I'll wait while you get that...

OK. Now follow these steps:

1. Open DVDMaker
2. Add some content, (doesn't matter what)
3. Press the Next button.
4. Select the 'Full Screen' style.
5. Press the 'Customize Menu' button.
6. Press the 'Save as New Stlye' button.
7. Give the style an easy to remember name like "HelloWorld".
8. Save the style and close DVD Maker.
9. Navigate to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Movie Maker\AddOnTFX
10. Use notepad to open HelloWorld.xml.

There you go. You now have the a basic menu style XML to work with.

The hard part is how we get it to say "Hello World!" instead of just being a string of videos. There's a difficult way to do this and a cheap way. Guess which one I'm going to talk about?

The DVD Maker menus are a composite of layer after layer of visual effects. The XML describes these effects and the order in which to render them. For our simple case all we're going to do is add one effect with our text on top of everything else. So we need is an image of our text to overlay. You can create one using any number of visual tools, (I used Digital Image Suite).  Create an image with the text in black and the rest of the image transparent. For example, here's my image, (the magenta part is transparent):

Put this image in an easy to remember place. I use c:\dvdstuff while I'm authoring styles for simplicity. Then, we insert some magic XML in the right spot of the file you already generated. (A little warning here: a badly authored style will not load in DVD Maker. DVD Maker should still work fine, but your style won't be amongst the available options).

Find this section in the XML and insert the section in green, (should be around line 80):

That's it.  Give it a whirl in DVD Maker. You should see this:

In a future entry I'll explain what the magic XML is doing.

Everybody in Windows eats some dogfood. The role a Windowian plays in delivering software significantly affects how much they eat. On average, a tester eats more dogfood than their dev or PM counterpart. Also, there’s something about being a VP at Microsoft that makes you dogfood relentlessly. Brian Valentine appears to dogfood starting with the first available build. And Brian’s not shy about telling you that your dogfood tastes like, well, dogfood.

But when we say we’re ‘dogfooding’ we usually mean we’re going about the tasks necessary to get our jobs done. This means that there’s plenty of dogfooding on IE, Outlook, Notepad, the Computer Management Snapin, etc. In comparison there’s hardly any dogfooding done on applications less useful to software development folks.

I know it comes as a shock, but there’s very little dogfooding on Solitaire and Minesweeper. Like the little shops between Macy’s and the food court, these apps get passed over by the majority of people rushing about Vista to get their immediate task completed. I’m speaking of boutique applications like Narrator or Purble Place.

Or DVD Maker.

As the test lead for DVD Maker I do what I can to get more Windowites dogfooding this app. I’ve gone as far as trading a DVD Burner for a couple pages of feedback, (offer ended yesterday, sorry). I nurture the feedback I get, but ultimately it’s just never enough.

That’s why when some random dev comes along and starts flooding you with email about how your app can be better it’s a startling breath of fresh air. That happened last week when Shawn from the globalization team engaged in a great thread with us on his experience with DVD Maker. He even volunteered to dogfood some private bits on his home box; just way above the call of duty.

The core of Vista has been pretty well locked for a couple months. I’ve had a stable, solid experience dogfooding it. But it’s because of people like Shawn that Vista is changing from being “a solid platform” to “a sweet platform I want to move to”.