New Technology

My initial thoughts about Mesh...

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:18:58 GMT

Update 7/28/08: LiveSide (http://www.liveside.net/, or Twitter @liveside) posted that Mobile Mesh is out in a limited capacity (no folder IO sync yet), http://m.mesh.com from your Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, or Symbian.

Update #2 7/29/28: Mac client was out briefly today, but was quickly brought offline. Screenshots for this & mobile are at http://www.liveside.net.

First and foremost:The platform sells itself: The key is getting people to install the client, add something to their Mesh from one device, and 'consume' it from another. Nevermind the details, they complicate things. Erick at TechCrunch stated in April that Mesh is 'aimed at developers'. What? Why are they aiming? Throw it out there with some simple user stories and see what happens. Share photos, back-up your important stuff, access your favorites from any computer, write your own news stream. It could be compared to the functionality of many social apps: flickr, google docs, twitter, all the recent sync/backup services (that's the trend lately I guess)...

Wish my Blackberry had a Mesh client. I would love to sync images/videos taken with my camera, view files from my laptop, home pcs, work pc, from my blackberry... Mobile clients are due in late '08.

Wish Mac had a Mesh client. My boss has shifted to the Mac camp, and I don't really blame him. Ours isn't the only enterprise with a chance to convert from MSFT to Mac/Linux in the next 3-5 years. Non-windows clients for the Mesh platform won't keep this from happening, but it will reduce the growing 'painting myself into the corner' feeling that MSFT technologies tend to have. Mac clients are supposedly due for release late this year.

Source control??? Sharing of files & folders, reporting, versioning, syncing, and for extra credit: realtime collaborative authoring (at the very least, via remoting)??? Still unsure about how many requirements Mesh meets here, still playing around with it.

Smaller bits from the blog team: This is probably rediculous, but Twitter is ruining my taste for verbosity. I guess there should be some detailed anchor content that is thorough, and it's as good a place as any. I have to wonder though: If the Mesh team posted more frequently on much smaller stories and concepts, Mesh adoption may increase, and the details would flesh themselves out via posts from the developers they're targeting (like me).

Public Mesh: It may not be practical in a Mesh topology, but it would be cool to be able to watch how other people are using Mesh, and it may create opportunities to broaden networks.

Competing with Google: MSFT needs to go live with a model that makes me feel like they're giving it away. I am sure they will have priced tiers for their services, but the 'free' service should be generous enough that I don't feel like I get more from Google. Let people appreciate the value of the cloud before they are even asked to pay for it in any way.

Hotkey: I love notifyicons, but I love hotkeys more. I don't like to have to hunt for my icon to view remote documents or interact with my colleagues. It needs to become a natural extension of my Windows experience, like OS X's F12

Social net awareness: Import my friends from {twitter, gmail, facebook, linkedin}. Mesh should give me as many opportunities as possible to bridge my social nets together - this complements its goals of bridging apps and devices. Friendfeed does an amazing job at this, but will probably always be just a social net.

Depot, an exercise in Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:43:59 GMT

No downloads or pics, just a quick rundown of a very cool app idea while it's in my head.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a small winforms app. It's stayed very rough around the edges and hasn't gone anywhere from the original prototype. This prototype (I called it Depot) was written as a proof-of-concept of the simplest possible community-sourced bookmarking / tagging / searching tool that could possibly exist. A self-organizing business-specific link / text library could provide immense value to a company.

Depot hinges on 4 basic features common with collaborative apps:

1. Producing: Adding content in the form of URLS and/or text (2 different fields that can be used individually or combined)

2. Tagging

3. Searching for any item by any combination of title words or tag

4. Sharing: All content is automatically shared, and open to edit & extend, by anyone within the network

The search is an autocomplete textbox, that works with any combination of title words and tags. Typing 'catering' displays all catering items, but as you start to type 'catering madison', the suggestions filter appropriately. As you would expect, changing the text over to 'thai madison' updates to items tagged or titled with thai and madison.

The url + text fields is an interesting feature - a user may want to toss in a quick note for a catering url someone else added, like "Beware the red curry!!!".

The app seemed to work beautifully, but the algorithm is not built to scale up yet. Everything is cached heavily on the client-side. There are no concurrency checks. Also, to be fit for production, it will need some kind of user-auditing, history, and probably some kind of browser integration (or at least bookmark / favorites sync).

I don't know yet what will become of Depot. I hope to find the time and motivation soon to dust it off and start polishing it up for a pilot group. If nothing else, I got an ornery hog of a tag-search algorithm that may come in useful someday.

Shrinking the 'App Surface' - Microsoft Mesh

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:58:30 GMT

I have lost track of how many social networks I'm involved with. The 'app-surface' is too huge to manage.

In my work, we struggle with a problem of custom development: another system means another place for the lawyers to worry about their data.

We are maintaining apps that were designed for a specific purpose but are being used by 25% of the organization.

Occasionally, I will bang out a new prototype app that may or may not take off. It helps keep the innovation conversation going, but it broadens the surface of possible apps to work in. This is a problem. The solution is buried somewhere within the combination of service-enabling application data, creating dashboards and pluggable architectures, notification systems, unified communication, etc... Lately we have been talking about Sharepoint as the ultimate solution because you can wire all of your enterprise libraries into web parts and slap it all onto a single webpage. What about mobile data then? What about non-web types of collaboration? What about persisting a conversation between meetings, email, and phone? The problem too big to solve with a website. It may be too big to solve with a platform, but it sounds like Microsoft is having a go at it with Mesh.

The Mesh is composed of 'mesh objects', which are standardized feeds (SSE, which is now FeedSync) of data. Mike Zintel from the Live Mesh Team talks about Mesh in his "Live Mesh As A Platform" post:

... a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses...
... one instantiation of a mesh object is as a local (shared, aka Live) folder on a PC. This same mesh object might be instantiated as a slideshow on a web site, and as preview and upload UX on a mobile device with a built-in camera. A Live Folder is but one specialization of a mesh object. A mesh object could also represent a range of cells in Excel or a To Do list that can be accessed from anywhere...

I want this so bad... My collaboration post here shows where my head is at when it comes to communication channels and their disconnectedness from each other. I think speech-to-text and text-to-speech, combined with data-to-feed and feed-to-data (bidirectional feeds especially, with FeedSync!) are going to tie things together and shrink our app-surface to a managable level. The Mesh, as far as I understand it, is the first technology that makes this seem possible.

In the meantime we will keep juggling (and forgetting about) our socnets along with our various calendars, emails, meetings, and apps...

Linq to everything

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:48:05 GMT

Charlie Calvert has a list of Linq Providers here.

Amongst the ones listed were a few that popped out at me:

Linq to LDAP and Linq to Active Directory

Linq to C#

Linq to Geospacial Data

Update: From the looks of things, there is no Linq to Link yet. I believe that Damon Payne is working on this provider though. His work is clearly inspired by the NIN cover of Legend of Zelda theme song.

MIX, TED - there goes your day...

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:01:41 GMT

MIX Session videos: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Follow-up email from TED conference:

And now, when you're ready, take 18 minutes to watch this astonishing talk from Harvard-trained brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. It drew a huge standing ovation in the first session of the conference and, by general consensus, counts as one of the most memorable TED talks of all time.

We also had a chance to hear details from Craig Venter of just how close he now is to creating synthetic life -- for example, bacteria designed from scratch to gobble CO2 and generate advanced fuels. This could be one of the biggest scientific stories of our lifetimes. It will either thrill you or scare you -- or both.

The astronomer Roy Gould ended weeks of blogosphere speculation by unveiling a beautiful new product created by Microsoft's Curtis Wong: the WorldWide Telescope. Here's the hi-res version of this talk. It's spectacular.

Ballmer on Yahoo!: "we will be a PHP shop"

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:02:31 GMT

I hadn't even thought about it...

MIX '08 keynote with Guy Kawasaki, about 43:28 into the interview. Also, I noticed Rob Zelt got to ask a question during the Q/A afterwards...

The interview covered Yahoo, as well as MacBook Air, Google, Apple, Firefox, and some Monkeyboy love for web developers.

.Net Users Group VS'08 Load Fest & Holiday Party

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:50:00 GMT

Join the WI .Net Users Group and Microsoft on Dec 11, 7PM for a Visual Studio 2008 Install-Fest / Holiday party!

This event is going to take a different approach than our usual meetings: better prizes, [rumored] better food (nothing wrong with the pizza though, of course), VS '08 licenses! (bring your laptop), and more..

Scott's announcement is HERE.

WI .Net UG announcement, location details & registration HERE.

Missing the Blackberry...

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:07:00 GMT

I recently gave up my Blackberry in favor of a Motorola Q. After 1 month with the Q (and Mobile 5), I've concluded that the things that bug me aren't just changes I need to get used to... instead, they're steps in the wrong direction for features and usability. Off the top of my head, here are some of my observations/frustrations:

* Speed dial sucks. I choose to carry around a bigger device specificially for the quertyness of it... I want to use any of my 26 keys for speed dial. I don't want to be limited to my numeric keys, regardless of how many speed dial #s they can store. Also, the Blackberry had a a-z speeddial reference page that was easy to open and quick to edit. Also, voice recognition is still far from perfect.

* Adaptive Interfaces are bad. Don't move icons. I expect them in a certain place so I can 'habitually' get to where I want. I don't want to have to hunt for it. Putting most-recent/most-accessed icons first doesn't work. Fortunately it's just the Homescreen layouts that try to be smart for me, so I changed to 'Basic' for now so I don't have to worry about it.

* Let me move my icons. On the blackberry, alt + click, scroll, click. Done.

* Don't bury alarm in 'Settings'. This is just annoying. Also, 'Disable on weekends' is a great option I really miss, especially since enabling/disabling it is accessed via: Start > Settings > Clock & Alarm > Alarm

* Email notification - This should be a setting in Profile, along with calls, alarms, etc. Instead it vibrates and it's not at all intuitive as to how to change this (haven't found it yet).

* No Alt-Tab??? There is no hotkey as far as I can tell to switch between tasks. There is no easy to see what's running excepting going to Start > System Tools > Task Manager. Once you're there, you can kill tasks or exit - at the very least, I want to 'go to task' from here, ideally I want a alt-tab-like hotkey.

* No backlight button? Display is either off completely, or 100% brightness, which lights up a dark room and drains the battery much faster than I'd like. Blackberry display was always visible, backlight completely off, and extremely easy to turn on (dim or bright) when needed.

Anyway, there are some cool things (*cough* nethack *cough*) like the camera, Windows file IO, slim profile, Mini SD slot, etc that are worthwhile...

Bottom line: It would be a very tough sell to get a company to use this device if they've used Blackberries in the past.

.Net now "Shared Source" NOT Open Source

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:49:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie announced on his blog, a few hours ago, that .Net source code will be opened up to the public, under a ms-rl license (for reference, read-only).

Scott's announcement, already flooded with lots of comments & trackbacks, mostly positive, is here.

Starting with Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), currently set to be released later this year, we will be able to reference the internal state of .Net objects as if they were local.

This means a few things:
1. F11 will step you into the actual .Net object being called, where you can reference in-state .Net classes.
2. You will see real objects, variables, line numbers in your call stack for the .Net classes being referenced.
3. (I assume) you will be able to “Go to definition“ and view actual .Net class source code instead of an interface. Of course, we've always had the ability to reflect on the libraries, and with a little work, figure out what was happening... but this will make things a lot more simple and accessible (have a look at Reflector to figure out the Asp.Net treeview control!)
4. WWBAD (What would Brad Abrams do?) Now we can see for real instead of reverse engineer it and spend our time figuring out what the variable datetime17 is doing. In other words, quality of code should improve. As we constantly reference the .Net library, some of the msft QA, v3.5 juju should rub off on us and help us fall a little more in line with standards, best practice, etc.

Anyway, it's read-only. It's not Open source. But it's another big step in what I think is the right direction for Microsoft...

Some good MS pages to check out on open/shared source initiatives:
- Open Source at Microsoft
- Microsoft Shared Source Initiative
- MS Developer Tools (A goldmine of open/shared source projects, most on CodePlex)

Webkinz, Netiquette 101

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:02:00 GMT

So my girls are loving Webkinz, the latest pre-adolescent internet phenomenon. They each have some animals, and are always asking if they can jump on to play. Most play entails competitive games with other anonymous webkinzers for webkinz cash, and spend the cash on cool things for their “house”. Gambling, materialism, and consumerism for the youngsters... We used to have to use our imaginations for those things.

Anyway, my younger, is trying to sneak into the older one's account, because she “knows how to make a bunch of money real fast.” I had to explain that logging into someone else's account is bad manners... thought it was funny.