This is interesting. Funny how the brain works (or doesn't, as the case may be).

Say the color of each word out loud, at a normal reading pace (Note: Don't read the word out loud - speak the color out loud):

YELLOW       ORANGE     BLUE     BLACK     PURPLE     BLACK     GREEN     PURPLE     GREEN     ORANGE     BLACK     PURPLE     YELLOW     RED     YELLOW     ORANGE     RED

A co-worker approached me not-so-recently (read: months ago) and asked about setting up a Terrarium server for developers at our company. It's a great idea - just a little hard to accomplish becasue my round tuit has been so heavilly taxed as of late. BTW, there is a public server available here. But we want to be able to do an internal version.

Anyhow, that's my community commitment (no more goals for me - just commitments) for the month. An official company game to give everyone interested the opportunity to grow as a programmer and learn more about .NET programming.

About Terrarium:

"Terrarium, a sample application built by Microsoft®, is game for software developers that provides a great introduction to software development on the .NET Framework.  In Terrarium, developers create herbivores, carnivores, or plants and then introduce them into a peer-to-peer, networked ecosystem for a survival-of-the-fittest type competition.  The game provides both a competitive medium for testing your software development and strategy skills as well as a realistic evolutionary biology/artificial intelligence model for evaluating the role that various behaviors and traits can play in the fight for survival.  Terrarium also demonstrates some of the features of the .NET Framework, including the Windows Forms integration with DirectX® for generating powerful user interface (UI); XML Web services; support for peer-to-peer networking; support for multiple programming languages; the capability to update smart client, or Windows-based, applications via a remote Web server; and the evidence-based and code access security infrastructure that protects participating computers from the mobile code they are running."

Pascal Belaud and family just has their second child, and made a very creative announcement:

• PRESS RELEASE: version 2.0 is now officially available

I laughed - and had to share.

Just a few links from recent blog-findings related to SharePoint and Infopath that caught my eye:

• SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Webcasts (past and future)
• Eli's SharePoint Resources (posting again becasue it's regularly updated)
• WSS FAQ
• Lamont Harrington's SharePoint List
• Creating Custom Site Definitions for SharePoint Site Creation
• Open Links in a SharePoint List-View Webpart in a New Window
• Use Windows Briefcase to Take Your SharePoint Libraries With You 
• Use the Research Pane in Office 2003 and IE6 to search your SharePoint Servers
• Integrate SharePoint Search into a CMS site using WebService
• Best Practices for Developing Web Parts for SharePoint Products and Technologies
• Implementing Lookup Fields with InfoPath

Over at CRN.com there's an article describing surprise in some circles that Office 12 won't be married to the Longhorn release of Windows.

What people may not remember is that Office 2003 (AKA Office 11 - the current version) was originally planned to release with what would become Longhorn (back in the day), and that as the Longhorn release has changed over time, that relationship was also broken off well before it reached the altar.

The fact that Microsoft keeps its productivity apps moving while building a healthy platform for them to run on - In other words not gluing them to each other - is a good thing. Longhorn will be a monster-sized change in the Windows operating system world, and while Microsoft will almost certainly build special hooks into Office 12 that will take advantage of Longhorn's new features when(ever) it's released, I'd expect (based on my conversations) that another version of Office will soon follow or parallel the Longhorn release, but Office 12 will include some pre-baked Longhorn capabilities. Besides, they'll have to support previous versions of Windows for at least some time, in order to allow people to properly interoperate.

Longhorn will be to Windows XP and 2003 what Windows 95 was to Windows 3.1 -- It will be huge, a major change in the way we use computing power from both the end-user and programming/design perspectives. Longhorn represents the next paradigm shift in the Windows computer world, if you will.

Microsoft now does a better job of quickly finishing better and more-frequent releases of their software. In-house quality assurance and release management tools implemented in the past year or two help them reach bug-free, clean code state ("Milestone Q") faster and with greater confidence, which better enables them to get products ready and out the door, with more features and fewer problems. It also enables them to switch gears and attack issues in existing products ruthlessly when needed.

I, for one, am glad we won't have to wait for Longhorn to keep growing and improving in areas like Office and some of the other productivity applications. New versions of Office mean we can reasonably hope for new or enhanced versions of other Office System tools, which we know are coming - specifically tools like Live Communication Server (look for some very cool and improved features there in the next couple of releases), SharePoint, Exchange and other Office System products on the server-side. Longhorn should be the platform to beat all platforms from a computing perspective, and other applications should be built to fit when Longhorn is ready (meaning feature-completed, tested and secured in a way that Microsoft has never done before). To do otherwise would be akin to the tail wagging the dog, and that just won't do.

A simple online web service allows you to take a Word-HTML file and clean it up quite a bit. Nifty:

http://www.textism.com/wordcleaner/

"This is intended for fairly basic styled text documents; there is no support for notes, sectioning, ‘widow’ and ‘orphan’ control, etc. Typographic quotes, proper dashes and other special characters, if they exist, will be converted to HTML entities to increase their portability among browsers and platforms. Links, tables and image references should come through fine. Everything else is stripped."

From KC Lemson's weblog, a solution to a frequently asked SharePoint question:

Publish a web part on your sharepoint site that can be dynamically consumed inline by other sites

The Exchange team uses sharepoint portal server for a lot of things, such as storing & tracking documents & lists & whatnot. As the release manager, I own the site that has the master schedule on it. There are other teams that used to have a schedule listed separately on their own sites. I wanted them to consume my web part rather than repeating the content, so that if/when the schedule changes, they don't need to update theirs (or worse yet, leave it stale and confuse someone).

Linking to my web part is one option, but that's not inline in their sites, so it's not as nice of an interface. Exporting my web part as a template for them to import will only give them a copy of it at that point in time.

Thankfully, MVP & sharepoint guru Sig clued me in on how to do this. My site is http://mysharepointserver/sites/site1. I have a web part that I want to expose inline in http://mysharepointserver/sites/site2's content. Here's how the manager of site2 can do this:

1. Open up site2 in frontpage 2003. Make sure you have the default.aspx open in the page view.
2. On the task pane, choose “Find Datasource“ (click the down arrow near the top of the task pane to see it)
3. Enter the URL http://mysharepointserver/sites/site1 and the name of the web part you want to reference
4. Drag/drop the result to the desired location on your site and save changes

It works wonderfully. Thanks so much, Sig!

Every now and then you find something on the Internet that simply captures your attention. You're not sure why, it just does...

WINDOWS SYMPHONY - Made entirely of Windows default sound effects.  Its pretty cool, actually!

(by way of Jeff Basham at http://airdispatcher.lockergnome.net/)

 
Creative Labs 20 GB Zen Portable Media Center

Samsung Yepp YH-999 20 GB Portable Media Center

Very nice. Time to do some research and get on the list for one of these. The Media Center Experience is about to take off in a big way. Both can store up to 80 hours of video, be that TV, movies or home movies, over 10,000 songs and up to 100,000 photos. See a demo of what there are all about here.

“Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Centers are handheld entertainment devices that make it easy to store and play recorded TV, movies, home videos, music and photos transferred from a PC with Windows XP. You can watch and listen to your favorite entertainment anytime and anywhere – in the palm of your hand or through a TV or stereo. It’s simple to sync your music, video and pictures from your PC with Windows Media Player 10, and fast and easy to find the entertainment you want to play on your device. Portable Media Centers also support Windows Media Audio and Video plus other leading file formats, so you can choose from a wide range of music, videos and pictures.”

Microsoft embraced blogging and open discussion some time ago. Now not only do they allow/encourage their employees to blog about their work and express their own opinions, they've moved all the greatness that is Microsoft-employee-blogging right onto their corporate web site. And they've completely embraced RSS as a delivery mechanism. Practically all their community content is available in RSS feeds. Nice.

From Microsoft's Community site:

We just launched the Microsoft Community Blogs Portal, a searchable listing of blogs by Microsoft employees, categorized by product or technology topic. The project also makes it easier for pages across Microsoft.com to publish lists of relevant blogs and posts from those blogs.

This project was intended to answer one of the key pieces of feedback we get from customers about our blogging efforts to date. As people posted in response to Scoble's question about Microsoft blogs, it’s sometimes hard to find blogs about a particular technology or product that we make, even on a site like blogs.msdn.com which only has full time Microsoft employees blogging. Our answer to that is to ask our bloggers to categorize their RSS feeds (and to indicate whether they’re writing for a technical audience or a more general readership). The blog portal then makes those blogs available for consumption.

The project also provides ways for blog content to be automatically incorporated into pages on Microsoft.com. We’ve already been doing this, in a proof of concept way, on MSDN in the developer centers, but the process has been very manual. This should make it much easier for all our site managers to incorporate blogs.

A nice side effect of the project is the ability to search across all of the registered RSS feeds. So if you aren’t able to find something using regular Microsoft.com search but you think one of our bloggers might have written about it, you can search across all the registered posts from the portal.

Oh yeah, about RSS. A second project which launched yesterday, called Smart Components 2.0, also allows these contextually relevant lists of posts and blogs to be re-published via RSS. What’s that mean? In a nutshell, every one of the blog recent posts components contains a white on orange RSS badge linking to an RSS feed that is scoped to the same content set as the component. The one on the blog portal has an RSS feed of the fifty most recent posts from all registered Microsoft blogs. If I’m on the Exchange community site, there will now be an RSS feed that aggregates posts from registered bloggers who write about Exchange. And we aren’t just RSS-enabling blog content. With the new code that we deployed yesterday, all sorts of smart components on our sites, including lists of newsgroup content, upcoming chats and webcasts, knowledge base articles, and security bulletins now emit RSS.

Finally, what we shipped yesterday was a portal and a toolbox for our site managers to incorporate these features into their sites. We’ll point to uses of the new components as they go live and spread Microsoft blogs and RSS across Microsoft.com. We’ll also write specifics about some of the other new features in the Smart Components 2.0 release.

(Bonus: there are some interesting hidden features in the blog portal.)

ADDED 7/11/04: It's definitely worth noting that despite the “revolutionary” apearance (to some) of Microsoft suddenly being “open,” that's not really the case. I have always been able to talk in depth with many people at Microsoft about the things that I do in my line of work, and they have always been quite open and helpful - both in terms of providing me information I need, and in terms of collecting information from me in order to make sure they're building relevant products.

Josh Allen has a similar opinion:

People at Microsoft blog because they tend to be open, independent, and communicative; not the other way 'round.  Blogs do provide evidence that Microsoft is just a bunch of normal people like any other company; but the blogging isn't the cause of this normalcy -- it's just a new way to communicate that reality.

Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, whose son Garrett committed suicide last year, presented a youth suicide prevention bill in the US Senate today. It passed this evening. The senator made a tearful speech on the floor that brought back some awfully painful memories for me. I have supported this bill since it was first written a few months ago.

I have a personal connection and interest in this bill. My son Brian took his own life four years ago. He was 15. While the months and years since then have been very hard for those of us left behind, our pain cannot be measured against what he must have been feeling. Depression is not an illness that people need die from. Suicide is a terrible and permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people. It is often detectable and preventable. This bill, should it become law - and it should become law - will fund prevention and risk detection programs that will save lives. Young lives. It's important.

Please give this your support. Please tell Senator Smith "thank you" for championing an important bill during a time in his life that I know is wrought with emotional pain.

To Senator Smith - Thank you very much for what you're doing. I'm right there with you.

• Youth Suicide Prevention Education Program - http://www.yspep.org/youth.html

I posted an entry a month ago about Sprint PCS' new advertisements for wireless service. Since then, I've been inundated with searches for "macaroni minutes" every time I see that ad on TV. These days I can pretty much predict when the commercial has just aired based on when the search referrals start to stack up all of a sudden. It's one of several funny, well-done commercials that poke fun at wireless carriers that charge overage fees and have complicated service plans:

• Red ball: School children are told that they may play with new red balls, provided they estimate how many minutes they will use the balls during the next two years.
• Soccer: A student is called off the field and informed that he can’t play anymore this month because he’s used up his minutes.
• Dinosaur: A class is allowed to watch a video only if one of the students can figure out the complexities of a VCR.
• The New Kid: A new arrivee in an art class is given much better supplies than the other students have.
• Macaroni: A student is told that he “is over” on his macaroni minutes and must pay the school $49 immediately.

Some trivia about the ads: They were filmed at Brentwood Christian School in Austin, Texas, and the kids in the ads are actual students there. They were compensated a whole $1500 for their talent, plus they'll get a residual payment for each and every time the commercials air.

Good article by an IT pro named Shannon Kalvar over at TechRepublic about how slightly different approaches to solving the same problem can make a real and significant difference. Worth reading all the way through:

"How tales about server unreliability help save face and influence people"

And he's written a number of other articles that are also worth investing some time in. They cover topics like project management, IT management topics, customer support and measuring success.

On Channel 9 today, there's an interview with Jason Flaks, a Microsoft program manager on the Media Connects team. He demos some of the new Windows Media Connect technology that's set to come out in the future. This is very cool stuff - and it looks like it will be a big market - I know I will be on the wagon!

• UPDATE: Jason explains more about how WinMedia Connect works in a followup video

There's going to be a real market not only for users of these devices and technologies, but for businesses that truly understand them and can help the "common-folk" adopt and use them. Building a complex home media system like we're about to see hit the market is not a trivial task. Sure, it will get easier over time, but for a while a least, there will be a real need for professionals who can take the technology investments made by consumers and make them work really well.

I'm excited about the next wave of media devices and systems. It's been under-reported and under-estimated. All your media (pictures, audio, video) usable across multiple systems and devices. Stream the program recorded on your PC across the network and view it on the screen attached to your XBOX. Project your digital images on the 10-foot projection screen. Listen to your MP3s in any room, and automatically sync your music and video with your portable media device to take with you. Browse your media libraries on the MCE PC from your DVD player. The possibilities are nearly limitless.

Evan Feldman has posted a second installment of his description of Tablet PC Field Trials (see entry Tablet Test, Trials and Tribulations from June 28).

• EDIT 7/8/04: And a third installment as well!
• ADDED 7/11/04: Part 3.1(?) published (Evans answers questions raised by the previos posts)

The great thing about Microsoft blogs is that you sometimes get to read insights into what goes on there, stuff that you'd never see otherwise. I enjoy the nitty gritty about how the technologies I use each day came to be:

"There are some things that I can’t really talk too much about but instead, I’ll give some of those secret anecdotes that have been floating around Microsoft that many have never heard before."

Some of the anecdotes are funny, but Evan also includes a few of the more serious ones (things he describes as more difficult to share) that changed the course of the tablet in the early days."

I'm looking forward to the future installments, especially what he eludes to as a future topic : The Tablet as Primary PC.