Microsoft PopFly is Social Programming

Microsoft PopFly is going to seriously impede my ability to do real work at Microsoft.  Oh, that’s right, I get paid to demo this stuff! 

PopFly is social programming, without the programming. Publish your ‘flys and have them rated; have other’s outputs for your inputs. Web sites could create their own Blocks to publish in this different form.

It’s just fun to build stuff that mashes data together. Below is what I could produce within 5 minutes (2 minutes getting a Flickr API key) and typing less than 15 characters: it is a simple Flickr photoviewer, showing the last 100 public images uploaded to my Flickr.com account.

PopFly was announced officially overnight – but I had heard about the project in my first week at Microsoft. Hearing about it vs. trying PopFly out are two separate things.

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AUReMIX07 Silverlight Video

frankheadgeek

Watch the video here of Frank Arrigo and Monique Eagles here. Yes, you will need to install Silverlight.

This is my first experiment with Silverlight and the Microsoft Expression set of tools. Using the inbuilt players in Media Encoder saved many days/hours of hand coding; yet I am sure there is more in there that will tickle out over coming weeks.

NOTE: Silverlight 1.1 is alpha-release!

Workflow (all on Vista Ultimate):

  • Edited footage in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
  • Export Sequence from Premiere Pro using Adobe Media Encoder 960×720 WMV9/WMA9, very light compression.
  • Import into Microsoft Expression Media Encoder (May preview)
  • Export footage as VC-1 Web Server High Speed (using a normal web server). This setting is 640×480. Obviously, I could compress this more.
  • Edit the Default.html to correctly reference EmePlayer.js (note: this got me for an hour. Linux web servers are case-sensitive, and the Default.html points to emeplayer.js. 404! Bug reported)
  • FTP files to directory onto nickhodge.com (could have used Expression Web, but I was debugging the problem with upper/lower case file naming above)

Thoughts? Comments?  I only have Silverlight 1.1 alpha installed. I’ve tested in Windows IE/FireFox and MacOS X 10.4 Safari/Firefox. The Mac’s audio might be out-of-sync. Again, this is reported.

 

Churchill, 14th April 1941

Winston Churchill, 1941

Any further information on this picture we have in our possession would be great.

From what I can tell, it was taken on the 14th April 1941 (coding 14441).

It is also the first picture I’ve seen of Churchill with his wife; the fellow in the bowler hat is a mayor or similar. You can see that Churchill has a gas mask over his shoulder, and is raising his hat with a cane (badly framed photo misses this)

The Week That Was

Neil Finn: “Hey, I am quite enjoying the feeling of being unpopular. There is something liberating in it.” Neil is in a battle of small phrases on the battlefield of the print and TV media. Neil: use the power of the intarwebs to fight back at ’em!

It seems my twittering on the Eurovision song contest has inspired Paul Foster to blog. Dude, I thought you were all over this European Union stuff!

New word: obscurantist. Used both by Paul Keating in relation to John Howard, and by Thomas Freidman in The World is Flat. The good news is that I’ve finished the book. It seems that both sides of Australian politics may be grokking the need to invest in education.

Lessons learnt: Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome. I realise the key variable here is time, and that the emotional hold works both ways.

Two key editorial comments in the last day put a religious slant on the use of technology: Howard Anderson in Computerworld IT in “A cynic rips open source” and Michael Singer in “Why doesn’t Microsoft Have a Cult Religion“. Microsoft, with thousands of bloggers and far-reaching impact, does not really foster a cult-like following. In Australia, it is called the Tall Poppy Syndrome.

The culture of information exchange with Microsoft is extremely open. Anti-obscurantist. It is difficult for cults to survive where knowledge is spread. Putting spin and machiavellian manipulation just doesn’t work. I think Microsoft is missing a cult following because it not obscure enough.

Maybe that is why the spinmeister Tony Blair and over-spun Scooch are the losers of the week. As quoted from Chris Saad over on the Particls blog: Rupert Murdoch on Media 2.0 ‘Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore‘

Random Neil Finn Lyric Server

All Lyrics are Copyright their respective Copyright holders.
Service Privacy Policy.

Fast Start:

To get an lyrics superimposed on image, use the following URL:

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.jpg

For JSON, use the following URL:

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.json

For SOAP, use the following URL to get the WSDL

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.wsdl

Simple XML, use the following URL:

http://nickhodge.com/finnwords.xml

Background

In 2002 I had a brainwave whilst driving to work. I don’t know where it came from, but here’s the result of some late night coding.I think that Neil Finn is the world’s best singer/songwriter – and this service is a tribute to his work. There are over 280 phrases from over 70 songs Neil and his brother Tim has written in the database. This collection spans from 1979 with the Split Enz album Frenzy to their most recent work in 2004 on his second Finn Brothers album, Everyone Is Here
To incorporate the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server into your web page is easy. Just copy and paste the following HTML into your web page editor of choice. As an image:http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsimageengine.php

<img src="http://www.nickhodge.com/finnwords.jpg" width="300" height="174"/>

or using iframe

<iframe id="finnwords" src="http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsengine.php" mce_src="http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsengine.php" width="175" height="175" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" frameborder="1" scrolling="no"></iframe>

If you would like to bookmark something to see a quote on a daily basis, just use this URL: http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordsengine.php

For those with an RSS Reader, add the following URL to your feed, and get a Random Neil Finn Lyric:http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/mungenet/mungenetrssengine.php?ver=2.0&content=finn

SOAP Server URL: http://www.nickhodge.com/nhodge/finnwords/finnwordssoapengine.php

endpoint: getRandomNeilFinnLyric

parameters: returnType a string containing the text xml, json, html or text to indicate the return format

Here is some sample PHP5 using the SOAP (Web Services) functions to call in a Neil Finn quote

$parameter = array("returnType","html");
$soapclient = new SoapClient('http://www.nickhodge.com/finnwords.wsdl');
echo ($soapclient->getRandomNeilFinnLyric($parameter));

On Butterflies, Aliens and Mountains

nz July 119

InDesign CS3 has a pretty neat Easter Egg: a good friend and InDesign Evangelist, Tim Cole, details the inner details of this easter egg.

The allusion to InDesign 1.0 through CS2 “Butterfly” motif, and the mountains to InDesign’s previous code names themes (K2, Annapurna, Caribiner).

The alien is related to QuarkXpress’ alien that appeared when a certain key combination is used to delete items on the page.

Thanks Adobe InDesign engineers for teaching us that humour is OK in the workplace; and reminding us being funny is subversive.

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