Fellow Australian DPE-ers, Chris Bright, Michael Kordahi and Greg Willis have been busy working on a micro- mega- project.
For the last 30 years, Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian community has paraded down Oxford Street. The Sydney Morning Herald has a library of images from the parade: and has used the Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight to display these images.
Michael Kordahi created the front-end (Silverlight) and Greg Willis architected the back-end (Azure)
Well done guys.
Continuing my theme of ‘synthing the Sydney Harbour Bridge: on Tuesday I took a series of 24 photos on my Palm Treo Pro camera of the bridge. Including a seagull:
@stilgherrian, @kcarruthers and @nickhodge. Yes, we are all on Twitter, twittering to the Twitterati.
We were waiting for Pia Waugh, one of Australia’s leading Linux and Open source experts to show us the Art Deco Theatre.
Excellent photo taken in the main street of Yass, New South Wales by @ApostrophePong. More Photos on ‘pongs site.
Testing only. If you are reading this, please ensure you are using Internet Explorer 8
Webslices are new consumer feature in Internet Explorer 8. You can embed simple HTML within a WebSlice that is a portion of a pre-existing page. To get IFRAMES and OBJECT to work there is a little tweaking required. Then you get Silverlight and/or Flash.
The IFRAME/OBJECT content is stripped (for security reasons) by the RSS engine in IE8. However, when displaying a unique page – things can get way more interesting.
In the example WebSlice below, I use an alternate display source. This alternate display is used as the content for the slice. This also permits smart styling in your slice; as used on http://istartedsomething.com/‘s Webslice. The xxxx.html below is the page with the Webslice content.
<a rel="entry-content" href="xxxx.html" style="display:none;"></a>
iFrame
Image
Object Embed
Thanks to Michael Kordahi, Chris Bright and Greg Willis for the push to check this out.
Today was the last day I will appear as a "social media expert" on behalf of Microsoft. The internet and social media is mainstream, and it’s time to move on. And do my real day job: evangelising Microsoft’s developer tools.
Over the weekend, Channel 10’s Rove attempted to fist twitter, bringing in at least 1000 new Australian twitter users. A plethora of ABC celebreties are following Mark Pesce‘s lead and are joining twitter. There are 5 million Australians on Facebook. Politicians have realised the shift of power towards, and reach of the internet. There is no going back.
Over the last 2 years, and more-so with the departure of Frank Arrigo from Australia, invitations to speak at ‘social media’ conferences landed on me. Internal Microsoft teams came asking about social media asked for my advice.
None of these are a formal, measured part of my job. Sure, using the technology and being a social media practitioner will still important: but being a Social media expert is not.
So, with a little regret, from today I hand over the reigns of social media expertise and public representation to others at Microsoft.
In the category of “why didn’t I think of this†comes liveslices.com. Go have a look (obviously after installing IE8RC)
Webslices is one of the new end-user features of IE8. It is easy to implement on your website: I added it to http://www.nickhodge.com/ within minutes. Some microformat wrapping around changing content, and it is active.
WebSlices will mainstream web-site alerts where RSS has struggled.
I first met Stephen Elop during Macromedia/Adobe integration talks and subsequently in Punta Mita, Mexico. He is one smart cookie for a Canadian.
Now here is at Microsoft leading the business software side. Watch this video to get a glimpse of the future of technology in our lives. The key theme I can see is the importance of a User Experience that scales across different devices.
Firstly, an apology to all those who have been receiving my bogus RSS feeds over the last week or so.
Essentially, due to complexity in my feed pipes: from WordPress through Yahoo Pipes to Feedburner caused the echoes of posts. I had recently updated the Feedburner plugin in WordPress and oddities in my Feedburner configuration left a textual hall-of-mirros.
Thanks to @duncanriley, @Tuna and a special call out to @suewaters for bring this to my attention.
It has been a little blogging quiet of late. Partly due to preparation for demonstrations in the next few weeks, and other email tasks.
Two major events have clouded out-of-hours productivity: The Windows Home Server crumpled with a BIOS booting error. This required getting a special USB re-setup key from the UK from TranquilPC.
Windows 7 rocks. Still cannot believe how much I can do with this beta operating system. However, the choice of partitioning the hard disk was not a wise move. Especially if you mix up your partitions the wrong way. I blame my choices, certainly not Windows 7
Onwards.
From Vista magazine, May 2007
This digital life (version 2.0)
Nick, a recent addition to Microsoft, is a long time blogger, presenter and geek. Read Nick’s exploits and stories at http://www.nickhodge.com. A part of Nick’s “job†at Microsoft is to collect and record Australia’s Geek Stories. Turn your web browser to http://thegeekstories.com. To hear what Nick is doing almost on a minute by minute basis, catch Nick on http://twitter.com/. Note: Twitter is the latest online success story, and no one who uses twitter exactly knows exactly why. Creating an account is easy, and adding Friends to watch and talk to is easy. Ignoring the tweets (singular noun of a posting) is tough. The web industry calls twitter “micro-bloggingâ€
Thanks to the previous owner of this real estate, Frank Arrigo. Frank is the personification of “geekâ€, and the owner of the title as Microsoft’s local Professional Geek.
My personal geek story starts when I saw my first personal computer: an Apple II in 1981. Prior to this experience, I had only drawn on used computer punch cards. Seeing that computer changed my life, a whole new world opened up and career started. A small Seattle company had licensed a programming language to Apple, called AppleSoft Basic. That small company was Microsoft.
Continuing the language trend, the first programming language in which my parents purchased and in which I become fluent was Microsoft Basic 1.0 for the Mac. Friends still pester me for the project I started way back in May 1984: MacFarm. It never shipped, or at least is in perpetual development.
Leap ahead through time and various companies over employers such as Apple and Adobe – here I find myself at Microsoft. With the heritage in languages now extending into operating systems, applications, servers, Xboxes, online Live services – there is no shortage of fun things to install, experience and tell the world about.
Now my parents are now semi-retired in the Barossa Valley, still have that original museum piece Mac somewhere in their shed. Their primary PC is running Windows XP – and it and an internet connection changed how grandparents interact with their grandchildren. The use of webcams with Live Messenger, emails via Outlook and pictures back-and-forth keep my parents in contact with their Sydney-based grandson.
As memories move from physical to digital: photographs, music, snippets of video, blog entries and twitter tweets; the world connects and the tyranny of distance experienced by our ancestors disappears. A photograph can be uploaded into the “cloud†of the internet for all to see and comment on almost immediately.
Having read books such as Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash, wonder where this always on, instant information world is could take us. It’s great to be here at Microsoft, being a part of helping Australians embrace technology – to get us closer together. My optimistic inner geek thinks the world will be ok.
Yes I admit it, I am a Professional Geek at Microsoft just like Frank.