Category: microsoft

LOLCODE at TechEd 2007, Australia [Update 23rd July 2007]

lolcode tshirt

TechEd, from a newcomer’s perspective, needs more cowbell. http://twitter.com/atl introduced us all to the world’s newest programming language in May.

Based on a democratic yet technologically flawed vote on http://nickhodge.com/ popular opinion is that LOLCODE should be presented.

Therefore, Chuck has let me subvert the hierarchy and made a slot for me to present the following:

Thursday 9th August

12:45pm-1:15pm   NIck Hodge: LOLCODE. CAN HAS NEW .NET LANGUAGE. LOLCODE IZ IN UR TECHED. C U THERE. KTHXBAI

Just the thing to start the day, and shake off any residual hangover.

Not sure what I’ll get to cover in a mere 30 minutes. Maybe LOLCODE will get into the keynote for 2008?

Buy the t-shirt at http://store.lolcode.com/

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End of FY07 in the Heart of Finance: AMP

Every year, AMP has a small IT expo where their vendors get to display the products and services they want to sell.

Microsoft, due to paternity leaves, various end-of-year / beginning of year shenanigans, it’s down to me. Single-handedly representing a multi-bazillion dollar company to another multi-bazillion dollar company.

Today, I do my normal day’s work with a crowd; blogging, social. Live blogging.

ampitexpo 001

8:10am arrive. Sydney CBD is quiet, considering this is Australia’s financial hub and it is the last day of the 2006/7 financial year. Billions of dollars move through bank accounts today. Quick park next door to the event and I am away.

8:30am all the stuff is wired together. Many other vendors here showing off their financial wares. As per Frank Arrigo’s post yesterday on the AMP Thought Leadership Festival, Microsoft Australia DPE is going “online” in a Web 2.0 fashion.

Off to grab coffee.

How I am wireless: The expo has not supplied wireless, so its a matter of using Bluetooth to connect from Vista to my Treo 750. Dialling out via Telstra NextG (although I don’t think I have the super fast Next G speed on the Treo until Windows Mobile 6.0) Dear Rob in Microsoft Australia who manages our mobile phone bills. Mine might be larger than normal.

ampitexpo 002

Picture: “Bridging the Digital Generation Gap” with my special semiotic message OfficeSpace t-shirt.

9:10am first question of the day. What is Web 2.0? I love this job.

9:25am Windows Live Writer rocks. How did I blog before this? The stand next to me is “web 2.0 for dummies”.  Where do I download that product?

9:33am a quick wander around the other stands. Someone has “IronRuby” shortcut on their Windows desktop on a Portals stand. My future friend.

10:08am question: how do I start blogging.  1. Get a spaces.live.com account 2. Windows Live Writer

10:18am demonstrate a chatbot. discussion of Second Life with few logged in users vs. chat/IM/mobile.

10:36am Conversation with marketer “reach out when people have a significant change in their life”, this will not be in the MSM. Mobile, chat.

10:45am Financial advice, online. Doing it independently, interact with a human, financial info is not clear. Clearly compare things. Professional advice $200-$500. Trust.

11:08am Autoplay virus. Answering a question from David

11:15am complied with the audit rules and stamped the card for the Vetting (read: Audit) department.

11:20am IBM showing some graphical business process drawing thing, and SecondLife where there are presently about 10 Australians logged in. Am resorting to Popfly with pretty pictures to get more questions.

11:25am people want free stuff. I am sending them to codeplex

11:50am selling lots of http://linkedin.com

12:00pm couple of HR people asking about employing digital natives

12:35pm Assisting parents with understanding MSN Live Messenger, talking about business continuity with technology

12:45pm demystifying Web 2.0. Attempting to separate marketing lingo from reality. Watching IBM guys go white across the hall

12:50pm had a box sent from North Ryde to here, I hope it arrives and doesn’t get stolen by the security guards

1:00pm the “Bridging the Digital Generation Divide” getting the mums in with teenagers. Assisting with guidance to online safety and the power of social community. Extending the meme of ensuring you know where you kids are going online, and have tried these out yourself.

1:15pm box arrived, customer happy. phew.

1:20pm talking about age gap of financial planners: younger planners expect deeper interactions with AMP, more instant, less paperwork.

1:30pm spending DPE mobile phone budget on NextG Wireless. This is about the size of Will Hughes’ salary for FY08

1:45pm Excel Pivot Tables!

2:00pm Uninstalling Internet Explorer 6.0 from Windows XP question

2:05pm selling lots of http://twitter.com/NickHodge .  FlickrVision / TwitterVision on big screen gets the oohs and ahhs. Altho’ its running from a mere Mac

2:30pm getting a LOLZ from http://lolbots.com/

2:45pm Popfly, Silverlight demo. Showing how to make your own block

3:00pm It could be over, not sure as there are still lots of people around

3:10pm Been surprising people all day not by selling stuff directly, but asking the question “what is AMP doing for the sub-25 year olds”. Making the age distinction (or being ageist) helps describe the digital natives, no matter the age. Provoking thought is critical for all us online customers of AMP. I’d prefer to deal with people via email. Believe it or not, its way more personal.

Scoble on Write-only Marketing

Robert Scoble, now earning a living dealing with PR people in the ‘valley, understands the difficulty of blogging from within large organisations. Robert refers to one of the 4000-or-so bloggers at Microsoft: David Weller.

The best way to learn about an organisation, its plans and products is with a search engine. Marketing and product teams are absolutely scared witless of the transparency that blogging provides. It’s not evilness, it’s the fear of informing the competition. Especially in the online world where the small is as powerful as the large, and products live and die within a 24-hour cycle.

Marketing and PR prefer a “write-only” internet. Sadly, the internet as we see it today is read and write, read and write.

Maybe Microsoft is not “ubercool” because it’s not obscure enough. Too much transparency, too many eyes, too many mouths. Please don’t forget for each one of these mouths, there is a matching set of ears. We are listening too. Bloggers write, and see the response, feed this back into the cycle of product development.

One wonders about other organisations, and if the “eyes” to “ears” ratio also applies. Read and Write.

Generating PDF via OpenXML, PowerShell…

Colleague in crime, and fellow Aussie (well, at least he’s naturalised now), Dave Glover has a post that crosses some old territories of mine.

Using Powershell, .Net, OpenXML and some code that I barely understand because it’s not Python; he’s been able to generate 60 to 70 documents per second.

Linking it here as it intersects the Adobe / Microsoft world.

Alive at Pamplona

Hey, Jeffa The Geek Stories has the scoop, before The New Inventors: watch the interview with the Alive Tec CEO Bruce Satchwell – that blue device attached to the patient is made on the Gold Coast!

Emailing Bruce last night, apart from complementing me on my sharp eyes and good memory – he also broke the news that Alive’s Web Developer, Tim Hilliard, is wearing the monitor for the running of the bulls in Pamplona in a couple of weeks.

Alive  have made a very crude map of the bull run route using Windows Live maps.

Map view

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=42.81795~-1.642793&style=r&lvl=17&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=11721060&&cid=62DC070579519371!130&encType=1

Birdseye view

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=r42pyngvwrkz&style=o&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=11721060&&cid=62DC070579519371!130&encType=1

Youtube video of the run in 2006

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTHHgxFOD_g

I hope this doesn’t end in tears.

Neil Finn Lyric Server goes Mashup

neilfinnblock

The Microsoft PopFly alpha can make you lose three days. In a good way. I haven’t had so much fun since, well, Photoshop maybe.

I’ve created a public PopFly “Block” called NeilFinnLyrics (now shared) this is bare, bare bones. It simply uses the new REST interface to the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server.  The Lyric Server supports SOAP/WSDL, and normal image insertion.

PopFly is social programming: drag and drop blocks onto the page, and create your own mashups of data. Adding Neil Finn’s Lyrics to the data that can be mashed up is just another step in getting the words out there. My love for Neil Finn knows almost no bounds.

neilfinnatic 004

Writing a Block with the current Alpha requires knowledge of JavaScript and XML. And a little bit of patience.

Come have a chat at ReMIX to discuss where you may also profit from PopFly. The first thing that should be created is a branded PopFly Superannuation Block. Thoughts?

Small Geek in the Wheel

More cluely people join the Australian DPE team. It’s way cool having smart friends on the team to balance my ignorance on all Microsoft matters important.

A Special shout out to the ever helpful Jeffa and Captain Coates.

confusing_hr

Frank seems to be relieving his end-of-year frustrations by changing my title in the HR system. It will be cool to see my first Microsoft Performance Evaluation with “Professional Geek”  A story to tell the grand kids.

Asserting Diplomatic Immunity in Subverting the Microsoft Hierarchy

After a series of presentations I gave to Principals of Victorian schools, I had described my role at Microsoft as a digital diplomat. This perfectly describes a part of my job as a bridge between the digital immigrants and digital natives. (Prensky, Marc: 2001)

Digital Diplomat

Now Frank Arrigo, my manager, has entered that into the internal Microsoft address/HR system as my title. What a laugh!

I wonder if I can claim diplomatic immunity when I go feral?

additional: … maybe not as feral as David Lemphers!

Questions from Brisbug, 17th June 2007

qf502

First flight to Brisbane, Sydney Airport 17th June 2007. Up at 4.30am, at the airport at 5.45am. Up so early, even the cats were surprised. Actually one of the cats didn’t even bother to come out and visit as it was so early. Motor into Windor to present to 25-30 members of the Brisbug User Group.

brisbugjun07 003

There were some unanswered questions, which I will tackle here:

Office Publisher 2007, breaking links. Break Forward Link: this is the process of removing the linkage from the current Text Box to the next, and retaining the text. From my quick research, Publisher 2007 does not change the functionality compared to previous versions.

Changing the selection/highlight colour in Word/Excel. This is relatively easy: Microsoft Word, as other well written Windows programs, respect the setting “Selected Item” colour in the Display Control Panel. This allows you to change the background colour that shows highlighted items, including text. Also note that Word 2007 has a zoom to make it easier to see text on screen.

OEM Windows XP Service Pack 2, Media Center. Install issue related to CDs with poor wording for insert CD (near bottom of chat transcript from May 2006). Seems like its an issue that is related to the wording of the install screen, not an error with the installer.

Links: Office 2007 file opening with previous versions of Office: If you have a mixture of Office 2007 and older versions on your home network, this http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&DisplayLang=en is the link to the plugin.

Update: 28th June 2007: Office 2003 vs. 2007 menus: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/06/27/office-2007-what-ever-happened-to-that-menu-option.aspx

Excel Finance function changes. The financial functions in Excel, apart from Nett Present Value and Compounding Interest, have sort of baffled me. From the help file:

Easy formula writing

The following improvements make formula writing much easier in Office Excel 2007.

Resizable formula bar   The formula bar automatically resizes to accommodate long, complex formulas, which prevents the formulas from covering other data in your worksheet. You can also write longer formulas with more levels of nesting than you could in earlier versions of Excel.

Function AutoComplete   With Function AutoComplete, you can quickly write the proper formula syntax. From easily detecting the functions that you want to use to getting help completing the formula arguments, you will be able to get formulas right the first time and every time.

Autocomplete assists with the writing of a formula. The most linked reference on the web for Financial function (now the how, more the why) is from here.