www.nickhodge.com

The FOSS com­munity has been con­cerned about the dif­fi­culties, pros and cons of includ­ing Mono-built applic­a­tions as a part of stand­ard Linux builds. Both Pro and Con.

Most recently, the Ubuntu Tech­nical Board pos­ted to their Ubuntu Developer Announce mail­ing list their exterm­ely prag­matic pos­i­tion on Mono applic­a­tions.

Today Microsoft exten­ded the Com­munity Prom­ise to the two under­ly­ing ECMA (and sub­sequent ISO) stand­ards that cover the CLI and C#. These prom­ises had already covered other EMCA stand­ards such as OpenXML, so it was quite logical that the CLI and C# would fol­low. Well, in a sane uni­verse anyway.

As the Mono pro­ject (and Moon­light) are based on these stand­ards, the Com­munity Prom­ise would logic­ally extend to these envir­on­ments.

Hope­fully now we can all just build cool soft­ware, not argue about licenses, pat­ents and other dis­trac­tions. Now let’s fix Outlook’s HTML ren­der­ing!.

(Thanks to John Bou­An­toun for the ori­ginal link, Peter Galli for the ori­ginal blog post, and Microsoft for doing the right thing.)

18 Weeks

18 weeks and 735 emails ago, Gian­paolo green-lighted my involve­ment on an Andrew Coates flight of fancy: What if we gave every paid del­eg­ate of TechEd a Net­book run­ning Win­dows 7? Ideas are easy, imple­ment­a­tion is hard.

By involve­ment read “Project Man­age­ment”. And, oh what a won­der­ful ride it has been.

18 weeks of dis­cus­sions, nego­ti­ations and thought. Wrap­ping your mind around all the side, non-technical implic­a­tions has taken the last 18 weeks to con­tract signature.

People man­age­ment, Fin­ance policy, legal agree­ments, terms+conditions, under­stand­ing internal policies. The funny thing is that I’ve done all this before dur­ing the last 3 years of my Adobe sales man­age­ment life. The internal Microsoft “stuff” was just my pre­vi­ous Adobe exper­i­ence, with a dif­fer­ent consequence.

Big thanks to Jorke Odolphi for being my sound­ing board. A calm shoulder to cry on. And think­ing of things I didn’t anti­cip­ate. Thanks, Jorke!

What is new is the Pro­ject Man­age­ment aspect. Tech­nical Integ­ra­tion is going to be rel­at­ively easy: 2000+ high qual­ity Net­books with Win­dows 7 is a doddle. Jeff Alex­an­der is tak­ing point on the image build. David Haysom and David Con­nors are the logist­ics and install team leads.

Pro­ject Man­age­ment not so much of a doddle. David Haysom will assist here. Right, David?

10 Weeks

The fun­nest part of this pro­ject begins now: one aspect is the logist­ics of get­ting 58 palettes of Net­books loaded for the TechEd delegates.

The other major aspect is what hap­pens with the Net­books. Here, it’s the Microsoft com­munity aspect: what can we do, as a Microsoft community?

Like Michael Rees, Kath­ryn Green­hill asked me to list “web 2.0″ things that Microsoft has avail­able to provide some bal­ance to a Mur­doch Uni­ver­sity event.

By web 2.0, Kath­ryn meant: “To me, Microsoft plays really well in the large cor­por­ate ap space and is very good at that … but if I want to show people about the con­ver­sa­tion, re-mix, open access, inter­op­er­able web, then MS is not the first port of call…”

I can only agree with Kathryn’s state­ment. Microsoft hides all its cool web 2.0 things under a bushel. In fact, the prob­lem prob­ably is that the cool­ness are hid­den under many bushels, all over its web foot­print. But hey, I am not from mar­ket­ing; I am a mere Pro­fes­sional Geek. That is also why these lis­ted are free. Some are even Free-as-in-Freedom, too.

I think it import­ant that people get to hear, see and try altern­at­ives before default­ing to “the known and safe.” And yes, I real­ise can work both ways.

Another per­spect­ive, and my own opin­ion, is that Microsoft should not seek to do everything on the web. For instance, cre­at­ing a “Microsoft Twit­ter Ulti­mate Edi­tion 2010″ is stu­pid. Nor should Microsoft seek to pur­chase every cool com­pany that pops on the web. Again, that is my opin­ion. And I am the low­est on the low of the totem pole; a.k.a Indi­vidual Con­trib­utor or Sac­rifical Unnamed Ensign (ref: Star Trek)

Here is an edited ver­sion of my email response; draf­ted quickly and by no means exhaust­ive. If you have other cool examples, just post a com­ment and I’ll update the list.

• http://Office.live.com for online mini-Sharepoint site for team col­lab­or­a­tion. Office.live.com is a good place to start where people will use desktop apps for a full exper­i­ence. Don’t for­get other online app tools like Edit­Grid and Zoho.
• Don’t for­get bing.com & asso­ci­ated sites (includ­ing Pho­to­synth, Vir­tual Earth) as viable altern­at­ives to google. Lib­rar­i­ans use all sources available
• www.worldwidetelescope.org
• Live Is more than spaces (spaces.live.com) – there are photo stor­age, file stor­age (sky­drive, as men­tioned by Michael Rees in his post), and live.com integ­ra­tion into twit­ter, face­book and other online social media services.
• There is a Cre­at­ive Com­mons plu­gin for Microsoft Office 2007 to per­mit cor­rect (cc) for remix stuff out of spread­sheets, word etc http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D1DDBDC8-627F-415A-9B0A-97362BC9B480&displaylang=en
• Other remix things: apps.live.com is a single source for our desktop apps, includ­ing Live­Writer (don’t for­get that Live Writer has a whole host of plu­gins: http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?c=0&bt=9&pl=8&st=5 ) and video edit­ing stuff, too. There are Wiki­pe­dia, FIickr, Twit­ter and all sorts of plu­gins. Office 2007 SP2 has both OpenXML and ODF (for Open­Of­fice) support.
• Don’t for­get that the most-used online con­ver­sa­tion tool in Aus­tralia is Live Mes­sen­ger (MSN) which does video + audio con­fer­en­cing, too
• RSS into out­look… hmm, pos­sible but not some­thing I’d recom­mend. Too clunky
• Don’t for­get IE8; with accel­er­at­ors and webslices http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 these use open formats to work
• http://visitmix.com/Lab has some cool tools, includ­ing Oomph with is a Micro­formats toolkit (works in all browsers, uses jQuery) … I use it on my blog. Licensed under MsPL (open source,  OSI approved, BSD-like)
• Another good, slightly techy tool for Win­dows users is http://www.microsoft.com/web with the Web Plat­form installer. Per­mits install­a­tions of PHP, Word­Press etc on your Win­dows machine without being a rocket scientist

Why not try mak­ing a new cloud applic­a­tion on Microsoft Azure with PHP. And poten­tially #win?

More details are on the New.CloudApp() web site.

Microsoft and Open Source, Unhandled Exceptions.

Microsoft and Open source? Isn’t that like cats and dogs liv­ing together? Dis­cuss and learn what (where and why) Microsoft is embra­cing Open source. See which Microsoft tech­no­logy can pos­it­ively affect your Open source based pro­jects, and how you can con­trib­ute. We would also like to hear your unfiltered feed­back on how we should con­trib­ute, too. Come along, bring your col­leagues, have some light refresh­ments and enjoy a relaxed conversation.

At the recent WebDU con­fer­ence, Jorke and I sat down with two groups of attendees to hear warts-and-all, on the ground stor­ies. Simple ques­tions and deep answers provided an insight that a Power­Point (or Key­note) present­a­tion gives. Listen­ing hurts, hard.

Extend­ing this into open source even­ings seems like a good way to go. No need to shill open source.

Register an pop along. Vent at us in more than 140 char­ac­ters. See you there.

DM me at @nickhodge

Only 5. ALL GONE!!

Once received, I need a pic­ture of you in said T-shirt – in a pub­lic place. Please be wear­ing more than the T-shirt supplied.

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>

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.

Back­ground

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.

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.

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-blogging”

Thanks to the pre­vi­ous owner of this real estate, Frank Arrigo. Frank is the per­son­i­fic­a­tion of “geek”, 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.