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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/nickhodge

Being a master of your own digital identity is a new life skill. Similar to riding a bike, driving a car or learning how to read – ensuring that your digital information is protected is paramount.

Recently I attended a corporate event where the senior manager of IT of a large bank was presenting. As he was talking about the bank’s use of technology, I coincidentally received what the industry terms a phishing email. Phishing is where nefarious criminals attempt to use electronic means to steal your login ids, passwords for financial institutions and other valuable online identifiers.

If you have email, you are likely to have received one of these in your Outlook, too. The email would have contained strange statements about “changing your account settings” or similar.

For younger people, social networks that once existed via the phone, are now online using instant messaging (IM) applications like MSN Live Messenger. Parents and teachers express surprise at how kids connect both to their school friends; and like-minded friends all over the world. Long gone are the days of pen-friends in different countries.

Banking, superannuation, communication, health, photos, messaging, telephone, government information – services that we all use to live in our society – are online, or fast moving to primarily online.

Where do you learn to be safe online? And more importantly, how do we ensure the younger ones in society are safe, and learn the “rules of the road”?

As much as software and networking technology adapts and adds barriers to cyber-criminals, sadly the state of human nature results in a continual process of development to block the nasties. Learning to carefully question what you read and see on the internet is as important as watching other drivers on the road.

NetAlert (http://www.netalert.net.au/ ) has a good starting resource for the younger audience. Netty for the 2–7 year olds and CyberQuoll for the 8–12 year olds — online characters and cartoons for the young.

We cannot ignore the internet and global connectivity, and learning how to behave in the online community is a life skill. Be safe out there, and enjoy the views from the cyber-highway.

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/nickhodge

Growing up on a farm in country South Australia, I remember the smell of the work shed. The work shed is not where vehicles or animals were stored; it is where the welding, banging, fixing, wiring and general repairs were made. The smells of oil, grease, petrol, arc welding and seasons wafted out of the nooks and crannies also containing bolts of unknown vintage.

Out the back of the shed, engines from long decommissioned cars and trucks stood idle underneath the gum trees and galahs. In summer, the shed was a cool refuge from the 35 degree heat; and in winter a shelter from the rain and wind.

Farmers fix all their own equipment. From petrol and diesel engines to swapping the shears on ploughs. Blacksmith, engine mechanic, electronic technician, radio engineer: all bases were covered with a myriad of tools and bit logically organized in controlled chaos.

Sheds migrated to the backyards of many suburban houses at the same time as the population moved to the quarter acre block. Albeit smaller than their country cousins, the same smells of two-stroke petrol for the mower and a half-repaired washing machine from Auntie Joyce usually shared the same corner as a family of mice who immigrated from next door. The pool shed containing noxious chemicals just didn’t suit the poor noses of the domestic mouse.

The shed is a place of sanctuary for the blokes of the family. A hidden esky or better yet, a small fridge, contains a collection of beers and after the barbeque is turned off – the men retreat to the shed to talk about whatever men talk about. Their castle, the house, may have a spare room – but the kids have taken this over with their board games, or the wife has started a home business and the racks of stock just don’t mix with a good yarn and stories.

Also in the shed, are what are called “weekend shed projects”. Apart from Auntie Joyce’s washing machine – there is a half-completed rocking horse – promised to the kids for their 5^th birthday, but never completed; a random invention for the garden that just didn’t work and a bicycle or two from the various lengths of the kids. Each of the bikes has something wrong: missing seat, flat tyre or a handle bar that’s found its way into the washing machine. These projects are never completed as there will always be time at retirement to potter around the shed.

Sheds, and weekend shed projects, still exist in the online age. The human imagination has taken us blokes from painting animals in a cave to sorting out the 6000 digital images we captured on our last trip to North Queensland.

What is your weekend shed project? I’ll give you a tip: start now. Retirement is just too far away.

While our keynote and discussion will be invaluable to anyone interested in democracy and communication in the first half of this century I also wanted the forum to be an opportunity for a look at practical examples of new technology tools.

To that end I’d like to invite any developers, web 2.0 or social networking activists with ideas for, or examples of, on-line tools that can be used in political campaigning and who would like to demonstrate their ideas (as a proof of concept or developed application) to the attendees at the forum to contact me.

Microsoft not interested in how the tools were or are developed, what platform or language the tool was or would be developed with as long as the idea is original, is yours, and you are prepared to demonstrate the concept or tool to the audience. It would be preferable if the idea were capable of wide usage but that is a matter for you.

• Up to three ideas will be selected for demonstration.
• Financial support will be provided to get to Canberra.

For more information, please visit the Australian Government Affairs blog or contact me.

Transitioning to Apple-bashing is a simple journalistic mechanism to attract eyeballs. I am going to ignore the anti-Apple sentiment.

The interesting statements are: “however, the Microsoft of today, while not totally reformed, is a lot more open and well behaved than it was, say, 10 years ago.”

One highlighted recent ‘negative’ on Microsoft is the OpenXML as an ISO specification.

Personally, I am a proponent of open file formats. Completely open specifications, no patent encumbrances, for all to implement read/write and change. It is very important that our descendants are able to read and write the digital files we are creating today. By publishing the file formats for our binary and XML out of Microsoft Office is an excellent start. ISO puts the format in the hands of the world.

Yesterday Microsoft released more toolkits for OpenXML support (including Java)and an OpenXML/ODF interop kits:

• Open XML Document Viewer
• Open XML/ODF Translator Web site
• POI Java SDK for Open XML

My advice is to not listen to the idle rhetoric of any vendor: watch the code and see what ships. That is the ultimate test.

From Wired 16.12 “Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode”

“I think we’re going to take a lot of people by surprise” – Ray Ozzie, TechReady8

Steven witnessed Ray’s presentation at Microsoft’s internal TechReady8 conference: a rare treat for an outside journalist. What he saw was Ray Ozzie presenting at his finest.

Before joining Microsoft, I spoke to Mike Seyfang. One of my reasons for joining was to be a part of the Ray Ozzie smartness. In my first year inside the firewall, Ray Ozzie’s teams were very stealthy. Quiet.

At PDC late this year, Ray didn’t present quite as passionately (maybe not so scare the developer-centric audience) – but he started to publically show his vision for the future of computing.

Microsoft has moved from the “PC” centric model. This shift started with the hiring of Dave Cutler, one of the Digital architects of VAX/VMS. From his work at Microsoft came Windows NT. A server-grade operating system that arrived on mass consumer/business desktops 9 years later with Windows XP.

Windows NT, and its successors, did breed a family of robust server operating systems; and applications that moved Microsoft into the heart of the enterprise: the server room. This dramatically shifted Microsoft’s product strategy, and how it engaged with large organisations. No longer just the menacing PC on the desktop to an enterprise IT architecture, from soup to nuts. And the revenue followed.

In the midst of this shift from desktop to server room, Microsoft has seemed to ignore the Internet. standardised protocols, freedom of choice, open source, creative commons licensing, disruptive business models, loosely coupled applications. Microsoft only noticed when its enterprise-customer defensive wall was attacked. Like guerrilla attacks: the skirmishes were many, but the barbs were survivable. Revenue still flows.

Witness Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan (for the Greeks, British, USSR and Coalition) and Pictish-lands (for the Romans) : guerrilla warriors ultimately win.

Ray Ozzie is the navigator that is changing Microsoft’s course from within. The fleet of supertankers that is Microsoft cannot turn quickly: unless facing imminent death as Apple did in 1995/6, large organisations have a momentum that is difficult to unwind.

We are witnessing the same shift today with a move into the cloud. Simply put: the platform is a collection of loosely coupled devices connected by the internet. Not PCs on desks, nor servers in racks in every organisation around the world.

The IT company most effected by this change in platform is Microsoft.

Ozzie felt that after losing its antitrust case, Microsoft had tempered its bullying behavior. “This is a different company,” he now says. “It doesn’t feel evil; it doesn’t feel inconsistent with my core beliefs.”

The fleet is turning. Ozzie has navigating the direction. We’re off.

Cloud Follow-ups:

 

• The intersection of social media and the cloud, Steve Gillmor, TechCrunchIT

· To get access to the Mac client, sign in to www.mesh.com, click Add Device, and then click the “Limited Mac Tech Preview now available” link underneath the Install button. If we haven’t exceeded the limit for Mac clients, you’ll get a confirmation dialog, and then Mac will show up under the available list of devices when you choose Add Device from the ring. (MacOS X 10.5.1 or higher required)

At the same time, Microsoft has released a client for Windows Mobile 6.x:

To get access to the Windows Mobile 6.x client, click on one of the following links (US residents, UK residents). Sign in with your LiveID, and you’ll be redirected to the device ring where you’ll see a link to “Use Live Mesh for mobile devices.” Alternately, once you’ve signed in this way, the mobile client should be available for download by pointing your phone’s browser to http://m.mesh.com

I’ve been using the Mac client for some weeks now, and I am mightily impressed. Being able to take a photo on your Windows Mobile and have the resulting images “magically” appear in your devices is way cool.

I have a small collection of invitations for Sydney based developers to see Steve Ballmer live.

For those, like me, who are not in Sydney on the 6th of November, there will be a web stream of the event.

As this event is post-PDC, so you are assured of some interesting new Microsoft-y things: all developer related. And no, Steve has not leaked them all already.

Email Me at nhodge@microsoft.com to claim your invite. Limited numbers.

The above list is “free as in beer”

Microsoft, and third party coders, have a whole bunch of cool bits and pieces over on Codeplex.com – which now supports SVN. C’mon gitsupport

Codeplex projects I follow:

• IronPython
• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Phalanger

My first chunk of heavy code on MSDN (yes, that MSDN!!) is a whole lotta PHP to SQLServer. Microsoft, and the world, is a funny old place.