www.nickhodge.com

(From Vista Magazine, June 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/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.

(from July 2007 Vista Magazine)

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.

ON-LINE CAMPAIGN TOOLS — OPPORTUNITY

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.

The Register, cer­tainly not the most pro-Microsoft web pub­lic­a­tion (note: sar­casm), today states: “Apple more closed than Microsoft”

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

Live Mesh Tech­nical Pre­view has been exten­ded to the Mac:

· 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 6^th 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.

http://www.bronwenclune.com/2008/10/17/if-you-thought-ms-and-open-source-dont-go-well-together-nick-hodge-wants-to-talk-to-you/

As heard from This Week on Chan­nel 9, here is a list of Free soft­ware and online Ser­vices.

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.