www.nickhodge.com

I have my new tab­let PC (which I’ve named Cap­tain Darling), and l am highly sur­prised how excel­lent the text recog­ni­tion works on Vista. And not only the text, it’s also the whole Aero inter­face: it lends itself to the pen. lt’s the whole UX. Win­dows flip 3D rocks with a pen!

My last exper­i­ence with text recog­ni­tion was attempt­ing to learn that weird Palm graf­fiti sys­tem. Before that I attemp­ted to yet that Apple New­ton stuff work­ing. And l haven’t trained the recog­nizer yet! The best part of the New­ton envir­on­ment was the pro­gram­ming lan­guage, New­ton­script. Dynamic, object ori­ented and very rich.

Now You ave prob­ably think­ing: you have to pur­chase a Tab­let PC thing. Nope, just avail your­self of a WACOM tab­let. Bingo. Vista Home Premium, Busi­ness, or Ulti­mate becomes a Tab­let PC.

What an inter­est­ing day with Win­dows Vista. It is cer­tainly “pol­ished” than Win­dows 2000 and XP; things seems to be placed in logical areas. Also took the oppor­tun­ity to install Adobe Pho­toshop CS3 Beta, which worked flaw­lessly — all run­ning suc­cess­fully in Par­al­lels! Two com­puters in one is a major time saver.

It was also time to swap to Microsoft Expres­sion Web, to com­plete the Microsoft-centric devel­op­ment envir­on­ment. Expres­sion Web cer­tainly feels more pol­ished than Visual Web 2005. I hope to spend more time in this app.
Clos­ing the loop on my Thursday exper­i­ment­a­tion with live.com and Vista Side­bar gad­gets: and the res­ult is a new little gad­get I am alpha test­ing: The Neil Finn Lyric Vista gad­get.

And it looks sorta like:

Please right-click, save-as a “.gad­get”, double-click and drag and enjoy the words of one of the world’s best lyr­i­cists. Com­ments and fea­ture requests more than welcome.

Best start­ing place for the pro­ver­bial Hello World exper­i­ence for Vista Side­bar gad­gets is http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

Daniel Moth, from Microsoft UK has an Excel­lent screen­cast on the Chan­nel 9 site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=255735.These gets you going on the first part: at least get­ting your gad­get run­ning and drag and droppable.

You will need to do a little more Javas­cript, as this trig­gers events that ensure your side­bar gad­get works

http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/ has some more up-to date info, as the MSDN site is a little behind on updat­ing. I won­der if Microsoft is going to release an Apple Dash­code style of mini devel­op­ment applic­a­tion for wid­gets? Hope so. Whilst the devel­op­ment pro­cess is no more dif­fi­cult than simple web page design; there are many pieces of wir­ing that could be made easier with a simple builder.

Time to get ser­i­ous on my res­ol­u­tions. Well, at least one any­way; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gad­get post­ing, and a gen­eral feel­ing that gad­gets are where it is at for non-professional pro­gram­mers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer cen­ter

Decision time: what to gad­get up? A Cricket gad­get is under­way. I am sure that one of the vari­ous national reli­gions of foot­ball will fol­low come March. For weather I can use my real win­dow to look out­side. (note: grow­ing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by look­ing through the win­dow at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyr­ics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small data­base, and ren­der­ing text smartly onto a ran­dom Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to con­fuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and down­load the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javas­cript. Easy. I have a loc­al­host web server run­ning, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, cod­ing music in the ears.

How to test out the gad­get? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of har­ness­ing your local gad­get to Inter­net Explorer and the live.com serv­ers to test out before embar­rass­ing your­self pub­licly! Hmm, seems like you can dir­ectly access the test har­ness with the cor­rectly formed URL. There are three ver­sions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gad­get test­ing Javas­cript har­nesses, Inter­net Explorer 7 and cross-site script­ing are in the midst of a con­spir­acy to stop test­ing. Time to hit the pro­duc­tion serv­ers with the code.

This post­ing on the new Gad­gets for­ums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of clean­ing up and renam­ing things as per the recom­mend­a­tions, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Fur­ther com­ment live.com gad­gets are simple to cre­ate. XML file mani­fest, or list of what’s import­ant; a CSS file to style your con­tent and the Javas­cript. This Javas­cript con­tains the logic of your gad­get which is essen­tially insert­ing HTML into the stream. It can gather text extern­ally to gen­er­ate this HTML into some­thing more inter­est­ing than a picture.

Panasonic does a deal with Con­nex­ion, spe­cific­ally so you can GSM/GPRS whilst Qantas flights.

Peter Jack­son to dir­ect “The Hob­bit” movie? Oh the horror!

Par­al­lels for Mac is now at build 1910. For those who want to keep their feet in both worlds, you can run Win­dows XP and Vista at the same time.

Vista RC1++ (alias build 5728), the “show and shine” / “spit and pol­ish” or most cor­rectly, the Rule#12 “Fit and Fin­ish” releases have started.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta (and the fol­lowup Beta 2 Tech­nical Release) is now avail­able for Aus­trali­ans to down­load. Aus­tralia was miss­ing for the first month or so.

I may have killed SVG off too soon, or at least taken an “Adobe-centric” view; and AndrewS com­ments that Search Engine Optim­isa­tion (SEO) and Flash is bogus. Read­ing some of the posts from the Flash­For­ward Con­fer­ence, the cur­rent, mod­ern mech­an­ism is to use SWFOb­ject.

Watch­ing the Par­al­lels web site, I noted that the engin­eers had pos­ted some more info, and a later build. 1896.2 I don’t know what the .2 means; prob­ably that .1 wasn’t quite right.

Wait­ing for a bet­ter video driver (to use up the 256Mb of the Mac­Book Pro, without resort­ing to Boot Camp)

Any­way:

Is Vista RC1 build 5600 installed and launched OK. Office 2003 installed per­fectly on RC1; now I am hunt­ing down an installer for Office 2007. Dontcha just love software?

Beta Tech­nical Refresh 2 on Beta 2 on Release Can­did­ate 1 on build 2 of Release Can­did­ate 2 on MacOS 10.4.7. Schwar­zwaelder Kirschtorte.

Speak­ing of cakes, Acrobat 8.0 is announced. I don’t have Acrobat 8 in any form, so I can­not add the cherries.

Down­load the 21Mb update to Par­al­lels (to build 1884)

Boot Win­dows XP to ensure all is OK before I install Vista. Win­dows XP “seems” to boot a little faster. Unable to quantify exactly how much.

Backup exist­ing 15Gb Win­dows XP .hdd, just in case. Cre­ate a new 15Gb image to install Vista into.

Pararl­lels settings:

Install into the fresh 15Gb image, 1024Mb of RAM alloc­ated to image. Vista is marked at (exper­i­mental) as OS. Installing onto a Mac­Book Pro with 2Gb of RAM and MacOS X 10.4.7

• Beta 2 Build 5384 DVD (thanks, Frank Arrigo at Microsoft Australia)
• Star­ted install at 11:05am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:35
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:43am
• Ques­tions (loc­a­tion, time, user­name) at 11:46am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:47am
• Into Vista Beta 2 at 11:50am
• Install Par­al­lels Tools from the Par­al­lels VM menu. Note that these don’t seem to be signed drivers, so ignore all the warn­ings and install away
• Manual Vista Restart
• On restart, if the “Wel­come Cen­ter” doesn’t appear, choose it from the Start menu. Click on Add Hardware.
• Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Also note that Vista also finds “PCI Bridge Device” which I asked Vista to ignore
• Restart; Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Note that the Net­work Adaptor set­tings for the Par­al­lels VM set “Bridged” worked OK

In short, it works. Note that I haven’t stress tested this; and the Par­al­lels guys say its exper­i­mental. Beta OS on exper­i­mental hyper­visor vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion. Your mileage may actu­ally turn into inchage quickly.

RC1 Note from 8:20pm

You can­not install Vista RC1 on Par­al­lels. Bug­ger. ISO, DVD burnt or upgrade from Beta 2 to RC1. None of these paths work.

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0×50434146, etc)

“The ACPI Bios in this sys­tem is not fully com­pli­ant to the spe­cific­a­tion. Please read the Readme.txt for pos­sible work­arounds, or con­tact your sys­tem vendor for an updated bios.”