Just a quick look at Windows Live Writer

This is a quick post using Live Writer, which I hadn’t seen before. I shall just do a quick note and then add a couple of pictures. I hope that I might use this to make uploading pictures easier and I may try it internally on the Sharepoint site blog. Let’s see how easy it is. I didn’t download the whole bunch of Live utiities as I’m on Vista with this machine, so I don’t want to break anything in use at the moment.

This is my son’s current guitar collection. The white one is an Ibanez, with a signature of Paul Gilbert on the neck. I think the Jackson soloist is my favourite, but the ESP looks great as it’s a bit slimmer. He also has another ‘Shattered Glass’ soloist with a Floyd Rose bridge but wants to sell that one (£1k if you have money left over from Christmas!)

View Full Album

Let’s see how this appears on the site.

Well it was easy enough but all the pictures are uploaded to Windows Live site, so I needed to use my Live id to login. They were big pictures (thanks to these modern cameras), so they took a minute or two to upload, but it was painless for me. Problem is that they now take the user to a Windows Live page to view them. There’s no gallery type javascript plugin to view them as a pop up window, even though they are in an album grouping.  They also seem to have a limit on the size which doesn’t show the guitars off to their best.

I might stick to the old way of doing things. I shall try and add a video here later, to see how that is handled and maybe a plugin to add code segments. This edit was published easily. It knows just what to do with any changes. Easy but not to my desired format. I might look at it more for the coding side and links to sharepoint using the plugins at http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8. Could be a quick solution for the code type blogs.

Chyron and Lyric update

I had a lightning tour of the new version of Lyric software for the Chyron character generator last week, from Kristy Weir and Dave Wade. It’s an impressive box with a lot of functionality that most users might never see. We’re looking at its use in a News environment, with many different types of graphics to handle. It needs to be comprehensive, but still easy to automate and operate. The Lyric software tries to cover both 2D and 3D environments and copes pretty well, but there will be times when the combination of 2D and 3D will become complicated.

VizRT – version 3 update

These are some notes on the Viz v3 update. It was a talk at the Viz offices with Lars Henriksen and Bernd Riedewald; with customers from Alston Elliot, Formula1, Sky, designer techs really.

We had a day or two of talking through the advantages of the latest version of VizRT software and why we should update. Previous versions of Viz3 have had some performance problems, but now that most plugins have been re-written it should be faster than the old version. The database has been re-written and is a complete in-house solution. This should be faster and more efficient; we shall see if this has brought any problems with it. Some of the older plugins have been built in to the new version and there are plans to increase speed by converting to 64-bit version. The transition to Windows 7 will have to come next year, since XP will lose support from Microsoft by the end of 2010.

Some notes on Microsoft dev at PDC09

I decided to watch the live PDC09 keynote by spending my evening with other similarly minded developers. Microsfot had invited us down to the Delfina restaurant at London Bridge to watch it socially, with a beer and a chat. Apart from a few issues with not being able to see content designated as US-only (why would they use that for an international presentation?) the evening was full of wonderment as the new version of software were discussed, Windows 7 of course, Silverlight, the web tools and Visual Studio.

Food and atmosphere was good as well. Recommend trying it.

devdays with Carsonified and StackOverflow

Had a pleasant day looking at a few different languages at Kensington Town Hall again. Organized by Carsonified and StackOverflow, so sounded interesting and Darren Kenny offered me his ticket, so too good to miss really. I did sit there at one point, thinking that I should really be doing some work instead of hearing about languages that I haven’t enough time and energy for, but overall it was quite an inspirational day.

Enterprise messaging

We’ve had a look at some of the twitter-like systems that are based around enterprise usage. This is just a quick knee-jerk reaction from our experience over the last couple of weeks. We wanted to use a system internally, to see if there was any advantages over email, and perhaps to think about how to take advantage of some of the social momentum that is around at the moment.

Initially we used an installation of Laconica, now StatusNet, which is a twitter clone that runs internally on a Unix system and then we setup corporate sites at both Yammer and Present.ly to see the advantages the full connection to the web would bring. It will be interesting to monitor their usage over the next couple of months as we try them for a project or two.

Online project management tools

I’ve just been looking at a couple of online project management systems for use within the company. Basecamp offers a free, single project plan, without storage. TeamWorkPM offers a free 2 project and limited storage option. I’ve looked at both and their APIs and subsidiary third party applications.

C# Web services from an Oracle database

This is another post about web services; previous one did a quick hello world app and talked more about setting up IIS on an internal web server. This one assumes a mapped drive onto the server, to which we shall upload the service apps. I’m using the F: drive in this case. The folder has been created previously. I’m using VS2008. I’m going to create a test web service to bring back XML from an Oracle database. I’ll give an example of both a SQL statement being used and a stored procedure.

The pdf of this page is OracleDBservices

Future of Web Apps – day 2

Second day (First day here) warm up was given to Britt Selvitelle (@bs) from Twitter. A tough task given that there was a late PayPal party the previous evening. Twitter are now thinking of the next step; they want more developer involvement so they announced the twitter labs site for this. They are producing their own javascript library. They will be advertising apps on their web site and developers may be able to integrate more closely to the twitter website. At some point they will open source the software stack, so that your twitter pages will be more flexible. Not too many details on the labs site or the API, but they promised to email details of the beta to the FOWA list.

Simon Wardley gave a talk at the Cloud Expo a month or two back and it was just as enjoyable second time round. Simon, from Canonical, is involved with pushing the Amazon EC2 standard into Eucalyptus on Ubuntu servers. An in-house cloud if you like and open source. Hard to write down the humourous way that he talked around the ubiquity of computing and the way that cloud computing will become commoditised. As demand increases and improvements in facilities occur, cloud computing will be everywhere. The transition will move from the current confusion, through management, trust, security to transparency of the services. What concerns him is the need to have an easy way to switch between services, data transfer etc. By moving to the standard for the EC2 API he says that this will help form de facto standards, which will make these problems easier. Componentisation will (vastly) increase the speed of development.

Future of Web Apps in Kensington – day 1

Another year rolls around to one of my favourite conferences, Future of Web Apps organised by Carsonified. It’s a little smaller this year and returns to the previous venue at the Kensington Town Hall. This is a comfortable size but previous problems with wifi were repeated on the first day. Intermittent though so I didn’t hear too many complaints. There is only one stream this year so we didn’t have to read through all the summaries to decide which to attend. Nice and simple was what I needed as I had been quaffing cocktails til the early hours with a few of the Microsoft web guys. They appeared at the show as well, so it was good to see that they’d survived. (Second day is here)