Cool

Win an XBox 360 Elite by playing with IE8

Colin Angus Mackay — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:01:55 GMT

Okay – You have to play with it in a certain way, but you can win an XBox 360 Elite. What you have to do is create one of them accelerator, web slice or visual search provider thingamabobs.

Even if you don’t win the XBox you could still be showcased in various Future Publishing titles.

For more information, links to a tutorials and videos to get you started, visit Mike Ormond’s blog: Fame and Fortune await those who play with IE8.

MSDN Library now has a low bandwidth version

Colin Angus Mackay — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:44:40 GMT

This is fantastic news. MSDN has always been slow and now Microsoft have produced a low bandwidth version designed for travelling developers on slower 3G and HSDPA connections. However, it will probably be my default view from now on. It is much cleaner and easier to read and, naturally, it is much faster to load which is what I want when I need to look something up. I don't want to lose the train of my thought while waiting for MSDN to load up.

If you are as excited about this as I am then there is more information here: Launching low bandwidth (loband) Beta for long haul! or you can just jump directly to the low bandwidth version of MSDN.

NOTE: In the top right corner is a link to "Persist low bandwidth view". If you click that any existing searches will be displayed in the low bandwidth version.

Microsoft Surface

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:49:33 GMT

Last weekend I was in Reading for the UK and Ireland MVP Open Day. And one of the highlights of the day was being invited to the Microsoft Technology Center at Microsoft's Thames Valley Park campus and to able to have a wee play on a Microsoft Surface device.

I'm sure you've seen the videos of it and it looks as if it is really cool. But, the videos that are shown are all aimed at how cool the device is to use. They are designed to sell it to hotels and casinos and other companies that could use it to entertain or sell to their customers. How cool would it be to go along to a pub quiz and have your team answer on a surface device rather than on a paper form. The quiz could have extra features that you can't have in pub quizzes currently. The device could be used to show video or pictures to the quiz takers. In a tie-breaking situation the devices could record how quickly a team answered the questions and the tie is broken by the quickness of the responses. In fact there are a ton of things that you could do with it.

Now, I did see some of the cool applications for the surface device, such as the one to the left, but I also saw something that was way better to a geeky software developer like me. I saw some of the diagnostic side of it. I have to say that I'm really impressed.

First off lets start with what the device itself sees (see right). It works by having a bunch of video cameras on the underside pointing up at the surface. The cameras aren't far reaching and can only really make out things that are within a few millimetres, or actually touching, the surface. As you pull your hand away the image gets faint very quickly. There is the ability to see what the cameras see in inverse (because if you have your hand touching the surface then the you won't see the image because your hand is obscuring it). As you can see from the image on the right the hand that is touching the device is very clear, where as the others that are perhaps only a few centimetres above aren't very visible, if at all. This means that any user who is animated about what is on the screen and is gesticulating during conversation is unlikely to accidentally affect the application unless they are near enough to almost touch it.

That's all very well and good, but what about writing applications. I don't want to have to interpret camera images. That's fine because all that is wrapped up in a framework that gives you useful information. For example, the picture to the left shows the information the Surface device feeds to the application developer when a person touches their finger to it. It is clever enough to identify the shape as a finger tip, it knows where it is on the surface and it can tell you the orientation. The fingers can be used in a similar way to a mouse, but with much more versatility.

One of the key points about the Microsoft Surface device is that it is multi-touch. As you can see from the image on the right the device has successfully recognised that there are 5 fingers touching it (no pedantic comments about thumbs, please) and there are 5 contacts in total (I'll come to the other types of contact in a moment). Under each contact point it displays a green oval representing where the touch is happening.

A blob is an object that is too large to be a finger is placed on the device, whereas a tag is something that has a recognisable tag attached to it. The tag identifies a portable device to the Surface. In the image on the left the phone has a tag attached to it. It allows the Surface to identify it. It can also determine the orientation of the phone (as can bee seen by the white arrow drawn on the Suface). Once the Surface recognises the device it can then interact with it.

If all this looks a bit much, it isn't. A Microsoft Surface device is simply running Microsoft Windows Vista and the applications are written in WPF with an extra bit of goo that allows multi-touch interaction in an almost Minority Report kind of way, if only it were wall mounted and 2m by 3m in size.

All in all, it was an excellent demo, if a bit short. I would have liked to ask more questions about the SDK and actually seen how some of the applications were written (but that's just me - I like to read code). If you are lucky enough to be going to the PDC then Microsoft will be releasing the Surface SDK so there will be an opportunity to find out more about the Microsoft Surface and how to write applications for it.

For more photos of the Microsoft Surface, please visit my Flickr site.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,microsoft surface,sdk,software development,mvp,multi-touch

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:16:05 GMT

I just got sent a link to a website called Wordle which creates "Beautiful Word Counds". It is quite good fun and I ran it over the Scottish Developer's May newsletter to see what it would come up with and this was the result:

(Click for larger version)

Cool switch snippet

Colin Angus Mackay — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:22:35 GMT

I was watching one of the MSDN Screencasts today and Mike Taulty put in a switch statement that pre-populated itself with valid values for each of the case statements within the switch. I hadn't seen this before so I investigated further (in other words, I emailed Mike and asked him what he did). It turns out this is a feature that has been in since Visual Studio 2005 and I'd only just noticed.

Essentially, if you are switching on an enumerator the snippet will expand with all the case statements created for you as you can see by the animation below. To access this, follow these steps

Type "switch", the intellisense will show the word "switch" with the torn document icon, indicating it is a snippet.
Press the tab key twice to expand the snippet, this will also highlight the text "switch_on".
Change the "switch_on" text to the name of the variable on which you want to switch.
Press return twice, this will further expand the switch statement filling in all the cases from the enumerator.

For an example, see the animation below:

Technorati Tags: switch,snippet,visual studio

OTT Christmas Decorations

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 15:06:25 GMT

More festive diversions with this display of synchronised lights on someone's house.

Technorati Tags: video,christmas,lights,display

A fantastic cartoon on SQL Injection Attacks

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:43:10 GMT

Just in time for the SQL Injection Attack micro presentation that I'm doing.

From: xkcd.org

Technorati Tags: SQL Injection Attack , cartoon , xkcd

Forum Signatures

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:36:17 GMT

Due to a slight problem with my email I'm currently downloading 14000 emails over the last few years. I don't know why Thunderbird suddenly decided to download everything agian, but I spotted some emails that I thought I'd deleted but are obviously still on the server.

Some of these emails were from forum posts made many years ago and I spotted some rather funny or thought provoking signatures in there. So, I'd like to share them:

Disclaimer: Because of heavy processing requirements, we are currently using some of your unused brain capacity for backup processing. Please ignore any hallucinations, voices or unusual dreams you may experience. Please avoid concentration-intensive tasks until further notice. Thank you.

"The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything." - Joel Spolsky

"I still maintain that seeing a nipple is far less disturbing than seeing someone get their brains blown out." -- Chris Maunder

'Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p'

I am an atheist only because fences are uncomfortable and the other side is filled with flames.

"In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength but perseverance." (H. Jackson Brown)

A working Program is one that has only unobserved bugs

I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted paychecks

Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas A. Edison

When all else fails, there's always delusion. - Conan O'Brien

I'm going to patent thought. I have yet to see any prior art.

Let's put "civil" back in "civilization"

'Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.' - The Doctor: The Wheel in Space

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little past them into the impossible.--Arthur C. Clark

VB is like programming with crayons.

"Your village called - They're missing their idiot."

Open the fridge door, scream, and everything that doesn't run into the corner is safe for eating.

Memes don't exist - tell your friends

SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue 0
0 rows returned

"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar

"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." - Bertrand Russell

"The different versions of the UN*X brand operating system are numbered in a logical sequence: 5, 6, 7, 2, 2.9, 3, 4.0, III, 4.1, V, 4.2, V.2, and 4.3" - Alan Filipski

Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"

My code isn't buggy. Those are all fleatures.

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. (Douglas Adams)

Chocolate Crunch Cake

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 11:44:03 GMT

One of my favourite sweet foods: Chocolate Crunch Cake

I used to make this as a child and I only just rediscovered the recipe

Basic Ingredients:

400ml sweetend condensed milk
100g butter or margarine
200g plain cooking chocolate
200g milk or white chocolate
300g Rich Tea Biscuits

Instructions:

Slowly Melt the milk, butter and chocolate in a non-stick pan on a low heat.
Crush the biscuits roughly (so there are various sizes of chunks) into the pan
Mix until the chocolate mix covers the crushed biscuits
Pour into the flat baking tray (lining the tray with grease proof paper will help get the set mix out later)
Allow to cool then refrigerate for an hour or two. This is the base
Slowly melt the milk or white chocolate then pour over the base and return to the fridge.
Once the chocolate has hardened it can be cut into squares and served.

Variations:

You can add a handful of rasins (or other small dried fruit), crushed nuts (unsalted) or seeds to the mix at the same time as adding the biscuits.

Reducing the quanity of butter will make the mix more solid, so it sets quicker, but it become harder to spread evenly in the flat mixing tray. Increasing the amount of butter will make the mix easier to spread out in to the tray, but it will make it more difficult to set.

It is possible to use benecol butter (the one suitable for baking - not all are), light rich tea biscuits and lite condensed milk for a slightly healthier version.

If you have an exceptionally sweet tooth milk chocolate can be used for the base, but it will be very sweet.

Tags: recipe chocolate cruch cake cake chocolate sweet

A wooden marble based binary adding machine

Colin Angus Mackay — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 23:25:51 GMT

This has to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.

If you want to read more about this project and others like it then visit http://woodgears.ca

Tags: binary marble wood adding machine