Nick Hodge, nickhodge.com, Professional Geek, Microsoft

What does Transparency mean to me?

Nick Hodge — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:43:18 -0700

I mulled long and hard over the content of this post over on techedbackstage.net. A discussion with a few people, and reading to through with Jorke cleared my mind a little.

Should I reveal we had a medium size hiccup in the first day of netbook handout at TechEd? C'mon, corporations don't make errors. Well, they sorta do - but never admit it. Problems are couched in corporate speak. All is well. Look over here.

My personal concept of transparency and honesty is telling it like it is. Whilst I don't state the actual number of machines needing re-imaging: we have yet to get more data tomorrow to be more factual: telling the story as it is, warts and all, is critical. It's closer to home here as I am responsible for the Netbooks. In retrospect, I feel I should have thought of the human factors when in production-line mode. Also, increasing the Q&A rate considering the tightness of the handout: I should have thought of that, too.

I'd like to put a big thanks out to Jorke who implemented techedbackstage.net. We really hope that you guys in IT get something out of this transparency.

Sometimes it's painful to admit your mistakes and say sorry. Thankfully, I work in an organisation that respects the need for this level of honesty. And a great team of people who are pulling to make it right for customers.

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The long search for the perfect WPF Twitter Client. Over.

nhodge — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:44:40 -0700

Twitter; Facebook and friends is the place where I spend most of my day. For work and play.

Separating work and play is difficult in single-column twitter clients. Enter mutliple columns, filtering as base requirements for my perfect twitter client.

Stuck in closed-source TweetDeck; or moving through a myriad of AIR based applications. Subjecting myself to unknown security issues, slow performance – and no ability to contribute – has frustrated me no end.

Then @aeoth create MahTweets. It’s MS-PL. It’s extensible (via MEF). It has IronRuby for scriptable extensibility.

It is awesome.

Use it. Contribute. Let’s make the world’s best WPF Twitter Client.

The long search for the perfect WPF Twitter Client. Over.

Nick Hodge — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:45:03 -0700

Twitter; Facebook and friends is the place where I spend most of my day. For work and play.

Separating work and play is difficult in single-column twitter clients. Enter mutliple columns, filtering as base requirements for my perfect twitter client.

Then @aeoth create MahTweets. It’s MS-PL. It’s extensible (via MEF). It has IronRuby for scriptable extensibility.

It is awesome.

Use it. Contribute. Let’s make the world’s best WPF Twitter Client.

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#auteched week begin

Nick Hodge — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:00:51 -0700

After 6 months of planning, lost sleep, deep thinking - TechEd with the Windows 7 / Netbooks coming to fruitition.

In a week's time, it will all be over. I really wonder what next weekend will look like.

In the meantime, this is the view from my hotel room:

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Twenty Years Ago Today

Nick Hodge — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:07:39 -0700

Twenty years ago today, Avril and I were married. And we still are happily married. BTW: didn’t Avril look totally beautiful here?

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Where is Nick?

Nick Hodge — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:24:59 -0700

As TechEd 2009 approaches, you will see me blogging over on TechEd Backstage

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Open Source Goodness Comes in Threes

nhodge — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:24:30 -0700

Hyper-V Instrumentation via Linux driver, source code contribution (GPLv2)
Microsoft Live@EDU integration for Moodle via a plug in, PHP source code contribution (GPLv2)
Gestalt. <script language=”ruby | python”> client-side scripting (MsPL)

Get a Backstage Pass

nhodge — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:44:39 -0700

As TechEd 2009 approaches, there are many people scurrying around behind the scenes ensuring the Windows 7/Mini-notebooks experience succeeds.

Andrew Dugdell is tracking the process from the outside; and Jorke has a new blog with indepth details from the inside.

I am merely the systems engineer now. Watching and carefully (lightly) directing all the smart engineers to do their thing.

Bookmark/RSS follow these sites and see what it takes to make 2,300 HPs sing in unison.

Unintended Consequences

nhodge — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:26:35 -0700

Two unintended consequences of Microsoft open sourcing:

1. Google Chrome (on Windows) uses the Windows Template Library (WTL) published under the Ms-PL

2. Mono outpaces Java for Linux desktop application adoption. An interesting quotation from the article:

“It is an interesting irony that Microsoft's sponsored technology, which is open source, is allowing developers to be more productive on Linux than other tools for Java and C++ development”

Irony, indeed.

PHP: Of Eyes, Ears and Clouds

nhodge — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:27:18 -0700

SOme quick notes on Microsoft and PHP things that are in motion. Things is such a great Anglo-Saxon word.

July CTP of PHP SDK for Windows Azure. If you are more visual, Rob Bagby has an excellent post and more excellent screencast overview:

Also, pop over to the online webcasts CodeWorks, which is hosted and run by PHP|Architect. These are sponsored by Microsoft.

If you prefer to read magazine style, the May issues of PHP Architect Magazine is a free download. Compliments of Microsoft.

Sanity Prevails

nhodge — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:59:37 -0700

The FOSS community has been concerned about the difficulties, pros and cons of including Mono-built applications as a part of standard Linux builds. Both Pro and Con.

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.)

Sanity Prevails

Nick Hodge — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:59:01 -0700

The FOSS community has been concerned about the difficulties, pros and cons of including Mono-built applications as a part of standard Linux builds. Both Pro and Con.

Most recently, the Ubuntu Technical Board posted to their Ubuntu Developer Announce mailing list their extermely pragmatic position on Mono applications.

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.)

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Tweets: Netbooks

nhodge — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:22:18 -0700

ntpro: Where was something kick-ass like this for the first 2500 #TechEd US registrations? Screw the party ... http://bit.ly/10iUtu

WindowsITPro: TechED Australia attendees each score HP Netbook: TechEDAustralia attendees will get more than a bag and t-shir.. http://tinyurl.com/n2spkc

nigelwadsworth: @jeffa36 Very tempted to go this year after reading this. 2006 was the last TechEd I went to.

wstan: WTF! This year no TechEd event in Malaysia but Microsoft is giving HP Mini netbook with Windows 7 to each paying TechEd Australia attendee.

BrianFarnhill: Just heard about the netbooks being given out at TechEd this year - man I wish I could go :-(

@freitasm: Microsoft Oz giving HP Mini with Windows 7 to each of 2,300 TechEd attendees. Microsoft NZ giving away seven digital cameras.

orinthomas: TechED.au is giving away a netbook to all paying attendees. I suspect that attendance (especially at my sessions ;-) will be good.

hollingsworth: Nice bit of marketing and community-building there Nick - TechEdfolk get free Netbook http://bit.ly/rEz9w via @NickHodge

ANZTechEDSecure: Holycrap! Free netbook to paying TechED.au attendeeshttp://is.gd/1iCky #auteched

Alegrya: must find some $$ for that TechEd ticket!! RT @NickHodge: And Sekrit Projekt #1 goes public: http://bit.ly/rEz9w

davidfowl: @DamianEdwards Wow I went to the wrong teched

Community Project No. 1

nhodge — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:32:53 -0700

Andrew Dugdell has started a blog following us HP mini-note/netbook guys on our 10 week journey to TechEd 2009.

HP Mini-notebooks/Netbooks at TechEd: The coverage so far

nhodge — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:30:47 -0700

Documenting the initial coverage for posterity. Will update as stuff flows

Long Zheng “got the scoop” on the story:

Microsoft TechEd Australia attendees to receive free HP Mini Notebook with Windows 7

Picked up by the Australian IT news community (in no particular order)

Builderau: Microsoft TechEd Australia attendees to receive free HP Mini Notebook with Windows 7

ZDNet: Tech.Ed attendees get free HP netbook

ITNews:Microsoft gives TechEd delegates Windows 7 netbook

ITWire: Microsoft to give Tech-Ed attendees HP netbook with ethical choice attached

Rolled into the International streams; mainly via Long’s tweet and blog

Hardocp: Attend Microsoft’s TechEd 2009 Australia Get Free Netbook

Intel: Microsoft TechEd 2009 Australia - Free HP Netbook 2140

Big Things in Mini Packages

nhodge — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:04:53 -0700

(the image above is not displayed at actual size)

Mini Packages

Yes!, paid delegates to Australia's TechEd 2009 are each receiving Microsoft Windows 7 on a HP 2140 Mini notebook (aka: netbook). Pop over to the TechEd 2009 web site to register to see all the terms and conditions etc.

Mini-note Relevant Speeds and Feeds:

Screen: 10.1”
HD: 160Gb
Memory: 2Gb
Wireless: 802.11 a/b/g
Processor: Intel Atom 1.6GHz N270

Delegates will be able to take their HP Mini back to work to show off Windows 7, or just loan the device for the duration of TechEd. Of those returned, Microsoft will be donating these these loan to charity.

Imagine each and every delegate with a mini-note roving around TechEd doing everything online; Messenger, Office Communicator, Twitter’n, downloading presentations … the list is endless.

Also imagine the IT skills provided to those less fortunate than ourselves.

Big Things: A Call-out to the TechEd Community:

What would you like to see running across these 2000+ devices?

A mass Azure stress test web application?
A magical Powershell configuration script?
A WPF-based network game?
A new Windows 7 based WinForms/Win32 Twitter client that doesn’t suck?

Ideas are endless … we’d love to get you, the community, involved in creating interesting scenarios.

Let the big ideas flow!

28 Weeks. 18 Weeks Down

Nick Hodge — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:07:01 -0700

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?

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New Windows Home Server

Nick Hodge — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:40:34 -0700

After becoming increasingly frustrated with the Tranquil Home Server, I decided to de-commission it. The drivers required at install time didn't work, and Tranquil technical support (online and via email) just didn't work. #epicfail

There is a motherboard configuration called Mini-ITX where the dimensions are 170mm x 170mm. Intel have a great board with 1Gb Ethernet, 4 USB and a PCI connector. Adding memory, a SATA HD and case: and you have an instant Windows Home Server. I used the Windows Home Server media and serial number from the Tranquil.

What I purchased:

Stuff	Price
Aywun A1-8989 Cube Mini-ITX Case with 150W PSU	67.10
Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS, 1TB SATA HD	180.40
Intel D945GCLF2 Motherboard, Integrated Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz	128.30
Kingston 2GB PC2-6400 (800MHz) DDR2 240-pin DIMM	39.99
Total	415.79

The case:

Building the hardware took less than 10 minutes, and the software install time (fresh) was less than an hour, including formatting the drive.

Now installed at home, repopulating the data and getting on with life. I feel way better having built this myself.

Oh, and the kittehs like the box the case arrived in:

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Japan Photo

Nick Hodge — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:17:08 -0700

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Microsoft and Web 2.0 Stuff

Nick Hodge — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:48:47 -0700

Like Michael Rees, Kathryn Greenhill asked me to list "web 2.0" things that Microsoft has available to provide some balance to a Murdoch University event.

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

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Bing Box on your Website or Blog

Nick Hodge — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:32:16 -0700

This took me a little time to find: How to Add a Bing Box to your Website.

As of writing this, the image is still the old Windows Live logo. Just to be hip, I created a 100x45 version of the bing logo.

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New.CloudApp();

Nick Hodge — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:53:37 -0700

Why not try making a new cloud application on Microsoft Azure with PHP. And potentially #win?

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

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Fifth Barcamp Sydney, Saturday June 27th

Nick Hodge — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:17:20 -0700

BarCamp Sydney is on again. This is our 5th BarCamp Sydney and as we are in the midst of the GFC and a recession we’ve decided that this BarCamp is the Recession Edition or “the BarCamp we had to have” (to paraphrase Keating from 1990).

In keeping with the Recession theme of BarCamp there are a few changes to this year’s BarCamp. Firstly a new venue, whilst we loved UNSW it was quite expensive. Thankfully the Australian Technology Park (ATP) Innovations Centre is giving us access to the space for free! Yay!

Secondly, we need to spread the load of the cost of running BarCamp across more people so we are asking for individual sponsorship as well as our traditional corporate sponsorship. So what do you get for your individual sponsorship? Nothing really, just the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from helping run this fantastic community event. Hopefully there will still be T-Shirts but that will depend on how much money we raise in sponsorship. However, if you are a corporate and would like to sponsor the event please contact us ASAP.

Finally, we have a new idea for a few of the sessions - the Think Tank room. The Think Tank room is a small room with no projector and no tech - just enough room for a small group of people discussing ideas. And what better ideas to discuss than ideas about the future. As a result of the recent FutureSummit attended by a few of the local twitterati, @liubinskas has suggested we keep the ideas coming with a FutureCamp! There will be a real FutureCamp later in the year but we can start the future discussion right here at BarCamp Sydney.

There will be more details forthcoming about the venue, the logistics and how you can register and sponsor, but for right now please block out Saturday June 27 for BarCamp Sydney and put your thinking hats on to present a ripper of a session.

Keep up to date at the BarCampSydney Blog or this email list.

Thanks to Jodie Miners for driving this Barcamp. Community is fun

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2765 Words

Nick Hodge — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:59:43 -0700

For various reasons, I am on another sabbatical from Twitter. This is not my first, and I dare say not my last. Duration, unknown. Frankly, I am boring myself and slowly sticking my foot in my own mouth. To fill the now empty space, I have spent more time thinking and writing. So, for instance these are some raw numbers from the last few days. This is by no means scientific.

Twitter

Average Tweets per day: 100
Average size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 10,000
Estimated Percentage valuable (ie: valuable content): 10%
Words of Value = 1,000

Blogging

Average Tweets per day: 100
Average size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 2,765
Estimated Percentage valuable (ie: valuable content): 90%
Words of Value = 2,488

So, the question remains: are the conversations on twitter worth 2.5 times the publishing via blogs?

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Working for the Underdog

Nick Hodge — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:19:05 -0700

Photo by TCM Hitchhiker/Jason Jerde
The following is the personal opinion of myself and is not a formal statement nor position of my employer

Firstly, think about newspapers. They existed from the 17^th century until the first decade of the 21^st century on advertising. Using the money received from advertising, they funded content created by journalists and writers. The content attracted attention (ie: eyeballs), which in turn attracted more advertisers. A virtuous circle.

Newspapers will not completely cease to exist; however both their business model and lack of environmental sustainability – and most importantly, lack of attention, will challenge long term strangle-hold of power.

Now, think about Google. Started in the first decade of the 21^st century. Using money received from online advertising, they funded tools and applications created by software engineers. Online, the cost of creating content is near zero, so everyone had the chance to create and share. These tools attracted attention in helping people find/sift/manage this content. By providing these tools, Google attracts and holds attention, which in turn attracts more online advertisers. A virtuous circle.

Traditional journalism will continue to exist as open societies demand independent, knowledgeable voices. However, who will publish their stories, and under what business model; is one of many changes happening in today’s society.

As more attention-time is spent online, the first model is under distinct threat; as is any traditional attention-driven business model. The attention is increasingly heading online.

Google has no direct need to earn revenue from these tools and applications directly. Using the online community to adopt (via APIs, etc) these tools, modify and contribute – Google wins more attention via the network effect. We have seen Google promote browsers (Chrome) with advanced APIs (HTML5, SVG, Javascript) as a strategy to shift the platform off Win32/.NET, MacOS/iPhone and simple HTML4

It just happens that Google’s model of software development is orthogonal to Microsoft’s model of obtaining revenue. As an added benefit, the model has the potential to cripple their largest potential competitor, Microsoft.

The effects of new software model will not dramatically affect the majority of the traditional, saturated software marketplace. Microsoft will continue to maintain a revenue stream from traditional enterprise platforms (operating system, office, servers, databases, CRM/ERP etc), but these are not long term growth businesses. Growth will largely follow World GDP rather than accelerate, as you would expect on a new business model. Growth at World GDP is merely a baseline

This is why Microsoft must, and is breaking out of traditional software-licensing model into tools and technologies such as Bing, Azure etc. Using the cashflows of the current platforms to ensure a long-term and viable business. Structural and product changes are already underway as seen with Microsoft's Online hosted applications, and industry acquisitions.

The next 5-10 years is going to be an interesting ride, and Google understands their competitive marketplace. And this time, Microsoft is the underdog. I like working for underdogs. It makes life interesting.

Notes, follow-up:

Henry Blodget "It's Time For Microsoft To Face Reality About Search And The Internet"
(Nick) Henry has an interesting perspective on how Microsoft is framing it's approach to the internet wrong, strategically. Henry's premise is that Microsoft should refocus as a pure enterprise software play, and give up on the consumer internet business. This is certainly an alternative not discussed above; but this does seem like a growth by marketshare strategy. When you are already a large player in a market, this does become difficult without causing more regulatory ire. Extending from technology mountain ranges, the new rivers of gold are too attractive to be forgotten. To succeed Microsoft has to exhibit and execute a major mental/strategic shift without abandoning the current revenue streams.
I read Steven Hodson over at The Inquisitr has a similar perspective as mine above, although coming from a different angle. Don't underestimate the attractiveness of rivers of gold.
Michael Goldhaber, "The Attention Society"
(Nick) In post-industrial societies the scarce resource is attention. Grabbing attention, such as the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic is at the time of writing, is valuable. In the above text, I make mention of the Attention Economy, or the mechanism of monetizing the attention of society. Once, as people sat down to television after work: content providers could sell this attention. (Advertising is primarily a mechanism for obtaining attention).

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The Group Twitter Account Conundrum

Nick Hodge — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:06:07 -0700

On my Soapbox, I have been somewhat negative (and somewhat vitriolic) on blind group twitter accounts. My argument has been that no-one talks to brands; humans tend to and would prefer to connect with rather human. There is a perspective I missed: where organisations want people to represent them, and the individuals see themselves are distinctly separate from the organisation.

My particular job is unique; not all organisations invest in weird people who name themselves a Professional Geek and describe themselves as Iconoclastic and Mercurial. As a daily part of my job, I becone a lightening rod in a small community for a large and historically faceless brand. At one end of the daily continuum there is kudos/whipping for everything that brand does; and the other I attempt to be whatever "me" is at this moment.

This is somewhat OK for me, but sometimes risky for the brand when I fly off the handle. As as wise man at Microsoft counselled me earlier this week, we are all human. Social media will mirror this humanity. Whilst fraught with misinterpreation, it is better than bland corporate-speak, any day.

Living the organisation you work for is a legacy of my on-farm upbringing. You live in the work environment. There is no escaping large or small jobs. That, or I have a form Institutional Stockholm Syndrome. Ultimately, I am doing what I am paid to do.

So how do individuals represent the organisation, service or product they work for when there are multiple individuals in the team where the individuals see themselves distinct from the organisation? There are valid reasons why a solution needs to be sought.

Lower latency conversational mediums such as twitter, there is no time to review a tweet by a group before tweeting on behalf of the said group. By the time the group has agreed, the conversation has moved on. l'esprit de l'escalier en twitter.

Enter The Multiple User Twitter Conundrum. I've seen a recent innovation on twitter which I support. It is a good compromise between my idealism, and the hard-nose marketing oriented "brand is everything" divide.

Let's review the Microsoft Bing team’s Twitter Profile page. It shows the five people who twitter on that account/address, with a name and caret (^xx) underneath the pictures of the humans. xx represent the initials of each individual. Tweets such as "SteveB at D (video incl. Bing at AllThingsD) http://twurl.nl/zorfia ^betsy" indicates Betsy, or ^BA tweeted this nugget. I now can identify a human behind that tweet, that conversation from the group twitter account. This caret-xx only takes three precious characters out of 140.

As a further step to my idealistic people conversational mode of social media, it would be cooll if each individual should put their personal twitter id on this profile page. Or email address: ideally some mechanism to double check the identity of the person to stop twitter spam-bot miscreants.

Maybe in the future all we will just have twitter ids. They will become more valuable than ego URLs.

But then again, I am possible stepping back up to that very small platform of a soapbox.

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Social Media. The Opera is dying, All Hail the Circus

Nick Hodge — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:00:22 -0700

Photo by bootload/Peter Renshaw

The Opera. Stages filled with ladies singing in a gruff germanic or romantic language, and men prancing around in colourful soldierly uniform. Stories so simple yet obscured by language; thankfully the Playbill(tm) details the plot. Plots of love lost and family betrayal, have remained unchanged in some instances for centuries. The audience silent in the stalls, listens and applauds at the appropriate places. It is all scripted and follows a well worn path.

Strong scripts, strident soaring songs and standardised characters are repeated year after year to an audience that dresses up to show off their cultural status. Baby boomers, once the bastions of cultural iconoclasm, now flock to the safety of the opera. The safety of the known story provides succour in a troubling and confused world.

The Opera is an appropriate mirror of a slowly declining, old power structure: standardised stories with a strong cultural understanding of expectations. There are few surprises, and the actors faithfully represent the characters as written. To stray from the culture will result in review rebuke, and potentially financial ruin. The utterances are known, and everything fits into the story.

In the modern, hyperconnected world where everyone wants to write their own scripts; to merely ape an old opera is stale. It no longer resonates, nor does it excite. The worn path may provide temporary comfort: but does not provide long term sustenance.

At the opera, the generously-proportioned female singer has begun her last stanza.

The Circus. I remember the circus arriving in our small country town. I, and the hoard of kids and teachers tramped down to the town's football oval to oggle. The animals we eyed were from a distant continent. Lions, Tigers, Bears and Elephants. It was like a zoo, but the animals were smellier and close. Eating and stomping close.

Traditional circuses such as these are now rare. Circuses with the animal menagerie are rarer, as they have been hounded out of our towns by animal liberationists. A tradition, as cultural as steeplechasing, has vanished into the mist. The animals are happier.

Modern circuses are about people. The animals have been sequestered and retired to zoos and forests. Circuses such as Quebec's Circ du Soleil give a medieval commedia dell'arte a modern flavour wrapped in a bright coat of 21st century globalised commercialism. Completely comprised of people, franchised to a culturally flattened world; therefore standardised to highlight human performance. These circuses are for people, about people and make a point of breaking the third wall to stretch the entertainment.

In more traditional circuses, clowns would regularly break the third wall. Throw faux water, in the shape of confetti, into a faux surprised audience. The circus entertains, as the sad clown provides a reflection on our mixed up, complex lives.

This forest we are navigating through: Social Media, is like a circus. It is a human centric institution, wrapped in new technology zeal with a hoard of clowns, mummers, so-called ring leaders and high-wire acts all screaming for your attention, laughs and money. Difficult to ignore when they are in town; and they can be smelly at the approach. Bright Lights! Shows! High wire acts with stars having incongruous names. Social Media has it all.

A true circus extends out from the focus on the tent and the highwire of show night. The canvas riggers and animal trainers transform into the spruikers of side-show alley. Crafty games of shooting, prowess of strength and precision take a fool from their money. Fairy floss, candy apples and fortune tellers return a future of rotten teeth and rotted minds.

In a similar way, Social media has a plethora of spruikers. The games they advertise remove you are after your gold. Some of these games have a large pay off; sadly many don't.

To really enjoy the circus, you must experience the whole show, not merely snack on the fairy floss and candy apples.

Social networking is more than the latest crazes of Twitter and Facebook. In fact, it predates blogs. And the WWW, even if you could hand-code HTML. Even before the internet escaped from the university cage and it's trainers, there have existed "social medias". Email, Bulletin board systems, Talk-back radio. Small newspapers and magazines; telegraph wirings and Morse code; pamphlet and book publishing. All add to the social discourse. In fact, since the democratisation of communication that began with the printing press: where thoughts in the form of words could be etched and produced enmasse; a social discourse has existed.

What is different is the connectivity we all enjoy. We all are a few steps away from the humanity that encompasses the planet. At once in one large, multi-cultural circus. No one mono-culture can exist. Generalizations break down as individuals assert their individual characteristics, subverting the propensity for traditional hierarchies to classify, box and bucket.

The impact of this individual yet share instant experience is being being felt now across businesses and governments. Unrelenting forces for change are singing strident tunes from the opera, whilst the circus clowns laugh in mock humour at the futility on the grave of the generously-proportioned female vocalist.

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Reading: Shell Global Scenarios to 2025

Nick Hodge — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:10:48 -0700

Loaned to me from a strategic thinking friend, Shell Global Scenarios is a hefty, yet easy to read analysis of really big (mega-) trends over the 15 year time horizon.

There is lots to think about; their three forces (market incentives, community, coercion/regulation) and how there are "two wins, one loss" out of the choices.

In similar quadrants, there are three objectives of societies (efficiency, social cohesion, security). Again the same choice matrix appears to describe a society. From forces and objectives appear Open Door, Flags and Low-trust Globalisation groupings. All of this MBA-level pretty pictures and frameworks leads down interesting paths, and coming from Shell there is a consideration of energy needs; however this is not the primary focus.

On page 120 (section 6f) the power of "Netizens" is detailed. A case example of Chinese regulations changing based on internet-based activism. The recent anti-Japanese sentiment, a negative rather than positive outcome, sourced from netizens in China is shown.

Most telling is a quotation from Izumi Aizo of the Institute of Hypernetwork Society in Tokyo:

"Mobile technology is a source of fundamental change - meaning the capacity to be connected whenever and whereever. This enables people to act immediately, either politically or socially. It is still too early to indentity the full consequences of this phenomenon, but it can be a major source of changes in the relation of people to each other. It already has a major impact on Islamic counties like Iran, Afghanistan and others."

The same pull-out details a summary of what we netizens are in the midst of right now, and I will paraphrase: the struggle for information power. The old institutions wish to put the internet genie back into its bottle, to regain the power. Filtering, File-sharing, patents and copyrights battles are proxies skirmishes in a much larger, cultural war.

A possible governing principle will be self-regulation, with bottom-up standard setting.

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Off My Soapbox of Self Righteousness

Nick Hodge — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:02:22 -0700

I love throwing words and venacular phrases together. This stems from the power of Split Enz to create visual imagery from common sayings. An extreme example: Another Great Divide (Judd/Finn/Rayner/Gillies)

Now how can I figure this equation, if multiplication's the rule /
You keep subtracting me from you, and it just doesn't add up at all

It should be further noted that there is always a Finn song for every occasion. Thanks @mediamum!

In the instance of Off My Soapbox of Self Righteousness, relates to battles and discussions that rage daily. Like all family dirty laundry, the exact nature will remain confidential.

But on a larger scale, it is my opinion that social media (whatever that is) is being misunderstood; or worse, mis-used by various less Cluetrained people. My fear is that the forces of oldskool will water down the potential for massive change that is blossoming. There are skirmishes being fought daily. The wider community does not see nor hear of these.

Sadly, those on the internal firing line are also copping friendly fire. Just sayin’

The strangeness is made more fictional when I have an internal voice that is shouting, not whispering, you're also doing it wrong. There is a high-wire act going on in my head, and the fingers of sanity may be slowly letting go.

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Microsoft and Open Source, Unhandled Exceptions. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane

Nick Hodge — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:57:50 -0700

Microsoft and Open Source, Unhandled Exceptions.

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.

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IronPython at SyPy, 3rd April 2009

nhodge — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:48:38 -0700

Photo thanks to James Dumay

Thanks to all for questions, and attending on Thursday night. Big ups to the Googlers (including the cheeky @pamelafox!) for their hospitality.

Linkages for relevant Pythonic and IronPythonic stuff:

Zoomit for Windows. Zoom into stuff when presenting.
General Courtney Hick Hodges (thanks, Dylan)
Dylan, the programming language (yes, I know this is not Python: but a cool language for language geeks to take a look at)
IronPython, itself: http://ironpython.codeplex.com/ironpython (MS-PL)
DLR and IronPython resource on MSDN
Dynamic Language Runtime, make your own scripting langauge run on the DLR (MS-PL)
Silverlight, DLR: Getting Started.

And for the committed Pythonic reader, Jim Hugunin at the recent PyCon (March 2009): IronPython: Directions, Data and Demos

Need to Test Against Varied Versions of Internet Explorer?

nhodge — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:32:15 -0800

Need to test your website against new and old versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer? Microsoft offers a set of VPCs free specifically for this purposes. They are downloadable as .vhd images, and include the base operating system. Of course.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en#filelist

These VPC images expire in April, 2009

IIS7.x, Server Farms and Ruby

nhodge — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:20:00 -0800

(Caution: Ruby application names are as prolific, esoteric and funny as Microsoft code names)

The previous post (broadly) demonstrated how to use a combination of URL Rewrite and FastCGI to put a Ruby on Rails application on IIS7.5.

As Rails, Merb (which I am reliably informed is what all the cool kids use today) and Sinatra

Another more common method of deploying Rails applications is behind a small web server such mongrel, thin or whilst development ruby’s inbuilt WEBrick. These servers are attached to one instance of the ruby application with a front-end web server acting as the reverse proxy server. This server forwards requests from the outside world to one of the instances of your ruby application; and ‘proxies’ the response back to the browser on the client.

Using an reverse proxy server architecture provides various goodness: easy instance creation, simple scaling and relatively easy deployment. If you get the configuration right.

To deploy a reverse proxy server with IIS previously required third party ISAPI such as ISAPIRewrite.

As complex deployments are becoming more common, Microsoft has released the Microsoft Application Request Routing Version 1 for IIS 7 (get it here). Note that the server also requires URL Rewrite.

The following is my simple setup.

How to Setup

As I have mongrel installed on my development machine, and am experimenting with sinatra: mongrel is chosen as the default server.

With a simple batch script, I launch the instances of my simple application. The ruby application is hi.rb. In this instance, ruby.exe is in my PATH. The '-p 4567' tells Sinatra and Mongrel to use port 4567 as the listening port. There are mechanisms to make these services. This machine is development only, so I’ll leave that alone

@ECHO OFF
ruby.exe hi.rb -p 4567

Install Microsoft Application Request Routing Version 1 for IIS 7. Note that the server also requires URL Rewrite.

Launch the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager

Create a Server Farm. A farm is a collection of servers (IIS7 and others) the server is going to farm the incoming requests to

Provide a name for your farm

On my test server, I wish to use multiple ports on the same server. That is, more than one application instance bound to separate ports.

Type the address (without the port) of an application instance. After clicking “Add”, click on the entry in the server address, and click on the “Advanced settings…”. Sinatra’s default port for an instance is :4567. As extra instances are added; add them to the farm with the appropriate port.

NOTE 1: The UI when adding a httpPort for each address is a little weird. What I found working is to type the Server address:, expand ‘applicationRequestRoutin’, enter the port (if not the default port 80), click add. Then re-click on the entry in the list, and re-enter the httpPort (as it seems to revert back to :80)

NOTE 2: Each server address must be unique in the Server farm. Therefore, if you have multiple instances of the same application, although on separate ports, on the same server: you will need to do some work on the DNS or hosts file. On my test machine, I have created aliases in my machine’s hosts file to the same server (run Notepad.exe as administrator!):
%windir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
127.0.0.1    localhost localhost-1 localhost-2

Server farms can also exist across physical IP addresses: this may be different IIS instances, different virtual machines or different physical machines.

To match the incoming requests with a particular farm, a URL Rewrite Rule is automatically created.

The below rule will matching any incoming request (which you may wish to tweak) to the server farm. Note the Action properties: pointing to a particular farm, passing on the {R:0}, or the pattern matched in the Match URL:

The .config file

The configuration (on my machine) looks something like:

%windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config <webfarms> 
    <webfarm enabled="true" name="localhost"> 
        <server enabled="true" address="localhost-1">

            <applicationrequestrouting httpport="4567" />

        </server>

        <server enabled="true" address="localhost-2">

            <applicationrequestrouting httpport="4568" />

        </server>

        <applicationrequestrouting>

            <loadbalancing algorithm="WeightedRoundRobin" />

            <protocol httpversion="Http10" />

        </applicationrequestrouting>

    </webfarm>

    <applicationrequestrouting>

        <hostaffinityproviderlist>

            <add name="Microsoft.Web.Arr.HostNameRoundRobin" />

            <add name="Microsoft.Web.Arr.HostNameMemory" />

        </hostaffinityproviderlist>

    </applicationrequestrouting>

</webfarms>

For Further Research

The Server Farms have extra features for checking the health of instances. Wiring these into mongrel would be cool.
Load Balancing mechanisms: wiring these for deeper integration
IronRuby. Now that would be cool.

Windows 7, IIS 7.5 and Ruby on Rails

nhodge — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:50:25 -0800

Having spent the weekend working on Ruby on Rails with IIS/SQLServer 2008 Express backend via FastCGI, here are some tips to get you going:

The best resource is Ruslan’s post on Rails and IIS7. In fact, go and bookmark this site right now. In Ruslan’s post, the web.config shown is best edited in a text editor.
When installing IIS7.5 on Windows 7 Beta (build 7000) is easy: Using the Control Panels\Programs, Turn Windows Features On/Off. Underneath the Internet Information Services, you need to also install the CGI feature (to get FastCGI)
Windows 7 and URL Rewrite: This forum post http://forums.iis.net/t/1154240.aspx will get you going whilst Windows 7 is in beta
Database connectivity to SQLServer seems to be a common question. Installing the option “sqlserver adaptor” which is now an optional part of ActiveRecord:
```
gem install activerecord-sqlserver-adapter --source=http://gems.rubyonrails.org
```
Connecting via the ODBC adaptor via the SQL Native Client worked, rather than the ADO connector. My connector string looked something like this:
```
development: adapter: sqlserver mode: odbc dsn: Driver={SQL Native Client};Server=.\SQLEXPRESS;Database=xxxxx;
```
As I am installing underneath the IIS7 root directory (that is: http://server/myapp) there are 3 small Rails tweaks required inform the application all the goodies are in a subdirectory:

in config/environment.rb, the header, define a global variable:
```
PATH_PREFIX = '/myapp'
```
in config/environment.rb, in the Initializer, set the asset home directory:
```
Rails::Initializer.run do |config| config.action_controller.asset_host = PATH_PREFIX
```
in config/routes.rb, ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw:
```
 map.connect PATH_PREFIX + '/:controller/:action/:id' map.connect PATH_PREFIX + '/:controller/:action/:id.:format'
end
```

John Resig: “The DOM is a Mess”

nhodge — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:29:14 -0800

John Resig, a developer at the Mozilla Foundation, presented at Yahoo! on jQuery. More specifically, John talks about the Document Object Model (DOM) … and the mess that web developers deal with across browsers.

John Resig: "The DOM Is a Mess" @ Yahoo! Video