Oh, that's cool
Things that I find interesting.
Notwithstanding the fact that this blog is almost a wraith-like version of its former self, and largely resident in the same shadowland occupied by OS/2 Warp and Lotus Notes, you may like to know that I am posting here.
All very interesting stuff, almost none of it anything to do with .net.
Ok, the new msn search is working okay this morning. I haven't noticed any US bloggers commenting on it being unavailable yesterday, so perhaps it got working again by the time they hit the office.
It's running fast and looking fine. I ran a couple of search terms that I run on Google from time to time, and got a longer set of results. Also ordered slightly differently. Better results? Too early to say.
The tuning feature looks interesting: hit Search Builder|Results ranking - you can prioritise/deprioritise the accuracy of the match, the popularity of the results and the freshness of the results. I can imagine that this would be useful when struggling with large result sets. We'll see.
Perhaps it's time for a sea change on my desktop - a move from IE + Google to Firefox + MSN Search. Yes, I know it's a weird mix, but then I've never cared about the whole MS is good/MS is bad thing. I just like products that work. Strange, eh?
I've taken my little Trackword game a step further. I've implemented a Daily Trackword page which selects a random trackword for the first visitor of the day, and then retains the trackword and the grid ordering for all future visitors that day.
The next step for that page is to build in stats, so players can see how well each other has done - ie who the found the Trackword quickest, who has found the most other words in the grid.
The main reason for the Daily Trackword page was to build an RSS feed containing the Daily Trackword game. That's also live now, at http://www.laurencetimms.com/rss.aspx. The feed shows the five most recent daily games. You can choose to play the Trackword just from the feed (using only the power of your mind, or maybe pen and paper), or click the link to open the relevant Daily Trackword page.
I realise that the dateline on the Daily Trackword feed & page is coming out in German! My host space is in Germany, and I haven't specified the culture for the date formatting. One of those things you never expect to have to do...
Main discovery: the RSS schema is really simple and obvious. Populating it with some interesting content is harder!
For this RSS feed I pull the Daily Trackword records from the database and assemble them into a DataTable object which is formatted according to the RSS 2.0 spec. I then bind the DataTable to an ASP.NET Repeater control and use DataBinder.Eval to pull the table values out into the Repeater contents. It's an elaboration on the approach described by Scott Mitchell here.
It's all a bit rough and ready, plenty of scope for refinement!
I wonder if this is the first RSS 'game'? I'm sure it's not. Maybe I'm early to the party though; that's good enough for me
Finally my little Trackword game has found a host. Check out http://www.laurencetimms.com/trackwordhome.aspx
It looks very v1.0 at the moment, but I have big plans including:
- RSS feed (daily game in an RSS feed, including the answers for the prevous day; user can play the game from the visual content in the feed or can follow the link to the actual page to play the daily game with the full UI)
- scoring
- foreign language versions (German first)
- save game option
- hi scores table
- 4x4 grid for people with way too much time to play word games
- make the damn thing look prettier
How many words of three letters or more can you find by tracking from one square to the next, going up, down, sideways or diagonally in order? You may not go through the same letter square again in any word. No proper nouns or foreign words. What's the hidden nine-letter word?
Trackword is a game written in C#, using a component architecture which means it's fairly easy to render it to HTML or to Winforms. It uses a SQL Server-based dictionary.
The core game component also has functions for finding all the possible words in the grid. That was fun to code.
I'm happy to share the code with anyone who is interested - constructive criticism is always welcome.
I am iCan. Which is this - interesting!
What are you?
Apologies for the silence. I know you've all been missing me (!)
After 9 years of tube hell, I left my job in central London and have moved to the RSPB in leafy Bedfordshire, a mere 10 miles from home. The commute is blissful by comparison and I'm getting nearly two hours a day extra at home with my family.
So that's a result.
Anyway, more Visual Studio stuff coming from this corner soon, since I have lots of interesting work in the pipeline.
In the meantime (whispers...) I've got a mere 5 gmail invites that need good homes. If you want one please contact me directly at my gmail dot com address which begins laurence dot timms. Cheers.
Ok dudes, I'm out of the office for two days. In the meantime I humbly invite you to enjoy the b3tazoo.
Those of you who know and love b3ta will know what this is about.
For those of you who don't: b3ta is a lovely place where people muck around with images. Some of the best paintshopping to be found on b3ta is the melding of one animal with another to create such beauties as the leopardfrog, the spidraffe and the orangutangula. The b3tazoo has them all collected in one place. Enjoy.
You may recall that I whined about the Microsoft UK on-line event booking process. Microsoft UK responded to my moans and garnered a bit more detail about my complaints. I was satisfied that they recognised the issues I listed, and in fact were already working on some of them. No doubt the process will improve!
Apologies to MS UK for not mentioning their response before now. Very unbloglike of me.
Anyway, after all that whingeing, I have to cancel my visit to sunny Reading this month because I'm going to Lübeck on the Baltic coast of Germany to spend two days doing long-term planning with my German colleagues Hela and Axel. Ah well.
Ok folks, put your brains in gear. Is it possible to read an xls file via ADO without having a full install of Excel on the same box?
I was trying to add something else to this post to make it more interesting, but I can't really think of anything. Umm...oh, I know! To all you London-based readers out these - I can recommend Masala Zone in Soho for a very good inexpensive lunch. Go there with a bunch of mates and have the Grand Thali. Go on, you know you want to.
Lookout, the company that created the eponymous 'Google for Outlook' app that I blogged about recently, has been acquired by Microsoft. It's been blogged about all over the gaff, but here is a good a place to start as any if you want to read about it.
Whatever Microsoft decide to do with it, I sincerely hope that the creators receive serious quantities of wonga for their efforts.
I know Mono is cool, I just wish I had a justifiable reason to get into it. As you all know, Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for use on Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system. And they have just released 1.0!
This blog entry is merely an excuse to repost the rather jolly Mono 1.0 promo gif.
What on earth is that thing? A monkey? A neanderthal? Some underpants on a washing line?
Over the last few days I've discovered three dead cool apps that are innovative, useful and deserve to be commercially successful. They are: ActiveWords, Anagram and Lookout. I have no idea how long these apps have been around, but they're new to me.
I have blogged about ActiveWords recently, so a word or two about Anagram and Lookout are due.
Anagram is a dead clever little app that eats up a chunk of text and spits out an Outlook contact, calendar item or task based on what it finds in the text. For example, if I highlight someone's contact details in an email and hit Ctrl+C twice, Anagram creates a contact record with all the fields populated with the right values. If I 'Anagram' a sentence like "we'll meet at 22 Hanover Square next monday at 2" then I get a calendar item generated for me; Anagram knows what 'next monday' means, it works out the location and figures out the time.
Oh, and Anagram works on Palm too. EDIT: As Marc Orchant correctly points out, Anagram supports the Palm Desktop, not the handheld OS.
Lookout is Google for your Outlook mailbox. Basically it chews up the dire built-in search features that Outlook offers and spits them out. It's fast and smart. I now 'Lookout' my mailbox just like I Google the web. I guess the Lookout guys aren't allowed to make that comparison, but I am! :)
I don't bother sorting my email into folders any more. I just pile it in a big heap and use Lookout on it.
And top kudos for the Lookout team for their website - the content made me grinny.
Buzz Bruggeman gave me a demo of ActiveWords yesterday. He was in Florida on a wi-fi link and I was sat at home in England, but somehow that didn't matter. (For the demo-minded amongst us, Buzz was using GoToMeeting.com, which gave me a smooth glitch-free view of his laptop; GoToMeeting can't deal with the stringent firewall setup I have here at the office, though)
It was one of those demos where the stuff you see being demonstrated really gets your head going, and you start popping questions. "Buzz, can I make ActiveWords do this? Can I make it do that? Can it jump through flaming hoops?"
And every time Buzz is either showing me how to do the very thing I'm asking, or he's taking notes and getting back to me. For the record, the questions left hanging were responded to within in an hour of the demo.
If you're wondering what ActiveWords is, then you're in the same position as someone who has just heard about WinZip. You've just heard about something that I believe is going to be as ubiquitous as WinZip, and as indispensable as your favoured email client.
ActiveWords means you type a word and something happens. Immediately. It doesn't matter where you are - on the desktop, in IE, in Outlook, in Word, where-ever. It lets you act on an impulse. For example, I'm halfway thru reading a news article in IE and I want to blog about it. Rather than popping a new IE window and navigating to my blog, I just type blgadmin (that's a personal ActiveWord I've set up myself) and my blog admin page opens in a new window ready to edit.
I'm just scratching the surface here. I encourage you to download it and give it a spin.
No, I'm not on commission. I'm just terribly terribly enthusiastic about this app.
They've done it! SpaceShipOne has been up to space and back again.
Well, I downloaded it, installed it and bingo! It's easy!
ActiveWords' own little productivity applet reckons I've saved $0.55 so far. Maybe, maybe not. But I'm having fun!
My two favourite ActiveWords so far - one that accesses my personal email via the web in four keystrokes and one that access my blog with similar ease.
Yes, typing. One finger, two fingers, four-plus-thumbs (like me) or fully fledged touch typing, it's the fastest way to communicate with the computer. Ubergeeks have known this for a long time - the best of us can navigate Visual Studio end-to-end without exercising the mouse.
This is why ActiveWords is such a stunningly good idea. No matter what program you're in, even if you're floating on the desktop, just type the word and you get an immediate response. This could be a jump to a website, a program launch, a substitution of a larger piece of text, whatever.
I'm going to install it and see what happens when I type "Expecto Patronum"...
Scoble blogged about ActiveWords earlier today in the context of a very smart demo from ActiveWords boss Buzz Bruggeman (DemoGod, apparently) to the extraordinarily busy Esther Dyson.
Smart demos apart, this is a very clever product and I encourage you to go and have a look. Their vision of integrating ActiveWords into a platform including everything from cellphones to PocketPCs to set-top boxes is the epitomy of a 'pervasive computing' strategy.
I'm guilty of this, and I'm sure others are too from time to time: trying to solve That Problem all by yourself. Are you loathe to admit out loud that you don't know how to solve a problem? Oh, and typing the question into Google, msdn, newsgroups, msn or your weblog doesn't count. After all, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. Unless you're Scoble or Don Box.
So I'm talking about walking up to a colleague or two and asking for help. Even better, call a little meeting and get a few of them together and talk it through. Even with the knottiest problems, everyone has got something to contribute (there's the Stone Soup bit - oh, and check out Fractint while you're at it; that's where I first read the Stone Soup Story)
You might not end up with a solution. You might not even end up with a choice of possibles. You might just get The Next Step. But that's one step further than you got before.
For all of you out there who are nodding sagely and saying "yes, that's how I solve all my problems - teamwork" - well done. You're way ahead of me.
I guess I'm last to the party here (date on the page is 2003), but I just noticed that Vertigo ported Quake II to .net. I was hoping that they'd done it in vb.net or C#, but it's managed C++.
It's all here.