Windows Phone: XML as a source

The post at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/18/building-a-windows-phone-7-twitter-application-using-silverlight.aspx is incredibly useful to illustrate how to parse an online XML feed to populate a ListBox control dynamically (including the "bodies" of a Panorama page, which are just ListBoxes).

...and here is a page that may do the same for JSON: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.serialization.json.datacontractjsonserializer(v=vs.95).aspx

Windows Media Center custom menu strip

My hopes of having a real Windows Media Center set-top box be released this year having been dashed, and having for various reasons begun looking into other online media consumption services for the TV, I've started to try and plug in as many services into Media Center as possible.

Third-party support for plugging them in is a bit spotty from app to app, with some of them adding themselves to the "Extras" menu (Boxee), and some of them creating their own custom menu on which they sit all alone (Hulu).

Finally today, I found a wizard called WMCWW that lets me (very) easily create a new custom strip and place as many other plugins on it as I want, then even delete the custom menus that those services created (Hulu) so I don't see duplicates.

Works on x86 x64 Windows 7...yay!

Group photo sharing through yogile.com

Here's a nearly universal truth: if a picture of a kid exists, that kid's parent wants a copy. Really self-controlled parents might go ahead and delete pictures that are blurry or where their kid is clearly not the subject of the picture. Maybe. But they want to make that choice themselves, and that means that any time you get a group of kids together in this age of ubiquitous digital cameras, there's going to be about 250 pictures per half-hour that every parent is going to want a copy of, from every other parent.

If said parents don't want to trust that everyone else will remember to include them in the list when sending out pictures (which may or may not happen), the solution has historically been for the event-planner to tell everyone to e-mail all the pictures to them, at which point they will make copies of all the pictures and get them back out to all the attendees.

Here's my question for you: has that ever worked out for you? In my experience, the absolute best scenario is that most of the parents will get copies of their pictures to the planner. But then the planners get to figure out when to draw the line of, "everyone who's going to send pictures, has sent them". And not only is it very easy to keep procrastinating, "just in case more come in", they really have no motivation to get those picture dispersed back out. After all, said planners now have all the pictures, so now they're happy, and their attention quickly turns to something else. And if they're really ambitious and actually decide to really get it done, they'll always end up being shocked at how many kids are in the pictures, and therefore how many copies they'll have to make and re-disperse.

Then along came services like Facebook, Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, etc. These well-meaning services have the right idea, which is to allow everyone to contribute photos into a single album, then provide everyone access to the pictures when they want to check in on their own. But they all require you to have an account to contribute and/or to view the album. And that's really a pain, as you're asking all these frazzled, non-techie parents to try and maintain all these different accounts, many of which they'll only use once. What happens is that if they register, they only end up spreading their invariably re-used credentials across the digital world, then forgetting that they even have that account. (Of course, I know that you use a unique log-on and password for every site for which you have an account, right?) And then they wonder why they get all this spam in their e-mail for the next twelve years.

Well, this morning I heard about a service that really makes a lot of sense. Yogile.com allows you to create a photo album for an event and optionally password-protect it. You get to pick a unique web address and e-mail address for this event. Then when you ask people to send pictures, they can either e-mail them as attachments or upload them at that site. If it's not a protected album, they can also view the photos from the event at the address you picked. And the best part is, anyone can contribute. Nobody needs to register if all they want to do is contribute pictures and view public albums. And yogile also makes sure that any pictures added to your album are sent to you (the album creator), so you don't even have to remember to log on and check for new additions.

It looks like it's free for up to 100mb, and $24.95 per year if you want unlimited storage with an ad-free interface. Here's the summary of their service from their page:

•Lets multiple people contribute with ease. •Add photos as e-mail attachments or uploads through the site. •Customizable URL and e-mail address per album, to share with anyone who wants to add photos. •No need for these users to register, keeping the process simple

So I haven't used it yet, but this is just the type of thing I've wished for in the past, so you can be sure that I will before too long. And I just wanted to share (and post it so I can remind myself of it when I do need it).

NASA Image of the Day Desktop Slideshow for Windows 7

Using the information I compiled and posted previously, and in honor of today's scheduled shuttle launch, I made a Windows 7 Desktop slideshow theme file that uses NASA's Image of the Day (large) feed to decorate your desktop wallpaper with daily-updated pictures of Space and NASA operations.

Unfortunately, due to how NASA runs their image feed, you can't download previous days' images into your slideshow...so the first day you load the theme, there will only be one picture. The next day, it'll flip back and forth between the new day's image and the previous one, etc. After about a week, it'll have a good number of images to draw on for your slideshow.

To control how many images are kept for the Desktop Slideshow, open up Internet Explorer 8 after having loaded the theme. Open up the "Feeds" tab of the "Favorites" window, and right-click on the feed called "http://www.nasa.gov/rss/lg_image_of_the_day.rss" choosing "Properties" in the context menu that pops up. Under the "Archive" section of the properties sheet, you can set the number of attachments (pictures) you want to keep.

The nice thing is, you can install the theme, causing IE to subscribe to the feed, then go back to whatever theme you'd been using before. Even though the theme isn't active as your Desktop Slideshow, IE will continue to download each day's picture in the background (keeping a default of 200 max). So you could come back a week later and set the Nasa Image of the Day theme as your background again, and it'll have a far greater number of pictures available to shuffle between.

One final note: it took my computer 5 minutes or so to download the picture, during which time my desktop was a plain black background. Once it downloaded, it just faded in, nice 'n pretty.

Enjoy!

NasaIotD.theme

Edit: I found a way to "seed" the feed with previous images so that you can have more pictures than just the number of days you've had the theme, and it's not horrible a horrible process, either. Once you're subscribed to the feed, right-click it and choose "Properties", as documented above. In the "Update Schedule" section, there's a checkbox that'll be checked to "Download Attachments", and next to it, a button labeled "Show files". Click the button, and you'll see all the pictures already downloaded from that feed (probably only one picture, if you've just subscribed to the feed). Copy that folder's path to your clipboard, then you can close that window, as well as the feed properties dialog. Now go to NASA's Image of the Day page. Grab the large versions of any past pictures you want to include, and right-click on the link offering to download the full-size version, choosing "Save target as...". When it prompts you for a path, paste in the feed-specific path you just copied, and save the picture there. Now your slideshow has many more pictures available to rotate between! (If you want to make sure it worked, go back to your Personalize menu from the desktop, and re-select the Nasa Image of the Day theme. It should rotate to one of the new pictures you just added). Note that you don't HAVE to use only NASA's Image of the Day pictures to seed the feed; you can put any pictures from any source you want to into that folder, and it'll get included in the rotation. It just kind of makes more sense to use something from the same feed :)

Media Center Plugins

Google Maps for Media Center (confirmed working in Vista- you have to save it in "%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Media Center Programs" or whatever your equivalent path is. For using it on an extender, use c:\users\mxc1\AppData\Roaming\Media Center Programs or equivalant.

=========

Personally untested, intriguing plugins:

Yougle (This one is supposed to bring online streaming video services to the media center (You Tube, etc). It doesn't list Hulu.

Media Control (This plugin is supposed to give better control over captions, fast-forwarding videos, etc)

Missing Remote

"Guide: How to Enable Concurrent Sessions in Vista"

Just a quick entry here so I can find it later- they've figured out how to allow concurrant remote desktop sessions in Vista Business and Ultimate, as well as enabling remote desktop hosting on Vista Home Premium. Most useful for users of Windows Media Center, since remoting into the media center computer kicks extenders off.

NOT MS-approved or supported. NOT NOT NOT.

If you're on Business or Ultimate, there's also a .zip here that makes it even easier. Just be sure to run the right version (Business or Ultimate) as an Administrator.

Hyper Static Union new album

We've been waiting for this day...though not anxiously enough to actually have known the date ;)

It's snowing here in Portland! It's a beautiful site and we love it. We just wanted to let you know that our new album "Meet Him in the Air" is now available from Amazon.com for immediate download here. There are also previews you can stream of each new song as well. We hope your enjoy the new album. We've also added some new videos of Shawn and Tim playing the new songs live in the studio. We are so thankful for your continued encouragement and support. We appreciate you! Shawn, Brian, Mike, Tim & Ray -Hyper Static Union

We haven't gotten the album yet...we're waiting a week or so to see if it shows up on Zune, but the previews sound AWESOME. So exciting...

If you haven't heard these guys yet, check them out. Their album called "Lifegiver" has been our favorite CD for more than 2 years now, which we think is pretty impressive!

Password recovery/reset in NT (XP and Vista)

I'm trying a few programs for a friend who had some odd problems and is now password-locked out of his new laptop. Please note none of these are intended for domain computers.

First: Password crack (read)
Ophcrack (http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/)
-They have separate XP and Vista Live CD versions- I'll report back if/how they work. This one is supposed to let you see what the password on a local account, with no change, allowing you log in with no loss of EFS encrypted files, but only works for a limited keyset (alphanum, usually). So it wouldn't work for people who use strong passwords like me. (I include alt+numpad characters that are out of ascii range...a side benefit is that nobody can get in using FTP on my account...ever).

Edit: I tried this tool first, but it didn't work for me. Whether that is because whatever the password was changed to was too complex, or because the tool just didn't work, remains to be seen. I'll try this out on some other machines later.

Second: Password reset
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd)
This Live CD is supposed to work with all NT computers (2008 not yet officially supported) that are not domain-joined. It just resets any user's password to blank, regardless of what it was before, allowing you to login and change it to whatever. Using this one will cause you to permanently lose access to any files encrypted with EFS, every time. However, most people don't use EFS, so it's a good solution. If you've forgotten your password, you'll lose EFS files anyway, no matter how you try to get in. Again, I'll report back how this works.

Edit: this tool is more complex than any beginner will want to use, but it ended up doing the trick for me, after I figured out which partition I should be using it on :). It seemed illogical to me that I should use it on the partition labeled boot, since the boot partition should be the CD I booted from, not the default boot partition for the machine! The GUI is dense and not recommended- the text version seemed to do the trick much better. I'm more comfortable in a console for stuff like that anyway. Recommended, if you know what you're doing.

Vista SP1 publicly available

It's finally here: Vista SP1 for x86 and x64 versions of Windows Vista, in the primary 5 languages.

Though I've been waiting since they announced RTM, I actually appreciated the way they were distributing it; they found some drivers that weren't compatible with the SP1 install process, so they gave the manufacturers a heads-up and worked with them to release updated and compatible drivers. (Hence the nearly month-and-a-half delay before public availability). Now that all the manufacturers have updated drivers, they've released SP1 and configured Windows Update to check and make sure you don't have any of the problematic drivers. If you don't, no problem, here's SP1. If you do, here's the drivers you need to update, THEN once they're installed, here's SP1. And according to an article by Paul Thurrott, the compatibility of the bad drivers wasn't even all that bad to begin with. They're just keeping the lowest common denominator in mind- those users who wouldn't know that a visit to the Control Panel would have gotten them their soundcard working again. Very smart.

Apparently over the next few months they will upgrade the classification of the updated drivers to important, so someone who doesn't even realize they have the old versions will be automatically upgraded, then SP1 will be offered. I don't know yet if SP1 will be installed automatically or not. My computer at work is set to install any available updates automatically at 3:00AM, and I made sure it's aware of SP1's availability, so I guess if I come in tomorrow and it's SP1, it'll install automatically. My guess, however, is that you'll have to click a button that you accept the installation of SP1.

So the first thing I did when this became available was to burn the install on a CD, wipe out my lab machine and install vanilla Vista on a empty hard disk, then install the service pack as soon as I logged onto the desktop for the first time; the process that's supposed to be the 'worst' upgrade path, since vanilla Vista doesn't have any of the prerequisite installs for SP1. However, I was pleased with how they pulled this off; it told me it might take an hour or more to install (!), and that I couldn't use my computer during that time. It offered me a checkbox to have my computer restart automatically. What that allowed it to do was that, when it did restart for the first time (5 minutes or so after I began installation), it never came all the way back to the welcome screen or desktop. It finished installation in the screen I refer to as the "Pre-welcome screen" WinPE-looking screen. So even if a user has a password to log onto the machine, they don't have to enter it each of the three times it restarts. Very nice. And only about 20-30 minutes for it to install, too. I guess that's the benefit of over-estimating; it's a pleasant surprise when it turns out to be shorter.

Now that this is out, as soon as we get AutoCAD 2008 with multi-seat licensing at work, I can image an installation and reformatting a computer will suddenly become a 20-minutes process! I can't wait. I just wish that, as a 'home' user, I could pay a nominal fee and get a slipstreamed SP1 Vista disk, either as a download, or in the mail. Preinstalled Service Packs just tend to be better than one installed after the fact. Even though WAIK blurs that line quite a bit, I just can't get over wanting a bundled disk straight from Microsoft.

Update: According to my observations on several computers last night, as well as comfirmation from Windoes IT pro, though the updated drivers will eventually install automatically, Service Pack 1 will NOT. It will download automatically, but then prompt the user to install it. Just the way it should be, with an update this significant.

Tip: Redownload Deleted or Lost Podcast Episodes (without re-subscribing)

This is very valuable to me...I found it originally through this article

In helping the church podcast their sermons, I've several times deleted a specific episode by accident and not been able to find how to get it back without deleting the subscription and starting over. It's actually quite easy, once you know the trick (that apple doesn't bother to tell anyone or put in a context menu anywhere). Collapse the podcast (so you don't see the individual episodes), then hold shift (or command on a mac) while expanding it again (clicking the gray triangle). You'll see it update, and previously deleted episodes will be listed as available for you to "Get".

YAY!

Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services RemoteApp Step-by-Step Guide

RemoteApp appears to be a new mode or feature expanding on the Remote Desktop application (mstsc.exe) in Windows (mostly Vista and Server 2003, though it was back-ported to XPsp2). It allows you to run a PROGRAM on a client computer as a native app, even though it's installed on the server, not the client. It looks to the user like any other program, but it's running from the server. For me, this would reduce latency when I try to run some of my programs at work from home by logging into the server, then logging in from there to my desktop...it's just not a viable option. This would theoretically allow me to run a program on the server that's installed on my desktop, which would be much faster. It would also allow me to run some of the mmc snap-ins from my desktop without having to log into the server.

Microsoft has a RemoteApp Step-by-Step Guide available. I haven't tried it, and I'm a bit confused that it appears to be strictly server (2003 or 2008)-based; I haven't found the steps for running a program installed on my desktop from the server. I also don't know if we have a license that allows us to install the Terminal Server role (which it says is required on the server to serve the program to the client). I'll have to look into all this.

I found this while looking for information about using WinPE as somewhat of a thin client. I found, to my surprise, that if I copy mstsc* from %windir%\system32 and %windir%\system32\{language} into the same structure on my WinPE disk, that I can run remote desktop quite successfully from the WinPE commandline (this is not the case with other apps, such as ones I've written - probably because of their dependancy on Windows libraries, which aren't available in the WinPE environment). My feeling is that it's not legal to do so, however, which is why I was looking for documentation on this process (never found any). RemoteApp would probably do what I needed anyway, and better, since WinPE is reported to reboot every 24 hours.

IE7Pro

Started hearing about IE7Pro a few days ago (though it's apparently been popular with savvy users for a while), and thought I'd check into it today.

Simple sum-up: it ROCKS!

The only add-on I've found I really liked in IE7 until now was an inline search replacement for the Find (on this page) popup dialog. The great part is that IE7Pro includes this as just one of its features! (Though it did mean I had to actually uninstall the old app from my Control Panel.) Note that this is just an add-on to your existing IE7 (or 6), not a brand-new standalone browser application.

Other GREAT features are
-ad-blocking (not just popup blocking)
-scripting support and pre-installed useful scripts (customizing gmail, for instance)
-spellcheck-as-you-type (it's been helping me on this post as I type it, though apparently it thinks spellcheck is two words)
-a download manager that you can turn on and off easily
-auto-scroll at a selected speed
-mouse gestures (I'll have to play with these before I decide if I like them)
-crash recovery
-better tab handling (tons of options that you can enable or disable as you like - I disabled most of them because I'm pretty used to IE7's way of handling tabs, though I kept super drag and drop, which lets me open links in new tabs by dragging them anywhere on the page [instead of all the way up to a blank tab])
-undo closing a tab
-syncing your bookmarks across several computers (requires a free account)
-Ctrl+M minimizes IE to the system tray (by the clock) - this is GREAT for me, since I usually have a Pandora.com window open that I don't want taking up room on my taskbar (this is probably among my favorite features, with Spellcheck and inline search)
-etc.

So far, I highly recommend it. Check out their website for a full list of features.

Vista Hands On #17: Solving a pesky resource problem | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

Great information here, especially for Vista which tends to use more resources. This lets you set the shared desktop heap memory higher so that more windows can be open without those weird visual glitches (missing controls or menus, etc).

One onOne with Mike Wong: Liquid Resize Public Beta - Update 1/31/2008

One piece of software (Liquid Resize) using the image resizing method that's come to be called 'seam carving' or 'retargeted images' (that I wrote about here) is getting ready to be released to the public- first as a standalone piece of software, then later as a Photoshop plugin.

I really can't wait to play with this software, and I hope that the method or similar concepts becomes as ubiquitous in photo editing applications as the clone stamp is now - I use Paint.net as a free alternative to Photoshop, but I don't think that Photoshop plugins will work with anything but Photoshop. OK, actually I'm pretty darn sure that's the case. :-)

This is a powerful method that deserves more attention and, in my opinion, greater availability in the future for the average home scrapbooker or web designer to have access to. The blog talking about the beta release is below:
One onOne with Mike Wong: Liquid Resize Public Beta - Update 1/31/2008

As a side note, it's an interesting line here- a tool so powerful that the designers certainly deserve all the credit and monetary profit they can get from their ideas, but that is so useful that everyone really needs access to it. Hopefully the companies that hire(d) all the people that did the early work on this concept will be able to publish commercial software with it, make money on it, reward the people who brought the ideas in, then once it's an accepted and high-demand tool, it will proliferate into free software and they'll be able to move onto other amazing projects like this with the company's support. This tool needs to be out there, just not at the expense of the designer's investment of time and money returning to them empty. Unfortunately, the corporate world of today rarely works like that.

Update: Wikipedia's article on Seam Carving lists some links at the bottom of the page to tools that already offer this ability. I tried most of them (you're welcome) ;-) and found that Seam Carving GUI was by far the best solution. This is very cool technology, and you can bet I'll be using it extensively from here on out.

IPOfficeInfo.com | IP Office Resource

IPOfficeInfo.com IP Office Resource

Links for skins on Phone Manager, as well as how to get Outlook to be able to dial my contacts.

The Lone Server...

Microsoft's marketing team hit a winner here for geeks (like yours truly). It's the first-person blog/video clip from the perspective of the last Windows Server 2003 server at microsoft.com

The whole point of this blog is to point out that even though Windows Server 2008 hasn't been released yet, Microsoft was so confident in their stability, security and performance that they started using servers for live traffic based on the OS that would become 2008, back in 2005 (when the OS was called Longhorn). Now all of Microsoft.com is run from server 2008 machines, even though they're still in Beta. Thus, the supposed last Server 2003 (of which there are probably, in all actuality, none left) moans about 'what happened to me? What do they have that I don't?'. Naturally, the bartender (who ends up being Windows Server 2000) has a list of exactly what they have that he doesn't.

There's even some inside jokes about old MS slogans, Windows ME and "A guy walks into a bar with a penguin under his arm". Just funny stuff - worth a look.

Vista CD Burning File System set to mastered

Note: If/When it's done, this might be an interesting topic to read, but until then, this is just a scratch pad for me to keep track of what I've tried, and probably completely uninteresting and confusing to anyone but me. I'll keep updating this as I go, but I'll probably just make a new post if/when I get it figured out.

Goal: get Vista's CD burning software to default to "Mastered" file system, rather than "Live File System". I've searched everywhere, and lots of people are asking how to do it, but nobody seems to have any answers.

What I've found:
1) There's a key in the registry that is called excludedFS under CD burning...it contains entries for each of the four UDF file types, all of which are just blank, and neither setting them to 1 nor 0 disables any of the options, nor does deleting any of the values (or even the key itself).

2) HKCR\Shell.CDBurn\Shell\Prepare\Command lists the command "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,PrepareDiscForBurnRunDll %L". Now we're getting somewhere...
-rundll32.exe shell32.dll,preparediscforburnrundll told me that it couldn't find that entry point, so capitalization counts.
-A Google search for PrepareDiscForBurnRunDll found 0 (zero...NONE) results. Dang. Of course, that'll change now that I'm publishing this. You heard it here first, people! :-P
-A little experimenting found I can replace %L with E: or E:\ and get the 'format disk' dialog to pop up for the given drive. Great. Maybe I can pass another parameter to specify HOW it should run (ie: mastered as default)? But I can't find it...passing anything other than a drive letter causes it to not even (visibly) start.
-Interesting though, I found I can get this to pop up for a drive containing a professional CD-ROM and "Mastered" file system is disabled. I wonder what that would do...surely I can't add files to a CD-ROM! Anyway, since it's just doing that based on the type of CD inserted, that doesn't necessarily mean I can dis/enable either option at will. Presumably the same thing would happen if I ran that command on a previously 'closed' mastered file system CD.
-Naturally, none of the switches -? -help /? /help /1 /0 /m -1 -0 -m -mastered /mastered 1 0 m mastered did ANYthing-as I said, it just didn't run at all. Running it like E:1 does let it run, but doesn't change anything-live is still selected, and version 2.01 (default). Probably means that it won't take other parameters, at least AFTER the drive letter. But maybe not.
-I don't know much about dlls, so I did a google search to see if I could find a tool that would extract acceptable arguments, or the number, or something. I'm not hopeful, and indeed, it looks like it's not possible - you need documentation or information from the writer. I'll search for shell32.dll information. We'll see...

3) There's a key at HKCU\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\explorer\autoplayhandlers\userchosenexecutehandlers\handlecdburningonarrival that says "MSPromptEachTime"...I wonder if changing this key does anything. If it didn't prompt each time, would it take my 'last selection' (mastered?). (tried it) ...No such luck. I need to do a search for MsPromptEachTime to see if there's an alternate phrase that I could put in there.

-----

-Things I've yet to search through the registry for:
udf
cdburn -halfway through this search (haven't gotten past HKLM\Soft\ms\win\currver\explorer\autoplayhandlers\handlers\mscdburningonarrival)
mscdburningonarrival
MSPromptEachTime
"cd burning"

-----

-Fun tidbit: Found I can change HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\AutoplayHandlers\MSCDBurningOnArrival ->Action to something like "Boogie" and that shows up in the autoplay dialog rather than "Burn files to CD" like @%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-17416 pointed to

An easier way to select multiple files in Vista

Now this is just nice:
An easier way to select multiple files � Vista Tips-n-Tricks Weblog

In older versions of Windows, if you had to select multiple files, but not all files, in a folder, you would typically do this: hold down the control-key (CTL) while clicking the various files with your mouse. You would eventually be done with selecting the multiple files. But, if you forgot to hold down the CTL key or just got tired, then one wrong click after that and you would lose your entire selection so far. That was so frustrating. Thankfully, that was so non-Vista. Vista now offers a great way to select multiple files. Here’s what you do:

Very cool. I wish this could be toggled on/off with a key combination, mouse click of a button or at least set as a per-folder option. I don't really like it for my entire system, but I might get used to it...it's got the side benefit of a logical way of deselecting (blurring, or taking focus away) from a folder view; just uncheck the box. No more hunting for a 'blank' area in Vista's explorer windows to click to deselect anything. That's really nice for me.

One thing they don't mention is that if you click the file name itself with this option set, you see the checkbox get checked, but clicking another filename is like you'd want - it unchecks (and hides) the checkbox for what WAS selected as it deselects it, but if you click the checkbox instead (just a little left of the filename), it leaves the first file checked and checks the new file as well, just like you were holding the ctrl key, but you see the checkboxes this time indicating the selection (as well as highlighting the selected items). Watch out though; because of this behavior, even if you have several things checked (selected), then click a file name, everything will deselect, just as if you'd released ctrl. Make sure to click the CHECKBOX when you want to multi-select.

Jib-Jab Year in Review

This is a GREAT year-in-review by JibJab.com. We saw it premier on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno when he came back from the writer's strike-caused 2-month time off. I actually wasn't expecting much, though I've used JibJab before for things like our Snowball Fight movie before; but I was quite surprised to find myself rolling on the floor by the time they were done...figuratively, of course.

A side note on the Tonight Show - for having to write his own monologue, I've gotta say it was among the better ones I've heard in years. I wonder if he can keep it up night after night...

Tales from the Microsoft Surface team

There's a new blog coming out of Microsoft now called Tales from the Microsoft Surface team. Microsoft Surface, if you haven't heard of it, is new technology that can best be described as a really, really big iPhone. But with tons more functionality. It looks like it's about the dimensions of those old pac-man tables you used to see in pizza joints, but the whole surface is touch-sensitive...in fact, multi-touch sensitive; meaning that several people can be working on the same screen at once. The obvious uses are in displays, of course...I've heard speculation of map displays in airports and malls, casino applications, and informational displays in cell phone stores (place the phone you're interested in on the surface and it will detect it and tell you all about it).

Sounds interesting, but there's a lot of work they've yet to do before getting them really wide-spread. Eventually though, it might be interesting to hang one of these on your wall like a new TV and have Media Center and other Windows applications available, in a really big format, at the touch of the screen.

There's a great demo at http://www.surface.com: skip the intro movie, then click on "The Magic". It really shows you what I'm talking about.