September 2006 - Posts
James Governor and Kevin Murphy both agree: site Privacy Policies should have RSS feeds.
Absolutely.
I'm heading over to New York for VSLive! New York. If you happen to be going too and want to meet up, let me know. I'll be there with Pablo Castro of the ADO.NET team who'll be demo'ing some cool stuff for Corey Thomas' opening keynote - 'Data Explosion: The Last and Next Decade in Data Management'.
(I tried to think of a longer blog post title, but couldn't)
Previously, the only way of streaming music from your XP machine to other devices was to use a separate app -Windows Media Connect (WMC), except in the case of the Xbox 360 - which uses Media Center Extender (MCX).
Now if you have an Xbox 360 but don't have Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) you can use the new Window Media Player 11 (WMP 11 beta 2) to set up your streaming music and images to the games console, instead of using WMC or MCE. Boomtown describes how to do this with WMP 11 beta 2, but the short-hand version is:
Media Sharing / Streaming with WMP 11 beta 2 1. Launch WMP 11 beta 2 > In the Library tab of Options > click 'Configure Sharing' > click on the Xox 360 icon > click 'Allow' > click 'Apply' and then 'OK'
2. Back in the Library tab of Options > click Monitor Folders > add and remove the folders you want available for streaming > click OK
3. On the Xbox 360 > select 'Media' blade > select 'Music' > select 'Computer' > and then select the XP machine you've just enabled above
I've got this running and worked first time. :-)
One issue I've had recently with the music libraries on Xbox 360 are duplicates. I caused this by pointing to another network drive while inside of the Media Center UI on the Xbox 360 that has a copy of my music files, causing the Xbox library to see a duplicate of every track, messsing everything up. And I did this because I was trying to force the library on the Xbox 360 to fill in some of the missing music / album /art info. I shouldn't have done this. as I needed to re-set everything, and that what you can do by following these steps:
Removing duplicates in the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender (MCX)
From this newsroup post:
"The changes should propagate through with time (especially if you let the Xbox 360 sit on the Music page in Media Center). If you'd like instant gratification, you can trigger a rebuild of the library for the MCX by removing and re-adding your MCX:
- Launch the MCX Manager (Start --> All Programs --> Accessories --> Media Center --> Media Center Extender Manager)
- Select your Extender, click Properties, select Remove.
- Select File --> Add a new Extender... and type in the 8-digit code displayed on the TV your MCX is connected to
Note that you'll need to tell your MCX where to find your videos, pictures,
and music again after you do this."
Album Art Fixer
I've also had some problems with missing album art info and working this out using WMP is a laborious process. So I looked around for a tool to help find and include missing album art / track info for my WMP and MCE libraries. I found this - Albulm Art Fixer -it's quick and clever.
(Ancronyms used: WMP, MCE, MCX, WMC !)
Favourite word of the month: 'Marchitecture':
"A Marchitecture is an architecture produced for marketing reasons, normally by a vendor. It is designed to put the vendor in the best possible light by emphasising the positive as well as hiding the negative. If you are in marketing you will spell it Marketecture."
Holy crap! I've been Wikipedia'd!
I found the entry via Philip who mentioned my recent blog move (thanks Philip and Brian too!). Curious, I checked out the edit history for the entry. The user who created the original entry is obviously a cricket fan as they have been busy updating Wikipedia with a whole bunch of entries including past and present professional cricketers (mainly Middlesex). The same user also created an entry for my great uncle, Charles (Charlie) Barnett, who opened the batting for Gloucester and England. A different user then updated my entry (not me) with a line on my more recent history / status.
It's weird, and just a little scary...
In my first week with the Data Programmability team, my new manager suggested I set up a bunch of introductory meetings with some of the team members. One of the very first of these meetings was with Software Architect Brian Beckman. I spent an hour with him and was totally blown away.
This is Brian, holding a copy of the 'Towards 2020" report published by Microsoft Research that he contributed to this year:
As I was sitting and listening to Brian's stream of consciousness I felt like I was watching a live 3D version of a Channel 9 video. At the end of our chat I asked him if he wouldn't mind me asking Charles Torre of Channel 9 to interview him. I really wanted others to have the chance to hear him talk. He happily agreed and the end result is now up for downloading on Channel 9. It's a large download but worth it - you'll be thoroughly entertained.
Brian is a cosmologist / astrophysicist / quantum physicist / academic-turned-programming language designer (!). His bookshelf is one of the more unusual you'll see around campus in terms of the mix (and is the only person I know other than me to own a Steve Wolfram book (I have A New Kind of Science - an extraordinary work).
He spent his early career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) researching nutty stuff such as the Time Warp Operating System and virtual time theory, distributed computing - running the Game of Life and virtual billiards on parallel processors, and developing War Game simulators for government (a little bit like the Game of Life, but more of a Game of Death involving large-scale nuclear warhead deployments and massive Soviet troop and tank maneuver scenarios: think of it as Sims Massively-Accelerated-Anti-Evolution Edition)...
Brian joined the Microsoft Research team years ago (before it was known as MSR) and today leads the our research and product incubation efforts in the Data Programmability team. He loves his functional programming languages: Haskell (Erik Meijer is one of Haskell's designers and is also in Brian's team) and Scheme. And he loves his Monads: Erik and Brian jointly wrote 'The Return of the Monoids' (not a science-fiction horror script, but research paper). As an example of what Brian does today, he was involved in the development of the Entity Data Model (EDM) into ADO.NET. This technology recently saw the light of day in ADO.NET Entity Framework CTP), with Brian taking on the role of translating the theoretical and mathematical models of EDM developed by the research team into coded concepts the product teams could interpret and then develop the technology for ADO.NET, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. In our first meeting we spent some time discussing the dynamic languages Ruby, Python and Perl - the great news for me was that he was very familiar with these and is actually quite a big fan of them although his day-to-day attention is focused on VB.NET as you can see from the video.
Mr Beckman collects calculators. He showed me one I've never see before - the CURTA Calculator. (The story behind its invention is as amazing as the device itself.)
He also show me this:
...which he has programmed to print out these:
His desktop scientific print calculator simply crunches out prime numbers, all day long, every day and has done for years.
Each new prime takes a little longer to calculate than the previous prime. Currently it takes about 6 hours to work out the next prime number. Earlier this year our team ran an internal competition - ADO.NET Idol: it's simple: the coolest app developed by a member the DP / SQL team using the ADO.NET vNext / EDM stack wins. Brian won it by developing an full-on emulator of the print calculator, GUI and all, programming each of the calculator's functions into a virtual ADO.NET vNext calculator to calculate and print out the prime numbers (at a considerably faster rate than the real calculator of course...). For fun.
Anyway, along with Brian and Erik and loads of others on the team, I've always plenty to learn each day around here...
I finally got around to sorting out my new 'Alex Barnett blog' on alexbarnett.net!
About my new blog
I'm using Telligent's Community Server (the recently released 2.1 version) and running very nicely thanks to the good folks at ASPnix (my new host - they know CS inside out, so *perfect* for supporting set up, and rectifiying my mistakes :-) plus excellent SQL Server support...I can even use SQL Server Management Studio to manage my own DBs (Express Edition here) hosted at ASPnix- sweet). Full FTP access to CS files, the lot.
The CS server has more than blogware (the same blogware running the blogs.msdn.com and blogs.technet.com blogs and the recently in-the-news Dell blog): it has forums, photos and files stuff and is used to run large community sites (e.g. ASP.NET, NetFx3 (btw, have checked out the new CTP release for .NET Framework 3.0?). CS is also used by a bunch of individual bloggers too, e.g. Larry Hyrb aka Xbox Live's Major Nelson and another blogger who's been in my OPML file for a while, Jason Knight.
Apart from the fact that you can customize (at code-level if you want) CS to you heart's content - no pun intended - the best part is that the 'Express' edition is free. Talking of customization, I settled on a pic I took in Yellowstone and got the blog looking pretty much as I want it (thanks to my sister Natasha who helped out on the CSS decyphering and styling). I'm using the 'Paperclip' theme as the base template - I might post up details later on how this was pimped. Anyway, what do you think?
I've also been able to use the new RSS / Atom / feeds syndication ('Mirror') features in CS 2.1 allowing the alexbarnett.net/blog to syndicate posts from my MSDN blog (more on this here). Hopefully once MSDN / TechNet / Communities team updates their instance of CS to 2.1 I can do the reverse (hmmm...need to think that one through though). In effect, my Feedburner subscribers don't have to change a thing (you see, there a was masterplan all along ;-)
Does this sound like an ad for Community Server and ASPnix?
I suppose so, but I'm just so pleased to be able to run my own blog as mine now. I'll be updating the MSDN blog from time to time for pure Microsoft releated stuff as I've still got a load of subscribers on the old RSS / Atom feed, so I'll have to provide those subscibers some gentle reminders to move over to my Feedburner feed. Plus the old feed is feeding the MSDN blogs aggregate feed that is syndicated pretty widely, so I should still use it to some degree.
Why am I moving my blog?
Well, there's something about knowing that your thoughts are hosted on your employer's infrastructure that I think has tended to constrain my writing somewhat - not much, but enough to be aware of it as I blog. And not because of company policy (i.e. 'blog smart').
While on MSDN, I always got a slight guilty feeling whenever I posted about purely personal or technical but non-Microsoft related stuff. I know there are bunch of posts I've written or wanted to write but didn't because I'm on 'official' territory.
Does that mean that my personal thoughts to be published on my new blog can't be intepreted as the words of a Microsoft employee, just because they live on my personal domain? No, I'm not thinking that at all.
If there's one thing we're all learning as 'Microsoft bloggers' is that what you write is considered a view of a Microsoft employee and therefore is quoteable and abusable as evidence of Microsoft's position on a matter. It doesn't matter how much you point out disclaimers (ah, that reminds me! I should add one to my personal blog...) that "your views are you own and not those of your employers' ", that fact it is that it is the perception that counts. Even as I write this post and know that I'm publishing from my new blog on a non-Microsoft-owned site, I am aware of my contractual agreement with my employer, I am aware the information that I know of but can't share publicly and the conversations with colleagues that cannot be made public. While at Microsoft, Robert Scoble and others regularly reminded us of that. This exit video of Scoble on Channel 9 is must-see viewing for any blogger in my view (most people are employed by somebody) - he talks about the fact that everytime he blogged he was very aware of the associated risks. I was sad to see him go - he taught me and the rest of us a lot about this topic. The fact that you might think that I'm writing 'on behalf of Microsoft' (which is not the case :-P ) is a fact that any blogging employee of any company needs to be mindful of. Blog smart in other words.
I've been blogging on MSDN since December 2003 (and on other blogs before that). It has been a great platform to get the feet wet on the 'corporate' blogging front and the Community team as well as the MSDN team that orginally got things going have been amazing in supporting the Microsoft blogging efforts, and they still are. As I say, I'll still be blogging there occasionally (on the Data Programmability team blogs (Data, ADO.NET, XML Team and SQL Protocols).
All the pieces of me
So here I am...in another part of cyberspace, playing with yet more stuff.
But at least this place, I hope to call home for while at least, is my place - where I connect all the distributed pieces of me. So it's not an MSDN gig, it's not a Live Space, it's my place. Let's see where I end up, here.
There is one downside though, a minor one, but only because I'm a competitive moron (but I'm not the only one...). You see, the blog traffic numbers at Microsoft are published each month internally and there is a little friendly competition among a few on the monthly numbers (most, quite rightly, don't care about these pv's and aggregate views and rankings), so, alas, I'm giving that game up. A good thing I'm sure...
Whatever, dude...
Eeesh...I'm writing this as if I'm making some kind of major life change! But blogging has been a big part of me for some years now, so moving from one blog to another feels like major deal to me. Anyway, enough of this nonsense! Enjoy the new blog!
P.S. Feel free to update your blogrolls :-)
OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog .
One of the reasons I decided to get my new domain 'alexbarnett.net' and get Community Server running is I want to be able aggregate all the 'pieces of me' scattered around cyberspace into a single place and then offer that up as a single 'uber me' feed (by the way, if you are reading this in your feedreader you are reading a post from my new blog...)
I now have around 1,400 subscribers to my FeedBurner feed since going live with it Sept 2006 and don't want my subscribers to have to update their readers - I just want to aggregate the various feeds into the FeedBurner feed (Feedburner doesn't allow 'splicing' of any feeds, only those they they have sanctioned - time for a change there).
The way to do this in Community Server 2.1 is to use the 'Mirrors' feature. You can create blog that you add feeds to. The new blog doesn't have to be made 'discoverable' or 'published' but the output RSS feed is available by CS so it can just act as an aggregator and publisher of several external (and internal to CS) feeds. Since the blog outputs a feed of its own I can then update my FeedBurner feed to subscribe to the blog's feed. Once you have this capability, you can create all sorts of aggregated feeds (with owners' permission). Here's the kind of thing I've done with my various feeds:
To acheive the above I followed Jason Knight's instructions (a Community Server MVP) in this screencast.
I spent ages looking for the link to referrers for posts within CS 2.1 and it seems I'm not the only one....so thought I'd share this with you:
From the Blog Control Panel > Manage Content > All Posts
In the list of the posts you'll see the 'Views' column and the number is a hyperlink. Click on that...bingo! -
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