Monthly Archives: January 2004

Scoble – community blogs or indie blogs??

Blogging

Recently, Robert Scoble has shared his thoughts on community blogs and his preference for independent blogs.

Robert posted his OPML this morning and I went and took a looksee.

Couldn’t help but notice that although I have moved my blog (yes though I am still cross-posting SOME of my content) he is not subscribed to my indie blog, but whatever happens to come through to the main feed of the group blog. (It’s true, I do, indeed, expect him to be subscribed to my blog!)

I am still tormented about the idea discontinuing the cross-posting.

More on the Tablet Team’s InkLog application

Tablet

I had the good fortune of chatting with Arin Goldberg today, the ISV Architect from the Tablet PC Group and the guy who designed the Tablet SDK and wrote many of the samples. He had fun telling me that he’s the guy who wrote the InkLog application that I wrote about in my blog and his interpretation that I was saying how horrible I thought it was! Egads. Now Arin, I didn’t say it was horrible, I just thought “very cool, now add in some legible hand writing and some links and the program is golden“. And I was VERY inspired by it. I spent days thinking about what I might want to see in an ink blog and how it might be implemented. And finally started messing around with it with BLInk!

Well, now that I felt like a total heel :-), Arin told me something about the inner workings of the application that basically astounded me. It’s a web application. Get it? Inking on a web page! Hello. Now that is VERY cool. How did he do it? A cute little trick called embedding a windows inking control into a webform. (Yes I am referring to the commont technique used with ActiveX controls and Windows Forms User Controls) Not that I’m gonna try this at home (not this afternoon at least). However, Lonestar (next version of the TabletPC OS which is a FREE upgrade coming out later this year) apparently addresses this and we’ll all have some more tools for doing something (maybe not full interaction yet, but closer than we are now) along those same lines with the new sdk. I look forward to checking out Lonestar and seeing more for myself.

A professional development course on Blogging!

Blogging

Yes you read that title correctly. I just learned about this class through it’s instructor, Nancy Pera who’s blog “BlahBlahBlog” has the skinny on this class. Don’t you just love that name? BlahBlahBlog!

“…professional development course on blogging–The Reading-Writing Connection: Internet Publishing made SIMPLE with Weblogs. I teach in the second largest district in the nation, and as far as I know this will be the first blogging course offered. I wonder what will happen.“

The class is for teachers, though Nancy also works with elementary school students and they are learning about blogging as well.

Nancy is also a fan of tablets and has encouraged me to stop sleeping at night and get BLInk! finished so that I can share it with her students. (She did not put on that heavy pressure, that’s my own doing).

Not only can you read about the course as it progresses on Nancy’s blog (can I just say that title again? BlahBlahBlog!), but you can see the output from the class here which includes some pros and cons.

A .NET Poem

dotNET

I have been looking at the BCL a lot lately in preparation for a presentation on What’s new in the Base Class Library for Whidbey that I am doing at EdgeEast and at DevTeach.

Ever since K.C. pointed to this brilliant visualization of Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements“ song, I have been hoping someone with more talents than I would attack it from the CLR perspective. But alas. Here is my first crack at it:

System, data, SQL Client, Text and XML
Reflection and Collections, Port and Diagnostic hell
Windows Forms and Drawing, Web, U.I. and WebControl
and Timers, Threading, Logging. I.O., Ports and Protocols
Security, Cryptography, Discovery, Transactions
Configuration, Interop and Serial-i-zation
I don’t know what’s come over me, this constant revelation
It seems it’s from a lethal redpill/koolaid combination

ok – lame ending but hey, I gotta get back to work

[syndicated from Julia Lerman’s Don’t Be Iffy Blog. Please refer and comment here]

Massachusetts backs off on Open Source policy

Just Rambling

A few months ago there was a proposal in the works for the state of Massachusetts that looked like someone was trying to force Mass to use “Open Standards and Open Source” software only and not get locked into licensing etc. (my interpretation of lengthy legal document…) This is pretty scary for a LOT of people, developers, Microsoft, etc. Just out of curiosity, I checked over on that site again today and coincidentally, they posted their official policy yesterday. They have split “Open Standards and Open Source” into separate policies and renamed Open Source to Acquisition, where they now strongly encourage the consideratoin of open source and freeware, but they do still have proprietary software on the top of their list. Phew!

Read more here:

Boston.NET’s Longhorn Study Group

dotNET

Just got this meeting announcement from Boston.NET and couldn’t help notice the special part (bolding etc are mine)

The January meeting of the Boston .NET User Group will be held tomorrow at the usual time, 5-8:30 p.m. We will hold the first meeting of our Longhorn Study Group from 5-6:30 and then are please to have Rocky Lhotka, noted author and speaker, as our featured speaker. Please register at http://www.bostondotnet.org and view the details on these events.

Wow. Already!!?!