Microsoft

Occasionally, not often, but occasionally I find out about some new technology that is so cool it leaves me speechless. The demo of Microsoft's new Photosynth is one of these technologies. Photosynth is a combination of Seadragon and image research from the University of Washington.

Photosynth takes ordinary pictures off the web (flickr for example) and combines them together in a spatially coherent way. Once all these images are stitched together you can then wander through the space, taking a 3D tour. The truly cool part of this is that the source images are regular, vanilla images uploaded by average uses. In a sense this technique could be used to take any image with metadata, especially geograpahic metadata, to create a virtual earth on steroids, one could even call it the long tail of Virtual Earth.

Recall the impact that Google's satellite images had on mapping, now imagine that you can zoom in from the satellite photos to pictures taken by people around the world. No longer being limited to the satellite view, you will see pictures of it from every angle. You can switch between the pictures to get a view from the different angles. You can drill down to detailed close-ups or back out for a different view. The end result would be a staggeringly cool virtual tour of the Eiffel tower, but don't forget this technique could be used on any publicly available image with metadata potentially creating a virtual tour of the whole world. Now that is one really cool notion.

The technology behind Photosynth gives is a glimpse at the advancements with more visual search methods, it will be extremely cool to see how this technology is applied.

Google has recently augmented their mapping solution by adding My Maps, a service that allows users to take a base Google map and add points, lines and polygons to it. Presumably this is a way to compete with some of the more advanced mapping solutions provided by Ask and Microsoft.

Both Microsoft's and Ask's mapping platforms are riddled with ultra cool features, are they just for show to try to one up the othe companies or are they real useful features.

Please share your thoughts here on what mapping features you like best and what features you would love to see.

In the past, Internet Explorer has always been required in order to download certain updates or Microsoft programs. When installing the PDF and XPS plugin for Office 2007, I used FireFox by default not thinking that I might need to use IE. I was very surprised when I saw that I could validate WGA and download the plugin from FireFox. Here is a quote from the site:

"Some downloads are made available only after users have validated their versions of Microsoft Office. Firefox and Netscape Navigator browser users may install a helper program, the Office Genuine Advantage plug-in, to enhance their download experience."

Perhaps Microsoft is embracing the the competition and letting people choose their own browser. Unfortunately http://update.microsoft.com still requires Internet Explorer.

Today I installed Windows Vista on my new T60, when I entered our corporate key for Vista the installer just died and the machine needed to be rebooted. This is a pretty embarrassing bug for the Microsoft folks given that a valid license key causes the installation to fail. My work-around was to redo the install but skip the key step so that I could enter it later.

During the installation it prompted me for the version of windows that was being installed. The CD is from the MSDN and it just says vista on it and I remember hearing that all version of Vista are the same, that the license used determines which features are enabled. So I chose Ultimate assuming that it would downgrade to business if necessary.

After I get the machine installed I enter the key and, low and behold, it won't accept it as an Ultimate key. But it also won't downgrade to Vista Business automatically either. So here I am reinstalling Vista again.

To make an installation package for a custom SSIS component the .dll(s) that make up the component must be installed into two places:

1. For design time it needs to be installed in the SQL Server's pipeline components folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\PipelineComponents
2. For runtime it needs to be installed in the GAC

All your setup package has to do is install the .dll(s) into both of these places and you are ready to rock n' roll. This micro-howto doesn't cover aspects of the GAC (like signing code) or developing an SSIS component, for those topics I would recommend www.sqlis.com. Read on for notes on creating an installation package.

One fine day I found myself staring at the Windows XP search animation, waiting patiently when the irony struck. The Windows XP search animation is a picture of a dog that is flipping through a book page by page searching for something. The irony here is how clear that animation depicts the actual search process in Windows XP. You give it a file name and it starts searching the hard drive file by file looking for matches.

Lucky for us Windows Vista's search is a significant improvement over XP; in fact it is very competitive with Mac OS X's spotlight service that has garnered so much attention. The search in Vista is a huge leap forward, in fact I would go so far as to say that is the single greatest reason to upgrade from XP. Vista is not only a spectacular search system, but it also excels in the usability category. This search is so good it will change the way you work with your computer. Read on to find out more tips, tricks and features of Vista's new search.

With the release of Windows Vista there has been a departure from traditional menus. Office 2007 provides the ribbon and both IE7 and windows explorer have ribbon like menu interfaces.

In IE7 or windows explorer you can temporarily show the menu by pressing F10 (or crtl-F10 if you already have F10 bound). This trick does not work in word 2007 so I suspect the ribbon is immune to our antics and backward ways.

I have now been using vista for about two months and I have come to like many of the subtler changes in Windows Vista. Originally I posted a scathing first impression criticizing it, but I have come to use it and come to appreciate many of the changes that were made between XP and Vista. I am going to post a short series of articles focusing on what I like about vista; improvements and features that are important to users when making the buy/upgrade decision. Here is the itinerary:

The good folks at Lenovo decided that the Thinkpad T60 didn't need an s-video out on the laptop as its predecessor (the T42) had. No instead they determined that the best place for the s-video out would be on the dock, What were they thinking?!?! It seems pretty obvious that they put all of 5 seconds of distracted thought into that decision, who actually uses the s-video out while docked? I can here you saying, "Yeah, yeah they suck but what does all this have to do with an xbox?"

I recently tried out windows Vista and I was sadly disappointed. I use windows XP at work (programming), and I use mac at home. So I am familiar with both but tend to think OS X is a better more stable OS.