istartedsomething

For a design-orientated conference, Microsoft’s MIX08 event has one of the worst-designed session timetables/planners I’ve ever come across. The sessions are listed in no apparent order and doesn’t actually provide any methods to sort the list by title, time, place or focus just in case you have any sense of control.

If you wanted to see what’s on during a particular time-slot, nope, can’t do that. If you wanted to see what’s on in a particular room on a day, nope, can’t do that. If you wanted to plan a list of sessions you’re interested in to find any conflicts, nope, can’t do that.

Because my time is so much less valuable than whomever designed that, I’ve taken the liberty to recompose the entire schedule in an Excel workbook to give some sense of time and place with what’s going on during the 3-day event with over 76 sessions in total.

First, I made an overview schedule of all the events and functions at MIX.

Then for each day, I compiled a detailed schedule of all the sessions that are happening that day columnized by which room it’s happening in.

Together with some nice colors, cell formatting and customized view options, if I may say so myself, I have designed a pretty damn good timetable.

What I’m going to do for myself is color highlight the sessions (cells) which I’m interested in attending so I have a clear picture of where I should be and when. Because I would feel so guilty being the only person at the event who actually has a clue what’s going on, I felt obliged to make available this Excel document for everyone else to download.

Download the schedule in Excel 2007 format (XLSX) here or the Excel 2000 format (XLS) here.

I’ll try to update the schedule when sessions time/place change. As a result of any errors in the schedule, I hold no responsibility if you end up in a LOLCat convention by mistake. But I’m sure you’ll fit right in.

Update (25/1): Added BlogZone opening and closing times to the overview.

One of the lesser known facts about wireless products is that they all have to tested by this little organization called the FCC, who for less obvious reason takes many photos of upcoming and sometimes unannounced products and puts them up on their (very hard to use) website.

What we have today is a (poorly lit) photo of Microsoft’s yet-to-be-announced Wireless Laser Keyboard 7000, the keyboard compliment to the recently announced Wireless Laser Mouse 7000. Ironically that too was uncovered early via FCC documentations.

This particular photo along with a batch of other external photos were only released recently due to a 45-days short-term confidentially agreement between Microsoft and the FCC in order to “ensure sensitive business information remains confidential until the actual marketing of the device”. Guess Microsoft’s falling a little behind on their marketing schedules.

What’s unique about this keyboard is the transparent glass frame surrounding the entire keyboard – an obvious harmony with the Windows Vista user interface, Aero Glass. Perhaps slightly inspired by Carbon Design’s Longhorn PC concepts featuring the same glass frame around the keyboard. In addition, it appears to be also the first keyboard on the market with a dedicated Flip 3D key (besides the right ALT key). Whether or not that makes the eye-candy feature any more useful was outside of the FCC’s testing criteria.

And if for some reason you don’t believe me, you only need to look as far as Microsoft’s own website for proof.

Can’t wait to see the proper high-resolution marketing photos of this product in a well-lit environment, sitting on a desk inside a room furnished by IKEA and used by over-excited people representing all skin colors and genders.

Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition	Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition	Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition	Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition	Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server	Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite

Whilst looking through DreamSpark, I noticed a boxshot for Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and thought “that looks pretty cool”. Then I realized that’s because I’ve never seen it before. Perhaps they have been published for a while now and I just missed it. Nevertheless, here they are with all the flavors of Visual Studio 2008 for you to enjoy, that is if you have a fetish for software packaging as much as I do. Shame they’re in such low resolution though.

No other company comes to mind that treats students as well as Microsoft. You only need to look at initiatives such MSDN Academic Alliance – where students can obtain Microsoft software for free for non-commercial use, and The Ultimate Steal (It’s Not Cheating) – the $60 Office 2007 Ultimate offer for students to appreciate their generosity. Others like Adobe and Apple offer marginal discounts for academics, but nothing close to these.

Today, Microsoft’s evangelism team has announced a new offer called “DreamSpark” where all post-secondary students from any specialization can acquire a range of professional-edition development and design software from Microsoft at a cost of only a few clicks and minutes. The catch is that students will need to verify their identity at their institutions and not all institutions have an identity system set up, but that’s only a matter of time before they should and would.

Whilst there might seem like an overlap between DreamSpark and MSDNAA, the difference is that MSDNAA requires involvement from the school and it also costs them money I believe. This offer, whilst still requires education providers to set up a system to verify identities of their students, allows students to go directly to Microsoft whether or not their schools are MSDNAA subscribers or not, which a surprisingly large number are not. MSDNAA also offers client operating systems where DreamSpark does not.

The range of softwares available currently include:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

The offer is currently only available to institutions from Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. and United States. If your country, like Australia, isn’t listed, it doesn’t mean it’s not available there, it just means no institutions have provided an identity verification system to Microsoft yet. If your school isn’t listed, start spamming your school’s IT department with the previous link.

Obviously Microsoft recognizes the ease of acquiring pirated software in a school environment and are taking innovative yet rational steps not to punish those who are acquiring Microsoft software as students, but providing them with alternative and cheaper methods of doing so that’s within the law. Of course, it also makes sense from a marketing point of view to get kids hooked on these drugs, I mean software, at an early age. As a student, kudos to them.

Ever since I’ve had more than 500GB of hard drive space, I’ve started collecting trash – that is, not clearing the Recycle Bin. My current Recycle Bin hasn’t been cleared since late December of 2007, and it’s bulging at over 33GB. On my laptop which has barely 40GB of free space, I clear my bin almost every day. But on my desktop, I’ve gotten into this habit of keeping things in there under the assumption one day something in there might prove useful once again. So far, I’ve only had a few encounters where that’s proven useful.

You always see these current affair stories on TV about people who fill their houses with trash, and it’s disgusting of course. Even though I’m quite an impulsive cleaner in reality, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m having the same problem now, in the digital sense. I have so much hard drive space, I can literally keep everything I’ve ever stored on there, without deleting it. That’s quite a scary thought.

Does anyone else have this problem? How big is your Recycle Bin and how long do you keep stuff in there?

Photo credit Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

It’s official. The number of tears from Robert Scoble is the new benchmark for software innovation.

Somewhere in Microsoft’s campus, Robert Scoble saw something today that he describes as “software that really changes my world”. He puts the technology in the ranks of the Apple II, Apple’s Hypercard, Excel, Pagemaker, Photoshop, Netscape, ICQ, Netmeeting and Skype.

Apparently us, normal people, will have to wait until February 27 to find out what it is. That leaves 12 days of hype and anticipation, which is also exactly what Scoble wanted.

The rumor-mill has already begun spinning with the few hints we have.

• The people who demonstrated the technology to Scoble are Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay. These guys work in the Next Media Group of Microsoft Research who’s focus is media and visualizations.
• Scoble points out “they’ve been traveling all over the world working with researchers from other institutions and getting data for their new thing”, which suggests there is some sort of data cache already in place that was beyond what was available to just Microsoft.
• Lastly, “you’ll see techniques that lots of startups are using and, even, that the Google Map team is using. This isn’t stuff that was possible in 1995 so it requires 2008-style Web services and data centers.”

The most obvious answer is of course Photosynth, the interactive 3D browser for large photo collections of a particular place. For that, Peter McCaffrey has gathered some evidence which certainly draws enough connections between what Scoble has described with what can only be the full release of Photosynth to the general public.

But I’m not too sure if that’s it. Certainly Scoble has seen Photosynth before and probably shared his excitement about it at the time, so I find it hard to believe he can be so touched by it again. Update 3: Scoble has confirmed it is not Photosynth.

Then I found this from “Bill” in my inbox from yesterday. www.opensourcehero.com. I remember looking at it yesterday and didn’t pay much attention to it because it was just a teaser. But then I looked at it again today, and I shivered.

As far as I know, there’s no apparent connection between this and what Robert describes, besides the date.

Update: It looks like I might be wrong. Open Source Hero is probably related to the “Heroes Happen Here” launch for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 which is incidentally also happening on February 27.

Update 2: Apparently Open Source Hero is entirely unrelated to what Scoble is talking about.

Update 4: Scoble aside, what’s Microsoft’s announcing for open source on February 27?