The “31 Days of the Dragon” promotion to give away 31 state-of-the-art HP entertainment notebook PCs is nearing an end with over 16 lucky winners already chosen and only 8 more chances left to win.

Today this site is kicking off its giveaway in a slightly more traditional and chaotic manner with a simple random prizedraw. That’s right, if you were too lazy to write a story, take a picture or make a movie, this is as simple as it gets. But there’s a twist.

The first part of the giveaway is easy. Head over to the giveaway registration mini-site and submit your full name and email in the form provided. One person is only eligible to submit one entry. If duplicates are detected, you will be automatically disqualified. But if you really want to increase your odds of winning, there is a legitimate way.

To obtain a bonus entry in the giveaway, you will need to be using Windows Vista. Why? Because Vista users gets almost no love and are even shunned for using the latest technology instead of its 7-years-old sibling. It’s a shame everyone’s being suckered into a hate campaign devised by media companies to sell more ads.

Without rambling on too much, the bonus entry involves users to voluntarily participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) of Windows Vista. No, this isn’t paid by Microsoft although I wished they did. I’m asking you to enable CEIP because it is really the easiest way for you as a general user to help Microsoft improve Windows (and other applications) without any work on your behalf. I for one have enabled CEIP on all of my PCs.

The data collected is entirely anonymous and secure. Some of the information they collect include performance and reliability metrics (ie. percent of time an application failed, average length of time it takes to complete an operation), usage (ie. number of notifications) and configuration (ie. most common processor speeds, distribution for screen resolution).

An example of an outcome from CEIP are improvements to User Account Control. “Vista used CEIP to track the real world UAC prompt frequency and the top reasons for UAC prompts. This data was used to make design changes that reduce UAC prompts in unnecessary scenarios.”

To claim your bonus entry, you will need to download a run a small 100KB application which verifies you have enabled CEIP. Special mention to Rafael Rivera for making this possible with an undocumented API call in Windows.

This site’s giveaway ends in seven days on the Sunday, June 1 and winner will be announced soon after. Good luck.

Update: The winner has been announced.

A very tired little birdie who flew all the way from Seattle to Australia has chirped to me Windows 7 will be publically disclosed for the first time at the D6: All Things Digital Conference hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher next week on May 27. The same conference where last year Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a historical appearance together on-stage interviewed by Walt and Kara.

Whilst my chirp-to-English translation is a little flaky, it makes sense because the D Conference has been used in the past for Microsoft to make rather grand announcements such as the introduction of the Surface computer. This time round, both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer will appear together at the keynote so it’s a perfect opportunity to talk about the future of the company.

In addition to just discussing their ideas and vision, it’s rumored the event will actually involve a demonstration of Windows 7 in some fashion. Whether or not we’ll actually see a live build of Windows 7 or purely a technology demo of a specific feature remains a mystery, but it’s sure exciting.

In the past the conference organizers did not put up a live stream of the keynote so I doubt they will this year, however the event is thoroughly covered by bloggers and mainstream press so just keep an eye out on the morning of May 27.

Update: Videos from the event will be featured on the conference website here.

Update 2: The event organizers have just confirmed this rumor. “During tonight’s interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates, Microsoft (MSFT) will demonstrate Windows 7’s all-new user interface.”

Popular hardware vendor NVIDIA who has been rightly criticized for their buggy Windows Vista graphics and chipset drivers is now one of the first third-parties to commit their support for the next version of Windows.

It comes at little surprise the job advertisement NVIDIA published last week is for a Senior Quality Assurance Lead on Windows 7, perhaps to ensure the same mistakes aren’t made again. It writes,

SR. QA ENGINEER, WIN 7 LEAD #1047614

NVIDIA is looking for a senior QA engineer to lead the roll-out of Windows 7 within the GPU Software QA organization. This is an exciting opportunity to work with nVidia’s world class GPU and software offerings that are the heart of visual computing.

Once on-board, this technical leader will work with each of the GPU Software QA teams, Windows 7 driver development, product management, and our Seattle QA team to assure a smooth roll-out of this new operating system into QA. This leader will also drive improvements into the test planning process by working with NVIDIA’s industry leading development organization to assure that our testing is enhanced using a broader range of testing techniques. For example, the addition of white or gray box testing to the validation process to augment the unit and black box testing already being performed. This leader will also assure that coverage meets target levels and that testing leverage between operating systems, system hardware, and GPU hardware and software is utilized wherever possible.

Specific duties include reviewing of product specifications and requirements required to create comprehensive and effective Windows 7 test plans and subsequently driving cross-functional review of those plans.

The bandwagon has just started rolling.

Out of what little we know of the next version of Windows, this feature might just be the most interesting yet. A team at Microsoft is hiring developers to work on adding native support in Windows 7 for Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) – Microsoft’s semi-proprietary specification for single-file virtual machine hard disks. Their job posting reads,

Do you want to join the team that is bringing virtualization into the mainstream? In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively. Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.

Do you want to have the opportunity to work on a great Core OS team at the heart of Windows? If you have big ideas and want to implement them, if you love writing code, if you love delving into operating system internals, if you want to work on high visibility projects with direct consumer and customer impact and still work in a very technical environment, then you will feel right at home in this team.

Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal.

Whilst “one of the great features in Windows 7” might be a bit much, this is right up there with the new multi-line Calculator. No seriously, this has rather interesting implications for IT administrators and even home users.

For example, having an VHD dedicated to gaming with optimized system configurations is entirely feasible then. A dynamic VHD would mean it would only take up as much room as it needs, you could move the file on many system and have the same experience, but best of all, you can still enjoy the maximum native performance at the same time being able to load it as a virtual machine to maintain and configure without rebooting.

Considering how much we don’t know about Windows 7, this is extremely promising.

Update: A few people I’ve talked to have expressed their concern this may not make it to RTM and I think it’s a valid point at any time feature may be cut so I’ll just add that note for everyone else.

Update 2: Apparently the technology already exists in Windows 7 today, as indicated somewhat below.

Novelty boarding pass. Photo credit: Jordan Knight

For the last couple of months I’ve been involved with a small group of students (David Burela, Edward Hooper, Dimaz Pramudya) in Melbourne to participate in Microsoft’s worldwide Imagine Cup Software Design contest for students and our hard work has finally paid off today when we were judged out of four finalists as the Australian Imagine Cup winner to compete at the world finals in France early July.

I’ve only had a couple of hours sleep today so I’ll just share with you briefly what our project is about.

SOAK which stands for “Smart Operational Agriculture toolKit” is an integrated hardware and softwares platform that aims to help farmers make the most of the water (and other) resources on their land. It does this through an integration of a wide range of sensors which gathers data about the environment in real time, provide rich visual information to end-user about the status of the farm, and electronically controls various systems such as sprinklers.

None of the individual components are exceptionally revolutionary, but it’s the integration that we deliver that separates SOAK from other traditional systems.

For example by gathering online weather forecasts about the property, if the weather is predicted to rain in the next 48 hours and the current soil moisture is adequate till then, our system can conserve water usage by not watering before the rain falls. Also as a precaution, is the rainfall is inadequate, the watering system will resume operations to compensate for the difference.

Obligatory screen teasers:

For the main administrative interface we built a web application with a mashup of Windows Live Maps and Silverlight 2.0 overlaid on top.

Of course I couldn’t miss a good opportunity to whip up some Vista Sidebar gadgets.

My team partner David has a bit more detail and documentations about the project. I’ll keep everyone updated with how we go at the world finals in Paris.

Update: Australian PC Magazine has just published a very insightful story on our project and the competition.

Update 2: We’ve also won the world finals. You can read about the whole Imagine Cup journey here.

Here’s an interesting campaign from Microsoft Australia to promote Office 2007. By listening to a short thirty-second demo of Office 2007 presented by a nine year old kid, Microsoft promises to donate one Australian dollar to the Smith Family – a charity in Australia to support. Although the site’s terms and conditions state “Microsoft may choose to donate up to $100,000 regardless (of number of views)”, the kids puts a smile on your face anyway so check it out.

Ethan (top left kid) especially has a rather interesting explanation of “What is Microsoft”. And Elani (bottom right kid) has a rather blunt answer to the question “What do you learn at school”. I’ll leave you to check it out for yourself and everything else.

If you need another reason to have a look, it’s also a pretty polished Silverlight site.