Tech Watch
« Previous EntriesBar talk at IMTC
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
OLPC Review
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Still time to register
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008There’s still time to register for my lecture at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference.
The session I am presenting is entitiled: eStorming with Live Meeting 2007. 3rd April 2007, 13:45 - 15:00 GMT.
This is a new session topic for me and one that covers lots of basics for working effectively with Live Meeting 2007. View the complete session abstract here.
Don’t worry, if you can’t make the event, you can always catch us over the internet in the Live Meeting.
Click here to register for the Live Meeting event at IMTC
Irish Microsoft Technology Conference 2008
Thursday, March 27th, 2008I am presenting a session about Live Meeting at IMTC that is happening next week in Dublin:
2 Super Action Packed Days (and 1 evening) for Developers & IT-Pros - April 02 / 03 / 04 - Dublin City
The session I am presenting is entitiled: eStorming with Live Meeting 2007. 3rd April 2007, 13:45 - 15:00 GMT.
This is a new session topic for me and one that covers lots of basics for working effectively with Live Meeting 2007. View the complete session abstract here.
Don’t worry, if you can’t make the event, you can always catch us over the internet in the Live Meeting.
Click here to register for the Live Meeting event at IMTC.
Steve Lamb talking on security at Heroes Launch
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Last week I attended the Heroes launch in Birmingham. As with all Microsoft product launches, it is rare for a single product to launch nowadays. In keeping with this tradion, we saw the launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Server 2008 and Sql Server 2008.
I was lucky enough to be able to stream Steve Lamb’s session on security in Windows Server 2008. Great content, if not slightly dodgy camera work!
Avatar Love
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008OK, so I thought I should put a few points down regarding the whole idea behind chinposin.com, the importance of avatars, the fun you can have with avatars and the significance of avatars.
Chinposin was borne out of James Governor asking me:
“Can you grab all the chinposin avatars from twitter?”
I said, “Sure, no problem”
I’m not going to expand on the features list, but the study of avatars has become an obsession.
This week, I decided to change my twitter avatar to monotone twitter cyan. If you know twitter, you know the colour. If not, go there and find out.
Soon after, there was an abundance of avatars, all monotone. The point came to me, as usual, after a glass of wine. But I was amazed how people went monotone and followed the craze.
Let it be said that me and james are thinking alot about avatars. Avatars really interest me and James. Hugely. And if I am not emphasising that enough, let me underline it. We fucking like avatars.
Tracking avatar behaviour and watching how the visual community changes is pure wizard. That iswhere we see chinposin. Tracking avatar behaviour across time.
A Chinposium for the Chinerati
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008OK its kind of kooky but me and James noticed some time ago that op-eds they always pose with the chin in hand. Do we really walk around and hold these poses? Some do sure, but its such a strong photographic idea, particularly on the cover of computer books.
So last week James used a silly avatar pic on twitter, with a chin holdin pose. Lots of comments and a week of gestation later he had a dumb idea. Lets try and get other people chinholdin. Why not make it a Fun thing for Friday on Twitter.
So I cobbled together the first release and we did pretty well. We’re up to about 70 people this week. Next week we’ll do better. Twitter users just need to make their avatar pic a chin pose and then follow @chinposin.
Please join us for a chin and tonic some time. And now let the fun begin. Oh yeah - here is the chinposin aggregator site- there are some classics there.
London Social Media Cafe
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008I’m going to the London Social Media Cafe this Friday at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street, Soho, London.
I went to one of these last week and vowed to try and make each one. Packed full of interesting peole and a chance to geek out, meet great people and all in the confis of a local hostelry!
Huge big up to Lloyd Davies, these are great events.
[update] here’s a video of Lloyd playing the seesmix theme tune that he created.
Question to sharepoint team about Academy Mobile
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008I have been following Michael Gannotti and his great Michael on the Go podcasts for a long time. I have also heard great things about Academy Mobile, which is a video service developed by Microsoft, built on sharepoint for an enterprise conversation. At the moment tho, it is only available intrnally at Microsoft. A great tool being used with great results at Microsoft. This needs o be released!
There is a huge conversation going on over at seesmic. I have been hugely guilty at wasting loads of time over on seesmic, and more recently over on utterz. I hav been talking about Academy Mobile for much longer than seesmic has been around.
I am dying to see Academy Mobile released. The enterprise needs this type of tool. The consumer needs this type of tool. I guess Microsoft is guaging all these markets and deciding on a startegy for release. At least I hope.
So I decided to ask Michael Gannotti the question as he *did* say leave questions.
Conference Call Golf
Friday, February 8th, 2008The idea of Conference Call Golf came about after seing that @kellypuffs was having yet another extremely looooooong conference call. So the idea was born.
The Rules
If the opposing team (anyone else on the conference call) start scoring points, you must counter these attacks, after all attack is the best form of defence.
The Points
Music on hold 10 points
Not muting phone 5 points
Not introducing yourself 3 points
Leaving and rejoining for no reason 2 points.
All RFCs on new standards welcomed. Should we create a league?
New seesmic features released
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Dennis Howlett wrote a great post this evening (or morning) about the new features released by Seesmic. A huge improvement. All those features you wanted. They are here!
A big thanks to Dennis for the mention about my Seesmic .NET Time Drain. Rather than re-writing Dennis’s post, get it over here.
Johann has also written a blog post about the new features. Nice work to all the dev team at seesmic. It’s been amazing to see how you have listened to the community and implemented the features we all wanted. Great job!
New vlog
Friday, January 25th, 2008OK. I finally got round to launching a site that brings together all my video stuff. I’m going to try and get round to backdating all my previous posts from http://kyte.tv/yellowpark. But fo the moment, all my stuff is on seesmic.
share.opml.org retired
Thursday, January 24th, 2008share.opml.org has been retuired. I thought this was a great idea, but I just wasn’t really sure what to do with it. Maybe that’s why Dave Winer closed it down. Great idea, sorry to see it go.
Still time to Register for the Round Table webcast
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Event organising with Live Meeting 2007 and Round Table
Date: Wednesday January 24th 2007, 4pm GMT
Speakers: Chris Dalby: Live Meeting User Group and Mark Deakin, Microsoft UK
Where: Online - Live Meeting webcast
Product: Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007
Audience(s): Users, presenters, developers and resellers of Live Meeting
Duration: 60 Minutes ish
Language: English.
What’s new in 2007?
Different types of meetings and events
Viewing and creating events
Creating custom registration pages and surveys
Using content to engage participants
An introduction to Round Table
Click here to register for the event
Seesmic Mobile Recording on my HTC Touch
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008I have been using seesmic for a couple of months now. The more I use it, the more I like it. I just wish there were more hours in the day.
Seesmic recently launched their mobile service, using ShoZu as the upload mechanim. ShoZu is a great service, allowing you to upload to a huge amount of sites, ftp, integrate with MMS and SMS direct to FTP lcoations. A great service.
So I tried this out on my HTC touch and it works. Nice 
ISAPI_Rewrite for Wordpress
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008I had an issue today while porting over a Wordpress blog that was using a .htaccess file. The blog had been setup to loose the /index.php from the folder structure which is a good thing to do, as some search engines refuse to index some URLs with a index.php?. So it improves your overall visibility and gives you a clean folder structure in your posts.
So I was porting over to the windows equivalent, ISAPI_Rewrite. This meant writing a completely new httpd.ini file.
This meant making changes to some wordpress 2.3.2 files to get all the important folders working correctly for style, images, api endpoint, admin etc.
To setup your httpd.ini file for ISAPI_Rewrite:
Change /wp-includes/classes.php
Change as follows (line 50 in Wordpress 2.3.2):
// $req_uri = $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’];
$req_uri = $_SERVER[’HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL’];
In your httpd.ini file, add the following rules:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
# 3600 = 1 hour
CacheClockRate 3600
RepeatLimit 32
# Block external access to the httpd.ini and httpd.parse.errors files
RewriteRule /httpd(?:\.ini|\.parse\.errors).* / [F,I,O]
# Block external access to the Helper ISAPI Extension
RewriteRule .*\.isrwhlp / [F,I,O]
# Rules to ensure that normal content gets through
RewriteRule /software-files/(.*) /software-files/$1 [L]
RewriteRule /images/(.*) /images/$1 [L]
RewriteRule /favicon.ico /favicon.ico [L]
RewriteRule /robots.txt /robots.txt [L]
# For file-based wordpress content (i.e. theme), admin, etc.
RewriteRule /wp-(.*) /wp-$1 [L]
#Form the API endpoint
RewriteRule /xmlrpc(.*) /xmlrpc$1 [L]
# Rule to perform 301 redirect to ensure trailing back-slash on post and pages
RewriteCond Host: (.*)
RewriteRule ([^.?]+[^.?/]) http\://$1$2/ [I,R]
# Rule to perform 301 redirect (Remove index.php if specified)
RewriteRule /index.php/(.*) /$1 [I,RP]
# For normal wordpress content, via index.php
RewriteRule ^/$ /index.php [L]
RewriteRule /(.*) /index.php/$1 [L]
Some of this httpd.ini was found over on the wordpress forum, and some of it I added myself. Seems to work fine out the box.
The Next Killer App
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008There’s a lot of talk at this time of year about what rocked last year and looking forward to 2008. So I thought I’d throw in my tupence, for what it’s worth, and tell you what will be my killer app of 2008 - eventtrack
If you use Twitter regularly like I do, you’ll see the need to group tweets. Eventtrack does this for you, along with grouping a whole host of other online services simply using tags to aggregate content.
Setup couldn’t be simpler. If you have a twitter account, simply follow @eventtrack. To start an event, or joing an existing event, simply tweet: “@eventtrack start*xxxxx” where xxxxx is the keyword for your event e.g. “@eventtrack start*geekmeet”.
The person behind @eventtrack is Craig Cmehil who works as an evangelist for SAP. Craig has whipped this up in his spare time because he saw the need for this type of service. I couldn’t agree more and look forward to using it more. It’s my killer app of 2008.
Bill Gates’ Last Day
Friday, January 11th, 2008
Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip
I’m Just a Consumer Within the Big Enterprise
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007There has been a huge amount of talk recently about enteprise software, misunderstanding enterprise software, enterprise software not sexy and trumped by James Governor’s post - the best thing I’ve read all year.
Dennis Howlett nails one majorly improtant factor:
Last week in Paris, some 2,000 tech innovators gathered for LeWeb3. The speaker list reads like the great and the good from the innovation side of the tech house. A good 80% were carrying MacBook Pros. There wasn’t a PowerPoint to be seen.
Microsoft must undoubtedly be aware of the huge move by all the cool kids to using Mac Book Pro, iPhone and/or iTouch. iw00t! The thing is, like it or hate it, video and webcams is everything to do with what is cool right now. The quality of the built in we3bcam on the MBP beats any windows web cam i have seen. From a consumers point of view, or an increasingly geographically dispersed enterprise user dangling on the end of a vpn and remote access, if it is meant to work with myiPhone or iTouch, cool. Bring it on.
In the mean time, show me where you can buy a Zune in the UK or Europe, and that’ll be the reason why I’ve never had my hands on one. This brings me to a point that I have been making for some time now. Everyone, from one man bands and SMB want enterprise features, but with a consumer attitude. It just so happens that the MBP delivers that.
The need for Mac and Windows networking support and integration is sure to be a growing factor over the next year. I’m gladI have a good support guy for that.
Tomorrow I will mostly be going to the party
Sunday, December 16th, 2007I’m really looking forward to meeting quite a few people I have been tweeting and collaborting with over the last few months at the party tomorrow. Come along.
Click here to sign up at upcoming
« Previous Entries