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1250 days ago
To me Wikis are an excellent means of eliciting distributed knowledge for the purpouse of creating a loosely coupled knowledge exchange. Think of collaborative team blogging and you are pretty much on the mark with what a Wiki does. Within organisations we would call that intellectual property (IP) or a knowledge management system, but to everyone else its basically a public knowledge base on a particular topic. Right now Google seems to be the indexing engine for everything including Wikis. But once people start to realise the power of contextual recursive queries (a mouthful I know - ie. recursive search refinements), you will end up with a very powerful "Oracle" of wisdom. Google presently with its page raking technology sort of does this, but a truely semantic web will seriously benefit from improved contextual search semantics. However, this means sharing all our search queries with search engines - and we don't want to do that just yet. Detailed user ...
1253 days ago
Microsoft's Groove Virtual Office Beta2 absolutely rocks! This is the next killer network application for knowledge workers - if you think that File Server, IM and email are important - Groove is right up there! The Architecture and Strategy team at KAZ that I am working with are all getting slowly addicted to it at the moment. It has a viral impact on those that use it, as its smoothly bypasses firewalls and improves team collaboration. With IM, peer-2-peer file replication, issue tracker, meeting items, shared calendar etc, it's a delight to use. It's so good, that I've even started talking some of my Microsoft buddies into using it and almost everyone else that I know... Being an "architect" geek that I am, I have had an urge to know how it works under the hood. So now I do. Some time back, Damien Hogan managed to find and send me a PDF document that described the XML messaging protocol that Groove uses. In a nutshell, Groove uses a ...1283 days ago
A new game seems to be afoot. Do you remember playing chess as a child and learning that the first few moves decide the final outcome of the game? Well Microsoft has applied this strategy time and time again as part of an aggressive new product development mentality. This time I am referring to their announcement of the Pay-As-You-Go Personal Computing initiative, also called FlexGo. The idea is simple: sell PCs with Microsoft software pre-loaded on them for say 1/3 of the original price (more affordable), and then have a timer that counts down from 800hrs down. When the counter reaches zero, you're out of credits, and need to recharge your PC! Does it sound like the pre-paid Mobile market model to you? Yup, but this time its for computers. The Microsoft angle here is that for those that can not afford to buy a PC outright, they can instead buy through incremental payments and ultimately pay it off. So all you do is use a pre-paid card, the phone or the ...
1285 days ago
Developers, Developers, Developers… love Mobile Devices! Hope you all have a great day tomorrow at MEDC 2006 in Melbourne. And I hope you all enjoy my session on Data in the Windows Mobile World, and equally enjoy the demos delivered in most of the MEDC mobile sessions by Nick Randolp (Device MVP). For those of you that manage to get your hands on the new HTC Windows Mobile 5 (SP5) devices and are keen to start developing on them, you must first unlock them for development. If you don’t your VS2005 development adventures will be rather short lived and frustrating. The 101 Guide to Unlocking your SP5 device: Download the following: RegeditSTG.exe the trusted version of regedit from HTC. (Oddly the link just stopped working - I'll get back to you on this! Dough!) SDA_ApplicationUnlock.zip a program to unlock the smartphone. Next steps to follow are: Connect your Smartphone to your PC via ...
1691 days ago
I've had a pretty interesting day today. Heck, I could almost say I have one of those every day, so much usually happens in it. Let me start and work it backwords. I just released the #2nd episode of the Microsoft Developer Show that I have started. You can click right thru to it from here: http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/msdev/2005/04/13/the-microsoft-developer-show-2/ I got Dr. Neil Roodyn (www.roodyn.com) on the show and we had a pretty fun time talking about all things Software and Microsoft. The audio seemed to play up at one point but the rest of the show turned out ok. Neil's audio was a little crackly by its not too bad overall. The next interview should have even better audio quality - I am still learning. The project that I am currently on, desperately needs a VBA developer so I frantically made calls and posted to the aus-dotnet mailing list. Got a few interested guys, but nothing concrete as yet. Good .Net devs are easy to find but VBA ...
