Announcing RSSCloud Notify for Windows Live Writer

I’m developing a project this year around the RSS Cloud protocol.

As a starting point, I’ve written a a short and sweet WLW plugin.

I’ve got it installed locally (eating my own dogfood), mainly cause useful in testing my system once its written.

This may be a bit of a contradiction in terms since wordpress.com already supports RSSCloud (you’ll see a RSSCloud tag in my feed if you view source. It gives the details of the wordpress.com aggregator).

By default it will use Dave Winer’s test server as an endpoint so make sure you change your settings before use.

Its available at codeplex here: http://rsscloudnotify.codeplex.com/

The source is in the repository if anyone wants to look at it.  Its not quite ready for prime time yet.

Update on WHS2SmugMug

Back in January i said I’d get back to writing this Windows Home Server Add-In.

Its now June, 6 months later.  For 3 of those months my camera was back at Nikon being repaired. So I took exactly zero pictures during that time. Its now back and I’m bracing myself for the flood of pictures. I carry 26Gb’s worth of memory cards with me, so I nearly always end up over doing it.

Which brings me to the Add-In. I’ve set up a Codeplex page here. And I’ve made a few check-ins. This is not even pre-alpha code. Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, I asked, via Twitter,  Omar Shahine if I could use his Smugmug Uploader code. now I’m a great fan of the Uploader. I’ve used it for every single uploaded to SmugMug.

So Omar kindly emailed me his code.

So what you will find in the Check-ins, should you be brave enough to take look is Omar’s back-end code sans any UI as part of a WCF service. The WCF service is hosted by a Windows Service (imaginatively called “UploadService”). My plan ( cunning or not) is to have the UI in the Console communicate with the uploader process via WCF. There are other methods, but WCF gives me incredible latitude when it comes to moving data back and forth.

So the Home Server Console tab will simply be a UI for uploading stuff. Instead of Remoting in and using Omar’s uploader. This is an intermediate goal.

My ultimate goal is actually to have a “Smugmug” folder and under it a folder for every Smugmug Album in your account. the above mentioned service will monitor those folders for changes and replicate those changes to Smugmug.

So I’m building now with such a convoluted architecture with a view to where i want to get this Add-in to.

So hopefully I can get the Add-in working soon.

I’m a pretty good test case for this, but I will need testers for it.

Watch my twitter account or my FriendFeed account for updates

PS If you’re asking why I’ve not moved blogs yet, I’m waiting for the next Oxite Release first.

Blogging: I need my Mojo back

 

Blogs still have a very important place in the on going conversation. There is no medium quite like it, not even Friendfeed. Like books, blogs are the long form, the canvas on which we write our longer thoughts. Whether we use it for venting or ranting, commenting or telling or just plain writing, blogs are the corner stone of the online presence.

The one blogging tip I’ve consistently found is the “stick to it” rule: find your subject and stick to it. Which, in all honesty is not something I’ve done very well with this blog. There is so much to talk about and comment on and just plain only chat about that it can be easy to lose your focus .

This is partly due to the fact that I only joined Twitter and Friendfeed recently, both of which are better for the kind of wide ranging discussion i enjoy.

And its also to do with the fact that, originally, this blog was set up at the drop of a hat, without any thought as to where it would go and what I would be doing online. It was almost an experiment with this newfangled thing that had come along. The whole idea was to witness the internet from the driving seat, rather than from the RSS feeds. This was at the dawn the of the social networking age, before Twitter and Facebook. Before a lot of stuff.

But I digress.

So what is my focus?? All things technology related. But as you can see, everyone else covers this far better than I ever could. Politics is too much of a heated subject for me blog about. Photography, one of my new passions in life, and programming (the passion), and music (the classical kind) and books (I joined Goodreads the other day).

My online presence at the moment is spread throughout Twitter, Freindfeed, Delicious and Smugmug. I’m seeing more and more people moving to bring these strands together in one site. This is perfectly logical and its the right thing to do.

A new site, a new blog, a new platform seems to be what I need. Sometimes I think setting up a WordPress blog is a little too easy. When you put the time and effort into the creation of something, you regard it totally differently.

So that what I’m going to do – set up a new site, part of which will include my blog.  And it’ll be me on the web, a personal presence tying together all of these desperate strands. Kind of like Austin’s Jet:

So I’m on the lookout for a new platform on which to run it. .Net is the preferred option, mainly because I can code it. I’ve looked at Oxite closely and the more I play with it the more I like it.

Why the effort?? You see, I enjoy writing. I really do. I don’t have English teachers after me for essays, or books to write. So writing a blog is the next best thing (maybe THE best). There really isn’t any other medium like it.

Now this particular blog will remain. No doubt I will find some use for it, but all that info is staying on line

I will continue posting here till things are sorted out, its probably some time away in any case.

Windows 7

Yep. I’m writing this from my Windows 7 VM (on Virtual PC 2007 SP2).

Performance wise, The setup inside of the Vm is making it sluggish. But of the gig of RAM its got, its only using 32%. Which is notable. Vista beta 2, on the other hand) on the same machine in a dual boot configuration used up 80% (of one gig of RAM) standing still.

Talking of performance, I’ve backed the VM up to Windows Home Server. It took all of 20 minutes. Which frankly surprised me. given the fact that this was a new OS running under a VM.

So I’m inclined to wonder exactly how similar to Vista is 7, file wise? Since WHS only copies to the server files which it does not have a copy of (or a version of). Or, it could be that 7 is optimised for WHS to backup (Which makes sense on a number of levels, but not to the European Union).

The other thing i notice is the new taskbar. I’ve grown used to the Vista taskbar for some reason or other, but this is a pleasant change. The fact that the  task bar items can be configured to show application names or not, is really neat.

They do, however get confused with the buttons in the Quick Launch bar quite easily.

The UAC logo has changed colour, to yellow and blue, in keeping with the OS colour scheme. The UAC prompts themselves are worded differently.

The absence of a sidebar is nice. And I hope that the performance hit that running Sidebar produced is gone too. Gadgets are still there, just in the background and way less conspicuous.

Its quite a please feel to the whole OS. Does it feel like Vista?? A little. Its familiar territory. But In truth, I’ve yet to explorer the OS thoroughly. So that answer will have to wait.

One thing that is defiantly different is that Google Chrome 1.0 looks different.its a dark Blue instead of alight blue.

Talking of web browsers, i decided to install IE8. Which didn’t install. It didn’t recognize the OS for some strange reason. Must try again cause I hear that a few people have managed to do it.

I must say that I’m impressed enough to be considering upgrading one of my Vista machines to Windows 7.

This Beta 1 makes me look to Beta 2 and Release with a lot of hope that Microsoft have learned their lesson of the Vista Release debacle.

The one thing that no ones said anything much about is the WinFS file system that Vista was supposed to ship.

With Sun’s ZFS redundant file system, Microsoft are lagging behind. Even OSX has ZFS built in ( it has to be enabled with some obscure command line tricks, but its there).

Even if Microsoft released a separate beta version with WinFS, I’d be happy. 

NTFS is old. Time to innovate it.

Back and ready to rock

So I’m back from holiday (Florida – no ride queues and was great).

And I’m raring to go .

To start the year off, WHS4Smugmug development will resume ( after a year of being busy and feeling guilty). There’s a great series of posts on Add-In development on the tentacleBlog:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

And I’ll be using them to bootstrap development and hopefully get moving.

One area I’m worries about is the file/folder structure that it’ll pull the photos from and send them to Smugmug.

So I’ll crowdsource this problem. Please leave a comment on how you organise your photo folder. Thanks.

This’ll help me with the 8000 photos I took in Florida.

Sliverlight 2 Ships!!!!

The next version of Microsoft’s Flash competitor is out.

And why is this big news? Well, a number of things stand out about this release.

The first big one is the number of languages that you can use with Silverlight: VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby. though this, potentially isn’t the whole list. Any language that is targeted for the .Net CLR can, in theory, be used. This opens up the number of developers with the skills to use Silverlight. Microsoft may not have the install base that Flash has, but its making that up  by allowing as many developers as possible to get started quickly.

So Microsoft will leverage the .Net developer corps as well as the Python and Ruby community to jumpstart Silverlight and Silverlight Adoption.

In addition, Scott Hanselman says that you can use Eclipse to code Silverlight:

But there’s also http://www.eclipse4sl.org/. Yes, that means you can code Silverlight in Eclipse. Details and progress at the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight Blog. It’ll be licensed under the EPL 1.0 License.

 

Scott Guthrie  adds (I missed this on first reading):

Today we are also announcing that Microsoft is partnering with Soyatec to sponsor additional tools for developing Silverlight applications using the cross platform Eclipse development platform.  Click here to learn more about this and download the free Silverlight Eclipse plugin.  Click here for a step-by-step tutorial that walks-through how to use their Eclipse tools today to build a Silverlight 2 application.

The other big thing, at least for me is the tools library. This has been the one thing stopping me from enjoying Silverlight to the full.

Scott Guthrie provides the details:

Today we are also announcing the "Silverlight Control Pack" – which will deliver dozens of more controls that you can use with Silverlight 2.  We will continually add new controls to the control pack over the next few months (we expect to ultimately have more than 100 controls total).  The first release of the control pack will include controls like TreeView, DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Expander, NumericUpDown, AutoComplete and more.  All controls will ship with full source, and with a OSI license that allows you to modify and use the source for any purpose.

Let me repeat that: All controls will ship with full source, and with a OSI license that allows you to modify and use the source for any purpose.

Unbelievable. I’m gonna have some serious fun playing with and tweaking those controls.

This is yet another element of Silverlight that will attract developers in droves. It all fits into to Microsoft’s pan of driving adoption of the platform on both the developer and client sides. I mean, Flash has no controls (except the most basic root level elements). And here is Microsoft offering developers the nirvana of controls and full source. It will boost productivity not only for developers, but also for designers who want to add that extra special flourish for their customers – its just a small tweak away.

Also, there’s one little line in Scotts post that jumped out at me:

We are also announcing today that we are releasing the Silverlight XAML vocabulary and schema under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which enables anyone to create products that read and write XAML for Silverlight.

That’s really interesting. Is Silverlight XAML going to become like XML is now? Where we output XAML on the fly? The possibilities that can come out of this little bombshell are quite amazing. can’t wait to see what people come out with.

That’s what got my attention (of course, there is more in Scott Gu’s post)

And just to wet your appetites, Scott Hanselman has a talk at PDC which includes Silverlight and his now famous Babysmash application that will showcase the networking capabilities of Silverlight:

I’ll also show a Silverlight version of BabySmash that talks to the same server-side endpoints, and we’ll all (the audience) run BabySmash Silverlight on our laptops during the talk (better than just checking your email, which is what you usually do in talks) and see if we can’t crush my server live. Then I’ll talk about new .NET 4.0 features that I could use to take the whole solution to the next level.

The Boom is Over

It is all over Techmeme and FriendFeed: Sequoia Capital (the venture capitalists behind Yahoo and Google, to name just two), have called off the tech boom and told their companies to start preparing for the worst.

Lets think about this for a second. Is the technology sector as a whole vulnerable to this downturn? Yes, but probably not that much.

Consider Google as an example. Google gets bundled with every install of Firefox ( and if memory serves, some OEM PCs as well). And Google is pretty much the homepage of the Internet. So Google’s traffic probably wont suffer that much.

However, Google make money off ads,and it requires advertisers to buy those ads (or be charged for them). Now this could be very bad or very good depending on the industry doing the buying.

For example, Jeremiah Owyang just said on FriendFeed:

“The economic downturn is a good thing for social media, it’s going to force innovation, revenues, and productivity benefits –the other tools will fall by the wayside. Agree or disagree?”

So either ads will become more aggressive in an effort to lure ever reluctant consumers into the open.

Or they will cut back. Some ads just don’t work as well as traditional methods.

My bet is that, as Jeremiah said above, the online space of ads and social media will be leveraged to an ever greater degree and firms try their level best to stay above water.

So why did Google’s stock drop yesterday? Again, I think that investors are nervous that Google, while having a very broad range of services, hasn’t spread its revenue streams widely enough.

Google need to figure a way to monetize Youtube ( for starters), rapidly. Youtube gets millions of views per day that Google earn $0 from.

I’ll tell you what Google should do. They should go to Adobe and license that audio-to-keyword tech in CS4 and run every video on Youtube through it.

Gmail is another one. Personally I have never EVER clicked on a link from the Ads in the sidebar. Sure they are accurate and frighteningly well targeted, but I have never clicked on them.

For the tech industry as a whole, software is integral to the lives we now live. It ain’t going away anytime soon.

FriendFeed Gets My Images, Too – FriendFeed Notify 0.2

Like this picture?

(Yerba Buena Island – Thomas Hawk)

Me too. How about this one:

(Passage- johopo)

Nice huh?

One more:

(Untitled – Me)

Couldn’t resist.

My point is that the above three images will be posted to FriendFeed along with the link to this post by the new release of FriendFeed Notify 0.2.

Now this isn’t for just for photography buffs like me and Thomas Hawk. It works for any images embedded in an img tag and greater than 50×100px.

Now the release isn’t actually feature complete. There are a few things I’d like to add to it. These will be in the 0.2.1 release. Including picking and choosing which images to post and  the posting of a comment by way of summary. These are simple to implement and I don’t thing it will be too long before they are out.

So go and get it from here.

Anyone looking at the code will see that i am using the .Net frameworks webbrowser control to retrieve images. This runs in the same dialog you are shown the images.The regexes I tried are all in the code, but commented out. If anyone can help with these, that would be great. It would cut down on the overhead. Thanks.

For those of you reading this and wondering hat happened to my Smugmug add-in for WHS.its been on the back burner for a while. I didn’t expect the hiatus to take this long. In the meanwhile, Omar Shahine has updated his Send To SmugMug utility. Some of the features for the next release that people are voting on are similar in concept to my add-in. So, go vote. I still intend to do this Add-In and get it integrated with WHS.

Enjoy.

Google’s Chrome

Google today launched a new browser, called Chrome.

And you can get it from www.google.com/chrome

Its lightweight, refreshing and has a few nice features I’ve been looking for Mozilla to implement in FF. Namely that you can move tabs between windows. And it has a spellchecker built in (I’m too lazy to install THAT FF plugin). And a privacy mode ( why on earth one would want to use it is beyond me). And its based on Webkit, like Safari.

Some screenshots:

 

Now thats as far as I’ve got with using the new browser.

Its already good enough for me to consider making it my default browser.

The Friendfeed bookmarklet works (although it detects that I’m using Safari).

There is no Delicious plugin yet (critical to me I can’t imagine not having it).

And Firebug would be nice as well – it would make developing with yet another browser slightly easier.

Robert Scoble has reported over on friendfeed that Google properties appear to be faster on Chrome ( not sure abut that yet).

And Yuvi, of statbot.com, reports that some Sliverlight apps load, but the heavy ones hang.

I’m betting that Microsoft offices are a touch louder than usual.

Lets see what happens here.

WHS Add-In: WHS2SmugMug – Update

I’ve neglected this project for a while mainly due to me being so busy with other stuff.

The hiatus has actually done the project good as feature creep was threatening to de-rail the thing the last time I had a look at it.

So I’ve cleaned up the requirements for the data to be stored locally. I’ve eliminated just about everything I can pull from SmugMug leaving me with a nice, clean object model to work with.

I was also struck by the fragmenting of the project into three – scheduled, service and WHS Console Add-in.

While this seems logical, it is a bit over the top. So I’m dropping the scheduled uploader and having uploads handled by the service.

Work is progressing nicely and I hope to have a working  service app soon ( if not a console add-in).

I’m now using the SmugMugAPIWrapper from Codeplex. Its MIT Licenced so WHS2SugMug will have to be too. This library is one that I can actually use without looking at the source as its built to use the current SmugMug API, so no worries there.

As with my Windows Live Writer add-in, I’ll host the project on Codeplex as soon as there is a release-ready codebase.