Tagged: December 2008 Blog Posts

I’ve essentially only had 3 hobbies: computers, golf and SCUBA.  The latter is quite a bit hard to maintain living in a land-locked state in the desert.  The second (golf), however, is very easy to maintain, but long past are the days of free golf that I used to enjoy while working at a golf course and being a part of golf teams.  I now have to actually pay for it :-) -- and sometimes it isn’t a priority to want to go out in 120 degree weather and play golf (although that’s usually when my friends and I go). Computers...

Having a hard time finding that gift for your techno dweep friend/husband/relative/co-worker?  Probably not if you are subscribed here :-).  But I thought that I’d highlight my favorite tech things this year that I think will make the perfect gift.  Arranged in my order of preference. Garmin Nuvi (model 260 or 760) My first pick is the best technology gift I’ve been given in years.  I received it as a father’s day gift this year and wrote how much I love my Garmin Nuvi 260.  The funny thing is that I have GPS in my car, but...

Who, didn’t think I’d see “Microsoft Corporation” listed in the Apple AppStore for iPhone this quick.  Want to view gigapixel images on your iPhone?  The team at Live Labs just announced their approved iPhone App – Seadragon Mobile. So what is Seadragon?  it was the original Microsoft Research project that many products are now based on.  Most popular probably is the Deep Zoom technology brought first to Silverlight 2.  This is the process of taking gigapixel image and providing a smooth viewing experience viewing that image over even lower bandwidth speeds.  One of the most popular Deep...

A few days ago Google announced “event tracking” for their Google Analytics platform.  My account was invited to participate in this initial wave so I decided to take a look.  The main reason of course is because of a keyword in their email they sent to me (emphasis mine): “Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc.” I have the script already running on my site for general analytics so I figured I’d whip up a quick sample to see how...

One of the things that we have heard in feedback is the need to surface more end-to-end samples.  While the atomic learning videos/samples are great as are more in-depth tutorials, there is still a desire to see how to package all these things up into a single application.  Seeing from start to finish helps absorb the learning process and see how these atomic things fit together and interoperate. Today we added the “application corner” to the Silverlight community site.  Yes, I know the name is less than exciting, but hey I’m not a super cool marketing person with unlimited...

First a word on the “continuum” I keep hearing about for applications.  I’d like to apply it to my digital lifestyle.  You know that vision where you only have one place to keep your music, but can access it anywhere, etc., etc.  I still haven’t hit nirvana like that yet, but for movie watching it’s getting close. I used to be a customer of Netflix when they first launched.  To be honest, at that time their pricing was singular and I just wasn’t watching enough movies at home to warrant the cost, so I ended my relationship.  Now I...