All posts by onlyconnect

adobe, flash, microsoft, nokia, silverlight, web authoring

Thoughts on Mix08 Day One

So how was the Mix08 keynote? Let’s start with the good stuff. It went without a hitch; it was engaging; we saw some terrific Silverlight demos; and Internet Explorer 8 looks like a compelling upgrade. Not all Microsoft’s keynotes are this good.

Did Ray Ozzie make sense of Microsoft’s overall Internet strategy? I’m not sure. He was too visionary for my taste. That said, he made some interesting remarks. He says that “all our software will be significantly refactored” to better integrate with cloud-based services. He says that businesses will be able to choose between on-premise and cloud-based services. He says that virtualization is the key to a rise in utility computing. He also spoke of advertising as the commercial engine behind the next generation Internet.

Scott Guthrie, now Corporate Vice President of Developer Division, gave an impressive tour of what is happening with ASP.NET and Silverlight, with the latter the main focus. He says that Silverlight is now getting 1.5 million downloads daily. As expected, he announced the beta of Silverlight 2.0, which you can download now. He also announced Nokia’s support for Silverlight on Symbian, though this news actually broke on Monday. It is still significant, though getting any runtime deployed on mobiles is an arduous task: carriers as well as manufacturers have to be convinced of the value. He also mentioned that Sharepoint is getting Silverlight web parts.

Silverlight demos included Aston Martin, Hard Rock Cafe, and NBC’s site for the 2008 Olympics. Highlighted features included Silverlight’s zooming ability, which is the technology formerly known as Seadragon and now called DeepZoom, and HD video. The Olympic demos were engaging, with features like the ability to do instant, user-controlled replay of live video. Aston Martin’s demo showed how well Silverlight works for exploring an online showroom, inspecting and customizing your chosen vehicle in a virtual environment (I saw a similar Flash-based demo at Adobe’s Flex and Air launch a couple of weeks ago).

Dean Hachamovitch showed off IE8; I blogged about this yesterday.

Now, the tough questions. Silverlight looks great; but we saw similar demos here last year. Silverlight 2.0, which is the one most people care about, is now closer to release; but equally Adobe has moved forward with Flash, in particular improving its video capabilities, and the question hanging in the air is: what does Silverlight offer that Flash does not? In this respect, one of the more interesting remarks in the keynote came from a guy from Weatherbug, who demoed a Silverlight app which he said was running on Symbian. He observed that their developers had also tried to develop in Flash Lite, but it has proved costly (in development time) and “didn’t really work”. The Silverlight app by contrast had been done in three weeks. This is Flash Lite of course, not the full desktop Flash, but it would be fascinating to know what the critical differences were.

As for IE8, it is a huge step forward in standards support, but if you subtract what is arguably catch-up to FireFox, what are we left with? Activities and Web Slices look handy, but these are not major pieces. IE8 is not done yet, and apparently there will be more user-centric features before it ships – but when will that be? Microsoft’s Chris Wilson told me last year that it would be around two years after IE7, which would be autumn 2008, but that looks optimistic to me.

Overall my feelings are appropriately mixed. There is plenty of good stuff here, and Silverlight will be great for Microsoft platform developers who can integrate it seamlessly into their ASP.NET web applications. Whether it can mount a serious challenge to Flash in the wider Internet remains an open question.

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internet, microsoft, web authoring

What’s new in IE8: Activities and Web Slices, developer tools

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Here at Mix08 in Las Vegas, IE head honcho Dean Hachamovitch has introduced Internet Explorer 8, which he told us will be available for beta download later today.

The big features are CSS 2.1 standards compliance (now the default), and two new things called Activities and Web Slices.

Activities are a way of installing browser add-ons that enables new instant links. You can select text in a web page, right-click, and get links for things like “buy on eBay” or “see user reviews”. This is enabled by an XML specification called the OpenService Architecture, which is being released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Web Slices are a way of subscribing to page fragments, or perhaps pagelets (my term). This then appear as links in the IE8 toolbar. Examples we were shown were an eBay auction, and Facebook feeds. Like Activities, this is enabled by an XML specification, this one called the Web Slices Specification. The page author determines what content ends up in the pagelet.

If the specifications catch on, I imagine other browsers could easily implement them.

Activities remind me of the almost-dead Smart Tags, in the way that they enable a new in-page menu of options related to a keyword or phrase. The difference is that there is no auto-recognition; the user has to select some text and right-click.

Finally, we saw some great developer tools for debugging JavaScript and CSS. In particular, I liked the feature which lets you select an element and discover which CSS rule is winning in the rendered page.

Note: Post edited to clarify how Activities work. I misunderstood these at first, thinking they were extra links authored into a page. Apparently they are not: you have to select some text and then use a pop-up menu. The advantage is that we will not get pages festooned with extra links. The disadvantage is that you can easily select text that returns no meaningful result.

I rather liked the idea of multiple destinations for a single link, but it seems this isn’t it.

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internet, microsoft, mono, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Moonlight update: Silverlight 2 on Linux hardly started

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Miguel de Icaza has an update on Moonlight, a third-party but official implemention of Silverlight for Linux.

Although progress is rapid, it is disappointing to read that a Silverlight 2.0 implementation is hardly started:

Silverlight 2.0 Other than the JIT support for Silvelright 2.0 at this point we have not done any work on it (well there are 3 classes stubbed privately).

There are two reasons for this: the updated 2.0 API is not public and although we have access to it, it is a bit of a mess to try to keep two separate trees (public and private) to support this and since Mix is just around the corner, we will just wait until next week.

The second reason is that we want to focus on shipping 1.0, completing the media pack integration and working on the configuration aspects of Moonlight (auto-update configuration for instance).

Good reasons; but the question it raises is this: by how long will Linux implementations lag the Windows and Mac releases of Silverlight? Silverlight 2.0 is hugely important because it enables .NET code to run. I constantly meet folk who are developing for Silverlight but waiting for version 2.0 as the real thing. Version 1.0 is browser JavaScript only.

More positively, at least we know that Mono already has a decent desktop implementation of .NET, so the fundamentals are there.

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adobe, flash, internet, silverlight, web authoring

Latest stats: Video web growing fast

Nielsen Online has released statistics about the most popular social networking sites in the UK and their growth year-on-year:

Rank
Jan 08

Rank Jan 07

Website

UK Unique Audience (000s) Jan 08

UK Unique Audience (000s) Jan 07

Change in UA Jan 07 – Jan 08

Social media type

1

2

YouTube

10,426

6,667

56%

Video

2

1

Wikipedia

9,557

7,758

23%

Information

3

18

Facebook

8,513

1,048

712%

Network

4

4

Blogger

5,145

3,697

39%

Blogging

5

3

MySpace

5,026

5,513

-9%

Network

6

8

Bebo

4,090

2,670

53%

Network

7

16

Slide

3,355

1,092

207%

Add-on tool

8

10

Yahoo! Answers

3,319

2,111

57%

Information

9

6

Windows Live Spaces

3,127

2,716

15%

Network

10

9

TripAdvisor

2,364

2,186

8%

Travel reviews

Source: Nielsen Online, UK NetView, home & work data, including applications, Jan 2007 – Jan 2008
E.g. YouTube was visited by 10.4 million Britons in Jan 08, 56% more than in Jan 07

Three things I found interesting. First, huge growth for Facebook and a decline for MySpace – but this is a volatile market and Facebook may the the next site to beome less fashionable.

Second, the huge reach of these sites. Neilsen reckons that 20.8 million Brits visited at least one of these sites in January, representing 63% of those online.

Third, the growth of video. I think this is the most reliable long-term trend. You can see it more clearly in Neilsen’s figures for the fastest growing sites, five of which are video sites (vidShadow, Veoh, Youku (Chinese site), Tudou (Chinese site) and Video Jug), as well as in the rise of YouTube to first place.

Is the Internet moving towards video in the same way as traditional media (print -> radio -> TV)? Possibly.

There is a technical story here too. I’m at Mix08 this week, where Microsoft is promoting its Silverlight plug-in for video and rich visual content. However, all these sites currently use Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which will be hard to shift. Without the ubiquity and ease of installation which Adobe has achieved with Flash, I doubt we would be seeing this growth in video content.

internet, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring, windows

Mix08: Rich Internet the Microsoft way

I’ve just registered here at Microsoft’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. I’ve heard a lot from Adobe recently, with Adobe AIR just launched, so this is a great opportunity to get Microsoft’s angle on the Rich Internet Application concept. Silverlight 2.0 will be prominent, as will Internet Explorer 8. I asked a developer on the plane what he likes about Silverlight compared to Flash. He told me that it is much easier to create Silverlight content dynamically at runtime, thanks to XAML. Silverlight renders XAML, whereas Flex compiles MXML – a significant difference.

In the Mix “Sandbox” lounge I got my first glimpse of Microsoft surface, which looks compelling. I hope to have  a better play later.

This evening O’Reilly is launching a new book by Christian Lenz called Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-date. It is a new concept from O’Reilly, using a kind of ring binder (not actually a ring, but you know the kind of thing). The book which I saw is 50% blank pages; but the idea is that you will be able to receive or download additional pages and insert them into the book to keep it up-to-date. Not a new concept, but still an interesting attempt to address the problem of technical books quickly becoming out-of-date. It is particularly suitable for Silverlight 2.0 which is not done yet. At the same time, I can imagine this being a considerable hassle, and pages bound like this don’t turn quite as easily. I hope to review the book in due course.

It turns out that the Venetian Hotel and Casino, where Mix takes place, is a Microsoft customer. How do I know? Well, many of the rooms sport screens over the door advertising various hotel attractions, and I spotted one that has a distinctive Microsoft flavour.

Which goes to show that wherever you are in the world, you are never more than 12 screens from a Windows error message.

If you’re at Mix and would like to chat, by all means get in touch.

bbc, internet, web authoring

New gadgety home page at bbc.co.uk

The BBC has a new customizable home page, with gadgets similar to those at Netvibes, iGoogle and elsewhere.

First impressions are mixed. I don’t like it’s large size (1024 x 768), even though this is the trend. This issue is not the size of my display, but that I don’t necessarily want the browser to occupy so much of it. I’m sorry there is not more effort put into web pages that resize nicely – one of the reasons I like Times Reader and its cousins.

Second, I found myself with large blank areas after a quick go at customization. I also noticed that even if I selected many more subcategories for the News panel, it is still much less informative and useful than the old-style (and smaller) News home page, which to be honest is normally where I go to when I visit the BBC. I hope there is no rush to update the News page to the same style.

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blogging, microsoft

Fixing Server 2003: reprise after two and a half years

Sometimes the Internet reminds me of Tony Hancock’s Blood Donor. You post advice when you have it, and take it back when you need it.

It was like that last night. I am following my own advice and weeding out any instances where username/password combinations are transmitted in plain text. Occasionally I send mail via Exchange as an SMTP server, so I’ve now configured this to use TLS (Transport Layer Security).

All went well until a fatal reboot produced event 32777: The LSA was unable to register its RPC interface over the TCP/IP interface. This is nasty, and causes a host of further errors which pretty much kill networking on the box. I have no idea what provoked it.

Fortunately I’ve had this before – two and a half years ago. Last time I used the blunt instrument of a repair install, but by going back to my earlier post and reading the comments I was able to apply fix this quickly:

  • Change the logon of the RPC service to Local System, as a temporary fix to networking
  • Make changes to local security policy (domain controller policy in this case): Add Adminstrators and Service to the Create Global Objects and Impersonate client after authentication in User Rights Assignment
  • Change the logon of the RPC service back to NT AUTHORITY\Network Service

All very obscure and the kind of thing you have little chance of working out for yourself. It is all to do with changes made by Server 2003 SP1 which appear to break important stuff in some circumstances.

Why not Server 2008? All in good time.

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internet, security

Google Health, Phorm, where next for your private data?

Let’s look at the fundamentals. Is an advertising company an appropriate place for sensitive personal data like health records? That’s easy to answer, no matter how many privacy assurances Google gives. Google is a specialist at mining personal data; and whenever I read its terms and conditions it is almost enough to stop me using its services. So Google Health? No thanks. Google, if you want to do this, split the company.

How about this idea: some of the UK’s largest ISP’s – Carphone Warehouse, BT and Virgin Media – intend to hand over their users Internet history to an advertising company called Phorm. The Reg has more details – read the comments to get fully spooked. Someone has setup a protest site here.

Phorm says it has strong privacy practices that safeguard user data, audited by Ernst and Young [PDF]. Safeguards include:

  • Deleting raw data after 14 days
  • Removing numbers longer than 3 digits
  • Not storing email addresses or IP numbers
  • Not storing form fields (thus no passwords)
  • Identifying users only by a random number
  • Analysing data only for predetermined keywords

Happy now? No. Some of these protections are weak. For example, the AOL search data debacle proved that replacing IP numbers with random identifiers is insufficient protection, because users can be identified solely by their activity. This applies even more strongly to an ISP’s data, which has everything you do on the Internet, not just your search history. Second, it is an opt-out system – it should be opt-in – and the opt-out on offer is weak; it merely stops you seeing the targeted ads, rather than preventing your data being sent to Phorm. Third, the data to be mined includes all your non-encrypted Internet activity, such as reading Google Mail, and not just URLs visited. While Phorm says it won’t read it, any additional use of this data makes it more vulnerable to interception and abuse.

What’s the answer? Change your ISP, of course; but also SSL, which encrypts your Internet traffic. Passwords themselves are inherently bad enough, without making it worse by sending them in plain text; further, we need to learn that anything we read or send in plain text over the Internet has been potentially been intercepted. This 2005 article spells out what that means. My hunch is that it is little better now. If we encrypt all the traffic that matters to us, then we won’t care so much that the ISP is selling it on.

[This post replaces an earlier draft].

Update: More details at the Reg today, complete with diagrams. Performance impact is also a concern.

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microsoft, vista, windows

Microsoft’s Vista Capable campaign: where it all went wrong

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A series of remarkable internal emails have been made public as a result of the class action lawsuit against Microsoft for its “Vista capable” marketing campaign in the second half of 2006. In essence, the claim is that many of these PCs were not really Vista-compatible, because they could only run Vista Basic, and not Vista’s distinctive Aero graphics.

This is not just about eye candy. See Microsoft’s Greg Schechter’s explanation of Vista’s Desktop Window Manager, part of Aero:

The primary takeaway for desktop composition:  the way an application gets pixels on the screen has fundamentally changed.

It’s fair to say that missing out on Aero means missing out on a core feature of Vista.

Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog has more details on the case, including a large PDF document showing internal correspondence from Microsoft and its partners, giving insight into how the Vista Capable campaign evolved.

The problem was that Microsoft allowed machines to carry the “Vista Capable” sticker even if they were not able to run Aero. An email from Microsoft’s Ken Goetsch:

We have removed the technical requirement that a Windows Vista Capable PC contains a Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) that supports the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), formerly known as the Longhorn Display Driver Model.

Other correspondence in the PDF shows that many at Microsoft were uneasy with this decision; however it was apparently done to help out Intel. Here’s an internal email from John Kalkman, dated February 26 2007::

In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded. This in turn did two things: 1. Decreased focus of OEMs planning and shipping higher-end graphics for Vista ready programs and 2. Reduced the focus by IHVs to ready great WHQL qualified graphics drivers. We can see this today with Intel’s inability to ship a compelling full featured 945 graphics driver for Windows Vista.

Later he says:

It was a mistake on our part to change the original graphics requirements. This created confusion in the industry on how important the aspect of visual computing would play as a feature set to new Windows Vista upgraders.

Now I know why I have over two hundred comments to my January 2007 post, Vista display driver takes a break. My laptop, a Toshiba Portege M400, has the 945 chipset. I bought it specifically to run Vista, towards the end of 2006; and yes, it has a “Windows Vista Capable” sticker. The early Vista graphics drivers were indeed faulty, though in my case a February 2007 update pretty much fixed the problems. I was lucky it did not have a 915 chipset.

How did all this mess come about? The heart of the problem seems to be the infamous Vista reset in 2004, when a ton of work on Longhorn was scrapped, and work resumed based on the Windows 2003 codebase. This was almost certainly a good decision (or the least-bad one possible); but the consequence was that Vista was very late. Another reason was the huge effort put into Windows XP SP2; and the reason for that was the number of desperate security problems in Windows XP.

So Vista was late, and in consequence was rushed. In addition, PC sales were sagging because XP was old and people were waiting for Vista (or switching to Macs), so Intel had overstock. All the pieces were now in place for a Vista-capable sticker whose meaning was not what most people would expect.

Embarrassing for Microsoft. It is better to be transparent even with bad news like, “Your PC will never run Vista properly”, rather than fudge the issue. The episode also illustrates one of the downsides of working with multiple hardware partners, rather than keeping both hardware and software in-house as Apple does.

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internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring, windows

Silverlight steals the show at Microsoft’s UK Heroes launch

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I attended Microsoft’s “Heroes Happen Here” launch in London yesterday, which overlapped the US launch presented by CEO Steve Ballmer. The launch is for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008, though these products are in varying degrees of readiness.

The event was marred by excessive reliance on buzzwords like “Dynamic IT” – someone should tell Microsoft that phrases like this, or “People Ready” which was used for the Vista launch, have no meaning. Dr Andrew Hopkirk from UK’s National Computing Centre enthused about the general benefits of virtualization, which led to a comical moment later. I asked one of Hopkirk’s colleagues what the NCC thought about Microsoft’s Hyper-V or other virtualization technologies. “Oh, we haven’t evaluated it,” he said. “Most people use VMware and they love it”.

I hate to be disloyal, but the US event which was relayed by satellite, and which hardly any of the UK journalists watched, was more up my street. Ballmer didn’t shout too much, and I liked the drilldowns into specific features of the three products.

Still, after several dry presentations the UK event brightened up when Paul Curtis from EasyJet, a UK budget airline, showed us a proof-of-concept Silverlight application which the company plans to implement on its web site towards the end of this year. We saw an attractive Rich Internet Application which was a mash-up of flight routes and fares, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and reviews from TripAdvisor. Here’s a blurry snap of how you might book a hotel in Barcelona. It’s a compelling visual UI which of course reminded me of similar things I’ve seen implemented with Adobe’s Flash and Flex. Behind the scenes the app will use Server 2008, IIS 7.0, and a SQL Server 2008 Data Warehouse, so this is the perfect case study.

I wanted to ask Curtis whether he was happy with Silverlight’s cross-platform capabilities, and why he was using Silverlight in preference to Flash. However, his bio states that he is a member of the Windows Live Special Interest Group and on the Microsoft Architect Council, so I suspect the answer would be, “it’s what we know.” It does support my impression that despite the rise of Flash, there is still a place for Silverlight within the large Microsoft platform community.

Finally, there was brief mention of high take-up for Microsoft Softgrid, which is described as “application virtualization”. I’ve made this the subject of a separate post.

PS: I met blogger Mark Wilson at the event; he has a more detailed write-up.