ScottIsAFool

With all that has been going on lately (Mel being in and out of hospital, etc), I forgot to post to say that I got re-awarded the Microsoft MVP award for my work in the last 12 months on the Windows Live Platform. I was reminded of this yesterday when I picked up my gift pack, which included my certificate, and a nice glass “thing”. I have put some pictures below of them.

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A while back I commented on how bad the comment spam was on Live Spaces, and I haven’t been the only one to be a little annoyed with it. Well, the Live Spaces Team blogged about the recent changes to Live Spaces, and included a little FAQ about Comments. One question in particular is worth noting:

What have you been doing to reduce comment spam?

We recognize that comment, invitation, and private messaging spam has been a real problem recently. In this release we’ve added a number of anti-spam measures behind the scenes. We don’t want to go into detail about how these measures work, as any information we provide may help spammers out. So far we have seen a significant decrease in the amount of spam in the last 2 days since the release, but we recognize that fighting spam and abuse is an ongoing battle, and we will be continuing to invest in methods to prevent and remove spam and abuse from our network.

This sounds great. However, certainly for me, it’s rubbish! Take the following screenshot (full image is 3mb if you click it):

You can see from that image just how bad comment spam on Spaces still is. The real downside is that on this blog and my developer blog if anyone leaves a valid comment, unless I check for comments several times a day, they could get lost in the ether because of these ridiculous comment spam.

So if you have left a comment and I haven’t responded, I apologise, but you can see what I have to deal with!

I know I haven't posted much recently, which sometimes is nothing new. However, in this instance, it is because when I'm not at work, I'm spending pretty much all my time at the hospital with Mel (girlfriend). She's been in there now for almost 4 weeks with a multitude of different problems. So you'll have to forgive the lack of anything on here.

SL

Last week a truly great man lost his fight against cancer and died on November 4th, aged 66. I am of course referring to the tragic loss of Michael Crichton. I found out just before the Bryan Adams gig started on Wednesday night, which made the gig very hard for me.

I’ve actually spent ages trying to work out how I’m going to write this post, and now that I’m actually writing it, all my thoughts about it have gone. This news upset me, a lot. This wasn’t just a case of this being my favourite author, he was my childhood idol! I talked about this when I reviewed his last book. His death has a big impact on me not just because of that, but because I’ve actually met him!

When State of Fear came out, he did a book signing at the Waterstones in Piccadilly and, not wanting to miss the opportunity of meeting him, I drove all the way up to London, just for that one thing. I was actually later getting there than planned, and was worried that I would miss him, especially if there was any kind of queue. Fortunately, there was no queue and I was able to just walk straight up to him and get my book signed, and even had a chat with him. I told him about how he  had inspired me to write my novel when I was just 15, and that fact actually impressed him! That was an amazing feeling that will stay with me my whole life. Although only brief, I found him to be a really nice guy, who enjoyed chatting with his fans, which to me makes all the difference in the world to fans. I was so nervous about meeting him but his casualness just helped to alleviate that. Having said that, my nerves were still there, and looking back, there’s so much more I wish I’d told him, like how one of his books actually plays a part in my own novel as a plot point.

Crichton was due to release a new book in the States next month, but the publishers have said they have postponed that indefinitely, presumably to get the permission of the family and let them have some mourning time. I’m sure the book will come out, and I hope it’s better than Next! I would hate for his last published book to be shit!

I think what I liked most about him is he didn’t give a crap. He got so much criticism for State of Fear and his views on global warming, but he didn’t care, he stuck to his point of view. I just have so much respect for him and it’s just not going to be the same without his new books.

Michael, you will be missed by so many!

Yesterday I got a surprise package in the post, it was an MVP rugby shirt. I promised some pictures, and here they are

3 and a half years ago, I blogged about a Momentous Day when I shaved off the goatee I had. Well, as you know, I have recently had quite a long goatee again. Well, yesterday I decided I was bored of it now (I’ve had it since December!) and got Mel to cut it off for me, cos afterall, we all know that I like change. So like the first Momentous Day post, here are some before and after pictures:

I have something very cool heading my way (more on that when it arrives), and I received an email yesterday saying it had been dispatched and gave me my UPS number to track the order. Well GMail gave me something that was more useful that the last time I blogged about GMail:

As you can see, on the right hand side I have a link which actually takes me straight to the UPS tracking site with my tracking number already in there. It’s things like this that just make that small difference (I’m all about the little things!). Are you taking note Hotmail?

Microsoft Research released a cool program last week called AutoCollage 2008, which, as the name suggests it automatically creates a collage of pictures, and does so really well actually. So in a predictably vain moment, I made a collage out of my 10 most recent profile pictures on facebook. This is the result:

I have done better examples, but I don’t have them to hand.

As you can see, it does a very good job, and I personally think this would make a great addition to Windows Live Photo Gallery, or as a Mesh App (imagine if you had a folder synced with Mesh that you could drop the photos into, then when it’s synced with Mesh, an AutoCollage Mesh app then makes all those pictures into a collage and puts it back in that synced folder!). The only real criticism I have about this is the size of collage. At the moment, the options for that are as follows:

Which is fine, except it would be nicer if you could do a custom size. For example, screen resolution is fine, but when I’m on two monitors (like I am now), and I want to do one for say my home computer which is just one monitor, then that resolution isn’t really that good. If I want to share my collages with people, I either have to choose a size that is either too small for a monitor, or two big for most people’s monitor. Having custom sizes would alleviate this I feel.

But other than that, it’s totally worth a try, and you can download the 30 day trial from http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/6f9325c6-cf4f-4408-8cab-8b1f0cabe0bb/Details.aspx

As you know, I’ve been playing with Photosynth recently and I’m seriously blown away by this stuff! On Saturday I decided to try one of my car, so 156 pictures later, I was done and really proud I had managed to get 99% synthy

This is the 3D spot model

And this is what it’s like with the actual images showing

Bournemouth also had an air show this weekend, which included the awesome Red Arrows and one of them was on display by the pier, so I got my camera out and snapped away. Only 79% synthy though, so a little disappointing. You can see that one here, or the low res one (which interestingly is only 67% synthy).

You can check out all of them on my Photosynth profile.

Thanks to Craig Murphy for this. This is one of those “answer some questions and stitch someone else up with the same questions” things. So here we go…

1. How old were you when you started programming?
I was actually a very late starter when it comes to programming, starting at 18 when I started university. I had done HTML stuff when I was at school, but even that was only at 16, before that I’d done no programming whatsoever.

2. How did you get started in programming?
If we take the HTML part, I was just playing around with that at home, not really sure how I got started with it, but it then progressed into doing an intranet page for my school as well as maintaining their actual website. With actual programming, again, it was at university and it was for my course (Software Engineering Management).

3. What was your first language?
HTML (although I never really know whether that classes as a language in this context). Failing that, it was Turbo C, which is when I started learning it all at uni…

4. What was the first real program that you wrote?
Now you’re bloody asking… Can I put a Hello world app for this one? No? Ok. Then the first one I wrote as an assignment was a simple ATM program that had to simulate the interface of a cash point (in DOS format).

5. What languages have you used since you started programming?
HTML, javascript, C, Java, C#, ASP, ASP.NET VBE (you know, that crappy thing that comes with Office).

6. What was your first programming gig?
The first (and to date, only) programming gig I’ve done was when I spent two months as web developer for the Bournemouth Churches Housing Association (BCHA) as they wanted a brand new website which would also enable people to apply for jobs through it.

7. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
I don’t know if it would have stopped me programming, but knowing what I know now back then would probably have prevented me from failing my second year of uni. As a quick example, one of the programs we were given in the first week was an XML > HTML parser. Didn’t have a clue! When I got back into programming again about 4 years later, I wrote something like that in C# in about half a day. sigh.

8. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Google is your friend. When I started programming again, I would always have two programs open: Visual Studio, and Internet Explorer. The internet is a wealth of knowledge and you can find so many examples that you can just work through and it becomes so much clearer than just reading the theory behind something.

9. What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?
Not sure if there have really been any. I’m more an enthusiast when it comes to programming. I don’t really do much of it for a day job (even though I believe I should, but don’t get me started), and I tend to get frustrated with things easily. So when things don’t compile…grrrr! Whether this counts or not I don’t know, but my two crowning achievements in programming have been having the most popular Windows Live Writer plugin (my video one), and LiveNet (which was co-authored with Luke Smith) as that is getting shown in a few MS conferences that Angus and Dr Neil have done when it comes to Windows Live programming. So really pleased with that.

So now you know all this about me, the world can continue as it should. But who shall I stitch up with this…? I reckon it should be: Angus Logan, Luke Smith, Craig Cavalier, Greg Duncan, Joe Cheng. I would have put my mate Alex, but as he’s not a blogger, would have been kinda pointless really.