Happy Birthday to me.

NDK Explorer....

Sprouting Social Networks?

In the last week I have received multiple invitations for contacts to join new social networks, "Reputation Network on Naymz" and "business connection on Pulse" has anyone any experience of Naymz or Pulse? Would love you know how they compare with LinkedIn and why one would join them, but frankly can not be bothered to attempt to move my Network just to find out.

Were they in MN?

Clifford Stoll

I want to meet this guy, he is my new hero

House Stealing

The local police distibuted this link last night, a fascinating scam:

Elastic Compute Cloud commercial ready?

And interesting announcement today from Amazon that may make their EC2 on demand computing capability commercial ready:
1. Multiple Locations
2. Elastic IP Addresses
They are embracing the notion that failure resilience is necessary. Cool news for those of us interested in Cloud Computing.

Talking to my Volvo

On Tuesday I had the car fitted with the Volvo branded Bluetooth handsfree kit. Extremely simple interface, five buttons but you only need to press one of them really, the big round one. Every thing else is controlled by voice, I was worried at first that the system would be tuned to listen for a yank accent, but to my relief and surprise it responds to my west country English accent just fine. People are complaining that my voice comes across very loud and I have a cal in to see if the send volume can be adjusted but no response yet. I am struggling yet to get all the wizzbang features to work, it is supposed to be able to talk to me if I receive a SMS message or a voice mail, but it did not work this morning when J texted me so some digging to do there. I also have had the Volvo OEM Garmin Nuvi fitted, and that is a fabulously simple device to use, I commend it to any one who is looking for a non-integrated GPS system, I chose it over the integrated one at the recommendation of Volvo, the touch screen is superb and I have yet to consult the manual. I has an integrated blue tooth phone system also but I am not that impressed with the quality of the loud speaker and people have complained that the quality is poor when there is any sort of road noise, hence the conversion to the Volvo system. For now I think I am gadgeted out, if have the iPod kit working great too btw. The only challenge remaining is converting all my Thule roof rack attachments to work with the Aero roof bars on the Volvo, need to call Thule to get some more info, their web site just confused me yesterday.

Weird Wide Web

Whilst browsing further into Glocer's blog I came across a comment that sounded just like a guy I know, I clicked on his name and hey presto it was our very own Peter Jackson Chief Scientist for the Thomson Corporation, nice site Peter. Maybe the six degrees of separation is real.

Glocer's Blog

I Live Searched Tom Glocer this afternoon to research our CEO-designate and came across his blog. one article made me smile: Think Positively and Good Things Will Follow

I truly believe in this principle, the negative effect that a negative attitude can have on those around you is astounding at times, I know I have been the cause and the victim of this at times but I don't know that I can chalk it up to my Mother Nation's culture that maybe a rather gross generalization.

The final paragraph rings very ture to me, especially to VC portion with which I have become very familiar, unquestionably the level of risk taking in the US is far higher than that tolerated by the investment community in the UK. One question it raises in my mind, does this explain why the pound is so strong right now....? Okay just kidding. Yo Ho Yo Ho the repulican party for me.... shot me.

End of an Era?

Today Thomson announced that the shareholders have overwhelmingly approved the acquisition of Reuters, and with that the retirement of Dick Harrington President and CEO, The Thomson Corporation . He has been at the helm of Thomson for 11 years, and it has been my privilege to have met him on several occasions. Dick Harrington has piloted Thomson through an immense transformation as it moved from the world of Print into the Information industry which it leads today. I for one will be sorry to see him leave, but I am excited by the prospect of the future here.

Save the developers

Save a developer upgrade your browser.

IE 8 is fine....

Just don't mess with the proxy settings. I am now running happily with it just as long as I have my VPN up and can access the corporate proxy. For some reason even when I disable the proxy through the Internet connection settings it still tries to use it. Which it cant and then fails....
I am finding a great number of sites that require the browser to be run in IE7 emulation mode, favorites.live.com being one such site. I am also finding that the emulation mode has a few quirks that cause pages to render strangely....

One thing I miss...

... about England.
Is the tax being included on the price tag, then you don't get nasty surprises like all the tax on a rental car. Who the heck do they think they are helping by quoting tax free prices and then slapping it on after the fact? It is a bizarre and frankly annoying behavior that exists across the entire continent as far as I can tell....

Vero Beach

We just got back from a week at Vero Beach, staying at the DVC resort. Right on the Atlantic coast, swimming pool, activities for the girls, restaurants, bars and a very nice three room suite for us all to hang out in. My parents visited the second day we were there.We also had a visit from a nephew who was staying with GPs up the coast, we all went out on a guided kayak tour. The highlight of which was Emma and I nearly being tipped over by a manatee we unknowingly disturbed in the shallows of Indian Creek Lagoon. We visited the treasure museum at Sebastian Inlet and met a turtle wandering along the beach. And had a late night one evening making smores with all the other families staying at thee resort. The resort while small was still a wonderful place for the girls and held their attention with its many attractions: Pool, Light house water slide, Water play area with canons, climbing frame, mini golf and 8 hours a day of organized arts and crafts if you wanted to stay busy. Downsides of the area, awful food, everything was fried that we found, but to be fair we didn't try the "fine dinning" list as there was no kids menu listed for them. Cell phone reception was dreadful, but this was also a plus point in terms of being away from the office. The weather was a lot cooler than we expected, mainly due to strong on shore winds blowing the entire trip. Large surf prevented the sea being a safe place for the girls but they enjoyed wave jumping with an adult staying by ready to grab them when they were knocked over by a waves - which was a frequent event. The bugs weren't bad, again due to the onshore wind I think. After the surf had stirred up the sand the beach was very pleasant to walk on, but initially it was covered in sharp crushed shells which hurt the girls feet - ($8 Croc knock-offs from Target helped with the shells). There was a Hobie Cat, a Jet Ski, and a sit-on Kayak to rent at the beach, the weather prevented any of those toys going out. The crazy rental prices for beach chairs sent us running to Walmart where we bought two chairs for less than the price of one days rental.... we left them for the next occupants. The drive there and back from Orlando Airport was fast and simple thanks to the talking GPS and empty roads (we arrived at 2am and departed on a Saturday).
Flying home now via Baltimore to drop off Emma, to 18 inches of snow blocking the driveway... love it, not.

Bryce Canyon Day 3

We packed up and drove to Bryce Canyon via Highway 9 and the tunnel through the hills. J decided this was the low point of the trip, she does not enjoy high speed hair-pin turns in an SUV apparently ;) we stopped on route for a horrible cup of coffee and arrived at Bryce Canyon by around 11:30.

We drove to Sunset Point and we hiked the Navaho Loop which was icy snowy and wonderful, the Hodo's were amazing as ever, and we were basically alone the entire time, we took a brief detour to the two-bridges


The hiking poles were a godsend again, enabling us to keep our footing on the icy stretches and provide a good support through the snow. We saw only one other couple the entire hike, and they were really struggling with the conditions underfoot.
We took a ton of pictures and then went to the local restaurant (there is only one) for a huge pulled pork barbecue sandwich which could have fed three people.

We had been advised then despite what you may think the fastest way back to Vegas (which is south of the canyons) was to go north, so we did and followed highway 89 north to 20, which we took west to I15. J was reading the guide book and spotted that we would be driving right by Kolob Canyon which is within Zion Canyon State Park and so we stopped off and drove the “scenic drive” 5 miles up and back down the canyon, it was very windy, but we stopped and took some picture along the route, my co-pilot complained I was too fast but hey we had a long drive ahead of us. I15 was 75mph all the way to Vegas so we made great time.

We checked into the MGM Grand and walked the strip to the Bellagio Casino where we went to Noodles an Asian restaurant where we were both unimpressed by our dinners, we walked back via the New York New York Casino and had sinful deserts (chocolate cheesecake) then crossed the road and went to bed. We are now flying home then next morning which has been uneventful so far, apart from a very nice coffee from Starbucks.

Angels Landing Day 2

During the previous evening we had visited the gift shop and I had remembered the hike that had inspired me the first time I visited the canyon, Angels Landing. This is listed as one of the top 20 hike s in the US by some people. We set off early and hit the trail around 8:30, we were the second or third party on the route and the sun was wonderful beating down on our backs as we climbed the side of the canyon up the switchback path cut into the sand stone. A very talkative man the previous evening (Len) had told us the hike was in three stages and each one was an accomplishment. As we climbed higher so more and more snow and ice remained n the trail, the last ten switchbacks were very icy and the hiking poles were a great help preventing a long fall. By the time we summited out on the second stage at the Scouts Lookout we had risen some 1300 feet up the canyon walls. The view was amazing, we could look down and see the cars in the bottom like little ants.
The remainder of the hike from Scouts Lookout to Angels landing is highly exposed, it goes out along the thin sliver of rock that in places is no more than two feet wide with 1500 foot drops on ether side, there are chains in places to hang on two. J started and decided her head was not going to handle the exposure and so I completed the last section very quickly on my own.
Given the exposure and the amount of snow and ice on the rock I wished I had a harness and ropes but what the heck, I did it and I am still here. The view was amazing, very exposed, windy and cold, so I hurried back to J and we went off along the west rim trail and found a great plateau to sit on and eat an early lunch of fruit and nuts and just enjoy the sun which by now was feeling hot. I stripped down to a tee-shirt and we descended the canyon at break neck speed poling all the way passing hordes of sweaty tourist climbing the switchbacks in highly inappropriate clothes and footwear – the lodge must do a roaring trade in band-aids for blisters.
By the time we got back to the lodge we were both hungry again and decided to see if the lunch menu was any better than the dinner menu, summary not a lot, but the French Fries were excellent...
We drove to the end of the canyon road and hiked the river bank until it ran out and turned into a water hike, we were not equipped to go canyoneering and we heard thunder which then turned into rain so we high tailed it back to the car and drove slowly down the canyon, stopping off at a couple of view points to take pictures and enjoy the view. We spent a while browsing gift shops, failing to get into a hiking shop which closes for an afternoon siesta! We returned to the lodge napped and then went to dinner at the spotted dog cafe, which I highly recommend, I had scallops, followed by a lamb and salmon surf and turf combination that was as good as any meal I have eaten out for a while. After dinner we returned to the lodge and I got my butt whooped by J at yahtzee.

Zion Canyon Day 1

We left Las Vegas around noon on Friday, the last session of the conference held no interest and so we were able to hit the road earlier than planned. One thing I must come back to is how we worked out how to establish an Internet connection using our Blackjack II phones, which saved the day for J who was unable to VPN out of the hotel... anyway the drive from Vegas to Zion Canyon was long (3+ hours) so we broke the journey at a town whose name escapes me but is home to the Oasis Casino, we did not stop at the casino, instead we drove through the town scoping out all the dinner options and decided to go for a hole in the wall Mexican restaurant called Mia's, I had a chicken quesidia, followed by some combo thingy, the appetizer was excellent and the highlight of the road trip for both of us. We also visited the local Wal-Mart and stocked up on granola bars fruit and massive bottles of water, all essential for higher altitude hiking. Even after our break we still arrived at Zion well ahead of schedule, this was my third trip there and J's second so we both knew what to expect. That said we were not expecting the lodge to be so nice (let's just say we had fairly low expectations of state park accommodations). We had booked the most expensive room at the Zion Canyon Lodge, still not pricey by business travel standards, and frankly worth every penny, we had a suite with a living room and balcony. A small bathroom and kitchen, and a nice king size bed. Don't talk to be about the pillows – they were the low point for me. Here is the view from our balcony:
Hard to beat! We decided we had time for a couple of hour hike and we had bought the Moon's guide to Bryce and Zion so we choose the middle distance recommended hike which was the Emerald Pool Trail, this hike consists of climbing the edge of the canyon almost opposite the lodge to pass by three dark green water pools formed by a series of spectacular water falls. Unfortunately there was not much water falling, but the first water fall you hit is a wide one in a semi circle, the water has undercut the hard crust rock and so you walk behind and under the falling water, it was a great feeling seeing the water falling and getting sprayed as it hit the pool below, the temperature was in the mid 60's and falling as the sun went down, but there was ice all around the bottom of the falls. There were a couple of families hiking this trail too, mostly descending as we went up the paths. The upper section had far fewer people and was considerably more rugged with the path no longer paved and in places indistinct. When we finally got to the top pool we felt it was a well rewarded exertion as we saw the fabulous 500 foot plus water fall plummeting down to a wonderfull pool.

There was just one other couple who made it up the path while we were there so we had it to ourselves, a wonderful experience.

We descended a different path, turning right (south) at the second pool which led us along a higher path back to the lodge. This path was less trodden and gave us a very peaceful way to return. We actually only saw one other person on this trail, which was a guy really limping along because he had knee pains. It made me very thankful that I had my carbon fiber sprung loaded hiking poles and had previously learned how to walk down hills and take the pressure of my patella tendon, otherwise I too would have been in a lot of pain by then, descending kills them without poles.
We decided to eat at the lodge that night as neither of us felt like driving, we both had fish, and neither of us were impressed, go to the lodge for the views not the food....

Customer Dinner

I was lucky enough to be invited to attended a customer dinner hosted by the Microsoft Evangelism team last night, excellent food at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant Postrio in the hotel, I had salmon and veggies, they were cooked wrapped in grease paper, the result of which was a combined steamed an baked style of cooking which meant the fish was delightfully moist. I sat with a group of technologists from the Corporate technology team from Papa John's Pizza and we had a great time inventing new ways to order pizza's, my favorite was definitely being able to do it when I order a movie from cable or Tivo and have a Pizza delivered simultaneously. Good luck Mr Ford on your marathon training you are an inspiration.

Despite the bugs

Despite the teething trouble I find described previously IE 8's debugging capabilities are an excellent extension to the tool, in case you are interested the issue with IE8 seems to be the corporate Web Proxy policy, I don't seem to be able to disable it (well the UI says it is disabled but it is still trying to use it I think)and hence when not on the corp WAN I am getting no DNS resolution etc.

Social Networks where are they taking us?

Most of the major players were represented, the MySpace, Facebook etc. at this panel discussion which overall missed an opportunity to educate us on their vision.
Several conflicting themes from this panel, 1. Privacy is a growing concern in the US, 2. Portability of Social Graph is essential for users, 3. No one has a business model to speak of except CPM ad revenue, 4. Game based social networks (Second Life et al) are creating massive networks in geographies out side of the US especially the Asia Pac area.

SkyDrive

Speaking of storage, this slipped my attention, but Microsoft have launched SkyDrive which is the concept that Google never got off the ground with G Drive.
Simply put its a password protected filestore available through the browser and through OS integration if you are on Windows.

SQL Server Data Services

Microsoft's first steps into cloud computing has been announced SQL Server Data Services “SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services. Built on robust SQL Server database and Windows Server technologies, these services provide high availability, security and support standards-based web interfaces for easy programming and quick provisioning.”

You can sign up for the Beta here

Seems like access to massive SQL capacity through very simple HTTP interfaces. love it....

MIX Humor?

I am not sure which was better the Elvis impersonator singing Johny Cash or Steve Ballmer banging an Apple Aero on the ground. Whilst the Ballmer Keynote/discussion was an amusing and engaging conversation I am not convinced I actually learned anything.
You can find some semi intelligent comments on the conversation here.

Gadget update

Apparently by June we will be able to get activesync installed on the Apple iPhone. The only real problem now is Mrs Crowhurst's employers desire for me to use a Windows Mobile device.

"Well, great news friends, Enterprise to Apple means Microsoft Exchange and ActiveSync support. We can expect features like Push mail and Contacts, Global Address List, Cisco IPsec VPN, authentication via certificate, and even remote wipe."

Thank the Lord for Firefox....

Call me a fool, call me reckless, but I could not help myself..... I installed the IE8 Beta, two reboots later I can start it up. For a few moments I was able to navigate pages, I saw with rye amusement that favorites.live.com does not work correctly in native standards mode. Then poof I am no longer able to see any pages, generic useless unable to display page message for any url. Reboot, no joy same issue, select IE7 compatibility mode, forced to restart, now able to view pages (and favorites.live.com works). Shut down laptop, came back to it, now cant select IE7 mode, unable to view any pages, and thanking my lucky stars I installed Firefox as a backup browser for just such an occasion. Of course IE8 took away IE7 from my machine, lets just hope I can reinstall 7..... that will be tonights entertainment I guess.

IE8 Beta 1

As previously mentioned, one of the major announcements was of the availability of IE8 Beta 1. This new version of Internet Explorer was developed to provide the 3Ps for both users and developers: Predictable, Performance, Power
So what does this actually mean to a user? Increased security features include the web site domain is now highlighted in the address bar in attempt to highlight when phishing is taking place. Managed add ons moved them to one place to mange them. Improved ActiveX control, per user installs without admin rights now allowed, per site control, and some new control around code execution prevention to reduce impact of malicious code attacks and vulnerabilities. IE 7 Backward compatibility mode available at the press of a button – more on why this is essential later. Reliability, Tab resilience, now if a web page causes a crash only that individual tab goes down, or in reality all the other tabs are reloaded to try and recover them. Accessiblility of rich controls through support for aria w3c spec for advanced web2.0 controls. Zoom improvements, including sensitivity to maintain the page layout while zooming. Activities, a new feature to enable users to right click on page elements and go directly to their services such as maps, email, blog or other web based services. Monitoring content, Web slices allow sections of pages to be tagged as subscribable, uses windows feeds platform to keep it up to date, Leverages hAtom concepts, easy to extend things already exposed as feeds through hAtom, Authentication added to feed platform to enable secure subscriptions to be managed.
For the developers amongst us: Standards mode now default, Backward compatible an option via tags. Authors choose when to adopt new standards. Html 4.01 compatibility. CSS 2.1 compliance. New layout engine to enable this new compatibility. End of hasLayout. 700 unit tests just published to demonstrate css compatibility and interoperability. Productivity, CSS, HTML and javascript debugger built into ie8, Style traceability of inheritance. Optimized for performance, upped connections from 2 to 6 simultaneous, Jscript perf improved, Dom object inspection improved, Garbage collection improved, String manipulation improved. Ajax Integration with navigation, through the use of some persistent hashing the browser can now support the back button for Ajax (big deal for the UX people amongst us). Network failure suport has been enhanced through the adoption of Html 5 spec Sessionstore and Localstore, limited to 10mb per domain and 100mb total Web apps can store state locally and query for network state. Cross domain mashup support built in, mutual consent of both domains required. Xdomainrequest new object to support this. Also some cross document messaging supported using postmessage and onmessage from html 5 standard.

Opening Keynote

Being out of the office is an oxymoron some days. Can one ever leave the office in the age of smart phones and wifi? Anyway I missed the keynote as a result of two conference calls. Jon a colleague from Thomson who is also here sent me his notes, for which I am grateful and also provided me a link to an amusing blog entry Ray Ozzie Says Nothing Again.

What ever your opinion you can watch the keynote streaming live using the new Silverlight streaming technologies.

http://visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/Day-1-Keynote/

Jon's notes:
"Ozzie says MSFTis focusing on search and advertising. Some talk about social commerce (trying to cash in on the social networking) and the importance of community. He figures the web will become a hub for all media devices desktop, handhelds, gps, car nav, mp3, etc. and calls it a personal device mesh.

Some really good demos on Silverlight in the second half of the keynote. The nbc olympic site this year is going to be amazing. Hardrock cafe also did some really cool stuff.

IE8 looks pretty good. They have fine tuned things a little more and now say that should look just like firefox. They are not only cleaning up the browser but are also trying to clean up some of the ambiguity in the w3c standards. They are really doing some good stuff here. They have also added some new things to the developer tools such as javascript debugging right in ie. No need to even do it from vs. They also have some new things like "activities". And "web slices" which I think are pretty cool. When a page crashes in ie8 only the tab will crash, not the entire browser."

MIX Logo

It is an interesting mix of people here – no pun intended, a plethora of Mac users informs me of the high number of web designers I am surrounded by, and the amount of applause for minor browser compatibility improvements tells me these are people that do real world work, a refreshing change from some conferences I have been to.
One very distinctive characteristic of this conference over other Microsoft events is the quality of the logos, lots of ‘flare’, this is similar to the markedly contrasting Silverlight and expressions branding that I have seen and represents a dramatic shift away from the bland generic traditional Microsoft product branding. I did see one amusing T-Shirt yesterday that I wish I had snapped a picture of it was the number 8 spelled out with the initial E replaced with the Internet Explorer E, as you will read in a subsequent post Beta 1 of IE 8 was announced at this conference yesterday.

MIX 08

So I am having the pleasure of attending the MIX conference in Las Vegas. The pleasure is heightened by its location, the Venetian hotel which is magnificent. For starters every room is a suite, and I lucked out and have probably the best view possible out across the fourth floor pools which are Romanesque in design. Three flat screen TVs a sunken lounge area and a sumptuous bed to top it off. The only negative so far has been the low bandwidth of the internet connection in the room, barely able to keep up with streaming audio, and definitely not capable of supporting SecondLife in any quality, last night I attempted to go to a life blues concert at the new Star Dust Café sim, horrible lag, mainly caused by the connection speed I think as my PC usually is able to sustain great performance if I turn down the draw distance.