Jun 22, 2004

Microsoft Quietly Unveils Brilliant Wiki-enabled Blogs

For quite a while now, blogs.msdn.com has been populated with Microsofties, independent developers, and interested third parties like IT admins.

Somehow, this seems to have slipped under the radar of the mainstream press, and has gone without a major press release from Microsoft.

Part of me understands the move. You don't exactly want to tell the world that you're giving every employee at your company the ability to talk about whatever they want, sometimes making mistakes as they go.

You also don't want to make public announcements that you'll be allowing your customers to write your documentation because you often leave holes in it.

In the meantime, they've gone and done both those things, and it's brilliant.

http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/05/12/130556.aspx just saved my butt at work. It's not official Exchange documentation, but someone at MS saw that a whole bunch of people were calling in with the same trouble, and grouped all the resources into one spot so that you don't have to pull your hair out while every user calls you to tell you that the email is down.

Once the poster had written the initial article, it was then open for Wiki-style editing. Anyone who comes to the page can add to the bottom of it! If I have something to say that adds to the recovery procedure, I just comment right on the page, and hopefully others will benefit from it.

I first saw the brilliance of the Wiki enabled manual at MySQL.com. Their technical documentation was lacking at the time, but the comments at the bottom saved me time and time again as other users wrote in with the fixes to their problems (and to mine.)

Is Microsoft quietly learning a lot of the right lessons from Open Source? Lesson 1 - "Your users are your army, let them help themselves and each other." - learned.

I hate to say it, but score one for Redmond.

7:08 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Crow, Dark City Director at "I, Robot" Helm

Until a few minutes ago, I had absolutely no intention of seeing I, Robot in theaters. Taking Asimov's forward thinking, intellectual stories which have already seen 2 Hollywood adaptations (A.I.* and Bicentennial man) and giving them the "T2/Matrix" plot didn't really appeal to me.

There's a new variable in the equation that has my curiosity peaked though. The director of The Crow and Dark City, two movies which at least evoke special feelings for me even if they aren't technically superb, is behind this new mega-budget behemoth.

I'm very curious to see the direction the film takes now. Alex Proyas (The Director) has a very distinct comic-booky style, and I can see a great portion of this movie being devoted to discussion of sentience and what makes something "alive," where as before I had assumed it would just be a robot/murder/chase movie.

I don't know if I'll go opening night, but between Proya's cool visual style and the possibility of a *smart* sci-fi movie, my hopes are certainly a bit higher now than they were after seeing the ads around NYC.

*AI was not directly based on an Asimov tale, but was heavily influenced by his stories and echos many of Asimov's themes.

Stolen from Wired, boingboing, and Cory Doctorow, who wrote the article.

6:36 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Cockamamie Gadget Ideas

Every once in a while I see something and think how marketable it could be if just tweaked a little bit and put in a bevy other other devices.

I believe Nokia has hit on just such a goldmine with their "Light Writing" phone for midair messaging. A small row of LED's and a cheap accelerometer allow you to "write" in the air by flashing the diodes in sequence.

The technology is nothing new - LED signs work on the same principal, scrolling the words across many rows rather than moving one row along.

Two ideas came to immediately after seeing this. First, why not make the display bigger. Imagine a jump-rope full of LEDs drawing 6' pictures in the air at raves and flashing messages at protests as the owner spun it around.

Second, with all the blue LED's on the highway already, why not use this same technology to write in the air as you pass bystanders and other vehicles. It'd certainly be at least a somewhat better use of the technology than just lighting up blue and going back and forth like night rider.

Come on, if you're already taunting the cops with your pimp-mobile mods and blue lights, why not go the whole distance and be able to key in "eat my dust" as you fly by at 120mph, "Out of my way" as you pass those slowpokes doing the speed limit, and then "Ouch!" as you slam into the guardrail.

Ridiculous as it seems, I bet this is on Pepboys shelves by this time next year.

2:30 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 2 writebacks |