DECODE

V&A Decode generative identity from postspectacular on Vimeo.

Just saw the Decode show at the London V&A. It was amazing to see people of different ages interacting with large kinestic computer installations. Its amazing how humans can naturally interact with a 3-D computer installation, matching this body behavior rapidly to the requirements of the machine interface. Some gave better results with wild fast movement, others with quick short burts and others with slow movement, and people were able to adjust their entire body to get the results they wanted from these innovative pieces of computer art.

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When Internet Pioneers go missing

This rather terse statement doesn't go into any further detail, so it doesn't shed any more light on what Agre has been doing in recent months, except confirming that Agre had indeed gone off the grid rather than being harmed. Nonetheless, the news should relieve Agre's family, friends and fans that he is indeed safe.

Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Safe - All Tech Considered - Technology News And Culture Blog : NPR

Before Phil Agre vanished from the Internet Jorn Barger also staged a major "Grid leaving", a kind of virtual death marginal persons made famous by the Internet might engage in.

This should all not come as much of a surprise. The ritual of leaving the virtual community is a regular activity online as most long term Internet participants can tell you. In the world of the Internet the only real power an individual has in a flood of information and short attention spans is to "leave".

Barger, the erudite blogging pioneer known for his influential Robotwisdom weblog, has disappeared repeatedly over the years, each time prompting friends, family and fans to wonder what's happened to him.

Jorn Barger Has Left the Building

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A better way to do SharePoint Search Scopes

Recently I posted about how to solve SharePoint scopes not turning up in drop downs. In that post I showed how to add Search Scopes to a Site Collection. In this post I am going to show you how to do it better.

The problem with site collection scopes is that they are limited to the site collection in which they are defined. Not only does this mean they can't be shared, they also can't be fixed by central admin without going in to the site collection itself. In the SSP Search you will see the scopes listed, but the ones made in site collections can only be edited in site collections.




A better way is what is shown above. Create all your scopes via a change control process. Once a scope is defined and understood why it is needed create it in the SSP under view scopes. Scopes created at the SSP level can be managed for the entire Enterprise at the SSP level, changed or deleted centrally, and they can be shared by the entire Enterprise.





Then when you wish to extend a search scope to a site collection it is made available through the Central Shared Service Provider rather than just created at the Site Collection level. The local admin would only need click it rather than define it.

In almost all cases using SSP to create scopes is the best way. But like so much in SharePoint it is actually easier to do it the "wrong way" and define scopes independent of the Enterprise view at the site collection level. This is creating just another silo, this time of search knowledge.

Search Scopes at Site Collections

I recently had to rebuild a set of search scopes after a migration. I was a bit frustrated that they were not showing up on the drop down. I finally found a solution for SharePoint Search Scopes not showing up.

Firstly the scopes you define either in the SSP or in the Site Setting for the Site Collection must all be in the display group "Display Groups: Search Dropdown"



You can add or remove these members by clicking on the "Search Dropdown group" and clicking those scopes you want to use. Its not my fault that Dropdown is misspelled.

Also remember that scopes must first have names added and then have rules added. Its a bit confusing but the most common rule is that you want a search of an area of the site. So first you create a new scope, clicking you want it in the dropdown display group. Then once the group is added you edit the scope by right clicking on it, and in the case I was working on clicking the radio button

Web Address (http://server/site)

You then post the URL you want the search to work against in the folder. After a bit of work I found it was probably best just to wait for the to be ready rather than forcing an update in search.

I would also say that even though I had to do it this way, the best way to do these scopes is in SSP. Scopes in SSP can be shared with the entire Enterprise. These scopes should also be planned out to some extent. For example you might have a scope to search a single subsite that you share in a portal. But when you actually go to the site you can contain your search to that site by default. What precisely is the value of searching a scope for one site from another? Is this something users would find value in?

Would not scopes of definitive data, like a company wiki or the official news site be better? Scopes could also define different kinds of information. Scopes could be for "company buzz" allowing you to search blogs and discussions for topics across the Enterprise. Or searches could target groups of authors.

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : December 2009 Cumulative Update Packages for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

December 2009 Cumulative Updates are available for download for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Cumulative Updates will now always be available at the Update Center

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : December 2009 Cumulative Update Packages for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

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BBC News - Apple's iPad to 'kickstart' tablet market

Industry watchers say Apple's long-awaited iPad tablet could reverse the fortunes of the tablet PC industry.

Microsoft introduced a tablet computer in 2001, but it failed to catch on.

However, advances in touchscreens and wireless technology mean that the market could now be right for products such as the iPad, analysts said.

"Tablets have been around for a long time and tablets have failed for a long time. This is a winning product," said analyst Van Baker of Gartner Research.

BBC News - Apple's iPad to 'kickstart' tablet market

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Apple - iPad - Price starting at $499

Apple - iPad - Price starting at $499

Apple is approaching the tablet/slate space as an extension of the phone, while Microsoft is approaching from Windows.

The fight right now is iPone vs. Windows.  I would bet Windows wins.  I am still holding to my innovation wave, I see the iPad as a "cool" device by Microsoft Windows 7

Share the Point

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Google Image Result for http://www.tabletized.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/apple-table-ipad-itablet-macbook-touch9.jpg

Google Image Result for http://www.tabletized.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/apple-table-ipad-itablet-macbook-touch9.jpg

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Apple launches iPad

Share the Point: Search results for iPod

Above is a graphic I drew to show the location of the slate. I seem to have gotten the word wrong, because when Jobs introduced the new Apple tool in this space he called it a Pad. The graphic he showed to introduce the Pad was close to this one, only showing Apple products.

BBC News - Apple to unveil new product, amid swirl of speculation

All eyes in the technology world are on Apple as it prepares to unveil its latest creation, amid a swirl of speculation it is a tablet computer.

BBC News - Apple to unveil new product, amid swirl of speculation

iSlate?  I think that is what we will see.

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CNN confirms my prediction, 6 months later

20th of July 2009 I predicted:

I think Twitter has peaked, that is its recent growth will suddenly come to a stop.

Share the Point: Twitter future?

(CNN) -- It was the upstart rock star of the Internet in early 2009, roaring out of relative obscurity to become one of the most exposed -- some would say overexposed -- services on the Web.

But since the middle of last year, the number of Twitter users has flatlined.

Has Twitter peaked? - CNN.com

So for once I got one of these predictions right, maybe.y

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Flash vs. Silverlight

Well I guess I have to be honest. I have been using Flash since the first release and have watched the product mature. I have been using Silverlight for about a year now, with my use picking up in the past few months.

How do they compare, sadly for Microsoft they don't. Silverlight, even using Expressions, requires a great deal of coding skills to get anything to work, and very quickly even a fairly simple animation or interface becomes a confused mass of XAML. The clean interface with Flash allows developers to manage vast amounts more complexity.

Just to stage a single repeating animation in Silverlight is a mind dulling piece of complexity. You keep asking yourself why they did it this way? Going from Flash, where you get an easy story board tool the drives the site and the ability to make scenes, you will find Expression confusing.

Probably a key indicator is how I learned. I learned Flash mostly by just playing around with it. Sure I got some books but really 90% of what I learned about Flash was because the interface was so obvious. And it was fun to play with and you could get results easy. And this was back in 1999 when it was not obvious what the tool was trying to do.

Silverlight Expressions on the other hand requires I keep the manual at my side constantly. This is with a full knowledge of what the final output will be.

Perhaps the worst part for me so far has been getting the animations to actually work. In Flash animations just start if you want them too, its like getting pregant if your Roman Catholic. So far in Expressions I have had to make changes to the XAML code setting a storyboard start object. This is not only confusing it then breaks the Expressions interface and makes it impossible for me to add to the existing storyboard without making the changes by hand to the XAML code. There may be an easier way to do this but I have not read that far in the manual.

Compound this with the fact that everyone has the flash plugin installed, Flash can run against Java and PHP back-ends, and Flash can be used by designers as well as programmers and Silverlight can only be used by developers; well lets say if you have existing Flash projects going keep them Flash.

I would imagine that at present SilverLight should be limited to the following:

1. Full Microsoft implementations
2. Simple user interfaces
3. Intranets and other controlled platforms.

All other situations should stick with Flash.