Smashing Magazine had a tidbit about HDR. They do it best so I'll let them give it to you:

Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion. In graphics HDR imaging is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows. This is usually achieved by modifying photos with image processing software for tone-mapping. And the results can be really incredible; in fact, many artists and designers come up with some pretty fancy results.

I keep coming back to look at the pictures because they appear both totally false and too real.   Here is one.  Be sure and click through and check out the ones they have in the post.

This post is long, but I've divided it up into sections so if you're only curious about specific portions you can find information, or you can consume a section at a time.  Otherwise, charge ahead.  I've tried to keep it compact and dense.

Keynotes:

Both Keynotes were good, but the Ballmer interview was the highlight. Now that I've had a few days to let my thoughts coalesce I am more impressed by Ballmer. Ballmer spoke with candor about key subjects to the future of Microsoft. Noam pointed out how impressively Ballmer answered audience questions about fine details of Microsoft's operations.  Another poignant moment was when Ballmer, addressing the crowd of software developers directly, said "I know you have a lot of choices out there.  Please pick us."  Reuters picked up the story of the keynote if you're looking for a quick upshot.

Sessions:

I did pretty well session wise this year, no real stinkers.  Here is what I attended with links (if it's worth seeing).  Here is a link to the Mix08 sessions page if you want to explore on your own.

Remember when I blogged about the LED Light bulb and the Airzooka? Well, for Valentines day this year my wife got me an Airzooka - Yes, I married the right woman. Well, we've(read I've) been using it to torment our intern and my co-workers. It's really pretty fun to shoot at someone and score a direct hit. (Thanks for being a sport Hunter).

Hunter, as the good intern he is, has found someone who has taken this idea to the next level

Good job Hunter!

Okay, that's really just a hook to get you in the door. Let me complete my thought:

TDD is total crap if you don't really do TDD, but get stuck on Faux-TDD

In the last four weeks the project I'm working on has grown from 3 libraries to 12 (it's probably a bit bloated).  It has gone from 30% unit test coverage to about 75% unit test coverage.  (The white-papers I've skimmed more or less say 70% to 80% is good and that getting above that is not cost effective unless you're writing fighter-jet or medical device software.)   We're successfully implementing an MVP based on the in-depth work Vijay did looking into approaches.  We are coding against interfaces not implementation classes, using an IOC tool and writing unit tests using a mocking framework.  And, most importantly, we're trying really hard to implement TDD.

I'm going to go ahead and say, we've done everything we can in he way of employing tools and patterns to make TDD happen - save one thing: writing tests before we code.  This is kind of the classic Software Engineer response: learn a tool, get some numbers, bang some stuff out to get it going.

Dinner at Telly's, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Had dinner tonight at Noam's favorite Greek joint in astoria. The whole red snapper was great. You win Noam, your greek place is better.

Telly's Taverna
2813 23rd Ave
Astoria, NY 11105-2707
Phone: (718) 728-9056

Stuck at LAS, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

That is airport talk for McCarran airport in Las Vegas. Apparently JFK is on a ground stop... Oh wait, we're boarding again. 11:51 flight boarding (again) at 2:18pm. At least we weren't stuck on the plane.

Here is the link to Scott Hanselman's talk on the ASP.NET MVC at Mix08 this year.  The site REQUIRES Silverlight which more or less puts you into IE.  That IE only BS needs to change for me to truly buy into Silverlight - I can't get it to run with Firefox.   In my previous post I named Scott my top contender for best presenter (that I saw) at Mix08 and it looks like he's going to carry the day unless I'm blown away by either of the last two sessions.

I actually ran into Scott in V bar last night and let him know I appreciated his talk.  Be sure and check out his talk.  My take on the MVC stuff is basically: It's not my future, but it's really pretty* technology.

*pretty: crazy great detailed implementation that is designed around testing and neat functionality quickly, pretty is pretty high up in the superlative chain to the end all be all 'elegant'

I'm sitting in Scott Hanselman's talk on MVC for .NET and he is just really great and very engaging. Not only is he doing a killer demo of MVC but he's doing a great sideways sell of TDD. Of all the talks I've been to so far at Mix this year, he's the best. He's all up in the code and keeps it really funny and irreverent. I will definitely be adding his blog to my daily reading list. If you want to know a little more about him, here is his bio scraped from the Mix08 site (I added the gold star).

Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager in the Developer Division, aiming to spread the good word about developing software, most often on the Microsoft stack. Before this he worked in eFinance for 6+ years and before that he was a Principal Consultant a Microsoft Partner for nearly 7 years. He was also involved in a few things like the MVP and RD programs and will speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen to him. He's written in a few books, most recently on Professional ASP.NET. He blogs at http://www.hanselman.com and podcasts at http://www.hanselminutes.com.

VS

Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki squared off today for the keynote which consisted of a one on one interview (Kawasaki, interviewing Ballmer).  While I'm not up on the history, there was certainly a friendly water-under-the-bridge adversarial thing going on.  Kawasaki being a big proponent of all things not Microsoft asked some tough questions that went straight for the throat.

His first question out of the gate went straight for the - What's up with Yahoo? question. It's not worth me rehashing it when you should just watch it for yourself - here. It stayed very interesting and Steve answered questions with great candor.

My favorite part: when Steve got all "monkey boy" and gave web developers a shout out. He actually reminds me a lot of my friend Troy - Can I get a Wooo Woooo! ?

In the open space area here at Mix08 they have Demo's of MS Surface.  You know that multi-touch table-top thing Microsoft rolled out as a concept doo-dad a while ago.  Well, I'm a huge fan of Multi-Touch and ever since Minority Report I've dreamed of the world where I can interact with a computer with my hands in a gesture driven touchy kind of way (think iPhone).   And there is a lot of academic work and some really cool YouTube videos of same.  This is the first time I've seen something like this (on this scale) in the flesh.  This is really cool and a nice step toward the dream of ubiquitous computing.

A little insight on what you're seeing in the photos.  The pictures of the phone (HTC Dash for T-Mobile) lying on the surface.  The surface has identified it as a Dash and shows you information about the phone (via blue tooth I think) and let's you interact with that.  The one over the map of Seattle lets' you see cell signal coverage in a given area.

The cell phone bits were pretty cool, but the thing I loved was the photo interaction.  The guy giving the demo picked up a digi-cam pointed it at us, took a picture and then set the camera down on the surface.  The pictures tumbled out and several people were able to intact with them (move, resize, rotate) simultaneously. It was really cool.

...Stays in Vegas, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

There is a ridiculous Rock Band setup here. And, of course the Elvis impersonator on the drums kind of puts the cherry on top.

The Ballmer keynote just before this photo was taken was also pretty awesome. Ballmer gave us some nice "Monkey Boy" action. I'll do a post about it on a full size keyboard and get a link to it up.

Oh I wrote a Silverlight app. Yes I did., originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Played with Silverlight on one of the hands on one of the lab boxes. Wrote a little app that rotated and changed the color of the text.

Then I did something that make the animation appear to break. I asked for help and after a couple different MS helpers I ended up talking to a Blend product manager. He was really helpful and we re created what I had done to get the weirdness and it worked fine.

Overall I will be playng with Silverlight 2 in the current preview of Blend some more, It's just a learning curve thing at this point. Looks like the goods are mostly there in the product.

I am a little bummed because I wanted to have a post about me breaking something.

Chillin' at Tao, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

At Tao beach hanging in the 60 some degree weather. Bit of a sausage fest, okay entirely a sausage fest. We'll chill here and then get some dinner.

I'll try and roll up a slideshow tonight.

Well, they almost got there.  This is Jonk's blog in Firefox:

This is Jonk's Blog in IE 8 Beta 1:

Doh.

Ari represent, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Ari's demo was great, cut through the bullshit and straight to the code, run it, break point and show the money.

IE8 has firebug., originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Well, not really. But they built something like it.

Actually the activities functionality through the OpenService stuff looks pretty cool.

Scott Gu is a rockstar, no really, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

So Scott comes on and the place goes a little crazy. Everyone starts snapping photos... Ooooh get on the stream, they are about to show IE8.

Flickr / Twitter overclocking, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

With all the user generated to screen Flickr / Twitter exposure it's like there is a race going to generate content.

The hot buzz seems to be that IE8 will be launched to beta in a little bit here. I'll see if I can post a link. Also, it appears the keynote will be streamed live.

Staking out for the keynote, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Celebrity sightings: Ray Ozzie getting his credentials challenged and I swear I saw Rockford Lhotka. Oh, and Elvis.

Pretty good Johnny Cash cover artist singing for us.

Note to Noam and Jason I am up front on the left side about 5 rows back.

Peppermill, damn straight, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Noam got a pineapple mojito and it was down hill from there. I had a manhattan and a massive quesadilla.

I am currently over Kearney, Nebraska ( I would throw in a link for you but I'm not connected to the inter-webs right now).  Two seats to my left is Noam of Blog.a.lish and right behind me is Jason of soon to be some blog somewhere.  We're on our way to Mix 08 in Las Vegas - Microsoft's Big web development conference.  The next few days will be dominated by posts about happenings at the conference.  Under a cloud of Wi-Fi, armed with a Wi-Fi enabled phone with and a post by email setup through Flickr I'm going to be a buzz with conference posts.

Last year at Mix07 the buzz was Silverlight followed by the Google-DoubleClick acquisition.  This year is certain to be Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo (is it safe to call it hostile yet? or just post bear-hug?).

This year has a few sessions about online advertising, an obvious subject of interest for anyone who knows why the web is "free" and/or want's a slice of the pie.  I'm also hoping to get some more insight into LINQ, Silverlight and the MS MVC. And, while it will be tempting to rant, I'm probably going to refrain from sharing my well earned opinion that WebParts are junk.

Actually, on a more non-specific front I'm going to quiz my MS friends about testability.  The project I am currently working on is using Sprint .NET as an IOC tool and N-Mock as a mocking tool. I'm curious what the MS boys have up their sleeve in this vein.  As I start to feel the effects of the TDD Kool-Aid these things have become more important to me as part of my daily work.

Sorry about the absence of links to the various subjects here-in.  I really am at 38,000 feet.  If only there were really Internet access on planes.  Then again, where else would I get to feel cut-off from the world in a cocoon of I-can't-affect-anything - oh wait, I ride the subway to work.  Thank you MTA for keeping me relaxed when I'm powerless.