Turns out the web IS a small world.  A few years ago when Jonk and I started working together he read this blog forgetfoo.com (NASFW).  Over the last few years we've started referring to the content of Foo's site as 'Web Tits'.  It's sort of a mash-up of web tips and, well, tits. 

So, a couple weeks ago I run into Dylan at Mix08 (under miscellaneous) who works at ClearSpring with Foo.  I mentioned to him that I read Foo and that we referred to his site as 'Web Tits'.  He got a kick out of it and obviously passed the word along because Foo threw down a little shout out (Not entirely safe for work).

Actually, a few years ago when I was interviewing for my job, the last person I interviewed with was a Vice President of Engineering.  He asks a simple yet tough question, "What do you read to get your information about new technology and or web trends?"

Seems innocuous enough, but you'd be surprised how many engineers freeze up or have no answer at all.  Well, not me.  I actually cited Foo's blog as one of the places where I get design inspiration and tidbits about what's hot on the web.  Then I proceeded to navigate the veep over to Foo's blog having not seen what the current post was.  Don't remember what it was that day, don't think it was tits, but I got hired.

And before I forget, top set of tits.

The Saitz has an interesting post about how a tribute video to his deceased dog Cookie got picked up in the YouTube copyright dragnet and how he dodged doing hard time in the hoosegow.

He does it better than I could so leap on over then roll on back for my two cents.

I guess I knew that they were doing some form of copyright violation trolling over there, but it never occurred to me what that might mean.  It has to be automated right, they can't possibly have offshore low wage workers watching YouTube videos that can identify what pop song has been stolen.

I remember that Verizon launched a music recognition service on their phones using software Song IDentity by Rocket Mobile.  You remember the cheese ball commercials where a chick is walking by a store blaring music out the front, holds up her phone for 10 seconds (I think they shortened the time for the commercial - I mean 10 seconds in a commercial of someone doing one thing, no way).  Her phone recognizes the song, she downloads it to her phone (who thought that service would be a good idea? - maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic) presses play and walks away the song magically picking up where it left off from the store.

This stuff is all circa 2006.  Actually, there is a CNET article about same (YouTube, your copyright and Google, by Harry Fuller; October 2006) that is somewhat interesting about how they were looking to automate this (sure I could find an article that is more recent, but isn't it interesting what they were planning to do and where they are now).  What I find fascinating is the database and processing power you'd need to scrub all the incoming videos to YouTube. 

More to the point, let's say I post a video today with a song by my favorite artist Raffi which is not in the You-Can't-Use-My-Work database when I upload it.  Then two months later Raffi gets wise and adds his stuff to the You-Can't-Use-My-Work database.  Does YouTube continually re-scan the massive library of videos looking for new violations as their database grows.  I'm guessing they must.  Well, I'm going to a talk on MapReduce next week - maybe I'll find some answers there.

Thanks for the inspiration Ben.

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.