Seadragon begets Silverlight “Deep Zoom”

Posted on March 12, 2008 by ewand

There’s a headline that might baffle…

Seadragon Inc was a Seattle-based software company who had done a load of work on handling vast quantities of imagery and being able to manipulate the data in real-time, on-screen. Microsoft acquired Seadragon and has been beavering away behind the scenes to finesse the technology further and to integrate it into other means of delivery – if you haven’t seen it, check out the awesome demo done by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at last year’s TED conference:

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

Well, the Seadragon technology gets closer to being available as part of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, now referred to as "Deep Zoom". It was announced recently at Mix08, and I must have missed the significance of this piece but when I saw the first Deep Zoom demo site, I thought "Wow".

One of the demos at the Mix08 conference in Vegas last week, was of a pretty amazing site put up by Hard Rock Cafe, showcasing some of the rock memorabilia they have – mosey over to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com and you’ll get prompted to install Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 if you want.

The Hard Rock site was built from the ground up in one month, and contains many gigabytes of visual imagery. Not that you’d notice when you visit for the first time having installed Silverlight 2.0…

The back end of the Memorabilia site uses Sharepoint for its content management, although the front end is all custom in Silverlight. There was a parallel announcement at MIX about the Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint, more details here.

No more to say about this other than it’s really, really, cool. Combine the early delivery of stuff like the Hard Rock Cafe demo site, with Blaise’s idea in the TED Video about how this technology could be used to present information in a non-linear way – imagine being able to zoom into the full stop at the end of a sentence to get pages and pages more detail about what the sentence contained – and the future way that web pages could be delivered to us might be very different from the linear, monolithic way a lot of information is presented today.

Exciting, isn’t it?

More info on "Deep Zoom:

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/03/09/silverlight-deep-zoom-goodies.aspx

http://labs.live.com/Silverlight+2+Deep+Zoom.aspx

http://joestegman.members.winisp.net/DeepZoom/

http://www.vertigo.com/DeepZoom.aspx

Deep Zoom composer tool preview

Windows Media Center query-based recording

Posted on February 23, 2008 by ewand

Here’s a tip for anyone running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions (the ones with Media Center functionality), if you have a suitable tuner set up and configured. I mentioned this in passing to someone who uses Media Center as their primary TV tuner, and they didn’t know it was possible – largely because it’s a bit obscure and not exactly easy to find.

I don’t use Media Center as my primary TV – we have a Sky HD box to do that, and although I’m generally happy with the functionality and reliability of the Sky box, its UI isn’t anywhere near as flexible as MC’s. The Guide is one example of that – Sky lets you browse the guide but the options to search it are a bit thin, so it’s OK if you know there’s something you want to record. MC allows you to query the schedules (including all the obscure channels you might never watch) to find specific named programs, or even ones where the metadata matches your search.

My PC in the study has a cheap Hauppauge USB Freeview tuner installed, and an XBox 360 in the living room allows us to watch stuff that gets recorded on the PC.

If you go to Recorded TV on the main MC menu, and select to Add a Recording, you get:

… meaning, you can record something based on searching the Guide. If you choose the "Create a custom recording" feature, however, you can have MC automatically record a programme that isn’t scheduled yet, on the off-chance that it will be shown again at some point. Useful for catching up with old films that appear every few months.

In this example, maybe I want to record Ghostbusters. Select Keyword from the custom list:

Now, selecting any of the first 4 options will search against the current guide, and if there’s nothing scheduled, you won’t be able to select it. If you pick Generic keyword, however, and you get a slightly different UI:

Media Center will allow you to save your query, and will record anything that shows up in the guide at some future date, which features the word you just entered..

If you want to check what custom recordings you have scheduled, start again from "Recorded TV", and select "View scheduled" – you’ll see a list of anything that’s set to record, but only if it exists already in the guide.

To see what you have set to record on schedule, choose the "Series" option on the left, and anything that shows up as "ANY CH" means it will record whenever the guide can match your query.

As I said, not exactly obvious… but very cool!

The Firmware of Everyday Things

Posted on January 15, 2008 by ewand

(with apologies to Donald Norman, for paraphrasing his excellent book title)

As an IT person, I’m pretty used to the idea that I need to update software now and again. Sometimes, it’s to make it more secure (closing down vulnerabilities that afflict any software exposed to the outside world), fixing bugs (which affect all software, period) or adding new features and functionality (which maybe the designers of the software didn’t think of before, or which they just didn’t have time to implement). Maybe the update is the form of a patch, maybe it’s a whole new version that I will choose to buy.

As the reach of software gets more and more pervasive, it’s interesting to note the difference between what people will do in an IT world, and what they expect from the rest of the world around them.

Now, I spent a good chunk of the last weekend updating the firmware in my car, specifically the software which controls the entertainment systems, the Sat-Nav etc – in my case, it’s Audi’s excellent MMI system, but many other manufacturers are moving to some kind of multi-modal, software-based control mechanism for the myriad systems in the car.

BMW “popularised” such a system with it’s iDrive control technology, which seemingly took several revisions to be usable by any car reviewer, even though it made perfect sense to me.

Getting software upgrades for these things is far from easy: arguably, nor should it be. What business do ordinary consumers have in getting hold of low-cost or free updates, which they apply themselves, to make their ownership experience better?

As it happens, I heard about a series of updates which would make the navigation system built in to my car quite a bit better – and on asking, my dealer was more than happy to supply the software update for me and install it, for only £100+VAT to cover the labour involved.

I managed to find far more than I ever dreamt I needed to know, through various online forums – http://www.navplus.us/ particularly – that opened up a whole series of secret key-press combinations to bring up hidden menus, the part numbers of the CDs I’d need to order from the dealer (at about £1.50 each), and the procedures to upgrade the whole thing myself.

Here’s an example of just one such hidden menu…

So many other devices which previously would have been considered an appliance, now have the capability to be upgraded if only the suppliers embrace the idea and maybe even make it easy. Examples abound – the Philips Pronto universal remote control has spawned a huge user community to modifying the way it works, precisely because Philips made the software available to do so easily, and regularly updates the device’s capability based on user feedback.

I upgrade my mobile phone with beta software regularly, my Zune music player got a whole new look and feel courtesy of some free software and firmware upgrades. There are secret menus on my TV that show the software version, the satellite receiver downloads firmware updates automatically (even though sometimes it manages to crash when it tries to install them). Even the DVD drive that I fitted to my home PC has a little bit of software that checks online for updates to its firmware, and the PC into which I fitted it was having all sorts of trouble with its memory until I applied a BIOS update from the manufacturer.

Much of this stuff is very much beyond the ken of the man on the Clapham Omnibus, but as IT hardware awareness spreads out to the general public in time, maybe it’s not going to be too far in the future when people routinely expect improvements to come to any piece of electronic equipment through periodic updates.

Of course, it can all go horribly wrong – twice on Saturday, I got myself into a situation with the car where none of the MMI system worked, meaning I had no radio, no navigation, no GUI to any of the other systems like parking sensors or suspension settings etc… and it took a good deal of fuse-pulling and rebooting to get it all working again.

Maybe it’s better to just rely on someone to do it all for you …

Bird’s Eye view on Live maps – how cool is that?

Posted on January 6, 2008 by ewand

The Windows Live search team did a pretty major update (a few months ago) to a number of elements of the search engine at live.com, but one of the nicest is the maps integration. Type in a postcode, a place or business name and click on Maps and you’ll hopefully go straight there…

As the Virtual Earth technology behind the Live Maps site improves, and as the quality of the data behind it gets better too, I’ve noticed quite a few sites shift to using it, sometime away from other mapping services like Google Maps or Multimap (which Microsoft recently acquired, so that may have something to do with it).

Whilst shooting the breeze on the web the other day, I thought I’d check out Rightmove to nose through a list of property that’s for sale near my home (having found Rightmove and PropertyFinder, Google Earth and Virtual Earth so valuable when I was house-hunting a couple of years ago). Rightmove now has a service called "AboutMyPlace" which is shown in response to searches of an area, but also pinpointing the exact location of specific property that’s for sale.

Anyway, I found a house not far from mine which was for sale; on the AboutMyPlace site, I was quite impressed to see their use of Virtual Earth, then saw that Bird’s Eye view was available…

View from AboutMyPlace, showing the Virtual Earth UI

I hadn’t realised that Bird’s Eye view had been improved so much, or that its reach had been so expanded – previously, it was really just major cities and the likes which got it, but during last summer, it’s clear that planes have been criss-crossing the UK and taking some really good quality pictures from multiple angles (so you can rotate the view)…

Now I can see my own house (and all of the neighbours’ too!) in a while new way – it’s amazing, and can drain hours out of your day if you’re not careful.

Here’s Microsoft’s TVP just as one example (try it for yourself by searching for RG6 1WG and clicking on Bird’s Eye view)

Now isn’t that good?

I need some Flo Control – or Arnie Control, more like

Posted on January 2, 2008 by ewand

Regulars may remember the trouble my PC was having with Arnie the cat… well I could use some more technology in and around the house to solve another little problem.

Arnie & his sister have now got quite big – they’re just over a year old, so fully-functional adult cats (well, not entirely fully functional, if you know what I mean), with a keen sense of how to catch, kill and sometimes eat quite a bit of the local rodent population (which given that we live in the country, is quite high).

Now it’s not much fun catching live mice that have been hauled in through the cat flap, it’s not a great deal better picking up the (sometimes partially consumed) cadavers of others, and I’m sure it’s not exactly a great time for the poor little meeces either.

Today, we spent some time dragging the fridge out to locate where the stink was coming from – and eventually located a long-dead mouse underneath. Less than an hour later, whilst we were sitting in the kitchen having lunch, Arnie came steaming through the flap with his latest victim in his gob – prompting stern and immediate attention, in slamming doors, shooing him back outside again etc.

So, a solution must be found.

A few years ago, I came across an intriguing project called Flo Control, where someone had rigged up a PC to the cat flap and performed facial recognition on the cat that was trying to come into the house – in this case, a cat called Flo. If Flo was alone, the flap would open, but if she was carrying anything in her mouth, it would stay resolutely shut.

It seems the guys behind Flo Control think that processor technology has come on so much in recent times, that it will be possible to release a box that fits to the door, without needing the PC attached.

The current solution looks pretty cumbersome – not just with the PC attached, but the box on the other side of the door. It essentially takes a snapshot of the silhouette of whatever sticks it head towards the flap, and then uses shape recognition technology to decide whether to open the door or not…


All clear, Flo	Not so fast, buster…

I Want one of those

This kind of idea could even be a winner for the likes of Dragons’ Den – I’d be quite happy (as a consumer) to pay ~£100 for something like this, and since there are reckoned to be more than 6 million cat owning households in the UK, there’s clearly an opportunity in this country alone. Magnetic flaps which only allow a cat wearing a specific collar to come in & out cost about £40, so it’s not outrageous to think people would spend a good bit more.

A basic device would have a mini-USB port that could take a laptop controlling it (to check on settings etc), would have a rechargeable battery and a simple training mechanism where the cat is plonked on the other side, and (like those fingerprint recognition devices) a few attempts of cat coming in are used to let the device’s cheapo camera figure out what “normal” looks like.

Deluxe editions might be inobtrusively mains-powered, offering the delight of being able WiFi attached, so you could help train it, provide a log of when the cat came in & out (and even which cat it was, if you have a collection) etc etc. Even get alerted on your PC if the cat’s trying to come in but the flap’s not sure if he is solo or accompanied…

Added finesse could even be automatic timing control – eg. cats can’t leave the flap after 9pm but if they’re still outside, then can come in until 11pm after which it closes for the night…

Is this a great example of a techy toy, or something that only a techie could dream up but which could find a following in the general populace? Or another “seems like a good idea at the time” gadget that would gather dust in one of those catalogues full of things you didn’t know you needed, that fall out of the Sunday papers..?

Happy New Year!

The downside of online shopping

Posted on December 21, 2007 by ewand

I bought myself an early Christmas present a few weeks ago. One Saturday morning, sitting at the home PC whilst noodling about on the web, I decided it was time to replace the old warhorse and get something a bit more modern.

So I surfed off to my favourite PC web emporium and specced up a nice new Shuttle box with a quad-core low voltage CPU, 2 GB RAM, 1Tb of disk and a half decent video card. A very good deal at less than £750 delivered, I thought. All from a trusted, well-used website that I’ve spent a small fortune with before.

Problem #1 came when the expected ship-date sailed into the past, and as time got nearer Christmas, I feared for getting hold of this new and shiny toy in time to give me an excuse to excuse myself from the washing-up on the big day.

Repeated attempts to contact the web-vendor failed – “you need to call the web-orders guy on this different number”, said the company’s ‘customer services’ people – and the web guy was either letting his phone ring out (and no voicemail) or was engaged. For two whole days.

Eventually (a week later than scheduled), the goods were showing as “shipped” on ‘reputed’ web company’s site.

This after the goods were showing as in stock on the day I ordered, that is, the day they charged my credit card. Oh, and to add insult to injury, they’d dropped the prices of some of the items the day before they shipped my order… which of course, I’d paid at the higher price.

Problem #2 came when the courier was showing the following day as being “with driver” – and yet nothing happened.

And the following day, it was still the same state.

And the next.

And when I left to take the 1.5 hour round-trip drive to their depot to find out what was going on… guess what… it was really out with the driver this time, and would be delivered before 5:30. REALLY? Yes, said the man. DEFINITELY? Of course.

At 5:20 and with no parcel in possession, I set off to the depot again. Arriving at (cough) 5:55, the nice man took the number of the consignment, checked where it was, and a mere 15 minutes later arrived with the parcel in his hand.

“Why was it not delivered today, as you promised?”, I asked.

“Oh, there’s a real backlog on that route and they didn’t get to deliver it today”, says he.

“And what would you do with that parcel now, had it not been delivered?”

Try again tomorrow. A Saturday. When there’s nobody in the office. And won’t be until the New Year, now. That is, at least a week later than it should have been delivered, according to plan.

And the delivery company says we have two days to pick the parcel up from them if they try to deliver it and nobody’s there, after which they return to sender (see Problem #1).

It’s all made MUCH worse by the fact that this particular courier firm (who I did not choose; the vendor did, because it suited them and was presumably cheaper) is a franchise operation so there’s no single “throat to choke” – they just put you through to the handling depot if there’s any problem. If the depot is incompetent and/or swamped there’s nothing you can do.

In the hour or so that I spent (in total) standing in the depot, the phone was ringing continuously and nobody was answering. There were people sitting at their desks doing “work”, and yellow-jacketed delivery guys hanging about, but nobody manning the phones.

So: I spent 2.5hrs on hold to these people; maybe 1 hour hanging about waiting to be dealt with at the actual depot; 2.5 hours or so in total driving down and back to chase them up because they don’t answer the phone, don’t respond to faxes* and don’t have an email address…

I sometimes wonder: is e-commerce really worth the hassle, compared to going down to the local PC shop who can give you advice, sell you what they have in stock and let you take it away with you..?

Would I willingly use this same company again?

Damn. I’ve just ordered a couple of new bits for the new PC I have, from the same people – it’s easy, they’re cheap, and they promise to deliver by Christmas Eve.

Bets, anyone?

* This was a story from another guy in the queue. He worked for a different delivery company, yet he was picking something up from this one.

He said, his company get fined (internally) if they don’t answer the phone after a few rings. He spent 1.5 hours on hold to this company from 4:30pm to 6:00pm the night before. At 6:00pm the message changed from (and I kid you not) “There are MANY people ahead of your in the queue” to “The offices are now closed… try again tomorrow”).

He sent them a fax, but got no reply.

Merry Christmas, by the way.

Bah. Humbug.

🙂

Zune software and firmware upgrade now live

Posted on November 13, 2007 by ewand

Just noticed that www.zune.net has the latest Zune software for the PC and corresponding device firmware, available for download. Today marks the on-sale date of the new Zune devices too. I’ll be in NYC early next month… and I’m confident (at the moment at least) that I’ll resist the urge to upgrade the hardware…

Given that other makes of music players (like Creative’s Zen range) and even other consumer devices (Philips’ Pronto remote controls are a great example), have had software updates provided long after the devices were sold, this is hardly anything new.

Zune Software

It does keep users happy though – I’m pleased now that my 9-month old Zune has a fresh lease of life. Happier, I’m sure, than the early adopters of a certain touch screen phone (or a certain Blu-ray games console) were when the price dropped not long after they’d shelled out for it…

Windows Home Server – would you have it in your home?

Posted on October 15, 2007 by ewand

I just read an interesting article from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet about Windows Home Server, speculating whether there really was a market for such a device, and who would buy it.

Adrian’s point – and it is a valid one, if you know anything about what the “typical” home user might do and buy – is that your average Joe or Joanna isn’t going to march out and splash a few hundred quid on a box to back up all their home PCs, even if they’ve lost precious data before.

In an enterprise IT environment, disaster recovery has often been treated as a second-class citizen, until a disaster actually happens – after which point, it’s properly factored into things. I vividly recall making the case for DLT drives over DAT over 10 years ago, yet on cost grounds alone it looked like DAT could do the biz… until the crunch came, a disaster happened, it looked like the DR plan wasn’t quite up to scratch, and after that it was easy to get money to do DR properly.

Sad to say it, but 9/11 and the London 7/7 bombings in 2005 probably helped a lot of organisations realise that backup (and more importantly, recovery) was actually worth spending a bit of time & effort on. You only realise how important it is to have a contingency plan, when you’re faced with the real need to have – or to show you have – one.

As an aside, if you haven’t seen it yet, Microsoft announced Data Protection Manager 2007 recently, as a means to snapshot and backup various systems to low-cost disk backup. DPM could allow you to backup not just file systems, but Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server, using VSS snapshot technology. We’re now using it internally to back Exchange up to low-cost SAS drives, as well as other things.

I have a buddy who’s known as “Foggy” (from “Foghorn Leghorn”), so called because he had a loud voice on the phone when he first joined Microsoft in a Product Support Services role. If you’re interested in DPM2007, just let me know and I’ll put you in touch with him – he’s “Mr DPM” in the UK and is keen to tell everyone just how good it is.

ANYWAY.

Back to Home Server. I’ve been beta-testing the “Q”/”Quattro” product for a while, and I think the finished Home Server looks really good. Have I got one at home? Yes. But then, I only have one other PC at home (besides the corporate laptops that occupy the place, and a few old machines that spend most of their time powered off) so I’m not sure I’d shell out for a Home Server (when they’re comercially available) just to protect that one box, and serve it content.

What I’d wish for Home Server

I’d love it if Windows Home Server could be a Media Center – ie I could whack a couple of TV Tuners in the WHS box, and it would stream that content to other PCs or Media Center Extenders around the house. Think of it like a Windows Media Center Server, if you like. I might even think about sticking the box in the loft, next to the Coax-amplifier which distributes TV signals around the house – especially if Bluetooth or WiFi remotes from around the house could control the Server, making the MCE experience available on remote PCs, Extenders and directly on TVs themselves.

I’d also really like some OEM to bring out a device which was hardened and much more appliance-like, maybe with some other features – I’m thinking like a box which had a Powerline-ethernet style built-in power supply (and corresponding remote adapter(s)) which would mean I could stick the box anywhere there was power and not worry about signal or CAT-5 cabling back to the wired/wireless network that all the PCs are on. I was thinking it would be quite cool to have a Windows Home Server in the garage. My garage is separate from the house (by about 6 ft) so if the house burned down, there is a chance the garage wouldn’t (though there’s probably enough combustible material in the garage to make it happen the other way around).

I thought if I could put a WHS in the garage, it would mean I wouldn’t need to cool the box much (even in the summer, the garage is going to be cooler than many places, and in the winter, it’s positively COLD) and apart from the odd spider invading the box, it’d probably be pretty hazard-free.

So in an ideal world, a Home Server would be a solid-state box with no vents or fans, which can draw network access through its power supply. There might be one company – Tranquil PC – who’ll be able to offer this nirvana sooner than most. Tranquil PC have some very interesting fanless technology, but for a regular PC there’s a payoff in terms of performance (ie to run their box cool enough so it doesn’t need a fan, it’s not exactly cutting edge) and price (there’s a premium for the design and low-volume nature). For a home server, you’re not bothered about quad core processors with 8Gb of RAM, so Tranquil’s offerings could well be in the sweet spot. Time will tell if the price point people are willing to pay will match these expectations.

Coming back to the ZDNet article – Adrian reckons that the average home user will spend $30 on backup. I know I’ve had hard disk failures but probably only back up to the USB disk I already have, every couple of months. Who’s going to buy Home Server this year, in time for Christmas? Tech-savvy folk who have multiple PCs at home, I’d think – maybe families where each of the kids have their own PC, but not exactly the less tech-literate types.

Maybe the time for Home Server is when it can not only stream data to remote devices, back them up and make sure they’re appropriately patched – but when users in the home can have the Home Server record stuff from the TV and distribute it directly to their device for later viewing.

Maybe that’s v2 functionality, who knows?

Dell’s “anti-crapware” initiative doesn’t go far enough

Posted on October 10, 2007 by ewand

My wife’s small business has recently had a requirement to upgrade a couple of PCs, after 5 or 6 years. Since I am ultimately responsible for all their IT (and I am not proud of what they have – I cut all sorts of corners to make my life easy, but they don’t know how lean it is), I’ve always bought Dell kit for them since it’s been good quality, relatively cheap, it’s quick and easy.

Looking around on their site, I figured the new Dell Vostro desktop range might be worth a look – and since the machines were shipped with “Just the Software you need – no Trialware installed” then it would save me time in rebuilding the systems when they arrived (as I’d generally do).

There’s a great discussion over on Steve Clayton’s blog, about tweaking Vista, and on Computerworld on how to take the garbage off your new system. I’d hoped to avoid any of this by just going with a well-tested, modern, high-volume desktop, so that everything just works with software that’s been available for the best part of a year, on Vista Business (no downgrade to Windows XP for us – even if Dell is now offering it as a “feature”).

OOBE

The Out-Of-Box-Experience was typical of a decent PC – lots of boxes, lots of packaging, printed manuals in about a dozen languages (which all go straight in the bin). It’s pretty straightforward plugging everything together now, and in no time we’re up and running.

I bet if this was a new Mac, it would have a lot less spurious cables and bits of paper.

No Trial-ware but plenty of crap-ware

ZDnet has talked about the problems of “crapware” (including relative to Dell) cluttering up new PCs, slowing things down, frustrating end users and annoying power users by giving them hours of work to clean things up.

On starting up the PC, we had Google Desktop indexing everrything, even though Vista was doing that already. We had a Dell/Google Browser Helper Object just waiting to redirect every bad URL or search, to a site that showed Dell adverts (called Dell’s Browser Address Redirector). Welcome to the world of “choice” – I’m almost surprised they didn’t install Firefox, Opera and Safari, just in case the end user felt like installing a different browser without bothering to download it. Pity the users who don’t want all this guff and have to take it off.

There are 3 separate ISP sign-up applications which are irrelevant to this small business, as well as a bunch of other bits & pieces which come from neither Dell nor Microsoft. Each of them has a program group in the start menu, and an entry in Control Panel’s Remove Programs section.

There are obviously some useful 3rd party addons (though I was going to rip out the – trial version – McAfee anti-virus, spyware and firewall, and replace with OneCare), such as DVD decoder, or CD burner. But even they don’t always work smoothly – there’s some Roxio software which as well as writing CD/DVDs, also seems to monitor folders on disk for some sharing function.

These machines are sold for small business use – why would I want to have 3rd party software cluttering up the system tray and occupying memory & CPU, monitoring folders for sharing media, on the LAN? In looking to switch off the monitoring, I right-clicked on the system tray icon and (not seeing any other option), choose an option to do with Managing the folder sharing, on the basis that it might give me an option of switching it off.

Boom. Visual C++ 6.0 runtime error. Every time. On both machines.

I don’t want to beat up on Dell specifically, but this is an example of a poor customer experience that is 100% down to the PC OEM to fix. Don’t install all this software on a PC unless it’s essential – or at least make it easy for users to revert to some kind of vanilla OS.

How many customers would assume this C++ runtime error was a Windows problem? Or would blame a slow machine on spurious Vista performance issues, when it’s every bit as likely to be caused by unnecessary and unwanted software running on the background, because the ISV has paid the OEM to include it on new machine builds..?

Maybe Microsoft should get into building PC hardware, and at least will have soup-to-nuts control over the hardware and software experience.

The Joy of Mapping

Posted on August 29, 2007 by ewand

We all tend to take maps for granted. In the 17th/18th centuries and even beyond, there were decent sized areas of the world which were just being explored and mapped for the first time. Now, the ease of access to cartographical data means we don’t much give them a second thought.

I bought a couple of Ordnance Survey Explorer maps the other day, and was quite surprised at how expensive they are – £7.99 each – and started wondering if they were worth the money, when I could just go ahead and get data online for free. There’s something unique about poring over a real map, though: not necessarily looking for anything, just finding out what’s there. A neighbour came round at one point when I was looking through my new maps, and said that (like I did), he used to sit in the car as a passenger and study the maps around the places they were driving through. He even used to take the Atlas of the World to bed and just look at it, which I figured was a bit weird and best not discussed any further.

Thinking about how accessible mapping information has become brings a few interesting points up, though: Ordnance Survey maps are actually pretty good value given that they must cost a fair bit to print and distribute, and if you’re out on a walk or cycle in the middle of the country, knowing that you could get a decent aerial view from Google Earth or Windows Live Local might not be of any use, whereas a good map in your pocket makes all the difference.

Meanwhile, I’ve become a big fan of Windows Live Mobile, especially after bonding my CoPilot bluetooth GPS receiver with the Smartphone (tip: it’s a BTGPS3 unit, and the passkey is unfathomly set to 0183 by default).

I’ve also used CoPilot for Smartphone as an in-car GPS/navigation aid, and it works really well (even if you don’t have a place to mount the phone properly, it can bark instructions from the passenger seat, just like a real navigator or navigatrix would). There are also lots of other fun apps (like Jason’s favourite, SportsDo) which can use GPS to record where your device has been – for later analysis on your PC. Or here, a developer at MS has built a real-time GPS locator which sends his coordinates back to a web service on his PC, so his family can see where he is all the time. Spooky, maybe…

Autoroute vs online maps

I remember when the application Autoroute first came out, in the early 1990s: it was an old DOS application which shipped on floppy disks, and cost hundreds of pounds at the time. The target audience was fleet delivery managers and the likes, who would generate route plans for the drivers rather than have the trucks wandering their own route and taking longer/using more fuel than might be optimal. So even though Autoroute cost a lot of money, it could save a lot of money and was considered funds well spent.

Microsoft bought the company who made Autoroute, and released the by-now-Windows-application for a much more reasonable price. Autroute 2007 retails today for about £50, and with a USB GPS receiver, £85.

It’s quite interesting now that Autoroute 2007 has direct integration with Windows Live Local – so you can find somewhere on Autoroute, then search the web for information about local businesses, or view the aerial/hybrid views from that point. It’s obvious to think that future evolutions of Windows Live Local might offer more of the route planning stuff that Autoroute is so good at, though UI-wise it could be more of a challenge…

Currently, Windows Live Local doesn’t offer the ability to do more than a simple “drive from here/to here” route – there’s no waypoints, no “avoid this area” type functionality. Google Maps does offer some of these things but it’s not quite as slick as Autoroute for now.

Rather than loading up Autoroute, though, it’s often quicker to go straight to the likes of Windows Live Local and zoom to a place you’re looking at (maybe you’re thinking of buying a house, for example – the single most useful aspect of this technology if my experience of house hunting last year is at all typical), so the usage patterns of all these types of applications is changing as the technology gets better.

One cool and current use of mapping technology is Bikely.com, which uses Google Maps to do routes that a user can draw or import from GPS devices, then share with others. Still has a long way to go functionality-wise when it comes to smart route planning, but it’s easy to use to do the basics, and is a good portent of things to come.