Geek In Disguise

Another variant of the Did You Know video.

hat tip to Mel

Yep, I bit the bullet and laid down my own cash on a laptop for the first time in…well, a long time. My Vaio TZ was starting to show the signs of two years  + hard labour. Though 2 years isn’t much for a laptop, that little fella has travelled the world with me and had 2 new keyboard and screens due to the pounding it takes. I’ve promised my Vaio X it’ll get better treatment.

I deliberated for about a week and finally placed my order via Sony Online for this new, diminutive, carbon chassis Vaio X. I went for the carbon lid (of course) and bumped up to 128GB SSD after concluding an extra £300 to take it to 256GB SSD just wasn’t warranted.  I also went for the 2Ghz Atom processor and WWAN.

The order went in and around 10 days later the unit arrived – whilst I was away at the PDC in LA so I was itching to get back and crack it open. A friend ordered at the same time and had been telling me over IM how amazing it was.

I opened the box and the first time you hold this thing you think something is missing – it’s astonishingly light. At just over 700 grams and 13.9mm in depth it a marvel of miniature engineering.

After two weeks of use, what do I think?

1. The design is remarkable – everyone who sees it wants to pick up up and then usually says “holy crap” once they have
2. The keyboard takes some getting used to – due to the thinness of the chassis there isn’t much key travel but personally I like it
3. The keys on the keyboard feel quite metallic – which I also like
4. The processor could be quicker for sure and with Aero glass on it shows some flickering occasionally in parts of the UI
5. The design is amazing – did I mention that?
6. The carbon finish is definitely worth the extra £50 and beats the champagne finish for me
7. The Ethernet connection point looks like it would never take a cable but do so ingeniously
8. Two USB ports. yay
9. The trackpad is a little bit to small given the size they had to play with
10. The screen is the usual brilliant Sony quality – it makes my Lenovo T61p screen look positively dark
11. VGA output only is a bit disappointing – I would have hoped for DVI, HDMI or display port perhaps
12. The in built 3G slot is nicely hidden under the battery – almost too well hidden
13. The software build still came with too much crapware – I spent 20 mins uninstalling and clearing up my startup items
14. The machine operates virtually silently – there is an occasional whir of a fan but hardly noticable
15. I wish it had stolen one thing from the Mac – backlit keyboard. do they have a patent on that perhaps?

Overall it’s stunning. Sure it’s relatively expensive for a 2Ghz Atom processor but the construction, design, screen and overall finish mean I am very very happy with it. If someone offered a free return and my money back now the 2 week honeymoon period is over, would I take it? Not a chance. This thing is here to stay.

Oh and Matt Mullenweg is equally happy with his calling it the “sexiest and most elegant laptop I’ve held or seen”

Two of my favourites from Hugh of late. He’s still out there…doing his thang but sadly sounds like he will not be at Le Web this year. Bummer :(

A few of my favourites from this brilliant site.

A brilliant slideshow from Wired - Cover versions: albums re-imagined as Penguin Classics. This is my favourite – Unknown Pleasure from Joy Division. Though Technique from New Order and The White Room from KLF run a close second.

I think it’s great to see such full fledged solutions already out there on Azure. It sounds like Acumatica has a solid solution for ERP and CRM that is both on premise and in the cloud – with their cloud part being Azure based. Nice to see that like some other app stores, we’re not restricting what can be built and sold on our platform even if it smells like something we do :)

“Windows Azure reduces the time it takes ISVs such as Acumatica to profitably deploy a SaaS solution,” said Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft Corp. “In less than five weeks, Acumatica’s team migrated a highly advanced accounting and ERP application to Windows Azure so customers with complex requirements are able to get their accounting services on demand.”

I hadn’t actually realised how much stuff was already running on Azure from companies like these

via http://www.ngonlinenews.com – kind of annoying (for me) that they say “indexed by Google” and Bing is almost an afterthought. We got there before Google :)

Okay, my final Bing post for tonight. The best feature (for me) until last….Bing Map Apps. Go to www.bing.com/maps/explore and click on the See Maps icon in the bottom left and you will see this

now when you’re on a map you can light it up with all kinds of stuff – my favourite of course being Twitter. We’ve seen geotagged Twitter maps before of course but I love the integration right in to Bing maps. Here’s how it looks

For a little more fun, go to Silicon Valley or Mountain View…tonnes of geotagged tweets to browse around in a stalker like manner.

A busy day for Bing. Bing for mobile got released…for Windows phone, Blackberry & Sidekick. I know..something is missing there…but not for me :)

This morning (PST time), Satya Nadella and team announced a whole load of new Bing maps capability. I’ve been fortunate enough to have played with some of this for a while and the integration of Photosynth is very nice – Streetside will get a lot of attention I’m sure and Silverlight brings amazing performance to the experience. It really is very impressive. Check it out at http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ or the video from Laura and Chris below for a walk thru of the features.

At the PDC Matt Mullenweg of Automattic talked about the open source support on Windows Azure – you can now run Wordpress on Azure with MySQL, Apache and PHP. In fact he did a great follow up post on this talking about what was announced.

Hot on the heels of that is a post from my old pal Simon Davies, an architect in our developer team here in the UK about Ruby On Rails running on Windows Azure. He has it up and running.

Is Azure the most open web development platform out there? it’s starting to look that way….

and then if you’re a startup who is looking to build you can get access to all of the tools, technologies and services (including Azure) for free through our BizSpark program. That’s precisely with Loic and his team from Seesmic did!

That’s how many years I have been at Microsoft as of today. Wow, it flew by…I earned some grey hairs along the way but wouldn’t change a thing. Here’s 12 random facts to mark the occasion

1. My first Microsoft laptop had 16mb of RAM and a floppy drive…and it still boots. But it weighs ~7lbs (3.1kg)
2. My current laptop has 2GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD drive and weighs 650g
3. I’ve owned at least 12 different Microsoft keyboards. Way more mice but the Starck remains my favourite.
4. The most frequent question I get when I say I work at Microsoft is have I met Bill Gates. Yep met him twice – nice bloke :)
5. I worked on SharePoint back when it was Tahoe…nice to be at the start of a $1bn business
6. I worked on Windows phone back when it was Stinger and had one of these
7. I’ve taken over 200 flights and never missed a single one. Yet!
8. I’ve played basketball against Steve Ballmer. He’s big. And tough.
9. My scariest meeting was with Nokia…long story but it was a weird house in Espoo.
10. I once started a TV channel at Microsoft. A tonne of fun but now dead :(
11. I admit it, I owned a Microsoft Barney. I consider it part of my pension now.
12. I’ve sent well over 50k emails since I started here, written over 3000 blog entries and over 5000 tweets . Not sure that’s a good thing.

Will I be here in another 12 years? Wouldn’t surprise me at all.

You’re familiar with GUI even if you don’t know it – it’s the type of user interface you use every day on your current class of PC (or Mac) – a Graphical User Interface. Over the last year or so, Microsoft and others have begun referring to NUI or Natural User Interface. This is where computers start to become, well, more natural with speech and visual gestures being the modes of interaction rather than mouse and keyboard. Todd Bishop has a post about this topic today and noted that Bill Gates recently talked of NUI as “the thing that people underestimate right now."

Wikipedia defines NUI as “common parlance used by designers and developers of computer interfaces to refer to a user interface that is effectively invisible, or becomes invisible with successive learned interactions, to its users”. In that Wikipedia entry, Bill Buxton of Microsoft is mentioned and you’ll see him in the video above as he’s been at work on this stuff as far back as 1984. Project Natal and Surface from Microsoft are also mentioned in that entry alongside the amazing work of Jeff Han on multi-touch which he showed at TED in 2006. On a side note, it wasn’t a surprise to me to see that poleydee was an early contributor to this Wikipedia entry as I know he’s a big fan of Bill’s work.

There is a lot of work going on at Microsoft around NUI and this video brings much of it together – from Windows 7 touch, Surface, Natal and the Office Envisioning videos. Until now, much of this seemed a bit far off – in the realm of Minority Report it seemed very “Hollywood”. However, inexpensive display technology is enabling any surface to become an interactive screen. Cameras and microphones can now be embedded in almost anything and the Wii and iPhone have shown that computers can understand simple gestures – with Natal that goes further with more advanced gestures and speech recognition. There is much talk of augmented reality at the moment and that adds another layer of exciting potential.

Component prices are falling fast so we’ll start to see hardware catch up with the software work that has gone on to date. Microsoft Research, it we get things right has a big part to play here as for years we’ve invested in computer vision, machine learning, user interfaces and language processing – across the many labs we have but much of that here in the UK in our Cambridge lab which I’m personally pleased about. It’s been a long journey as this work goes back as early as 1991….finally we’re starting to see it bear fruit.

We’re taking a platform approach to this and looking to others to innovate on top. The PDC began some of our quest to unleash  that innovation to some extent - the laptop giveaway encouraged these new types of NUI apps with a machine designed specifically to highlight the sensors in the unit and build completely new applications based on touch and more. The second video below shows you some of the apps that were in the laptop from the PDC – but these are just the tip of the iceberg – I can’t wait to see what developers do with all of this.

A very cool little project from the folks at LiveSide.net has turned the Microsoft executive roster in a a Pivot project. If you have Pivot installed, check it out by opening jkipk.com from within Pivot. If you don’t have Pivot, go grab it and explore a completely new way to navigate data. You’ll need an install code and Liveside has 50 of them on offer in their post.