I’m at the Google Developer Day 2007, here in Sydney on this chilly winter’s morning.

I’ll update this entry throughout the day. 

Opened by James O’Lauchlan, of The New Inventors on ABC. Being broadcast live on the ‘net. This is the second largest group, with 700 people registered.  

Keynote

• Two new products being launched
• GData feeds into 8 apps – read/write/auth access.
• Heavy focus on Mashups using Google products – Maps, Google Base, Earth, etc
• Announcing Mapplets: Mashups in Google Maps
• Announcing Google Google Gears – allows offline AJAXy sites.

James O’Lauchlan back on …

Creator of Greasemonkey is on… Aaron Boodman

Why Google Gears

• Reliability: 1% of downtime can hurt at the wrong time
• Performance – Local acceleration
• Convenience – not having to find a connection

Gears provides three key bits of functionality:

• Localserver – runs web apps offline
• Database - self explanatory
• Workerpool - runs Javascript “background threads”

10:13AM - Giving code samples

- Demoed how it works - live demo, the presentation itself is the demo - pulled network cable, claps, cheers, etc. Very cool.

Database:

- Parametised SQL, built in SQL Command line

WorkerPool provides, basically background threads in JS - threads execute outside browser (I think), so UI and browser is unaffected.

10:28AM - Google Gears is completely Open Source, very early beta.  Available on IE, Firefox and Opera - on Win, Linux and Mac. http://gears.google.com

10:30AM - James O’Lauchlan back, more jokes.. presenting Dr James McGill.

10:35AM - http://maps.google.com.au/preview - Google Mapplets Preview.

10:40AM - Mapplets are “Gadgets” for Maps - mapplet providers provide gadget, which returns location data and other information for the map points + pop item (eg; hotel availability). Google provides additional map stuff, eg, search nearby.

Can turn on multiple gadgets, so can overlay different data on each other.   Example  given were properties in SanFran, plus crime reports in SanFran.

10:45AM - Mapplets based on iGoogle Gadgets - very small level of modification required to convert.

10:53AM: - Mapplet runs on gmodules.com - not on maps.google.com. (presumably for security reasons)

To enable comms between the map and the mapplet - mapplets run a maps.google.com iframe, then set the hash to your serialised portion. Maps.google.com then deserialises and runs the code.

Key thing however - you can’t run JS Code inside the infoboxes (those popups you get when clicking on a point in gmaps).

11:15AM - Break, cookies, etc

11:50AM - Bo Majewski is on, to talk about Google Maps.

Another real live “the presentation is the demo” thing - no Powerpoint/whatever. This time running in Firefox on a Mac.

12:20PM: Guide tour through Google Maps API - some funny bits. Bo demo’s adding various items to the maps

(Maybe it’s just me, but Bo looks somewhat like Cain, from Command and Conquer)

12:30PM Lunch! Four different “canteens” with different types of food - “American”, Indian, Seafood/Deli, Chinese Stirfry/Noodle Box.  Playing around with some of the mashups that were on show, and a Nintendo Wii (my quick go showed me that I suck at Wii Sports Tennis too).

2:00PM - We’re back,  and learning about Google Gadgets.  It’s been a while since I last looked at the Google Gadgets code - looks interesting.

2:24PM - Now onto Google Gadgets - interesting - I’ve built one, but there’s new functionality which lets you do more.  Also, gadgets can be hosted outside just iGoogle now - other sites, Vista Sidebar, Google Desktop, Mac Widgets, etc.

(Note: These bits were written the next day, due to lack of power on my lappy)

???? - Google Web Toolkit, it was mainly about how you can write Java, which can produce efficient, smart Javascript. Looks like it’s a competitor to ASP.NET AJAX and such.  Allows debugging, etc.

???? - Break - more cookies, fruit, drinks, etc. 

???? -  GData. Kinda dry, but it’s a good way of being able to shift data around in a consistent format. Allows you to pull data from Google Products, fiddle with it, then save changes.   Has built in versioning - if someone tries to modify an older version, it won’t work - needs to happen on the newest version.

???? - KML Overview. - Excellent session by Michael Ashbridge. Google Earth allows a lot more things to be done in the upcoming KML 2.2, adding some web-like functionality (i.e links to places, within Infoboxes and such - lists of locations, etc)

???? - End of the day, Google Dev-Day t-shirts, lots of free imported beers, wines, and stacks of nibblies.

All in all - a very very good day, 99% of it was excellent - the access to Google staffers both in person, and on the IRC chat room was a great idea.

So, there I was, on the phone helping out the friend of some family member set up their new mp3 player to download podcasts from the ABC. 

Me: “Ok, so click on the address bar, and type in www.example.com, and press enter.”
Them: “w w w … ” (etc) 
(silence) 
Me: “So, you’re at the site now? You should see ‘Download Centre’ on your screen.”
Them: “No - I just see my home page”

…Yeah, this was going to take forever.  Rather than keep on with this electronic version of Marco-Polo, I decided to bite the bullet and try out Copilot. 

Copilot is an application that Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek made with four interns, over summer. In essence, it’s a stripped down, very simplified version of VNC, with a ‘man in the middle’ server portion to work around any firewalls or NATs in the way.

It really is simple: enter your card details to buy a 24hr pass, download the “helper” application, and then tell the person the invite code.

The thing that took the longest was explaining how to get to the copilot site, and download the “recieve help” application.

The best thing, is that It just works. Through NAT’s and other strange setups too.
As long as that person can talk out to the wider world, there’s a very good chance Copilot will work too.

Another good thing is that you can make the other person pay the cost (USD$5 for a 24hr pass) - after all, they’re the one getting the tech support.

There were, however some changes I’d like to see:

Give an option for “Low Bandwidth” mode.

I was helping someone with a 256/64kbit ADSL connection. Because of the compression Copilot uses (lossless) - it can take quite a while to get screen updates. 

I understand they’re “keeping it simple, stupid”, but I really would love this mode to be present on the Helper’s application. I’d be prepared to accept lower quality, for faster response time.

Sign the executables

Internet Explorer complains that the app isn’t signed by a trusted party when you try to run it. Therefore you have to click Run/OK about 3 times.

Sure, this isn’t a Copilot generated thing, but it means more prompts for the user. I’m not sure though, whether this would be easy to fix.

All in all - I’m very satisfied with my (admittedly limited) usage of Copilot.

A year or two ago I saw a bit of a kids show - Sesame Street, I think it was. The segment I saw, left me amazed - the animated segment had someone telling kids what email was, and how to send it.   At that point, I realised two things: a) technology (and the internet specificly) really is everywhere, and b) kids are getting a heck of a start to this stuff.

Today I read on Slashdot, that a 13-year old CEO Anshul Samar ’stole the show’ at TiECON 2007, a “big technology conference in Santa Clara, California”.  The article on VentureBeat is quite informative, and worth reading. I do have to wonder if his inclusion of his 11-year-old sister as VP of Sales was his decison, or something to do with the parents insisting he share. 

Check out the game/company the they’re asking for USD$100k (!!) investment for - Elementeo. It appears to be a very well thought out card game, using various chemical elements and compounds for the play.

Good luck to them, I say - I’m just hoping they don’t decide to do away with anyone over 25 after they take over the world.

(For some reason, I’m reminded of the TISM Song - If You’re Not Famous At Fourteen, You’re Finished)

Randall is the guy behind XKCD - “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” as he puts it.   The comic is so chock full of geeky goodness, that it’s just about required reading as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, Randall went to MIT to give a lecture a few days, and, well - it looks like they all had a whole lot of fun. Except for the presence of RC Velociraptors. (At least appropriate countermeasures were available).

Someone also dropped plastic playpen balls from the roof , which had stickers with some certain… numbers on them that the AACS don’t want you to have.

Pictures galore over on the MIT Site.

Speaking of certain magic censored numbers - Thinkgeek have the appropriate t-shirt.

Q: Why did the Irishman wear two condoms?
A: To be sure, to be sure.
(Apologies to any Irish who happen to be reading this.)

I’m currently working on a project where I need to upgrade an application to support some new functionality.   This application was originally written by others,

While I was doing a review of the code, I found a segment like this (names anonymised):

        CountOfIDs = ds.Tables(“SomeTable”).Rows.Count
        Select Case CountOfIDs
            Case 0
                ‘ Do Nothing 
            Case Is >= 1
                If CountOfIDs >= 1 Then
                    ‘ Do Something
                End If
        End Select

Those IDs are slippery little things - better check twice, to be sure.
(Hint for the C#/C++/etc readers: VB doesn’t need a ‘break’ statement to exit a select/switch block)

(Oops, forgot to post this one a while back, it’s been sitting in my Drafts for ages)

Whilst I was in Sydney last weekend a month or so ago, I went to see Sunshine (Official Site, IMDB, Trailer), with Mitch (my uncle). Unfortunately for us, about 20 minutes before the end of the film the projector broke down so I didn’t get to see the end (until the next night, anyway).

Sunshine has got a few fairly well known actors - Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), and Chris Evans (One of the Fantastic Four), plus local Rose Byrne. Who do a good job, despite the flaws written into the script (more on that later).

“The premise of SUNSHINE,” explains producer Andrew Macdonald, “is that in 50 years from now the Sun is dying. It is no longer providing the energy and the light that mankind needs to survive on Earth. The entire global community pools its resources to send a mission into space to deliver a bomb to reignite the part of the Sun that is failing.  Our story concerns the eight astronauts and scientists who lead this mission.  On their journey towards the Sun the crew stumble upon the ship that was sent on the same mission seven years previously, the Icarus I, drifting in space.  From this point on things start to go very wrong and it’s about how the crew react under the enormous pressure of their endeavor to save mankind.”

The movie is pretty good as far as SciFi goes. It took a turn, which I wasn’t expecting (but I won’t give it away) and turns into more of a thriller, set in space. 

When ABC’s At The Movies reviewed the movie, Margaret Pomeranz had a discussion with the director Danny Boyle, who said words to the effect that Sci-Fi Fans are very demanding, and expect a lot from movies & TV Shows.  

So, I thought it was pretty ironic that they screwed up a few of the more major things:

1. They had gravity throughout the ship, perpendicular to that of the direction of the sun (despite their proximity to the Sun)
2. There was no apparent gravity whilst in vacuum, but the moment air is returned (even when there’s no power to the ship) - so did the gravity.
3. Apparently people freeze solid within moments of being placed in vacuum, in the shadow of the sun.

Those three completely broke my suspension of disbelief. I can believe they had gravity generators of some sort - but they wouldn’t operate without power.  There’s another thing about gravity that struck me as kinda strange at the very end of the movie too - but I won’t reveal that, either.

All in all - it’s a decent flick, if you’re either not conscious of the physics involved (even on a basic level), or just don’t care that much about the (lack of) reality behind it.  Go check it out.

Silverlight really needs to get with the pre-loading and obvious controls thing.

Edit: Correction - okay, so like Paul says - it’s not Silverlight itself, it’s the templates that people are using. Still, they’re templates that come with the various Silverlight capable applications (Blend, Expression, and Media Encoder) - so they’re going to be used fairly frequently.

Here’s a Youtube video:

How do you play/pause, or skip to a certain portion? How do you know how much of the video is loaded? 

They’re fairly obvious after about 5 seconds of watching the player run. The little red bar runs to the right as it loads, and the dot follows along as it plays. Drag the dot - you start playing at that point.  

What about a QuickTime video?  (I’m not exactly a fan of QuickTime either)

  

Yep, that’s reasonably obvious too. There’s the play, skip/etc controls - and a similar style of displaying the amount of video loaded.

Now let’s take a look at this Silverlight video:

Well, we’ve got skip back, play and skip forward.. err.. how do I tell how much has preloaded?  Oh - that’s right - with this helpful little glyph:

What does the 36 signify though? It’s not until you actually watch what it does for a while, that you realise it’s not some sort of countdown timer until you can start the movie  - it’s a percentage counter of how much it’s loaded. (Silverlight will start playing the moment it has some video loaded - regardless of whether the connection between you and the server is fast enough to keep it up).

Okay, so, how do you skip forward in the video… err.. .wait… can you? Well, assuming it’s been pre-loaded - yes, there’s a little blue bar with a white gradient — that’s the play position indicator. You can drag the white bit around to set the current play position.

The only issue is - it breaks the common UI visual cues’, so it took me about 30 seconds to find the control (it’s really not obvious). What’s the likelihood that my Grandmother is going to know how to use it? 

One big win for last week, which I havn’t mentioned was that work is picking up the tab for my TechEd 2007 ticket. (Thanks, Malcolm - even though I’m sure you don’t read my blog)

So, I’ve gone ahead and booked flights and accomodation for then.

Looks like I’m going to be busy in the next few months - Google Developer Day in Sydney on May 31st (free), ReMIX in Melbourne on June 25-26th ($140), and finally TechEd on August 7-11.

Due to some configuration changes on my webhost, Wordpress (2.1.x) stopped working correctly on one domain.

Basically, even though Windows Live Writer was submitting to the XML RPC Interface via POST, it was still returning “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.”. Not exactly helpful! 

Windows Live Writer was giving a message like  ”Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid.”, and I could only find this post as a possible solution.

Anyway, the kind folks at Dreamhost fixed it up by adding the following line to the top of the xmlrpc.php file: 

$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents(”php://input”);

What it does, I’m not quite certain (fixing a global variable?) - but it works nicely now.

One of the blogs I host is having some issues, and I’ve done everything I can to fix it. So, the last resort is to contact the folks I get my web hosting from.

On their support form, you need to jump through a few hoops to demonstrate that you’ve done all things you’re supposed to, to try and fix it yourself - it’s not terribly complicated anyway. But when you’re finally submitting a ticket to them, there’s a prioritisation option which always gives me a chuckle:

Just another reason why I like Dreamhost (Over 2 years with them now, yay!) 

Oh, and they’ve done their bit for the environment too - by going carbon neutral.