Karl Kopp

Microsoft has released some great videos about their new iteractive interface for the Xbox 360 called Project Natal. This will open up some super exciting opportunities and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it!

PS - rebuilt my MacBook Pro with Windows 7 RC so been too busy of late to blog. But now I'm up and running, expect more!

Lots of people are Twittering these days, and I just don't know why? What value to your day does it add? How does it better help you achieve your daily tasks? I know what its about, but I don't see the value!

Am I alone? Do you see the value?

Let me know.

On a side note, I find some of the technology stories about Twitter interesting - billions of small messages, being delivered real time, and tracked by millions of users - interesting stuff!

Todays interesting news.

• Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, actually recommends the use of the mega drop-down navigation. After he suggested regular drop-downs are rife with usability issues, it's an interesting result.
• Tim Sneath from Microsoft has a really interesting post on how they created the CoreCLR to fit the .NET CLR into Silverlight, and made it all fit in around 2mb.
• And lastly, a few Next Digital launches from the last week in no particular order: Logicane, McCabe Terrill Lawyers, Hamilton Harbour from Devine, and QInvest.
• Never heard of Joe Hewitt before, but just read he has released a free, open source iPhone library called Three20, after the 320 pixel wide screen of the iPhone. Definitely worth taking a peak if you are building iPhone apps. Got my Mac Mini dusted off and running today because I want to take a look around the new iPhone 3.0 SDK. Hopefully will post some of the adventures I have ;)

Some kewl links from around the web today:

• Microsoft release a new open-source security tool called !exploitable Crash Analyser that helps developers analyse software crashes to see if the problem could lead to a security vulnerability. Looks interesting. Details are available on the Microsoft site, and you can download it from Codeplex.
• Ars Technica has an interesting article on how the performance gains in Windows 7 I've mentioned previously can be attributed to the advent of the Netbook. Interesting. And on ZDNet, they have tested the latest Windows 7 build (7057) and found it to be the fastest Windows OS yet.
• There is an interesting article on Tech Crunch that questions how good HitWise data really is, and a subscription isn't cheap.
• I love Chrome, and actually switched from Firefox mainly for the large improvements in speed. And it seems I'm not alone, some signalling this is the end for Firefox.
• Scott Hanselman has writing a great post on creating mobile ASP.NET MVC apps (well ASP.NET apps in general) and the new mobile.browser file available from Codeplex.
• Maybe there is a use for Twitter after all - How to remotely Admin Servers via Twitter!
• And lastly, was TRYING to read The Age this morning, when the ad below popped up and covered the entire page! It didn't even allow me to close it. I had to copy & paste the page into Notepad++ to read it. I bet the ad click throughs were nice and high ;)

Daily update #2.

• On my previous post regarding the ACMA blacklist, I in no way condone the materials hosted at ANY of the sites listed. I just honestly believe the whole concept of using a blacklist is absolutely pointless, cripples the web, and achieves NOTHING - content of that nature pops up faster than you can add the URLs to the blacklist, and those that want to get it will always be able to circumvent it. Today they even blacklisted a tuckshop and a dentist, which casts further doubt on its usefulness. I actually thought the Howard governments NetAlert program was much better, although under publicised.
• ASP.NET MVC has gone RTM.
• We released a new site for Ford Performance Racing today - nice work boys
• The upcoming Umbraco 4.0.1 release will include a sweet new XSLT visualiser - looks awesome! Still would love version control on the XSLT files just like the content :)
• Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is now out
• More details on Mac OS X / Safari hack in a good interview on ZDNet. And from this statement, maybe the SDL Microsoft implemented is working?

Why Safari?  Why didn't you go after IE or Safari?

It's really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit.  The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don't do.  Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don't have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you'd find in Windows.

It's more about the operating system than the (target) program.  Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too.  The underlying OS doesn't have anti-exploit stuff built into it.

Rather than doing lots of small blog posts, thought I would start to round up some interesting new of the day. So I present to you, the first instalment of "A few interesting items crossed my email / browser / rss feeds today":

• Microsoft Expression Web Superviewer allows you to view a web page in different version of IE on the one screen
• Fully patched Mac OSX + Safari was hacked within a few seconds! Seems like IE8 and Firefox got hacked as well, just took a little longer
• VSDL2 looks interesting, and is looking to be rolled out in Australia soon. Have read that you need 6 (!) phones tho.
• I knew it wouldn't be long, but looks like the ACMA blacklist is out and available for public viewing (funny, Wikileaks on Google is ranked 6th, while on Live its 2nd, and on Yahoo its number 1)
• As I posted earlier today, I really love the Google Chrome Experiments. Az asked, is it encroaching on the OS space? Add the new Chrome Extensions as well, hmmm.
• Old skool geekness - I need to look at architecting a MASSIVE existing ColdFusion (like OLD ColdFusion, like when it was just a scripting language!) site into something else (thinking .NET and MVC at the moment) but I don't like having to install other IDEs just to get descent code highlighting (I already have a few, but Visual Studio 2008 is by far the best). So I found this little trick = Open Visual Studio 2008, click Tools / Options / Text Editor / File Extensions and add a new one for .cfm files and map it to the XML Editor - DONE!

The Age is reporting it was a tremor in Melbourne. Although I still don't fully appreciate it, Twitter is also saying there was a quake. And apparently Geoscience Australia said it was possibly a 4.6 magnitude on the Richter scale.

I'm sure I just felt the "earth move" and it wasn't just me - most of the guys in the development area did as well! Maybe another earthquake in Melbourne?

...everything looks like a nail! And often you are so blinded, that even when you don't have a hammer, you still look at everything like nails :)

It all started this morning when I sent an email to a few of my trusted senior guys here Next Digital, and sent them this link that is a good article about Joomla verses WordPress with a focus on ease of usability for the end user.

I got all sorts of answers around comparing apples and oranges, WordPress is not a CMS but a simple blogging tool, Joomla is a 'CMS framework' and so on. But I think that some of the guys missed the point - WordPress DOES make it easier to get content to a website than Joomla, and for 'basic sites', WordPress is an easier tool to install, setup and manage!

But I think that because the majority of the sites we build here and not classed as 'basic sites', we start to lose some perspective. The first few clients wanted a website that enabled content to be added, and WordPress wasn't around so we used tools like Joomla, Umbraco, Sitecore and FatWire. But as time marches on, new tools are developed that do fulfil a need - take WordPress and simply creating a blog - that then do get extended (like WordPress and its new ability to add static pages) and now fill a void. And sometimes they fill that void with improvements or enhancements that further simplify implementations, like WordPress themes and plugins which are just fabulous.

We are so used to looking at everything as a nail / CMS, but we need to sometimes stand back and see if this implementation may be a case where a simpler tool will a) get the job done, b) get it done easier and c) provide more value to the client. I'm definitely a fan of all the CMS's mentioned above, but I also think its important to put the hammer away and see what other tools are out there.