Madd0's Tech Blog

It took less than five minutes to go the Microsoft Connect website, download and install Microsoft SharedView to share my desktop with a friend.

The installation is as simple as it can be. Once installed, you use a Live ID to sign into SharedView if you want to create a session. The session is created in two clicks and you are given clear instructions to invite people to join it (see screenshot). Guests to your session don't even need to sign in to join.

When members have joined your session you can share specific windows with them and even let them take control of your shared window. You can invite one or more people to present your work or to collaborate. It works fine over the Internet, even across firewalls.

Microsoft SharedView is still a beta (then again, what isn't these days?), but I really recommend that you give it a try. Free download available here.

...with tafiti!

Tafiti, from Swahili "do research," is a new Silverlight application by Microsoft that approaches searching the Web in a rather original way.

Of course, egomania dictates that I must demo by tafiti-ing (?) my name, so here's the video (captured with CamStudio):

As you can see, you get to preview, filter and save results in categories such as Web, Blogs and Images.

There's also the tree view, which presents results in a, albeit, useless, but interesting way.

To test tafiti by yourselves all you need is a couple of things:

1. A browser. It can be any of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari on Windows or Mac.
2. Silverlight. Which you can get from silverlight.net, or better yet, just follow directions when you visit tafiti.com for the first time.

My only regret is that tafiti obviously uses search results from Microsoft Live Search, and I've already commented on what I think about those. As a matter of fact, look at search results from Google and tafiti, respectively, for the keyword "tafiti":

Sure, one of them looks nicer than the other, but who do you think I'll visit more often to get up-to-date results?

One word: relevance.

I was looking for information on WPF/e (now Silverlight) today and, without thinking twice, I went to Google to find it. However, after seeing how good the results were for this Microsoft technology, I thought I go take a look at the Redmond-giant’s own search engine and see how it performed.

Disappointing, to say the least.

Take a look at the results (I’m shrinking them to put them side by side, but you can click to see them better):

Before going into relevance, let’s talk design.

When I use a search engine, you will probably agree with me, I couldn’t care less about the search engine itself, what I want is to find resources related to my keywords.

I’ll admit that my screen resolution of 1024×768 is not targeted by Live Search, even though about 70% of users still have resolution equal to that or less (you can google* look it up on Google if you don’t believe me) but still, Google displays 5 complete top-level results while Live Search only gives me three. I don’t want to have to scroll, I want my result to be in the top five and have the top five in front of me when I execute my search.

Now let’s talk about relevance.

These are Google’s top 3 results:

Notice how result number one is a link to Microsoft’s official website for WPF/e. Even better, notice how Google’s index is so up-to-date that the title is now MSDN Silverlight Dev Center, a name which was only release one or two days ago.

Now take a look at Live Search’s top 3 results:

Do I even need to comment? I guess if Microsoft wants to offer search services and sell their products, they should by search results from Google :)

* Google would like to avoid having its name become an everyday verb.

In the good sense of course… Today was a great day! It was a day of discovery, of rediscovery, of new things in general.

So, what’s all the excitement about?, you might wonder. Well, let’s see, more or less in order:

I might be onto a gig in Malaysia, how cool is that?

I was one of the winners of the Trick-or-Treat category in MAKE’s Halloween contest! I get the latest issue of MAKE magazine. Check out all the other winners in all categories. Next year, the Hack-o-Lantern will be mine :)

I installed Simon’s newest release of My Exposé for Windows Vista. It’s a CTP (Community Technical Preview), but it’s pretty stable and bug-free. It features a new placement algorithm, way more organic than the original grid placement. An improved trigger interface, so that you can write your own triggers. As a matter of fact, it comes with a new trigger for Voice activation and control (of which I wrote a first version, but Simon pretty much rewrote it afterwards). Oh, and it also comes with extremely cool icons, made by yours truly ;)

Last week I was notified that I had won a book, two books actually, on Certifdotnet, by getting a top score last month. Both books arrived today: Ajax : le guide complet and XAML, which happens to be part of the same collection as my own book. (Yes, all in French, sorry)

I got the serial cable for my Lego Mindstorms yesterday. I can’t believe how hard it is to get the right serial cable these days. What’s worse, it’s also hard to connect it to a “modern” laptop computer, since they don’t have serial ports any more. But no worries, I borrowed a RS232-USB converter from a friend (who will remain anonymous, just in case ;) ) and, after recharging and buying batteries today, I got to use my RCX again after about 3 years (OK, I’ll admit I could’ve looked harder…).

So, I’m geek enough that playing with Legos (albeit very technological and not-necessarily-childish Legos) is already exciting, I went ahead and downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Robotics Studio November 2006 CTP. Yet another CTP, but this one, sorry Simon, is way cooler that My Exposé. I guess the “new technology” factor + the “moving creations” one makes it more exciting. The only feature I’ve tried for now is the Visual Programming Language (VPL), which allows you to program your robots using drag & drop, but that was enough. I can’t wait to play with simulator and the runtime. I think it’s safe to say that this weekend I’ll be playing with Legos quite a lot :)

Finally, just before starting this post, I learnt that Photosynth, from Live Labs, is now live! Well, a preview is live… If you don’t know what it is, I suggest to get my OPML file and subscribe to most of the feeds to stay informed and/or click here for their explanation. There’s also videos here.

Well, I guess that’s pretty much all. Sure it might not be everybody’s idea of an exciting day, but then again, it’s not everybody’s blog ;)

Oh yeah, and I won 25 cents at poker, which doesn’t seem much, but I actually doubled my stack :)