How about that for a birthday present yesterday, Kara got got 6/6 on my TD Keno game yesterday three times. Wow. The odds of doing that even one time aren’t very good, much less three times.

Should have a v0.2 of the game next week, perhaps before Google updates their modules directory list. They still only show the original five modules (by Google employees) but you can find several new modules posted in the Google Homepage API group.

It’s my wife’s birthday today (happy birthday Kara!) so not much time to check this new API for GTalk out, but it is definitely in the future plans. I did notice, however, that the Google groups for the various APIs are growing with the following membership numbers:

994 - Google Talk Open
612 - Google Homepage API
367 - Gmail Agent API
185 - Google Deskbar API

code.google.com:

Libjingle is a set of components provided by Google to interoperate with Google Talk’s peer-to-peer and voice calling capabilities. The package includes source code for Google’s implementation of Jingle and Jingle-Audio, two proposed extensions to the XMPP standard that are currently available in experimental draft form.

Libjingle is available via a Berkeley-style license which is summarized as follows: no use of Google’s name to endorse or promote products created from Libjingle, redistribution of the source code must keep the Google Inc copyright notice and redistribution in binary form must reproduce the copyright notice. And then there is the standard liability disclosure stuff.

Thanks Techcrunch, who also points out that this could force SkypeBay to release a more full featured network API.

I’m sure loving all this API goodness being spread around lately. Hope this trend continues!

The widget/gadget scene is starting to offer many options for developers:

Yahoo! Widgets - now fully rebranded with version 3.0 and no longer called Konfabulator. [developer reference]
Dashboard Widgets (Mac) - considered a Konfabulator copycat by non Mac users mostly, but tons of cool widgets
Microsoft Gadgets - Microsoft’s entry to supplement live.com, skipping the widget name
Google Homepage Modules - Google doesn’t like the widget name either, and offers up “modules” for users to be able to customize their own Google Homepage.

I’ve only created a widget for one of these (a game), but am curious about adapting it to these other widget/gadget platforms if for no other reason than learning how their system works. I found Google’s Homepage system fairly straightforward to work with. I’ve looked over Microsoft Gadgets a little bit and Dashboard Widgets on the Mac. I run v2.0 of Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets on the Tablet but don’t use it very much. The only widgets I regularly use are on the Mac. Something about hitting that F12 key to get the things I’m most interested in popping up that I like.

How many of you are using widgets/gadgets/modules and if so what are you using them for? Fun & games, stats, productivity, site promotion?

Google Homepage API. A developer walk-thru example with hello world is here.

I decided to take some time today and build my own fun Google Homepage module: TD Keno v0.1. It’s a take on one of my wife and my favorite casino games: Keno, and now you can play it for free on your Google homepage. This has been submitted to Google, but I have no idea if it will make their cut or not. So far the only modules on their website are from Google themselves, but this was just announced yesterday so they are probably still sorting out submissions.

TD Keno v0.1 has been tested and works in current versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. To add to your Google homepage just do the following:

1) visit and login to your Google account at http://www.google.com/ig/
2) in the upper left corner choose “Add Content”
3) in the “Create a Section” type developer.xml and click “go.” This will give you a new “My Modules” screen. While tihs step is optional, it is also useful if you want to create your own Google Homepage modules.
4) Add the following module: http://www.tdscripts.com/scripts/google/tdkenov01.xml
5) Now you can move the module wherever you want on your custom Google Homepage and start playing.

How to play
You need to enter at least one number (to a maximum of 6 numbers) from 1-80 and then click the “Add” button. If you make a mistake or want to choose a different number just click “Clear” and type a new number. When done selecting your numbers, click the blue “Play!” to start playing. Each player starts with a score of 25 and the following odds/payouts are used:

1 spot
– catch 1 odds: 4 to 1 win 3

2 spots
– catch 2 odds: 16 to 1 win 12

3 spots
– catch 2 odds: 7.20 to 1 win 1
– catch 3 odds: 72.07 to 1 win 42

4 spots
– catch 3 odds: 23.12 to 1 win 3
– catch 4 odds: 326.43 to 1 win 120

5 spots
– catch 3 odds: 11.91 to 1 win 1
– catch 4 odds: 82.69 to 1 win 10
– catch 5 odds: 1550.56 to 1 win 800

6 spots
– catch 3 odds: 8.46 to 1 win 1
– catch 4 odds: 34.31 to 1 win 3
– catch 5 odds: 323.03 to 1 win 85
– catch 6 odds: 7752.84 to 1 win 1,500

If your score reaches zero, don’t worry, no ATMs necessary, the game will automatically reset to 25 again. You can also just refresh the page and start anew. The number of games played in each session will be recorded but it doesn’t currently remember scores from session to session. Perhaps in v0.2 if enough people are interested I’ll add that functionality.

My best so far is catch 4 out of 4. Let me know how you do, especially if you catch 5 or 6. There is a special message for catching all numbers. Have fun!

So it’s been more than 36 hours now since I signed up for the Alexa Web Services and no email, no call, no response from the Alexa team. Consider this my official Alexa Web Services watch (will update this post when/if I finally connect with them). Since I signed up shortly after seeing John Battelle’s post, I have to be among the first batch of folks who signed up. It’s definitely odd that I haven’t at least received an auto-reply message.

Anybody else hear something back yet?

Update 12/14/2005 4:41pm PST: Received an email from “Alexa Web Search Platform Account” with the following message:

Hello,

Thank you for applying for an Alexa Web Search Platform Beta account. Due to the high volume of applications it may take a few days to get back you.

We appreciate your interest.

Alexa Web Search Platform Account Management

12/16/2005 9:36pm PST Rejected! Receieved the “sorry, we’re full” email at 5:55pm PST. It was a lot longer than that, polite and professional. Seems like I might get a shot once they add more capacity but they are making this a very limited release. Again, I signed up within the first couple hours of the announcement. This early bird didn’t catch the worm. I’m going to check with some other developers I know signed up and see if they got in.

Still thinking about buying a Tablet PC this year? Hey, I know the feeling, and was there a year ago. Actually if you count the two preceding years leading up to my purchase, I’ve now spent three years thinking about the Tablet PC and how it fits into my computing life. Depending on when you read this, possibly to the very day it’s been one year since I made the plunge and actually have lived the Tablet dream.

The following entry will highlight the various uses I’ve found for the Tablet, what it worked good for, what it wasn’t so good for, and what I’d like to use it for in 2006 and beyond. Each experience is unique and I hope by sharing my experience other would-be tableteers will look more closely at this platform. The above picture illustrates where the tablet currently spends most its time: right next to my primary work monitor, to my right and to the left of the telephone; a prime position for regular, every day use. This isn’t somebody who just bought the machine, I’ve been using it a year and I think the Tablet PC is that valuable that it belongs that close to me every day. It used to sit to my left where I needed to turn to use it, but the Mac is there now. Upgraded!

For those who didn’t read my post last week recommending what type of tablet to buy, I won’t be rehashing that here. My recommendation will likely change when we see lighter, trimmer slates that are Vista certified.

Since it is an anniversary, I made a comic of the 365 days of Tablet PC Ownership with some of the key moments over the first year (pictured right), click to see the larger full res comic.

We also bought a Mac back (a little earlier, in October 2005) and have setup a special blog (Mac Mode) for it where I’ve kept some of my notes along the way of that learning experience for those who are considering the Mac platform instead and, like me, have been a Windows user most of their computing life.

In December 2004 I bought the Motion Computing M1400 slate Tablet PC. The tablet has gotten significantly more use than the Mac but didn’t receive a dedicated blog until May when tabletpcblogs.com opened allowed others to create blogs. Thanks to the legendary first family of Tablets, I was able to setup my first ink blog in 2005 as well. I originally planned to use that as my primary tablet blog, but have been using it as a daily crink blog (more on crink shortly). Of course Hmm received its own Tablet PC category and has been stocked with various posts on tableteering.

For newer readers not familiar how these type entries are laid out, I’ve broken them into three distinct areas of usage what/where/how I’ve learned/done with the Tablet PC in the last 12 months: business (online and offline), home and a new one: developer. Hopefully this information is of use to those contemplating the purchase of a tablet this holiday season.

(Note: my most recent opinion piece: Don’t buy a new Tablet PC, buy an older model instead or keep waiting might be of interest to those thinking about buying a Tablet PC.)

Business
- Used for sales presentations several times. Definitely provided an edge for getting prospect’s attention.
- Microsoft Streets & Trips 2005 with GPS was particularly handy as a navigational tool. Used frequently to chart the location of appointments in the field.
- Meetings provided the primary notetaking tool. No legal pads were used after Q12005. OneNote was the tool of choice for notetaking, although I did do a trial of Evernote.
- Took the tablet to two different industry conferences: the CES 2005 Tablet meetup in January 2005 and to the Seattle Mind Camp in September.
- Digital magazine reading. While this could go under Home/Personal, it more applies to work since I blog about a lot of things in my two Zinio subscriptions: PC Magazine and MacWorld. The slate tablet is great for reading magazines.
- Snipping tool PowerToy one of my most used apps. Great for cutting (inking?) out screenshots and annotations. I keep this on the lower left corner of the desktop, a convenient click away.
- EVDO was great when I got it working using a crossover cable from our older laptop, in the 15 days I tried repeatedly with different cards, different configs, and tech support to get working and wasn’t successful. Would like to try this again when more EVDO cards and drivers are available. If working this would be one of the best companions to the slate.
- A 99 cent plate holder is my most used accessory. It props up the tablet (shown in the top picture) and works great. You can get these at any dollar store. Don’t waste your time on $15-20 plastic stands (mine broke in the first six months). I still think it’s bizarre that you spend $2,500 on a machine and they send a piece of crap stand.
- ActiveWords a definite timesaver and one of the five must have apps that no slate should be without. Don’t forget the ActiveInkpad.

Home/Personal
- Gaming. I’ve tried OS intense MMORPG games like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies as well as online and offline casino games like Vegas. This machine is surprisingly good at gaming.
- started a daily crink blog. Crink = CRappy INK. My goal to become at least a little better artist isn’t going to happen without practice, and these daily crinks posts illustrate my path of sharing ink instead of words for key/significant daily events.
- inking email and IM (via MSN Messenger) much more personalized than typing. This could go under business too, because people have told me that these inked messages stick out compared to type. Wonder how long we will be safe from ink spam?
- our youngest son has created some neat drawings using ArtRage, some of which have been shared on this blog.
- took 78 days to break me down and buy an external CD-RW drive (the slate came with no CD drive). Might be the longest I ever went without a CD drive in modern days of computing on a machine. I was able to get by awhile by sharing a network drive but that became clumsier than just plugging in the USB CD-RW drive and going that route.

Developer
This has been by far my most disappointing use of the Tablet so far. Despite having Visual Studio 2003 and now the new Visual Studio 2005, I haven’t done much in the way of ink-based development. I have done a little bit — nothing shared though — and plan to do significantly more in 2006. Perhaps it was good that I spent a year as a slate user so I can better understand the needs of slate tablet users.

Fortunately there are at least a few fellow developers championing the Tablet cause like Andy Gray who created a couple of very useful, free OneNote plugins: OneNote Daily Journal and OneNote MultiCreate. Craig Pringle is working on an ink-based blogging client. Not sure how that is going but the video demo teaser he posted showed some promise. Loren Heiny has started experimenting more with ink in the browser which again (have I said it enough) is an area ripe for development (Tableteers see SearchTip).

Other Tableteers followed in 2005
These folks cover most of what’s going on in the tablet scene (in no particular order): Rob Bushway, Warner Crocker, all the Heinys (Loren [linked in dev section above], Lora, Layne and Robert), Eric Mack, Marc Orchant and James Kendrick. Thank you for sharing the information through your blogs, websites and podcasts. Oh, and can’t forget the consummate convertible tablet blogger, Robert Scoble, who lately has gotten away from posting about the Tablet PC somewhat, but still offers a tablet nugget here and there (and usually catches hell from some of his readers, too).

As far as forums go, Tablet PC Buzz is the favorite among many but I’ve had mixed experiences there. They had a considerable amount of server problems and run into a couple anti-social types. Typical board BS, but still worth a bookmark if for no other reason than this seems to be one of the largest messageboard water cooler places for tableteers.

Tablet Owner disappointments in year one
#1: manufacturer (Motion Computing) announced they would stop creating batteries & accessories for their M-series computers after December 31, 2007, but contradicted this by saying that they “wouldn’t leave their customers hanging” whatever that means. Probably my biggest disappointment with them is that after calling them directly to voice my displeasure and making posts in several places about this (not just here on the blog) I never received even one official reply. Yes, I spoke to a nice guy when I called them, but they never found the time to contact me and explain more fully what their plans were for M-series customers beyond December 31, 2007. Do they have to do that? No, of course. I’m just one customer. But I’m also likely to be one customer who buys from their competition once the true fate is known after Dec 2007.
#2: trying to get EVDO working on M1400 failed
#3: Outlook 2003 still doesn’t work (crashes on start every time), maybe Outlook in Office 12 will work?
#4: not enough ink-enabled websites, a definite area for improvement in 2006
#5: my own anemic Tablet PC development efforts.

Tablet Owner excitement in year one
#1: Using ink on a slate!
#2: Tablet PC in the sales environment
#3: Handwriting recognition much better than I expected
#4: switching primarily to ink note system
#5: Feel more mobile than did with laptop or any other prior computer
#6: system uptime has been outstanding (despite reports form other tableteers that their systems don’t keep running)
#7: doesn’t feel outdated and obsolete yet even though newer models are available (though arguably not that much better)

Whew! I will keep writing about my new Tablet experiences. If you join the tableteer ranks, then let me know what cool things you are doing. Perhaps you’ll be part of my tablet owner history in 2006. The past posts used as reference for this post are below if you’d like to follow along in chronological order.

History of Tablet PC Ownership posts
December 19, 2004: First full week of ownership complete
February 13, 2005: 60 days after buying a Tablet PC, was it worth it?
March 3, 2005: Day 78 bought external CD-RW drive
May 3, 2005: Day 140
June 27, 2005: Day 196 incompatibility of EVDO Kyocera cards
August 12, 2005: 241 days of Tablet PC Ownership
September 1, 2005: Day 261: Tablet PC sales projections being downshifted by market researchers
September 15, 2005: Day 276 Current office main configuration includes Tablet PC, 3 PCs, Mac
October 12, 2005: Day 302 as Tablet PC owner: email, chat and gaming

Other 365 day tablet owner memoirs (updated, as they ping or I find them)
12/15/05 sbreck, a New York City IT consultant and musician

When you get to 365 days (or close) then ping or use the comments to tell us about it.

Was about to head off to bed, but John Battelle’s blog entry on Alexa opening up their entire database of 5 billion documents — a whopping 100 terabytes of data — for almost **anybody to get inside and mash away, awakened my gaze.

But not just open, gaping wide open:

Anyone can also use Alexa’s servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or …well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa’s (er…Amazon’s) platform, should they wish.

The cost of entry is $1 per 50 gigs of data processed, $1 per gig of storage and $1 per gig of data uploaded (pictured above). I checked out the signup page and noticed you have to **”apply for an account” (this is the asterisk part in the leading sentence) and there is only a limited number of accounts being made available during the beta period. Signed up. Looking forward to chatting with an account rep tomorrow.

I’m going to do the dilligent thing and check this out further before commenting on the merits of this program. In the meantime, this is all live right now, so have at it, night crew. I look forward to reading what others have to say tomorrow.

Nice work, Loren with SearchTip. Curious though, why not target .NET 2.0? Is it because you figure most people already have 1.1?

Would be interesting if some logic was applied that would work with either 1.1 or 2.0. Yeah, this would requires switching between two different components but I suspect this would be a real issue needing tackling on widespread usage in the browser (and one I already have on the list to figure out how to tackle, actually).

This is exactly what I’ve been talking about with other .NET developers: filling what I feel is a huge drought of browser-based ink uses for tableteers. I would like to see complete websites, not just forms, converted and geared towards tablet users. Yeah, it would be clubby because only Tablet PC users (using Internet Explorer most likely) could partake, but there are over a million tableteers that would love to be able surf content that was specifically geared towards keyboard-less browsing and interactivity. Also think about accessibility issues, seriously, some disabled folks cannot type but are able to use a pen.

There is a greatly unfulfilled niche here and as Loren learned there are some definite pros and cons to putting the controls inside a webpage (no additional software to download). Hopefully other developers are on board with making more content like this. I am and will be doing some of this type development in 2006. You can pretty much guarantee it and will be hearing about it in the future. There’s my first 2006 prediction.

Let’s see more, fellow tablet devs!

This coming Wednesday, Dec 7, 2005 at 10:00am PST there will be an online Tablet PC chat:

The mobility of Tablet PC is combined with ink and speech tools to let you take your PC many more places and use it in many new ways. Join Microsoft experts as we engage in a fun and interactive online chat about Tablet PCs.

It’s on my calendar. Hope I don’t get pulled away for other meetings or engagements. I’m also coming up on my first year anniversary as a slate Tablet owner and have been putting together notes here and there on my experience and should be getting that out next week hopefully.

Hey, a slightly dramatic post. Haven’t had one of those in awhile. As always, skip this if you don’t like reading that type of stuff, friendly readers.

Just received the following comment to my Visual Studio 2005 Ready To Launch notes (RTL):

I was sent this link by Microsoft after I requested direction to the Launch 2005 demo of Visual Studio Team System. This not only does not fulfill my need, I see extremely little information of value to anyone. I’ll go back to Microsoft again…

You can read my specific reply, which one of my friends said was too harsh. He’s right. Sorry, Chris if I came off like an a-hole. Really, I try not to disrespect people who comment, but Mr. Anacker’s comment reminded me again of precisely what did and didn’t work at this recent event for our business. Is this selfish to write about what works and doesn’t work for my business? I don’t think so of course, which is why I published my notes.

Will these notes be useful for everybody? Of course not. They can’t be. But was my information of “extremely little value to anyone?” Disagree strongly.

I wished I had done more recon looking for what others felt about this event: what was useful, worthwhile, poorly presented, etc? What tracks should I attend? Was the keynote any good? These were all questions that I wondered so I could maximize the time by attending the tracks, talking to the vendors, etc. so that I could find how to slot these new Microsoft products into our business.

My friend, Lestat, just posted his opinion of the VS 2005 Ready To Launch Tour event in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Green Bay attendees didn’t get box lunch paid, so I should thank Microsoft for the good roast beef sandwich (I liked it, really):

I must say my interest was captivated for the afternoon. After the session, there were the prize drawings, of which I didn’t win anything. Oh well. Of course the true benifit, was that after the 2nd session, we got to get in line for our free SQL/Studio 05 software AGAIN!

Not sure I’d have traded my roast beef box lunch for a additional copy of VS 2005 standard, but hey, to each his own. They punched our badges after we filled out and turned in a questionaire and received our CD at the end of the event.

The three key things I took away from this event
1) .NET 2.0 apps aren’t available on most web hosts yet and it might be as much as a year or more before most are up to speed.
2) The goodies in VS 2005 cannot be used with .NET 1.0, 1.1 apps, they need to be imported.
3) The event was not targeted for smaller/independent developers, it was for the larger corporate development clients.

There is nothing wrong with #3, of course, if you are a larger corporate client. Microsoft can target whomever they want with their launched, but I’d be willing to wager of the thousands of attendees most of them were not large corporate clients.

An audience full of men and women are targeted. Hmm is right.

Something valuable I learned a long time ago: write what you know. Sure, I could write about Team System programming but the reality is I rarely do Team System programming and have only done a small few team projects ever; just not our business. So me writing about the Team System environment would be much less valuable then somebody who lives, works and breathes the Team System environment. Heck, I’d be better off linking out. Any readers who are Team System enviropros?

If what Mr. Anacker wrote was accurate that someone from “Microsoft” in fact sent him here looking for “direction” to the Launch 2005 demo of Visual Studio Team System (which frankly I find hard a little hard to believe), the only real direction I can give is to Google it, er, I mean MSN it, of course.

My original posted notes I did wonder about a project telecommuted across continents? I have programming friends across the world so maybe we could get together on a .NET 2.0 project using this Team System and then I’d have much more to say on the subject?

Here’s what I think really happened. Mr. Anacker was sent somewhere for a non-Microsofty (that’s me) giving an honest opinion on the Team System developer track at a recent RTL event. I took more pictures and have more detail than was posted in my original notes and could post more, I suppose.

The reality is that I’m not all that interested in doing so at the present time, sorry. If other readers are interested in more of these notes and pictures then please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, this stuff might end up in the B file.

This weekend I’m hoping to go through the package of RTL goodies and swag I picked up from the event (pictured above) and maybe I’ll blog about some of those contents in the coming days.

Now here’s something I should have said — my bad, sorry — to Mr. Anacker: thank you for reading and stopping by and hopefully something here will make you go hmm.