urig

Breaking News: Kasamba bought by LivePerson!

urig — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:56:12 GMT

The company where I work, Kasamba, has been purchased by LivePerson for approx. $40 million!

Kasamba Inc's motto is "Expert Advice - Live!". Kasamba has an instant messaging and phone platform where experts can conduct paid sessions with customers seeking their expert knowledge.

LivePerson Inc provide online support tools for service they have acquired Kasamba for approximately $9 million in cash and $31 million in stock.

Congratulations Kasamba! And LivePerson too - you've made one heck of a deal with us :).

Microsoft Surface - A Multi-Touch Screen to hit the market soon?

urig — Thu, 31 May 2007 11:10:20 GMT

Kudos to liorz for beating me to it (link to post in Hebrew).

Veteran readers of Tidbits might recall my fascination with the "Multi-Touch Screen" technology developed by Jeff Han of NYU and how it might revolutionize the way we interact with our computers.

Microsoft Surface promises to be a commercial implementation of a Multi-Touch Screen that will hit the market this winter (according to their PR site). See Bill introduce the product at the Wall Street Journal's D conference:

It's very surprising to hear that Microsoft has beaten Han's Perceptive Pixel in bringing this technology to the mass market. Perceptive Pixel only sell to heavyweight clients, mostly security and intelligence organizations. Microsoft claims the idea for a multi-touch table has been rolling around in Redmond since 2002 - that in itself is a surprise to me.

I believe that if Surface is really as good as it advertises itself to be then we're in for a major revolution that will leave our computers free of keyboards and mice. I hope this will happen sooner than later - depending on how good the implementation is and how quickly prices will drop to reasonable levels.

Paint.NET is the open source Photoshop

urig — Tue, 08 May 2007 10:08:45 GMT

Back after a long period of time away from the internet. This won't be much of a comeback though, as I'm getting married (!) the day after tomorrow and then I'm going here for a week: Santorini on 43places.

But I digress. I just want to recommenced Paint.NET. In a sentence, it's the open source Photoshop. It's a free for download open source photo editing software.

Of course it's not a real competitor for Photoshop - certainly not for professionals - but all the basic stuff is there - the lasso tool, gradients, layers and a lot of special effects. It's perfect for the casual user like myself.

It's open source and it's written in .net 2.0. Which means even I can tweak it and contribute to its development.

I heard about it from Jeff Atwood's post "Programming Tip: Learn a Graphics Editor" over at Coding Horror. After you've read it and agreed with every word, there's also a followup post for you to read: "Basic Design Principles for Software Developers"

See you after I get hitched! --urig

Back in a jiffy!

urig — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 20:18:25 GMT

I will be going offline for a couple of weeks, starting tomorrow. This is not some innovative web2.0 experiment intended to explore the possibilities of living without email. Rather, it is a much more mundane call to reserve army service :).

I will be back with a vengeance come May 1st, with further coverage of some cool new features from outbrain.com, plus a review of Google Calendar and the wonderful ways you can make it work together with Outlook 2007.

See you in a couple of weeks.
urig.

Spotback is now in public beta

urig — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:41:31 GMT

Spotback which advertises itself as the "rate everything!" platform for the web 2.0 is finally out of private beta and available to the public.

Spotback provides widgets that blog writers can embed in their blogs. The widgets enable readers to both rate blog posts and see which blogs posts have received the highest ratings from others.

Spotback users are also provided with a personalized recommendation service that takes their past ratings into consideration - a bit like outbrain.com.

I haven't given Spotback a "run for their money" (note that the service is totally free :) ), but it sounds promising. Their public launch should spice up the competition in the emerging arena of personalized rating-based content.

Check back here for a full review of Spotback's new public features.

FIX: Google Toolbar resets/breaks/messes up IE7 toolbars

urig — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:42:00 GMT

Ever since I've upgraded from IE6 to IE7, I've noticed that whenever I reopen my Internet Explorer, all my toolbars get messed up. It's as if they are reset to the original "factory" setting, regardless of how carefully I've tweaked them before previously closing IE7.

Clearly something was wrong, but to my surprise the fault lay not with "Evil Microsoft" but with the "Benevolent Google"'s beloved Google Toolbar(!). I've learned here that the Google Toolbar uses some evil voodoo ("hijacks ITBarLayout from within its satellite BHO") which interferes with IE7's layout mechanism.

Luckily, a site called IECustomizer.com makes a simple solution available here. It's a small Windows Registry .reg file that disables the Google Toolbar's BHO with the effect of restoring IE7's toolbars to their normal self, while keeping the Google Toolbar alive and well.

I've tried it and I'm pleased to say that it works. Now it's up to Google to fix their code so other people don't have to go digging for third-part solutions. I wonder how I can submit a bug report...?

Outbrain.com - Personalized blog recommendations

urig — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:49:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I've had the pleasure of attending outbrain.com's "friends night out". A small get together of bloggers, outbrain.com crew and sympathizers. Not only was it great fun, it was also educational as Dr. Nahum Sharfman (of shopping.com fame) gave a short talk about the recent web 2.0 startup boom.

Dr. Sharfman's bottom line seems to be that nobody knows what's going to catch on and what isn't, with the one exception that a viable business model should be the prerequisite for anyone thinking of getting involved.

I heartily second that. I dread the thought of a repeat of the .com bubble and its collapse. I think that if investors avoid spending money on ideas that have no clear way of returning that money, then that would keep the it market stabler and give a better chance for the genuine articles to succeed.

But I digress. What I'd really like this post to be about is outbrain.com. Outbrain's idea is to give you a steady feed of blog posts that are custom tailored to your interests and reading preferences. The key concept is that you rate whatever content you happen to read, wherever you get to read it, and based on these ratings outbrain's algorithms will supply you with relevant new sources.

Rating content is done through a small FireFox extension that gives you a standard "5 stars control" at the bottom of your browser:

An IE7 extension is to be released soon. The FireFox extension has recently been upgraded to also embed the "5 stars control" inside Google Reader, adjacent to each post:

Now how convenient is that? (With the exception of it currently only working in Expanded View :) )

In return, outbrain gives you an RSS feed with up-to-date blog posts that match your interests. This personalized feed is a great way to get to know blogs and other sources that you might not have the chance to find in other ways. I've already added 3 new blogs to my reader and I'm sure I'll be adding more.

Bottom line - You should definitely check out outbrain.com for yourself!

Some nice tweaks for your blog

urig — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:43:00 GMT

I've finally gotten around for some long delayed blog maintenance. Here are some nice tweaks that you too can employ:

I've added a button linking to my LinkedIn profile. This is one of Guy Kawaski's Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn have a wide selection of customized buttons available. If you want one, sign in, click "My Profile", click "Edit my Public Profile" and there find the link to "Promote your profile with customized buttons".

On a side note, I would recommend that you set "Your Public Profile URL" first. That would give you a friendly URL that goes directly to your public profile. Friendly not only means easier for users to type-in but also for search engines to index.
I've customized Snap Preview Anywhere to be less conspicuous for my web readers. That means setting the color scheme to match that of the blog, having it only preview external links and making it only pop out when you hover over one of the small bubble icons next to a link. I hope this keeps it useful and at the same time unobtrusive. (If you feel different - please let me know).
I've properly set the Title, Description and also the meta keywords and description. This should help both human and computer readers take an accurate first impression of what the blog is about and whether it's worth their time.

Further improvements to follow!

Visual Studio 2005 Freebies from Microsoft Learning

urig — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:59:00 GMT

Don't ask me how I ended up there, but "Dig Deep and Go Further with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005" has some nice freebie book chapters on VS2005 plus discounts on the actual books (mostly for US residents).

Free SMS alerts from Google Calendar in Israel

urig — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:47:00 GMT

Woot! I've just received an SMS from Google Calendar reminding me of an event due in an hour. The greatest part? I'm in Israel. Who would have thought Google would support this feature for a market as small as Israel?

Here's a list of carriers supported by Google Calendar: "Which mobile providers does Google Calendar support?".

Currently 2 of Israel's cellular carriers are supported: Orange and Cellcom. Who's missing from the list? Pelephone of course. That company always ends up last in the race to adopt new technologies. I really should cancel my old subscription with them.

How to setup event notifications by SMS on Google Calendar then? Here's the step by step:

Log into Google Calendar. Click 'Settings' then click 'Notifications'.
The bottom section of the page is titled 'Notify me on my cell phone:'. There you choose your country and enter your phone number (no need for the international prefix).
Now click the 'Send Verification Code' button. An SMS will be sent to the phone number you've entered, containing a verification code.
Enter the verification code and click the 'Finish Setup' button. You're almost done.
Now you can return to the top of the page where it says 'Choose how you would like to be notified:' and check the SMS checkbox next to where it says 'Event Reminders'

Enjoy!

SeaMonkey - The poor man's FireFox

urig — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 20:59:00 GMT

This is a bit on the "old news" side of things, but have you heard of SeaMonkey? SeaMonkey is FireFox's smaller, uglier but faster brother.

SeaMonkey is a web browser from the Mozilla Foundation that's based on Gecko - the same "layout engine" as FireFox. That means it renders HTML to your screen the exact same way as FireFox does.

The difference? ~~While FireFox uses the fancy, but "expensive", XUL for its user interface, SeaMonkey uses the native UI elements of whatever OS it runs on~~. SeaMonkey has less features and looks uglier but runs faster that FireFox and consumes considerably less system resources. SeaMonkey now has versions for Windows, Linux and OS X.

Because it relies only on native UI elements, it looks considerably worse than FireFox but runs considerably faster. It also has a lot of FireFox's functionality like a password manager, a javascript console and more.

SeaMonkey is no FireFox. I wouldn't use it as my default browser here at work on my powerful desktop station. But on occasions where you have limited CPU or memory resources, it's very useful. Its quicker response times are highly appreciated on slower machines.

Followup to original post: Thanks to all commenters. I stand corrected: SeaMonkey also uses XUL. Its faster-than-FireFox performance can be attributed to having less features written in leaner code.

Response.Cookies.Set() vs. Response.Cookies[] =

urig — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:42:00 GMT

I've stumbled upon behavior that I cannot understand in ASP.net's handling of the Response.Cookies object.

The trigger for this post is a page where I have Response.Flush() followed a bit later with an attempt to write an HttpCookie to the Response. Everything works fine when I try to write the cookie like so:

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies[name].Value = value;

But when I use this alternate method:

HttpCookie httpCookie = new HttpCookie(name, value); HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Set(httpCookie);

I get this exception thrown at me:

"Server cannot modify cookies after HTTP headers have been sent."

The unsettling part is that the second situation makes more sense to me than the first. Why? Because once Response.Flush() is called the HTTP headers have indeed been sent to the client and setting a cookie's value (which is done through HTTP Headers) should not be possible.

Why then is it okay to do this (set a cookie after HTTP Headers have been flushed to the client) if I'm using the indexer [] instead of the Set() method?

Your insight will be greatly appreciated :)

Wake On LAN

urig — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:12:00 GMT

I use this blog as my private (or should I say protected?) "Knowledge Base" repository. Whenever I bump into an issue and successfully resolve it, I'd blog about it for future reference's sake.

This post is the same, except I wasn't the one to resolve the issue, or even bump into it for that matter. That credit goes to Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror, who wrote a lovely review about "Wake On LAN".

WOL is a bit of tech that's integrated into most modern LAN adapters. Even when your computer in sleep mode, the adapter keeps listening and if you "call" it from another machine in your LAN, it will wake up.

For the finer details on how it works, read Jeff's post. His blog is a gem.

Google Checkout - We don't serve your kind here.

urig — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:45:00 GMT

I just tried to register with Google Checkout - Google's shiny new payment service. To my surprise, I could not find my beloved country of Israel in the countries drop down list.

Turns out Google Checkout is only available in a few, select, countries. I learned this and little more in a support article buried deep inside the site.

Why isn't Google Checkout available in Israel and so many other countries? Google isn't saying.

Until then - Bad service Google dudes!

Which Science Fiction Writer are you?

urig — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:24:00 GMT

Take this quiz and find out.

And whaddaya know? Turns out:

I am:

William Gibson

The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I couldn't ask for a bigger compliment!

January IVCUG meeting was a disappointment

urig — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:22:00 GMT

Yesterday's Israel Visual C# Users Group meeting at Microsoft, Ra'anana featured a lecture from guest speaker Tomer Shamam and he gave a talk about Windows Presentation Foundation.

The meeting was a mess. Here are some highlights to show why I left yesterday's meeting disappointed:

The invitation for the meeting said it'll start at 17:00. When we got there, we were told the lecture will only begin at 17:30. MS brought in pizzas for us while we waited - thanks for that!
The lecture did not actually start at 17:30. It was delayed for a further 15 minutes because it took Tomer ages to boot his laptop.
The lecture wasn't well structured. It was based on a PowerPoint introduction that was intended for a much longer session. Tomer skipped many slides and it was difficult to keep track of how things progressed.
WPF demos did not work very well. One attractive feature - embedding video into a button control - failed because Tomer's laptop wasn't powerful enough for it.

To balance things a bit let me say that Tomer definitely knows his WPF and I've learned quite a bit from yesterday's lecture. But the points above require significant improvements on behalf of both IVCUG and Tomer himself.

WikiSeek - A better way to search Wikipedia

urig — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:16:00 GMT

I'd like to give a thumbs up to WikiSeek - a new search engine that indexes Wikipedia and is a well needed alternative to Wikipedia's inferior search engine.

Wikipedia have been taking their sweet time improving their search engine so SearchMe - a search engine company - was clever enough to fill the void and implement a better solution.

BTW, If you're using YubNub, I've added a command there for WikiSeek, called "week".

"Minority Report" Touch Screen UI - soon at a store near you?

urig — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 13:02:00 GMT

Watch this video demo of "Multi-Touch Screen" technology devloped at NYU.

With UI like this, reminiscent of what's seen in Spielberg's "Minority Report", my mouse is now considering early retirment.

Thanks goes to Vic Divecha for the link!

Innovative defense of wireless networks

urig — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:37:00 GMT

Pete Stevens' neighbors were "stealing" his wireless internet access. So he decided to secure it in an original fashion.

First he mapped all their web requests to go to KittenWar (danger! high saccharin levels). Then he decided to hook them up to a proxy server that would turn their internet literally on its head:

Here are the technical details :).

Via MonkeyBites.

How to enable programmatic access to VBA in Excel 2007

urig — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:50:00 GMT

Just had my first encounter with VSTO, trying to embed a C# macro in an Excel workbook. I fired up the ol' Visual Studio 2005, created a new "Excel Workbook" project and bumped straight into this:

"Programmatic access to the Microsoft Office Visual Basic for Applications project system could not be enabled. If Microsoft Office Word or Microsoft Excel is running, it can prevent programmatic access from being enabled. Exit Word or Excel before opening or creating your project."

The problem with the above message? I didn't have any Word or Excel process running at all.

A quick google gave me the solution for Office 2003 (thanks go to Harry Miller - MSFT):

On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then click Security.
Click the Trusted Publishers tab.
Select the check box next to Trust access to Visual Basic Project, and then click OK.
Close all Office applications and try your project again.

But! I'm using Office 2007 beta. Where on earth is the Tools menu there? Yours truly spent well over 2 minutes digging through the menus and ribbons to give you the following instructions:

Open Excel 2007.
Click the Office Button (top-left most button in the window)
Click the Excel Options button.
Click Trust Center in the menu on the left.
Click Trust Center Settings in the window on the right.
In the new window that opens click Macros in the menu on the left.
Check the box next to Trust Access to the VBA project object model.
Click OK.
Click OK.
Close all Office applications and try your project again.

Works like a charm, as long as you accept the security implications of allowing Excel and Word programmatic access to the "Microsoft Office Visual Basic for Applications project system" mentioned above.

A Kodak Moment

urig — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:24:00 GMT

Here's a wonderful Kodak ad found via the Feng-GUI blog. I just love crazy, raving rants when they're done so well:

When a company finally realizes it's lost its innovative edge years ago, that's the first step in getting it back.

PS - I'll be writing some more about Feng GUI once I actually get it to actually work for me :). It keeps giving me a "web request timeout" message for some unknown reason.

"Minority Report UI" coming closer to reality

urig — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:09:00 GMT

You might recall my previous post about innovations in man-machine interfaces that bring us closer to the vision seen in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report - where Tom Cruise interacts with a computer by moving his hands in space to move 3D "objects" on screen.

That post was about a novel touch screen that supports multiple points of contact - allowing for 2D interactions that is much more intuitive than using a keyboard or a mouse.

Now comes a brilliant project from Microsft Research's Andy Wilson. He's written a program that utilizes a simple 30$ webcam to monitor his hand movements, in space, to interact with his computer.

He calls his system TAFFI (Thumb and Forefinger Interface). You can see a video he posted below and you can read more about it in a paper he published titled Robust Computer Vision-Based Detection of Pinching for One and Two-Handed Gesture Input (Requires Registration :( ).

TAFFI is very impressive considering the humble hardware it relies upon and the potential it has to be extended from relying on a 2D view from one webcam to a 3D view by two or more high definition cameras.

I've had the pleasure of experiencing something similar at the Adidas store on Champs-Elysees in Paris about a week ago. In addition to highly overpriced Adidas sportswear the store also invites the users to interact, using their hands, with commercial presentations displayed on big screens. Adidas calls it their "mi Innovation Center".

One at a time, a shop visitor can step up to such a screen and put his arm forward. Something like a green laser scans the area of the wrist for about a second and then the user can move his hand pointing at different parts of the screen and an on-screen cursor follows. When the cursor is made to rest on one of several thumbnail pictures floating on screen, that is considered a "click" (in old-fashioned mouse terms :) ) and the thumbnail opens up into a picture or a video.

It was a lot of fun to play with for a few minutes, but it's not quite "there" yet. This toy only supports one point of interaction at a time and you need to be careful not to move too fast or out of a certain zone in space otherwise calibration is lost.

And here's a video of the thing from YouTube (Careful, loud soundtrack):

Partially via Gadgetopia

A failed attempt by Linux to market itself

urig — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 19:38:00 GMT

It makes me somewhat sad to write about the Linux community's latest attempt at bringing their product to the wider public.

MakeTheMove.net is a website dedicated to spreading the word on why Linux and other FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) are the right choice for average Joes and Joans and not just for the ubergeeks.

Ironically, the website looks like a parody of Linux' user unfriendliness. It is a failed attempt at being communicative. The layout of graphic elements and text is downright bad and unattractive. The long (and wide) paragraphs are difficult to read and worse - downright boring. The "Why Should I Move?" section is a depressing example of this.

I am a fan of Linux as a concept, I guess. Nut as much as I admire the development of a powerful and robust open source OS, the last time I installed Linux on my machine was back in the days of RedHat v5.2. MakeTheMove.net certainly doesn't make me want to give it another try.

Barcopedia - Turn your webcam into a barcode scanner

urig — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:48:00 GMT

StreetTech just ran an item about a website called LibraryThing. It lets you populate an online catalog of your books by scanning the barcodes on the covers into your computer.

The interesting question is - How do you scan a barcode into a PC and onto the web? Gareth from StreetTech suggests using something called a CueCat. This is an old barcode scanner gadget that was distributed freely to magazine subscribers a few years back (all Wired subscribers received them at some point).

These things are no longer manufactured - the company went bust after it was discovered that the company kept track of what specific users had scanned violating their privacy. Buying a standard barcode scanner like the ones you see at your local supermarket is somewhat expensive (starting at ~100$). Problem.

The solution? Barcopedia! This website connects to your webcam and if you point it at a barcode, it will scan it in real time and give you the full details for the item (provided it's is in their DB of course).

I can tell you I was as excited as a little boy the first time I scanned a book, the website pinged and the details showed up on the screen.

I wonder what other magic can be done to barcodes via Barcopedia and how extensible it is. If it has a decently open API, I can imagine myself cataloging my entire library through their service.

How to name Private Methods in C#?

urig — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 16:45:00 GMT

I'm having a debate (with myself mostly) concerning the proper way to name private methods in C# projects.

For some forgotten reason, I have been accustomed to use camel casing when naming private methods - as opposed to using Pascal casing for public methods. Example:

private int getBlockInfo(int memberID) {...}

public int GetBlockInfo(int memberID) {...}

For me this seems very comfortable for differentiating between private "secret" methods within a class and public methods that are visible outside. This is similar in my mind to using camel case for private members while using Pascal case for matching public properties.

private int memberID;

public int MemberID { get { return memberID; } set { memberID = value; } }

Still, feeling somewhat insecure concerning the origin of this habit of mine, I consulted the C# "Naming Guidelines" document buried deep within the MSDN. To my surprise the "Method Naming Guidelines" sections ignored the issue of private vs public methods and instructed that all methods should be named in Pascal case.

There is not doubt in my mind that I should follow Microsoft naming guidelines at all times. And yet there's this nagging feeling that my current habit rises not from whim but from logic. I must've seen this convention somewhere and adopted it. Do any of you, my trusted readers, know where it came from?