The Portland White's

Someone on the PADNUG mailing list asked a question about whether there was a cost to attend the PAXNAUG June meeting which will be held this week.  I typed up a quick reply which I thought I'd shared here as well.  And seriously, if you're interested in sponsoring PAXNAUG or PDXUX.Net, feel free to contact me.

PAXNAUG is a free event, just like PADNUG and PDXUX.Net. You should definitely come, and please feel free to encourgage others.

If by some chance you feel guilty about showing up and partaking of the grub--some recruiters may feel this way--then please feel free to contact either George or myself about sponsoring PAXNAUG. :) Seriously.

This audience tends to be very technically competent, these are guys who would rather code than play Halo 3 (at least some of the time). And as far as the type of coding they do in their spare time, it isn't just basic web sites, either. These are junior-level architects who single-handedly manage multiple n-tiered applications for the Windows, Xbox 360, and Zune platforms. Well, "junior-level architects" might be stretching it a bit, but seriously, feel free to show up and find out for yourself who this group really is and what we're all about.

Regards,
Kelly White
(The junior-level nerd herder)

Here's a blog post I never got around to writing from last year's GameFest.  The title just cracks me up, and yes, I'm one of those that laughs hardest at his own jokes.

Kids + Xbox 360 + XNA Homebrew Games = Master Chief does Speak and Spell 

Just one of the things announced at GameFest (from developermag.com).  This is so going to be my next project, that is, if it would only pay the bills.

GAMEFEST: Landmark legal move allows consumers free use of Halo, Forza and Viva Piñata assets in homebrew works

After announcing the 2.0 version of XNA Game Studio during Gamefest's keynote, XNA general manager Chris Satchell also revealed that the company had made an "unprecedented" move to allow consumers direct, legal access to game content from a number of Microsoft-owned IPs.

Effectively immediately, Microsoft has granted consumers "a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use and display Game Content and to create derivative works based upon Game Content, strictly for noncommercial and personal use".

The licence, similar to the Creative Commons agreement that some writers and artists use to give their works free and open copyright to the public, gives users access to any game published by Microsoft Game Studios (but not any third-party brands). Users don't get rights to share the games themselves, but can share creations that use game content.

....

More details can be found at Microsoft's official 'rule' list for the agreement.

Yes, I'm still here.  Things have been busy.  PDXUX.Net meet last week.  Earth Class Mail keeps me busy (and happy).  I'm finally getting back into some Silverlight dev projects at home.  I've been digging into Amazon's S3 API, and Basecamp's API.  It's amazing that I'm just now digging into those, and that they've been out for so long.  I should have some nice apps I can be releasing (or at least talking more about) here in the next month or so.  Jasmine is doing softball, so that keeps me really busy with games and practicing.  I took Tyler and Jasmine out to the golf course again to hit range balls, and everytime I do that it is painful, but someday they'll thank me.  XNA projects have fallen behind, not sure if I want to try and attend Gamefest 2008 this year, I just don't know if I have the time.  I'll try, though.  Can't attend the PAXNAUG meeting tomorrow night though, got a softball game for Jasmine.  I really need to do a better job promoting them.  Been playing around with Lego Mindstorms, Tyler loves that.  He comes in the office and points to the desktop icon and tells me he wants me to start a new robot.  That's fun, but I keep putting him off cause we're doing other stuff instead.  Forgot Carrie's birthday, forgot Mother's Day, forgot Dad's birthday.  Since MIX I've been going non-stop, wow, I need to unplug.  Actually that's what I've done, if you can't tell.  Now it's time to get back into the fight.  It's been a good break.  I think I ready to start rocking and rolling.

I'll tidy up this post later, add some links and formatting.  Right now I just wanted to say hi.

I thought I'd share a couple emails I sent that I sent around to my managers and coworkers right after attending MIX08. At the time I was working for an interactive marketing agency who is a dotnet shop but does all interactive work in flash. These emails are the approach I was taking. Hopefully you find them useful or can point out ways I could do this better. Thanks, and enjoy!

Subject: silverlight being used for the olympics

There’s a good article in PCWorld that talks about how Silverlight is being used by NNC to stream video for the Olympics web site.  Just so everyone is clear, the demo at MIX was with Olympic coverage from previous years.  This year’s coverage at Beijing will be shown live and then made available as video on-demand.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143232-page,1/article.html - the article
http://adamkinney.com/blog/317/default.aspx - features implemented on the site

• Default View
• Large View
• DVR-like controls
• Share with a Friend
• Sports browser (34 different sports, 2200 hours of video)
• Large View w/ Picture in Picture
• The Control Room (4 camera angles of the same event playing at once)

Regards,

Kelly

All registration for Webfoot is being done through Upcoming, a social event calendar website. Right now we're limiting the attendance at 200 people, so be sure to register now rather than later. With past events we've been known to get a surge of late registrations all at once and you don't want to miss out on this event so please, reserve your spot now!

PDX Webfoot will be held this Saturday, April 12th, from 1:00pm to 7:00pm.  This is a FREE event for the whole family, with sessions on

• Silverlight
• Flex/AIR
• Safe Internet Browsing
• Internet Explorer 8
• and more...

There will also be FREE food (pasta/salad/soda/dessert - just like the InstallFest).  For more information please visit the web site at http://pdxwebfoot.com/.

Wow.  It's been three weeks since I left the MIX08 conference at Las Vegas.  I think I'm finally recovered and can start blogging again.    I have a lot I want to say, so instead of writing one really long post I think I'm going to break it up into a series posts based on different topics.  Hopefully that works, and if not, oh well.

First off, MIX was awesome.  I got to meet a ton of new people, saw old and new friends, caught up with local Portlanders, played some Rock Band, watched some Donkey Kong, got a hug from Laura Foy because I said I was friends with Rory, wrote a bunch of code, attended fewer sessions than in previous years, talked to more people than in previous years, remembered how to twitter, and overall walked less because I was staying in the Venetian for the first time in 3 years.  Whew!

Is that enough to wear me out?  No, not really.  The part that wore me out was leaving MIX early to hop on the Code Trip Bus, literally staying up all night preparing demos and presentations, presenting in Salt Lake City, presenting at the Boise Code Camp, catching a 6:40AM flight back to Portland, launching a reskinned site for Columbia Sportswear, organizing the March PDXUX.Net meeting, attending the March PDXRIA meeting (with Mike Culver), attending the March PAXNAUG meeting, launching the PDX Webfoot site, and then still falling behind on everything else that is going on (which you'll find out about soon enough).  With that said, I haven't had this much fun being this busy in a very, very long time.  It's amazing how much satisfaction there is at the end of a day when you're completely worn out and exhausted.

Vista Gadgets are very cool.  They're like these mini-apps that can run in your sidebar and provide you with some pretty cool functionality.  You write them just like you're writing a web page.  You can use Javascript or Silverlight, make calls out to RSS feeds or web services, and provide some pretty cool services.  They are way simple to install.  Typically they are distributed as a zipped files which you then unzip and place in a certain directory.  Presto!  Viola!  It's magic!  Not really, but it is simple and cool and it works.  Well, mostly.

Have you ever downloaded and installed a Vista gadget and then not been able to get it to run propertly?  Heh, I have.  I tried to download my own Silverlight Tip of the Day Gadget and install it on my home machine.  I downloaded it, installed it, and the blasted thing didn't work.  It just sat there and said "Connecting..."  What?  How could this be?  I was frustrated, I was befuddled, I was flabbergasted.  Other people have downloaded my gadget and and successfully run it on their own machines and it worked just fine.  Or so I thought.  Was there a bug in my gadget and no one was telling me about it?  Was no one even downloading and using my gadget?

I copied the gadget folder from my machine at work and did a binary diff between that and what was on my home machine.  There was no difference.  I then tried debugging the gadget, but not until I first found a handy debug viewer app for that.  i put a try/catch block around this line of code, launched this handy tool and blog entry describing how to debug your Vista gadgets.  I modified my javascript with a try/catch block and wrote out the exception using System.Debug.outputString().  I then started up the DebugView and then launched my Silverlight Tip of the Day Gadget.  Immediately I was able to see there was a permissions error, and eventually I was able to narrow it down to a specific line of code.

"Ah hah," I thought, "I have found it."  So i started searching on Live and found a lot of similar people with similar symptoms but no solutions or even acknowledgements that this was the problem.  I then started using that other search tool that has 60% market share but still didn't find anything.  I just didn't understand it.  Where was the community help explaining what the problem isand how it can be overcome?

At this point I knew there was not problem with the code.  If anything it was a problem with permissions.  Yeah, once I said that word a light clicked on in my head.  Now which one of you geniuses is going to be the one who asks me if I run UAC (User Account Control)?  The answer to that question is yes, of course I run UAC.  I run UAC at home, at work, on all my Vista machines.  I'm not humiliated or embarrased by this fact, I like it.  UAC does not hinder me or make me less productive.  I figure given that I exclusively use a blank keyboard means I'm entitled to the privelage of using UAC without having to take crap from any of you script kiddies who shout out against it. 

At this point I'm pretty sure I've identified the problem.  However I still don't have a solution.  "Sure," you may say, "turn off UAC and everything will work great".  Whatever.  That only hides the problem.  But what is the source of this problem?  That's the $64K question.  The source of this problem is that this gadget was downloaded from a different or "untrusted" machine.  Consequently, some javascript would run just fine for this gadget, and yet other javascript would not.  Once I realized this I immediately went into the gadgets folder, right clicked on the offending script file, and looked at the permissions.  Yep, just as I thought, I'd seen something like this before.  I then selected to unblock the script, removed the gadget from the sidebar, and then re-added it.  Nothing happened.  Huh?  How could this be?  So I proceeded to do the same thing and unblock every file that existed in folder/subfolder for this gadget.  Viola!  Presto!  It's magic!  Whatever, but at least my gadget was now working.

So there you have it.  If you're experiencing the same problem please don't think the solution is to turn off UAC.  The problem is that those files are not trusted and the real soution is to make them trusted.  My next task is to find out how I can automatically make those files become trusted.  I'm not sure how to do that yet, but I'm thinking that writing an installer for my gadget should do the trick.

If you have a Vista gadget which is being distributed as a zip file, please remember to include a readme file.  That file should explain both this problem and how the users can unblock the downloaded files in order to use your gadget.  And never recommend that anyone should disable UAC in order to use your gadget.

I hope this helps.

I'm not sure how many of you have heard of The Code Trip. It's a bunch of geeks hoping on a bus and driving to visit you. Why, you may ask? What are they possibly going to want to do in Missoula, Montana? Tim Heuer will be one of the guys on the bus and has more details on his site.

We'll be podcasting, video blogging, creating applications on the fly, streaming from the RV, hibachi-night wednesdays, and other great ideas. Our mission is to talk about some of the great stuff Microsoft has coming out and demonstrate the technologies, but we also know you want to be heard.

If you have ideas of things we can do (and great places to eat) along the way and in your town, please let us know. We're building a couple of applications along the way and are excited to show them off to our communities. We'll also be bringing the latest from MIX08, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Silverlight, etc.!

Be sure to subscribe to the main feed for updates. Also, expect to see live updates on the Twitter feed as they tour through the different cities. The current route/schedule is posted online, so check it out and see when they'll be visiting in your area.

One last thing, these guys are sponsoring the "after party" at the Boise Code Camp on March 8th and it's going to be a blast. If you're in the area or relatively close you should definitely go out of your way to attend this code camp. I'll be keeping an eye out for my old co-workers and friends from Idaho Falls, Idaho.  I look forward to seeing you guys there.