Halo 3 Announcement
Bungie has a great page up for the Halo 3 announcement, including the trailer from E3.
Nobody saw it coming. Halo 3! Who knew? For the last year or two, people have speculated about what our next project was and surprisingly, in all that time, not a single person guessed that it would be Halo 3. Not one.
We declare it the best kept secret ever.
Damn, do these guys know how to make an entrance.
Nail meet coffin
Some updates from the Microsoft E3 Press Conference:
-HALO 3 announced, trailer up on Xbox Live
-GRAND THEFT AUTO 4 will be on the 360 the first day.
–Exclusive deal for espisodic content for GTA4 on Xbox Live Marketplace
-Forza 2 and Fable 2 announced, trailers on Live
-Test Drive Unlimited and Lost Planet demos are up on Xbox Live
-Xbox Live Anywhere – On Vista, and on Windows Mobile phones.
-Splinter Cell: Double Agent in September.
-Buy Zuma on the 360, play it on Vista or your phone with the same gamertag
-Design custom decals on your PC, and apparently upload to Live and use them in your Xbox 360 games.
Or might as well have.
Today they announced that they’ve cut major features from the PS3 including the ridiculous “dual HDMI” feature they’d previously hyped to kingdom come. They also annouced a $500 price point for the base model of the Playstation 3. This model lacks countless features like built-in wireless, HDMI support, and memory stick + SD slots and includes a 20GB not upgradeable hard drive.
Keep in mind that with no HDMI, this is no longer a $500 BluRay player in any true sense. Because of Sony’s “content protection” schemes – you’ll need the $600 player to watch movies in full resolution.
It looks like Sony is content to hand this round to Nintendo and Microsoft on a silver platter.
When is a search not a search?
All too frequently I will tell someone that I work on Desktop Search, and get the response “That’s cool, but I know where all my files are so I don’t need that.”
Wrong I say.
I keep all of my files organized in a logical hierarchy. For instance, music is organized into folders by Genre, then Artist, then Album. All of my photos are organized into reasonably sensible folders, same for documents.
Very, very rarely will I ever search for something on my hard drive not knowing where it is. But I use Desktop Search every single day, almost everytime that I sit at the computer. Why? Read on.
1) Speed –
Without WDS – I can play Slide by the Goo Goo Dolls by going into my Music folder, drilling into “Rock”, then “Goo Goo Dolls”, then try and remember which album it’s on. If I remember that it’s Dizzy Up The Girl, I’ll go there and double click the file to play it. Or I could go through media player and follow a slightly reduced path.
With WDS – I can play the same song by typing “slide” into the Windows Search Deskbar. Heck, I only have to type “slid” and I see 2 versions of Slide (one from the album, and one acoustic that I forgot I had) and another Oasis song called Slide Away. Not only did I get there faster, but I saw every copy of the song I have in one place.
2) Everything in one place
Without WDS – I might have photos in Picasa, music and videos in Media Player, IM conversations in Trillian or Messenger, E-mail and attachments in Outlook, plus documents in all kinds of formats. What’s worse, I might have some music in Media Player and some in Napster, iTunes, MPC, or another program. Maybe Media Player doesn’t know how to deal with my SHN and FLAC files. So now one kind of data requires me to work through different programs and UIs. Yuck.
With WDS – I can instantly bring up data no matter where it’s stored on my computer (or even on my network shares!) and see it all in one place. If you’re a live music fan like me, you might have 10 different copies of a song like Dave Matthews Band’s #41. One query and I can see them all, even though they’re scattered across 10 different folders. I can adjust the view by adjusting the query or filters. Now I have one UI for getting to my data all the time. And once I’ve found it, I can take whatever action I like against it.
3) We’ve only just begun to tap its potential
Search-based UI is still in its infancy. The potential for rich visualizations offered by a lightning-quick index with non-hierarchical structure is vast. For example, you can infer hundreds of different hierachies from this data without locking yourself into one. You can pivot from one kind of metadata to another. You could even use the result set from one query to feed the parameters of the next one.
Remember, you Desktop Search results are data, not just hyperlinks.
If anything, I find the Desktop Search label to be a bit confining. Saying it’s “just search” is like saying that Windows Explorer is “just a graphical dir command.” There’s a lot more to it than that.
175 and counting
It’s been maybe a month and a half since I started my aggressive workout schedule and began reducing my caloric intake. The result? 15 pounds vaporized. That’s about 8 lost since my last update. And it means the “32 waist” section of my closet is open for business once again.
Which means I’m almost to my short-term goal of 170. However, being the kind of person who is never satisfied, I’m moving the goal posts to 160. I’m already close (if not already there) to benching that much weight again. So an additional goal is to once again be able to bench my own weight, which should happen somewhere along the way down to 160 – which is where the charts say someone my height should be anyway.
My strategy has been simple. Eat less, exercise more. Since I hadn’t been exercising at all for a long time, “more” really means “a lot.” Of course it helps to have motivation, and I’ve had the “really huge crush” variety for a couple months now. Still, I think I would have done this anyway. It was really the only facet of my life that I wasn’t happy with, and now that’s already changing.
I haven’t been using any special software, although the Calorie King application that Chris showed me is pretty sweet. I do think that buying a scale was a smart move. It really helps me get a sense of progress and accomplishment. And on the days where it goes up a little bit, I’m just that much more determined to do better. Oh, and a lesson I learned early on was: don’t buy a cheap scale. I went with the cheapest one I saw just because I thought “A scale is a scale, right? I don’t need anything fancy.” Turns out, the cheapest ones are really inconsistent and horribly impercise. So I got a better one (I think $40 or something) from Tanita that’s far better, and shows accuracy to a tenth of a pound. It can also estimate body fat and hydration, although I consider those kinds of analysis to be some dark form of “magic” and don’t pay them much mind.
Oh, and all those “lose weight fast!” commercials and spam mails really bug me. I never once considered taking a pill or going on some kind of extreme diet. Those diet drugs are either useless or dangerous. And you can pry my fresh baked bread from my cold dead hands. If you want to lose weight, you already know how to do it. Exercise and eat better. It’s not supposed to be easy. Nothing worth doing is.
Is Google introverted?
Lately it seems that Google has been keeping to themselves quite a bit. Now they’re apparently not participating at Gnomedex this year. What’s up with that?
Come outside guys. A little sun is good for you!
Through an old friend I discovered a really awesome site – Last.FM
Check out my Last.FM profile. But Emily’s is more interesting since she’s used it longer.
I’m still exploring everything they offer. But the first thing that grabbed my attention was their plug-in for WMP that pings their server everytime I play a song. The site then tracks what I listen to and shows cool graphs of what I listen to the most. It also lets me add that cool little list in the right column that shows you what I’ve been listening to (stalkers rejoice!).
It looks like they have a plug-in for all the major music players to do the same thing.
Next up, they have a little player you can install that will recommend music based on your tastes, and stream it to you! When you hear something you like, you click on their player and it takes you to a page with details about the band, album, and links to buy the album if they have it in their catalog.
I’ve seen other sites with functionality like that last part, but it was the really the statistics about what I listen to that I was most interested in. What’s interesting is that I was perfectly willing to share my listening habits with them in order to see a clear visualization of the data that they’re grabbing. If they’d wanted me to install a plug-in just so they could spy on me and recommend things… I’d be less enthusiastic.
Cool stuff.
WDS 3.0 Beta Engine Preview
Some news sites are posting a link to the WDS 3.0 Beta Engine Preview that’s up on the Microsoft Download Center as of today. A few things about this release:
- This release is an engine preview and has no UI.
- Most WDS users, even those that love installing Betas, should not install this release (but rather wait for the next beta which will have UI).
- This release is for developers targetting the WDS 3.0 indexer on XP/2003/Vista, or beta testers of applications that use the WDS 3.0 Indexer – like Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2.
- Some of the UI can actually be turned on by creating a registry key in “HKLM\Microsoft\Software\Windows Desktop Search\DS” called “ShowStartSearchBand” and setting it to 1. You can then click “Search” on the start menu and see the familiar WDS UI. However, lots of things are broken and this version of the UI is almost entirely untested and unsupported. (thus why it’s disabled by default).
So what’s different in WDS 3.0 from the current WDS 2.x releases?
WDS 3.0 represents a massive undertaking to turn WDS into a platform component to power the Windows Shell, Office, and any third-party applications that want indexed search functionality. Any of you that have run beta versions of Windows Vista have already used the WDS 3.0 indexer. Just like so many other Windows Vista platform technologies (like Windows Presentation Framework, .NET 2.0, etc), this represents the downlevel redistributable for users that haven’t upgraded to Vista but want to run applications that are built upon the technology included in Windows Vista.
Just like in Vista, this version of the WDS indexer runs as a Windows Service, and not a user-mode application. This means that your system only needs one index regardless of how many users you have. Data and search results from the system index is only accessible to users who have permissions to access that data directly. So even though there is only one index, each user will only see items belonging to them or that are shared. This also means that the WDS 3.0 indexer can index even while no users are logged on.
Applications such as Microsoft Office (or any other third-party application) can use the WDS index to store data and perform searches, thus eliminating the need for them to store seperate indexes or implement custom search functionality, removing redundancy and providing a more consistent and unified experience for the end user.
However, as I said above, this release represents a very early state of the WDS 3.0 package, and is meant only as a preview of the indexing engine and not of the WDS 3.0 user experience. Unless you have a specific need for the WDS 3.0 engine, you should continue to use the latest official release of WDS (version 2.6.5) for now.
MindCamp Links
Flickr Photoshow. There’s something like a billion pictures on there.
There should be some great videos from the event popping up over the next few days.
Home from MindCamp
MindCamp 2.0 wrapped up this morning and I’m happy to say that I made it through without leaving for the comforts of home like some people =)
Major props to Andru Edwards, Monica Edwards, Stuart Maxwell, all the other organizers, the “camp counselors,” and everyone else who contributed to this great event. MindCamp once again demonstrated how great it is when you get 200 smart and interesting people together in one place and just let them talk with each other.
A quick summary of my experience at MC 2.0:
-I got a brief introduction to Dave Winer. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to talk to him about some cool OPML ideas that Steve Ickman and I have been bouncing around.
-My first session was called “Why does church suck?” and discussed how to make religion and spiritual communities appeal to today’s culture.
-I had some great conversations with Robert Scoble and Ryan Calafato (a speech writer for execs at Microsoft)
-Enjoyed some delicious food sponsored by Windows Live. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the caterer.
-Met lots of great new people from the Seattle area: An SDET on the Windows Vista Shell team, a useability expert from Boeing, the guy responsible for the Wireless Networking UI in Vista and XP SP2, and dozens more.
I almost managed to make it through the night, but did spend an hour or so attempting to sleep. When I got home this afternoon I realized I was definitely too exhausted to make my regularly scheduled swim session with my co-worker Paul, and instead opted for a good old-fashioned nap.