Nicholas Clarke

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the event here in London. It makes a nice change for an event like this to be on my doorstep

The event was really good and it is was great to finally put some names to faces. Ian Moulster has posted that the sessions are now available to watch, which is great news as you normally can’t attend them all:

“We recorded most of the sessions at the recent Mix:UK event and have now made them available online for you to view / download.

They’re available at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/agenda.aspx, and worth a look.

The Scott Guthrie sessions are particularly good, and the Windows Live sessions are some of the best I’ve seen to get you up to speed with the developer capabilities of Windows Live.”

Mix:UK session videos now available

No, Microsoft has not overnight bumped up the price of their OS, but its the price you could pay to show your allegiance to Redmond for a private number plate in the UK.

I searched for MAC and MACOSOX but there was no equivalent

While attending some events at Microsoft’s Reading campus I have seen a couple of the Windows Mobile cars driving around covered in stickers, but I think they missed a trick with the number plate:

image from Jason Langridge

I guess everyone changes their mind from time to time. Today it is my screensaver day

I was prompted by seeing Steve Clayton post about the cool looking FlipClock.

Smashing Magazine has a large collection of links to help you burnout some pixels also.

At the moment I have picked the PolarClock:

image from Smashing Magazine

It wasn’t until I read Ryan Boren post about the new beta for WordPress that I realized I had misunderstood what Microsoft’s Live Writer can do. His first bullet point was “Tagging support for Windows Live Writer“!, this was odd as I thought Live writer was just for Microsoft’s Spaces blog site.

I now stand corrected after downloading it and giving it a try. Its quite a cool blogging desktop application that allows you to post to different blog engines. All I had to do was point it to my URL and then it came back after 1 minute with all of the settings/locations and enabled me to start posting.

I did however notice a couple of oddities, the installer looks like it is just waiting for input, it is however just taking a while to install and while it is doing that it offers the change to append additional services to the setup. Not very clear, I even canceled it a couple of times as I could not find the next or finish button.

The other was the fact that there seems to be about 3 visible buttons, menu items or sidebars for the same thing. Check out the screenshot below:

I can count:

• 2 x View
  • Toolbar x 2
• 2 x Tools
  • Toolbar x 2
• 3 x Weblog
  • Menu
  • Toolbar
  • Sidebar
• 4 x Insert
  • Menu
  • ToolBar x 2
  • Sidebar

Not too sure why all of these different links and buttons are needed as they all serve the same purpose.

Looking for some great tips for improving your writing skills no matter of your media?

“Many of these tips can be useful no matter if you are a blogger, writing reports at work/in school or quietly spending your nights secretly working on that great novel that will astonish the world.” –www.positivityblog.com

Here are some great tips by the slightly eccentric writer Stephen King.

Not sure if Microsoft has started a new blogging drive but in the past week the msdn blogs have gone crazy. Normally when I check the feed there is approximately 200 to read, which using Google Readers keyboard shortcuts I can zip through quite quick. But not any more:

This is just over the last couple of days! Maybe I now need to rethink about subscribing to all public msdn blogs Shame as there is always a good mix of information in there.

Would be great if it was possible to strip out all non-English posts maybe in the feed or via Google Reader.

Dave has used a crazy web of APIs and websites to come up with quite an interesting approach to mobile blogging.

The idea interested me because I’m in two minds whether or not to buy a laptop (for the train) or a new desktop computer (extra time to sleep on the train). The mobile blogging and thought collection is defiantly a plus for the laptop/phone, especially when I currently spend 3 hours per day travelling and there are only so many books you can read.

When there is no Wi-Fi SMSing to my blog/twitter would be great as it would allow me to send myself drafts and also publish posts while on the go (you never know, one day I may have a scoop that can’t wait ). With SMS the message length is limited so I would mainly use it for twitter or the occasional post and then laptop for the main blog/articles writing.

Thinking about starting to develop PHP on windows!?

Well, fear not Joe has collated a great collection of information to get you on your way.

Hopefully the days of hacking PHP into IIS are long gone.

WWF has used the shadow from the sun to highlight the issue of rising ocean levels.

This a great idea especially when you consider that it is using the sun as power, so is not having any adverse effects

Shawn has created a short but sweet video of what debugging .Net code will be like. He also goes on to confirm that the source code will only be released in a “Read Only” format! Meaning that we will not be able to modify, recompile and of course redistribute any of the libraries.

This is not to say that someone wont try, but then this is of course then without any Microsoft support, permission and could end up with a court appearance!

Shawn Burke : Discussing the Release of .NET Source Code

Shawn also has some more info on this blog post.