Dan Maharry

Mozilla’s Conceptual Designs

Dan Maharry — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:40:09 +0000

Mozilla Labs blogged today a call for people “to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.” At the link for example, there are three concept videos outlining a few ideas the people at Mozilla Labs have already had. If you can ignore the icky script and lift music, the ideas aren’t as awe-inspiring as the Microsoft Photosynth\Surface\Seadragon demo last year, but they are interesting nevertheless. Realistic certainly. In particular, the Aurora demo video from Jesse James Garrett (father of AJAX) seems perhaps the most far-fetched - like, didn’t we see that a few years ago, dude? - but when you come to think of it, what the demo shows is perhaps only a few steps beyond the existing live meeting spaces and whiteboards we use today.

On a side note, why is it that 3D desktop environments always seem to be the answer? Am I alone in thinking they’re a tad cliche? Or is that just inherited bad feeling from watching Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, Minority Report and the like?

‘Oslo’ : Doesn’t sound exciting does it?

Dan Maharry — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:13:27 +0000

Just in time to keep a

Microsoft Releases .NET Source Code

Dan Maharry — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:42:34 +0000

It’s taken a few years but Microsoft has announced that it will

Two hidden promises - one failed, one in abeyance

Dan Maharry — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:05:23 +0000

And so Microsoft released Halo 3. And for at least 48 hours developers (being the geeks that most of us are) ‘were off sick’ and then came back to work to notice that the Borg had also released two other items to the wild.

It’s not with some ironic rolling of eyes and shrugging of the shoulders

Becoming A Better Developer

Dan Maharry — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:01:21 +0000

A common thread going round the blogosphere questions what is required to become a better developer. One blogger reckons it’s to read a book a week for 26 weeks and do a little catch up learning. He’ll certainly be better read than before, but better as a developer? Well, maybe. There might be a few other things that will help too.

Ensure your foundations. Know the basics really well.

Longhorn first impressions

Dan Maharry — Mon, 21 May 2007 22:58:58 +0000

So Longhorn gets its first public beta. Time to see what can be seen.

I ran it in Virtual PC first to great and get a grasp on it, but without any dedicated VM Additions, it ran so slow I couldn’t get anything done with it. So I cobbled together a physical test rig and came across my first problem. Longhorn’s activation process is much pickier than those of previous OS’s. Using the same DVD as I installed on the VPC, Longhorn mark 2 wouldn’t activate. Further investigation revealed it was because I had already activated it on the VPC. And as I couldn’t unactivate the VPC, I had to get a new Longhorn disc. Mad installers beware!!

Second thing to note is that wireless networking isn’t installed

Who guards the Google ad guards?

Dan Maharry — Fri, 18 May 2007 10:37:47 +0000

The co-operative I work for asked me to have a look at Google AdWords a few months ago. I duly set up an account and created a few simple ads for them to see how it all worked. In the end, it was put on hold until marketing had the time to put together a proper campaign but my original ad stayed out there and generate a few click throughs a day. Then yesterday I got this from Google.

———————————————-
Campaign: ‘Campaign #1,’ Ad Group: ‘Ad Group #1′
———————————————-

AD TEXT:

Buy a .coop domain name
Are you a registered co-operative?
Build your brand online with .coop
www.domains.coop

Action taken: Suspended - Pending Revision
Issue(s): Ad Text Trademark Term
~~~~~~~~~

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad: co operative.

–

With all the nice posts about Google, it seems out of place to complain but….

- Since when is the word ‘co-operative’ a trademark? Does that mean that all the co-operatives in the world (bar one presumably who has trademarked it) will be barred from using this word in all Ads?

- Why didn’t this ‘trademark infringement’ come to our attention sooner. For example when I wrote the ad four months ago? Doesn’t Google have some sort of automatic checker for this kind of thing?

- Further investigation reveals that “Due to trademark complaints, we do not allow advertisers to use certain trademarked terms or elements in their Google AdWords campaigns” of which the word co-operative appears to be one. So who complained about the use of that word in a Google Ad? And did enough people really complain that Google decided to uphold the issue?

- Why is there no obvious way to appeal this decision? I’m not saying that you can’t - you have to first edit the ad, make no changes and then click a button to appeal - but it’s not that obvious. Come on Google, you’re a friendly bunch - give us a bit of a clue here.

Rant concludes.

A few more things Microsoft SHOULD be announcing at MIX07 (but won’t)

Dan Maharry — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:33:24 +0000

Jon Galloway writes The 9 things Microsoft SHOULD be announcing next week at MIX07 (but won’t). It’s now less than a day to the ‘big announcement’ at MIX ‘07 and I’d love for a couple of these to become true - I can’t see how Silverlight will be written for without an Express version of Blend for example and

Something is amiss in the blogging world

Dan Maharry — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:32:19 +0000

Something seems to have shifted. Usually when spam arrives, its some automated crap about v1@gra, but it seems that a few prominent tech bloggers have started getting much more unpleasant things in their comment feed and in blogs about them recently that’s causing them to freak out. And frankly I don’t blame them.

There’s probably source material in the action for a novel but cyberstalking in public blogs just seems wrong. I’m all for digital liberty in a free and friendly society but not one that’s filled with cowards and FUD-mongers.

Vista Is All About The Pixels

Dan Maharry — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:44:05 +0000

Forget Aero. Whether you run it or not, running Vista with any degree of comfort is all about screen real estate. Technically your system may run Vista fine, but don’t forget that it also takes up more of your screen than ever before with its larger desktop icons, task bar and new sidebar. Even aero adds a few more pixels per window to its borders. So beware.
Having just fallen foul of this myself (and big ups to Dell Customer Support for their cracking service during the whole self-imposed debacle), here’s my thought for the day. Buy the best screen with the highest resolution you can afford. Even if you don’t play games, your first impression of Vista will be its user interface which Microsoft has worked hard to improve and is justifiably proud of. Using it with a crap screen will not help matters.