Mad Props!

In case anyone doubted that I actually attended Code Camp this year:

(That's me in the yellow t-shirt, by the way.)

See the whole set here.

Here we are on day two of Code Camp Oz for 2007.

Day one, I must admit, was a bit slow for me. There were presentations on TFS and CRM, neither of which we use, and one from Dave Glover on Windows Mobile 6, which (although it looks great) I can't see us using in the foreseeable future. The highlight of yesterday was the talk on code-level attacks/security in .NET, which featured Corneliu Tusnea's Hawkeye - a very funky little tool.

We arrived today in time to catch most of Joel Pobar's talk on concurrency and parallelism in the CLR. That was awesome. After hearing Joel on Dot Net Rocks last year I knew I'd want to see that presentation. Right now we're watching Chris Hewitt from Readify talking about Service Orientation. We still have a session on WCF and one on WPF, both of which should be great, and an XNA presentation last up which we may not stay around for.

So day two has totally made up for day one. All in all it has been another great event. Something like 180 people attending and some very knowledgeable speakers. If you didn't make it this year you should definitely put it in your calendar for next year!

We have HD DVD!

I repeat: We have HD DVD!

Watching King Kong tonight on my new HD DVD Player for the Xbox 360. Can't wait!!!

Today, for the first time ever, I ran Outlook 2007. Up 'til now I've used many different mail clients (xmail on unix, Lotus cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, Windows Mail on Vista, Windows Live Mail desktop, Thunderbird, Outlook Express) but I've never used Outlook proper.

I'll save more detailed thoughts for a later post, but there's one thing I had to blog about straight away:

Where the hell is the "Mark as Junk" button?

If Outlook incorrectly flags a legitimate email as spam, and moves it to the "Junk E-mail" folder, I can right-click on the message and select "Junk E-mail|Mark as Not Junk..." to tell Outlook that it wasn't spam. However, if a spam message wasn't caught by Outlook's spam filter, there's no way (that I can find) to quickly flag it as junk! I can manually drag it to the "Junk E-mail" folder, but I'm not sure if that's doing anything in terms of "training" Outlook's spam filter.

Windows Live Mail desktop has a "Junk" button as a first-class citizen right next to the "Delete" button. Where is it in Outlook 2007?

Update: I don't want to sound like a negative-nancy here or anything, but: No newsgroups??? What. The. Hell? Apparently the official word from the Outlook team is that they don't include support for usenet news in Outlook because they don't want to duplicate features already available in the free Outlook Express product. Uh ... guys? You do realise that Outlook Express does email too? What, it's ok to duplicate some features but not others? WTF???

Pete and I are travelling to Melbourne this evening so that we can attend a presentation tomorrow morning entitled, "The Death of the File Share; what Microsoft SharePoint means for your Workplace". It's being hosted by Euan's new place of work, OBS, who specialise in SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies.

Should be an interesting trip. We'll get to see SharePoint from (I hope) a few different perspectives, and maybe get to rub shoulders with others who are either already seasoned veterans or, like us, just getting into it.

Afterwards I hope to have a bit of a look around the CBD in case the HD DVD accessory for the 360 hits the street a few days early!

And as a reminder for those interested: Code Camp Oz is this weekend! I might not be there on time, but I'll be there (along with Crucible)! Should be a great event.

Today's my birthday, for those who didn't know.

No massive present-haul to report, because this year I asked Sal to get me the HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360, and that's not released in Australia 'til next week. For now all I have to show for my birthday is the DVD of Battlestar Galactica season 2 (which Sal bought even though she's spending more than enough already).

So anyway, yay for me. That is all.

As Chris pointed out in the comments for my last post, I totally misrepresented what microformats really are.

It turns out that, rather than an XML format, a microformat is a way of displaying information in HTML, marked up with CSS classes etc in such a way that they're able to be formatted for display and made machine-accessible.

So if we were to properly construct a comic microformat, it might look something like this:

<div class="comic"> <span class="title">Silver Surfer</span> <span class="volume">3</span> <span class="issue">1</span> <span class="released">1987</span> <span class="name">Free!</span> <div class="cast"> </div> <div class="crew"> </div> </div> 

With this format, you can use CSS to decide how you want to display a comic, and a machine can detect the necessary markup if it needs to access it programmatically.

I'll keep thinking about the idea of microformats. In the meantime, however, Dave from ComicVine has offered to develop a programmatic interface to his database, which really is what I've wanted all along. This could be the start of something big for Comicster (which as of right now only has a very meagre online database).

Stay tuned!

As the developer of a program to catalog comic-book collections, I keep track of a lot of comic-related sites around the net. There are a bunch of sites which catalog comics, and/or your personal collection. For example:

• The Grand Comics Database
• ComicBookDB.com
• The Long Box (sadly defunct, it looks like)
• ComicVine
• CBDB - The Comic Book Database

On top of these there are other, more focused sites, like ComicList.com, ComicsPriceGuide.com or ComicSpace.

Each of these in some form or another try to make information about comics available. They publish stuff like the cover price of issues, their casts and crew, the publishing company etc.

Wouldn't it be great if these sites could share data easily? Or if client-side applications could make use of their data in a uniform manner?

What if we all got together and put together a microformat for comics? That is, a way to express the information in a way that everyone understands. For example, a single issue might take this form:

<Issue ID="xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"> <Title ID="xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"> <Name>The Silver Surfer</Name> <Volume>3</Volume> <Publisher ID="xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"> <Name>Marvel Comics</Name> </Publisher> </Title> <Number>1</Number> <Name>Free!</Name> <Cast /> <Crew /> </Issue> 

... you get the idea? When a site needs to publish the details of an issue, they do so in a common, standardised XML format, and anyone can make use of that info.

If they want to pretty it up they can run it through an XSL stylesheet and turn it into HTML.

I don't know what the format should look like - the above is straight off the top of my head and has all sorts of things wrong with it. But I think it's worth a thought. What do you think? You guys who run the sites above - you reading this?

For those interested in creating an account here at madprops.org (perhaps you want to post in the Comicster forums), you will now have to activate your account by clicking on a link in an email you receive when you sign up.

I've turned this on in a bid to stop the spambot users that keep signing up. We're getting three or four new users per week, but they're almost all spammers rather than real people.

Hope this doesn't dissuade anyone from registering - you really only need to do so if you want to post in the forums anyway.

For the first time, I believe, Crucible has beaten me to the punch in recapping this month's meeting of the Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group!

Last night we had Anton and Tristan presenting; Anton covering a module for Dot Net Nuke called Enterprise Forms, and Tristan talking about the LAMP development stack. Both were very interesting and engaging presentations. Tristan's almost made me want to get back into PHP. Almost.

For those who are relatively new to madprops.org, you may not know that at one point we ran on a content-management system called Drupal, written in PHP. At the time, I created a Drupal module called Propstar, which allowed you to assign star-ratings to posts and would bubble the highest-rated posts up to the front page. It's still in use on some sites today.

Next month we'll be looking at code generators as part of a presentation from Anthony, which should be fascinating. Brian will also show us the Goolge Web Toolkit, which I had never heard of.

In May we hope to have a presentation from Microsoft about Workflow in SharePoint! That should garner some attention. I'm desperate for more knowledge about SharePoint Workflow, and perhaps Microsoft themselves can sate my hunger.