The Ultimate Escape Kicks-off

For the next week or so I’m going to switch over to blogging at “The Ultimate Escape” with my fellow participants in the remote working experiment. As part of the exercise I will be working from Byron Bay for a week to demonstrate that with the right technology you really can work from anywhere, have a great lifestyle and still be productive.

If you are interested in remote working whether it be co-working, working from home or whilst you are on the road I encourage you to subscribe to the feed.

Code Camp Oz 2008 Speakers and Sessions Published!

Well, it took us a while to get there but the Code Camp Oz 2008 speakers and sessions list has been published. You can find it here on the Code Camp Oz 2008 site. I’ll be contacting the speakers ASAP to confirm everything but I’m looking forward to this year.

No get out there and spread the word!

ReadiMix - tomorrow.

Tatham has posted up about two sessions we are running in Sydney for Readify Developer Network tomorrow night. This is a late change to the sessions that we had originally scheduled. We are just waiting for an opportunity to send out an e-mail announcement to everyone.

Hope to see you there! Check out the location details at the RDN site.

Two New Activities for Internet Explorer 8.0

Over the past couple of days I have created two new activities for Internet Explorer 8.0.

• Find in Wikipedia
• Share to Readify Developer Network (Facebook Group)

Hope you find them useful!

Should we just let Generation-C take over?

I was reading this post by Andrew Parsons. It’s just my luck that the world is change just when I’m having my turn at being a parent. It means that I have a choice as to whether I encourage the Generation-C tendencies that my daughter will undoubtedly have, or whether I try to squeeze her into the same mould that was cast decades ego for many of us?

I suspect that I won’t have a choice and since I very much live the digital lifestyle I’m probably more accepting of it than some, but is there anything that Generation-C won’t be able to handle with their approach to life?

Alan Kay

I just watched this TED video by Alan Kay (thanks to Darren for the link). Obviously the geek in me was attracted to the use of technology as a learning tool but then I got thinking about how different this is to the way that kids are currently being taught. Bella, in reality isn’t being taught much more differently to the way I am being taught - why is that? Is it the teachers not being able to leverage this technology? Is it a lack of investment? Or is it a lack of the balls to radically change our educational institutions?

The Ultimate Escape

So Roger Lawrence over at the Microsoft DPE team has posted a link to The Ultimate Escape web-site which has been put up by i-mate. Basically they are going to get a bunch of folks together in Byron Bay, equip them with phones from the new i-mate Ultimate range and set them at the task of working remotely.

Yours’ truly has been lucky enough to score a ticket to this little shindig which is cool since I’ve been experiencing some serious geek lust for the Ultimate devices since last year. The models have changed but the 9502 is pretty much the device to die for.

So basically I am counting down the days until I jump on the plane to Byron Bay, I’ll be working while I am up there so it won’t be all fun and games, but I think it will be great being around other people that get the whole mobile worker thing.

I just implemented IE8 WebSlices in an internal application - three minutes.

Last week myself and some co-workers launched a new internal business intelligence application to help us better identify issues out in the field - basically it is a worm (ala television debates) which takes the pulse of people across the Readify business.

Please note this isn’t the live data, we are just doing something to our test SQL server at the moment so I can’t show the real stuff right now (I would if I could - honest).

Anyway, after a few minor tweaks to the HTML in the page (basically adding a container div, a header and content div with special class values) I got the desired effect.

For the observant I am using the Google Charts API exposed to ASP.NET through this neat control written by Chris Pietschmann (when is Microsoft going to ship a charts API so that I don’t have to use Google?). Anyway, once this is done, the magic happens and hey presto, I’ve got WebSlices!

Which means that I can add it to the top of my IE8 window, like this.

I think the Internet Explorer team has done a really great job of making this particular feature brain dead simple which should help drive adoption. I’m always checking this page during the day at the moment so this will allow me to take a quick peak.

If you want to implement WebSlices in your own applications check out these resources.

• http://visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/IE8-Activities-With-Jane-Kim/
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx
• http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=567

Got any questions - post a comment!