Eric'o'theque

For Chris: TechMeme hacked. Part of an expirement at Gnomedex to see how well we can elevate a TechMeme listing.

Gnomedex 6 starts tonight and I’m excited. For the past couple of years I’ve been looking forward to a regional conference / geek-together given all the great things going on in Seattle and Portland. Usually, though, things are just too crazy at work or I’m out of town. Fortunately, Gnomedex is now in Seattle and my schedule aligned and I signed up as soon as I could.

I’m going as an enthused individual, not officially representing Microsoft.

Here’s something interesting for the other attendees: Chris released the OPML of the folks registered for Gnomedex. Dave pointed to a directory listing web page created out of the OPML. Over the weekend and a few recent late nights, I ran a script to get the OPML into Outlook as contacts and then decided to put snapshots of the various speakers into the contact cards, along with throwing in categories for Gnomedex and Gnomedex-Speaker.

Then I gave the mouse a cookie.

I decided, hey, why not get to know all of your fellow attendees by visiting their given web page. And, hey, if they have a headshot, why not throw that into their contact info. Oh, and, hey, if they have a bio or such, why not throw that into their contact details.

This got a little carried away. So I’d like to share it, if I could:

Outlook contacts for Gnomedex06: http://www.ericri.com/et/gnomedex06/gnomedex06.zip

That is a ZIP file containing an Outlook 2003 PST which contains a contact folder called Gnomedex06. Import this PST into your Outlook – as a folder off of your Outlook root – and you’ll have all the attendee contact info that I’ve put together during the past few nights. I have not filled in a lot of gory details (no email, no phone) and have not gone and Google-stalked folks or anything; if your given web page led to a quick bio or representative snippet, I pasted it. Along with a headshot.

That’s all.

You might find it useful. Feel free to use, and if you need to convert it to some other format go right ahead. If you share that let me know and I’ll add a pointer to it, too.

And let me apologize if I didn’t fill out your info or if you’re well known to a lot of people and I missed putting in your info. I was browsing, copying, and pasting as fast as I could for nearly 300 people (with a glass or two of fine Woodinville red wine in me). I also didn’t fill in much for the speakers since they are well known.

Drop me a line at Eric_Richards at ericri dot com if you have any comments / feedback.

Update: Chris notes this doesn’t work with Outlook 2000. Sorry.

gnomedex – gnomedex6 – gnomedex2006 – gnomedex06 – Eric Richards

Via Mary Jo: what an interesting article to read, given my thoughts as Gnomedex 06 gets closer and closer:Dealing with Microsoft Haters

That’s right, I’ve got the open-source zealot heebie-jeebies. The last time I introduced myself to a OSZ, in a casino bar wind-down after a great marriage ceremony we all attended, he shocked me by saying, “We just shouldn’t talk to each other,” and walked away. And that was him mustering all of his abilities to be civil!

Anyway… I’m quite proud of who I work for so Thu / Fri / Sat may or may not have some more interesting moments for one Microsoftie…

Q: Did IE6 Make Web 2.0 Possible?

A: yes.

Oh, and as an extra, here’s a link to my latest Web 2.0 exercise-wear from Mule Design.

Scott Roberts has a tips and tricks post around the Office 2007 Contact Selector control that you can add to your InfoPath form: InfoPath Team Blog : Open your rolodex from InfoPath using the Contact Selector

It is not a built-in, first-class control, meaning that you’ll have to do some work to get it integrated into your form 100%. But it’s a lot easier doing all that vs. writing your own control from scratch.

I’ve always kept an eye out for Intuit, curious if they would ever start towards the e-forms market: Intuit’s upgraded QuickBase hastens competition with Microsoft, Google

I’ve always said that if someone asked me to code up the binary search algorithm as part of an interview, I’d bonk them on the nose. Why? Why get so upset over an obvious algorithm that anyone can explain? Because there are always bugs: Official Google Research Blog: Extra, Extra – Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken

Now a whole new class of bugs: integer overflow.

Hmm. Now I’m almost hoping someone does ask me to code up a binary search at my next interview, just so that I can do a safe mid-point calculation and see them contemplate whether or not to ask me why in the world the line is coded that way.

Wellll, who am I to disagree with Forrester Research, especially given this delicious title: Forrester Research: Microsoft InfoPath: A Strong Performer In e-Forms Leveraging MS Office?

The report hasn’t made its way to our internal market research repository yet. I look forward to the read…

Updated: read it. Lesson: don’t get too cocky from the title of a report. While InfoPath ranked “Strong Performer” IBM and Adobe’s products got ranked as the higher “Leader” products. The report was well done, just I didn’t agree with the weightings used to come up with the final metrics.

There is nothing better for learning a new product or features or such than a practical example. David has two parts so far to his “Building Permit” example:

• Building Permit Application Solution: “Design Once” Concept: reviews setting up a browser compatible form.
• Building Permit Application Solution: User Roles: goes into implementing role-like behavior in this form, even though – ahem- the built-in Roles feature is not implemented for the browser-form platform.

Along comes the Sysinternals PowerShell IDE – dang. I’m in the middle of learning some Python via IronPython. I thought about learning PowerShell (aka Monad) but have put it off. Now this. Hmm.