Ink blogging with text recognition. Metaweblog API. App & code coming soon...

Blogged on a Tablet PC

Has anyone programmed Radio Userland using C# or VB.NET? I don't want to get involved in religious wars about blogging APIs, all I want is an example that shows how to create a blog post using .NET objects like HttpWebRequests. My first attempt just timed out and Google isn't helping me, even though I know this should be trivial:

string xml = "<methodCall><methodName>metaWeblog.newPost</methodName><params><param><value>blogId</value></param><param><value>user</value></param><param><value>pass</value></param><param><value><item><title>foo</title><description>stuff</description></item></value></param><param><value>true</value></param></params></methodCall>";

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

doc.LoadXml(xml);

HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest) HttpWebRequest.Create("http://localhost:5335/RPC2/");

req.Method = "POST";

req.Timeout = 15000;

HttpWebResponse res = (HttpWebResponse) req.GetResponse();

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream());

textBox1.Text = sr.ReadToEnd();

Philip Greenspun had Let's Bash Microsoft Day over the weekend and I couldn't resist Scoble-baiting. Sure enough, Scoble defended the Outlook / VBA security model: "...it's impossible to double-click on executables in Outlook 2003, so the chances you'd get a virus now are very small...." Oh dear, now I am worried that he's drunk the Kool Aid. Less than a month after Sobig.f and they defend the VBA model?

Office 2003 allows side-by-side execution of the VBA security model and the .NET Framework security model, which strikes me as profoundly schizophrenic (as in, simultaneously promoting two obviously contradictory premises). On the one hand, Visual Studio Tools for Office not only recognizes that maliciousness must be suspected in all received documents but that such suspicion is even more appropriate with documents, those most ubiquitous and mobile bags of bits. In VSTO, permissions are reduced even for those documents whose macros / programs originate in the Intranet zone! Yes! Good! Slightly paranoid, but you know what? They are out to get you! 

But you can still get a document that has the same-old brain-dead all-or-nothing "Do you trust the person who sent you this?" macro enabling dialogue and, sure enough, VBA macros can still open up the Outlook object model and iterate over Contacts. Contrast that with ""Microsoft just shipped OneNote. It doesn't have an API. Why? Because of security issues." Guess who said that?

"Alternate Programming Languages for .NET" got approved as a BOF gathering at the PDC! Since I'll be the host, I guess now I really do need to get a room...

Is there ink-recognition relevance to the rsereach at an Elingsh uinervtisy, taht seowhd it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are? Should word recognizers try to exploit a similar strategy, concentrating on recognizing the initial and ending strokes of an ink group, the length of the group for a rough letter count, and just sort of muddling along in the middle? 

Hey, speaking of ink-recognition, someone from Microsoft told me that the Tablet PC ink recognizer is derived from the Newton's (in)famous recognizer via Pen & Internet's Calligrapher. Just to make things confusing, Pen & Internet ships a "next generation" handwriting recognition tool for the Tablet called RitePen. 30-day trial available.

Your tax dollars at work: the latest PC Magazine reports "Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory have developed software that can detect extremely tiny differences -- smaller than a fraction of a pixel -- between two digital images...."

Update: PC Mag's description is wildly inaccurate. The INEEL "breakthrough" is a program that rapidly aligns two digital images and then alternates them on-screen, which causes non-matched pixels to flicker, at which point the human observer notes the differences rapidly. The real impressive part is that "The alignment compensates for differences in camera angle, height, zoom or other distractions that previously confounded flip-flop comparisons."

All the Tablet bloggers are pitching in ideas for Microsoft's internal Power Toys competition (it's so easy to think of software). Loren's suggested a "snap on dwell" tool and Peter a "pen scrolling tool." So my suggestion is that if you can't pull off a fully customizable and skinnable tablet input panel (which, by the way, ought to have pen-friendly keyshapes):

...and you hate radial context menus...

... then can't you at least see that we need an IE toolbar with an ink-enabled address combobox?

Disruptive Programming Languages Technology Todd Proebsting, Microsoft Research, October 16, 6 PM - 9PM, PARC, Palo Alto. See you there!

Funny: A colleague of mine at SD Times tried to sign up for press credentials to Sun's SunNet conference and received the following error message:

Micro-expressions -- facial expressions that last a fraction of a second -- give away exactly how you feel, no matter how hard you try to conceal it. A CD-ROM set teaches how to detect the emotions people try to hide. By Kim Zetter. via [Wired News]

Okay, the particular application is cool, but what I'm really interested in is that video technology is where publishing technology was 20 years ago -- on the verge of a desktop revolution. The tools to assemble a professional video-based training product -- digital camcorders with Firewire/1394 capture, mikes, editing suites, and codecs -- have all moved into the consumer realm, just as the first PCs (or, more accurately, the first Macs) brought the tools necessary to create camera-ready copy into the consumer realm.

There are tons of video editing products out there, but their impetus is always movies / story-telling. Serious Magic is the only training-oriented I know of, and they're skewing towards corporate training and overemphasize their (nice) chromakeying feature. I'm much more interested in a product that retails for, say, $99ish that plays to the fact that everyone can coach something. Templates, scripts, some kind of simple animation technology (but stripped down: the animation should be to Macromedia Flash what Microsoft MovieMaker is to Adobe Premiere). I think there's a product there.

We had a lot of fun at the Portland .NET Users group showing the information that's publicly available on Whidbey, Yukon, and Longhorn (with a little Indigo thrown in).

We've posted our slides.  Feel free to check them out. via [Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog]

Good stuff, but be warned that this contains both speculation and some stuff that, I think, represents outdated strategies.

Don's take on the state of MS's developer relations (although, as he admits, he's no longer unbiased).

via [Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet]