We all went to see Spider-Man 3 last night and had a blast, lots of fun.
Very ambitious movie, almost tries to cover too much material.

"Next summer, the greatest battle lies... within."

"A strange black entity from another world bonds with Peter Parker and causes inner turmoil as he contends with new villains, temptations, and revenge."

Pretty cool looking at the statistical ratings for Spider-Man 3 at IMDB.com.

Interesting trivia:

• This film is reportedly the most expensive film ever made in U.S. dollars, with a budget of $250 million. This breaks King Kong (2005)’s record of $207 million, and in terms of adjusted dollars, would be third to Voyna i mir (1968)’s budget of $560 million.
• The over 600 latex "web" balloons in the celebration scene had to be hand-painted with a Sharpie marker.
• Thomas Haden Church worked out for 16 months to build up his physique to portray Sandman.
• Kirsten Dunst dyed her natural blond hair red for the role of Mary Jane Watson. Bryce Dallas Howard dyed her natural red hair blond for the role of Gwen Stacy.
• The film's translation in Russia is "Spider-Man 3: Enemy in the Reflection"

Joel Spolsky has an excellent article on office design, especially manufactured walls. It's really insightful.

Joel takes you through how FogCreek, paid for expensive office renovation, with their first office. All of which wasn't really tax deductible.

But with their new office they are going to use manufactured walls. Since manufactured walls are a real asset, not only can they write off the office expense, they even get to lease the purchase.

This explains why so many tech companies prefer cubicle farms over having real walls. But I think Joel's right, with manufactured walls you get the best of both worlds.

We're starting to outgrow our current office at Taylor Data Systems. I'm glad there are other options for us besides cube farms.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

Presentation Guru Guy Kawasaki discusses a rule called 10/20/30 PowerPoint rule in one of his recent blog posts. What is the 10/20/30 PowerPoint rule? He states, “a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Guy argues this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

Like they say in the Guinness commercials, "Brilliant!" I'm sold, and the fences this creates really helps keep things simple and easy for everyone presenters and listeners both.

I've started loking for good SilverLight / Windows Presentation Foundation examples.

Here are some I've found so far:

DENOUNCE
Podcast Listener and Blog Reader

NOSTALGIA 
Yahoo! Flickr Browser and Photo Manager

DA.CODE 
Interactive Trivia Game

CINE.VIEW 
Netflix for Your Desktop

Harmony: visualize your music library

One impressive feature of Windows Vista is its support for 3D. This proof-of-concept is a knock-off of Coverflow (recently integrated into iTunes) with a few extra "twists".

de.collage: 13 painters with a view

In French, "décollage", roughly translates to "take off" or "to become unstuck". This application queries the internet to bring famous paintings to your desktop.

Module: the right hand for your desktop

Can't wait for Microsoft Vista's Sidebar? Why not try ours? Simply launch the application, type in your zip code, and away you go.

Echobox: adding voice to design

Design is hard to manage by email. This proof-of-concept facilitates basic design collaboration via FTP.

fp.hue: color conversion for Sparkle

Sometimes you have to make your own tools. This widget converts HEX color values into Sparkle's floating point RGB values.

Windows Vista RTM - Demonstation of Windows ReadyBoost - Google Video

Last week Page Brooks, Chris Reeder, and I were discussing the benifits of Vista's ReadyBoost, especially for laptops. Here's a video that should help demonstrate the power of ReadyBoost.

I've embedded the video below, so if you rss reader supports it you're all set.

The code camp is Saturday, May 12, all day, at the Central Piedmont Community College.

For more information and to register, visit http://www.developersguild.org/codecamp/2007/.

The 2007 Charlotte Code Camp will be held on Saturday, May 12th with CPCC and Microsoft to bring another Code Camp to Charlotte! A full Saturday of "primo" hands-on labs and tech presentations covered up with code, code, and more code.

I'd love to attend the XNA Simulation Labs, but I think I'll attend the Presentations track.

.NET University Labs

This track is designed to give you a good technical introduction to the four new technologies that ship with .NET 3.0: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and Windows CardSpace.

XNA Simulation Labs

XNA is Microsoft's new game development platform for Windows and the XBOX 360. This track is designed to give you a good technical introduction to how to develop a game on these platforms.

Presentations

This non-lab track will present upcoming technologies including Orcas (VS 2007) and LINQ as well as solutions to everyday developer issues like the Building Blocks of a production ASP.NET application and building custom webparts for WSS V3.

Sign up now!

Tim Sneath's post Our First WPF End-To-End Reference Sample: Family.Show caught my eye today, and boy am I glad it did.

I have to admit from what I've seen Microsoft and Vertifo Software have done an outstanding job on Family.Show. It is definitely more than a demo, I'm not sure reference application does it justice.

You can install and run it using ClickOnce, btw. :) Source code is available. Be sure to check out the lab to see more projects.

"Microsoft and Vertigo Software launched of a brand new end-to-end reference sample for WPF."

"Available for download immediately, Family.Show is a genealogy explorer that allows you to create or import a family tree and explore, annotate or save it to XPS."

"Our designers employed every trick in the WPF book– styles, resources, templates, data binding, animation, transforms– to present an innovative visualization of the classic family tree, freeing our developers to concentrate on behind-the-scenes features like XPS, P/Invoke wrapper for Windows Vista common dialogs, and ClickOnce for WPF."

If you are into data models or databases be sure to check out the following:

Library of Free Data Models from DatabaseAnswers.org

Highlights:

1. Here are about 450 very useful 'Kick-Start' Data Models.
2. Ten of the Data Models are featured in the Express Edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
3. Here are the Top 20 Data Models.
4. The site also has a Data Model Search facility.
5. A new Tutorial on Understanding a Database Schema.
6. Awesome FAQ, you will find something cool here.

This site is kind of like the Super DBA's scratch pad. If you look around and you'll find some gems.

Get accepted into Windows Home Server Beta 2.

Windows Home Server
https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer

Install TVersity on WHS.

TVersity is Release 0.9.9.1 (November 26, 2006)
http://www.tversity.com/download.html

TVersity QuickStart Guide
http://tversity.com/support/quickstart/

DivX - XBox 360 Guide
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1002/2

Install DivX Windows Media CoDec on WHS

DivX Windows Media CoDec
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/ACE_Mega_CoDecS_Pack.htm

Since Windows Home Server runs on a modified version Windows 2003 Small Business Server, you can install the Windows Media related codecs from the Ace codec pack instead (this is because WMP 11 is not currently available on this systems).

Connect to WHS from XBox 360

Enjoy the show!

The Technology Specialist (TS) Exam 70-540: TS: Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 - Application Development is in development.

Exam Topics Covered

The following list includes the topic areas covered on this exam. The percentage indicates the portion of the exam that addresses a particular skill.

You probably already know that Daylight Saving Time has been extended by 4 weeks. This is a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It will begin 3 weeks earlier in the spring, and end 1 week later in the fall.

If you have a Windows Mobile device you should know that your devices are probably not ready for this decision. Just in time, Microsoft has released a series of updates that should correct for this.

Windows Mobile Updates for Daylight Saving Time (PocketPC)

Windows Mobile Updates for Daylight Saving Time (Desktop Tool)

Windows Mobile Updates for Daylight Saving Time (Smartphone)

Windows Mobile Updates for Daylight Saving Time (Windows CE)

So now the question is does it support cold-boot recovery or does the device forget about DST everytime the battery dies etc? Hmm... ;) [Windows Mobile & DST: It's like nailing jelly to a wall.]

The Making of the Windows Mobile Updates for Daylight Saving Time

In the begining Microsoft had a knowledgebase article that simply listed the registry changes that needed to be made and left it up to the poor reader to implement the modifications.

I couldn't help but thinking isn't that like Microsoft saying you need to chop down this tree and here's an axehead. Huh? I hate to think it is really all that difficult to create an Windows Mobile cab file. ;)

Fortunately, edgeblog took the requirements and released the results as a cab file.

It's even worse for Windows CE device users. (BTW did you notice any update links missing up above!) Here's an article that gives their options:

Method 1 (for end users): Manually adjust the clock for daylight saving time
You can manually adjust the clock for daylight saving time. To do this, follow these steps:

1. In Control Panel, open Date/Time.
2. In the Date/Time Properties dialog box, make sure that the time zone is set to the correct time zone for your area.
3. Click to clear the Automatically adjust clock for daylight saving check box.
4. Click OK.
5. Manually adjust the clock at the start of daylight saving time and at the end of daylight saving time.

Ha, I love it! That's funny! There's a method 2, and it basically says contact the OEM. Ha! Stop! Your killing me! No seriously, I really laughed out loud when I read that.

Can't you see the new advertising campaign: Windows CE now with Manual Clock 2.0!