Web Activities in Windows Live

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Windows Live becomes more open to other Web-based platforms. Maybe this was there already before, however, I haven’t seen it, yet. Windows Live is able to consume further events from platforms. Among the supported ones you will find TripIt, Flickr, Twitter and others.

Windows Live Web activities

Adding the applications is quite easy. Sometimes (e.g. for TripIt) you have to sign in and to confirm.

Share your activity on Windows Live

Looking forward to find even more supported activities in the future. It looks definitely like a step towards the right direction.

Photosynth goes Live

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Live Maps came up with a new feature where you can find your Synths on the map. However, not easy to find whilst looking the first time for it.

Live Maps

To get the Photosynth collections, zoom into any area of interest, and select Collections and Explore Collections from the upper right menus.

Collections

On the left side you can choose from which collections the results should be displayed. The fourth icon provides a list of Synths from the region in the viewed area.

Synths

First Impressions on Google Chrome

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Google Chome is out:

“Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”

It looks very lightweight, though. Reminds me to the early beginnings of Netscape and Internet Explorer. It gives you the impression that it’s quite fast. However, during rendering it looks a bit like Safari.

Google Chrome

For some pages that look quite nice in Firefox and Internet Explorer, rendering also behaves a bit odd. So, is this one more browser we have to test our Web application against?

Messed Up Rendering in Google Chrome

One feature provided is the creation of application shortcuts on your desktop that will open the Web site in its own, plain window. Very nice but failed several times when I tried. not sure if it’s worth switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Source: http://www.google.com/chrome

Synthing Karlsruhe

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I did a third Synth, this time I got it 100% synthy. In this try, I used about 30 images of Karlsruhe, I did during a night session. I also used a panorama, I created out of a few of this images. This seems to be a quite good approach to help Photosynth to create the good Synth.

 I’ve also used the first time the map feature you can find at your Synth’s page.

Map

You simply select the place, where your Synth belongs to and save it along with it.

Location of Synth

Synthing Your Photos

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Since Photosynth was announced the very first time, I was keen to try out this technology. Finally, Photosynth became public and you can create your own synths.

After installing the Browser plug-in you select “Create your Synth” on the Photosynth Web site.

Microsoft Live Labs - Photosynth

To sign in you’ll need a Windows Live account – probably you have a messenger account. You’ll start a synth by selecting a set of photos.

Photosynth - Start new synth dialog

The dialog is quite self-evident. Don’t forget to select the license you want to use for the synth. That’s quite important as each and every synth is public available.

Photosynth - Create synth dialog

Select “Synth” and then just wait…

Photosynth - Generating synth dialog

You’ll probably get a good “synthy” rate.

Photosynth - Synth completed dialog

And that’s what you finally get:

Source: http://www.photosynth.net/

delicious.com

tools,

Have you realized? del.icio.us got a new URI: http://delicious.com. Johannes Meinecke pointed out the new toolbar for Internet Explorer which is quite an improvement to the previously offered buttons.

aheil @ delicious.com

Since I use multiple machines for development at work and university but also at home, delicious became one of my favorite tools for managing bookmarks. The best feature coming with the new toolbar is definitely the complete integration into the browser. By selecting one of the bookmarks you can directly change it’s properties without browsing to the delicious site.

Source: http://delicious.com/help/tools

Fight Back SPAM

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For some days, it looks like there are some issues with the Akismet API. A couple of SPAM entries found their way into my blog not being monitored by the service at all. Now I decided to give ReverseDOS a try.

ReverseDOS Homepage

It’s a small HttpModule developed by Michael K. Campbell. Let’s see what he is going to say about ReverseDOS:

“ReverseDOS is a very simple HttpModule that checks various parts of incoming requests against a list of crap that you don’t want pushed on to your site. If ReverseDOS detects a match, it attempts to stall the requesting client for a number of seconds (specified in a .config file). During this loop, which uses virtually no server resources – and only a tiny smidgen of bandwidth, ReverseDOS checks every .3 seconds to see if the client is still connected. If the spammer disconnects, good riddance. If the spammer sticks around, they’re finally rewarded with the Response Headers – containing an HTTP 403 – Access Denied Response Code.”

Does not sound too bad, does it? Since I run my own server now it is a cinch to get it run. Deployment is quite easy, copying the bits, the configuration file and adding one line to your Web.config. Following the installation instructions, it took a few minutes to get everything set up. So far, it looks like it runs fine with dasBlog 2.0. I’ll give the default configuration file a try, before I see what to add there.

RSS for CRUD Events

webcomposition, , ,

With the last update on the WebComposition/DGS, we now provide RSS feeds for CRUD events. Therefore, the Meta-URI /meta is extended by the additional path segments /meta/crud, /meta/crud and /meta/crud/rss. The Meta-URI /meta/crud can be extended to /meta/crud/create, /meta/crud/read, /meta/crud/update and /meta/crud/delete. Each URI points to a certain set of events. The event URIs in form of http://www.example.org/meta/crud/abab1c07-9262-4e6a-9f52-3dc497ef92f1 point directly to the RDF of the corresponding event.

CRUD Event RSS Feed

Following this HTTP-URI will lead directly to corresponding description of the events as seen below. Therefore, we take care of our carefully chosen URI concept within the WebComposition/DGS approach.

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:meta="http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/meta/"
         xmlns:ns="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
         xmlns:crud="http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/crud#">
    <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService">
        <meta:event>
            <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService/meta/crud/abab1c07-9262-4e6a-9f52-3dc497ef92f1">
                <ns:date>2008-05-15T19:20:13.7+02:00</ns:date>
                <ns:creator />
                <crud:read rdf:resource="http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService/foobar" />
            </rdf:Description>
        </meta:event>
    </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

A more visual depiction of the event can looks like below. Following the RDF data you are pointed to the resource that was affected by the event.

CRUD Events

<pre>

&lt;rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=&quot;http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#&quot;
xmlns:meta=&quot;http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/meta/&quot;
xmlns:ns=&quot;http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/&quot;
xmlns:crud=&quot;http://www.webcomposition.net/2008/02/dgs/crud#&quot;&gt;
&lt;rdf:Description rdf:about=&quot;http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService&quot;&gt;
&lt;meta:event&gt;
&lt;rdf:Description rdf:about=&quot;http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService/meta/crud/abab1c07-9262-4e6a-9f52-3dc497ef92f1&quot;&gt;
&lt;ns:date&gt;2008-05-15T19:20:13.7+02:00&lt;/ns:date&gt;
&lt;ns:creator /&gt;
&lt;crud:read rdf:resource=&quot;http://www.foo.bar/DataGridService/foobar&quot; /&gt;
&lt;/rdf:Description&gt;
&lt;/meta:event&gt;
&lt;/rdf:Description&gt;
&lt;/rdf:RDF&gt;

</pre>