Quiet New Year’s Eve?
For those who are having a quiet relaxing, stay-at-home, internet-and-slippers sort of New Year’s Eve, there’s a bunch of people over on DailyKos.com getting competitive about who’s having the lamest New Year’s Eve.
Last Book of 2005
We’re cleaning up the house for a little New Year’s party tonight, but I’ve been a bum because I’m also trying to finish a book I’ve been reading over the holidays: “We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs” by Nasrin Alavi.
I read Anthony Shadid’s excellent book “Night Draws Near” earlier this year, and “We Are Iran” reminds me of it in some ways. They’re both books about countries that the current U.S. administration has dubbed “evil,” and they’re both full of real words from real people on the street, instead of pontifications from pundits and politicians or the view from inside American military hardware through the eyes of young soldiers or the oxymoron of “embedded journalists.” With all due respect to those sorts of perspectives, I’m a lot more interested in what real people have to say about the things happening in their own back yards.
“We Are Iran” is mostly about the blogs coming out of Iran during the last two years. There is a rich, vibrant blog culture in Iran that has been a huge thorn in the side of the idealistic and disconnected regime. While those in power recite religious platitudes and make excuses for their corruption and ineffectiveness, men and women are risking their personal safety to get the truth out, and doing so under conditions of constant surveillance and heavy-handed “anti-terrorist” tactics employed by shady and unaccountable government and military organizations.
Oops, I digress. Back to Iran …
Iran’s blogging counterculture is largely unknown in the West, in part because many of the blogs are written in Farsi. Farsi is the fourth most common language for blogs worldwide, and there are more Iranian blogs than Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese or Russian blogs. Another reason for the lack of awareness of Iranian blogs is the fact they’re mostly opposed to the non-elected clerics who run the country, so there is no coverage of these people in the official Iranian media.
The book presents little summaries of political and cultural events in recent Iranian history, followed by excerpts from blogs that have covered those events. The format works very well, because many of the blog posts are things you’d not understand unless you know the background of the events being discussed.
A sense of humor is prevalent throughout many of the blogs, such as the quote on FaranGeopolis that translates into English as “God invented war so that Americans can learn geography!” Or this great post on “How to Liberate Iran” by Sharif N. Mashi. I felt much more hopeful for Iran’s future after reading the book, not least because it’s clear that the current generation has no respect for the hard-line Islamic fundamentalists who have presided over Iran’s economic decline. As in Cuba, it’s hard to keep the people happy with talk of anti-imperialism if the average family is worse off 20 years after the revolution.
After I finish this book, I’m going to read “Come Back to Afghanistan” by Said Hyder Akbar, the teenage son of Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman Said Fazel Akbar. This guy was a Californian of Afghan descent, had lived in the U.S. his whole life, and then was thrust back into Afghanistan as part of the new post-Taliban power elite. Hyder’s perspective has been described as “heartbreaking and hilarious” — I hope that’s true. And as long as I’m studying the Axis of Evil, anybody know where I can find a funny political book by a North Korean these days?
OK, I can’t hide from the vaccuum cleaner any longer … finished the book, even blogged about it … nowhere left to hide, time to get cleaning …
Sniper on Highway 167
Last night, we went to a movie: the recent remake of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” There were less than a dozen people in the theatre, and I don’t know why. I mean, for a chick flick, the two lead characters were pretty hot.
Anyway, enough of my review. As we were leaving the theatre (the one across from the Keg on East Valley Road, not far from the Spot Tavern), we saw flashing blue lights across the street. Police cars had the on-ramp and off-ramp of 167 blocked. We turned left (north) on East Valley, and headed toward Renton. Soon we saw police cars all over the place, all with their lights flashing, blocking access to 167 from 405 and Rainier Avenue.
It seems that somebody had a rifle and was taking shots at police officers from the hill above Highway 167 in the dark. It’s morning now, and I’ve tried to learn more on-line, but so far there aren’t many details available.
Learning About Office 12
2006 is going to be a big year for Microsoft Office, and I’m going to cover a lot of the details right here. Office 12 will ship later in the year, and it will be the biggest, boldest upgrade of Office ever. The user interface has been radically simplified, the developer APIs are much more open and robust, and the file formats are more open and much harder to accidentally corrupt. Office is now a set of server products as well as desktop client applications, and that opens up a whole new world of opportunities for independent software vendors (ISVs).
If you’re interested in learning more about what’s coming, here are a few links worth checking out:
Jensen Harris, a Lead Program Manager on Office 12, has an excellent list of 30 articles about the Office 12 user interface on his blog.
One of the key changes in Office 12 is the XML file formats. The documents you create in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are saved as a bunch of XML files in a ZIP package, and this opens open many creative possibilities for developers. For one thing, you can programmatically create, read and modify documents without even running the Office software, using simple industry-standard tools like PKZIP and Notepad.
The best demos of the XML file format that I’ve seen were done by Brian Jones, another Program Manager working on Office. Brian used to work on the Word team and is now focused on the XML file formats in general. Check out his blog for lots of great information about how the new XML formats work.
And for the official word on all things Office, check out Microsoft’s Office 12 preview site.
Those links are good places to start, and in January I’ll be posting a lot more links, screen shots, code samples, and other Office 12 info right here.
Blog Revisions Done For Now
As the final step on revising the blog for now, I’ve changed the header image. That’s a shot of the keyboard of our upright piano, which Megan had delivered in December. I’ve started playing again after a long layoff, as seems to happen every few years.
What fun to have a real piano again, although the fingers are a bit out of shape. Practice, practice, practice. But when?
Oh, one other thing that I changed is permalinks. Now the URL of each post is a plain-English version of the title and the date posted. Try clicking on the title of this post, and note the address you’ll see in the Address box. Enabling permalinks just required a change to a setting in Wordpress and an .htaccess hack, as described on the Wordpress Codex.
Past posts are still available via their cryptic numeric URLs in addition to the new link style, so this change doesn’t break any existing links to my blog.
Working from Home
Ah, the joy of working from home. Went out to Susan’s 5100 Bistro for lunch, and had a delicious 5100 Burger.
Susan’s has good food and a casual approach. They don’t wait tables, you order at the counter, sit down, and then they bring your food out to you. Try the panini sandwich in the morning. Mmm.
Microsoft’s 2006 Tidal Wave
There are a huge number of new Microsoft products coming out next year. I’ve been very focused on Office 12 and related products, but there are also thousands of people around here working on other products I don’t even know about. Oh yeah, and there’s Vista too (the next version of Windows).
Here’s a good preview of what’s coming, from a link on Scoble’s blog today. I’m pretty sure this will be the most lines of code a company has ever shipped in a year.
For those who spend their time trying to make the point that Microsoft has become irrelevant to the future of computing, I expect 2006 will be as unsatisfying as any of the last 20 years were. But no matter how dead the horse, the beatings continue.
Category Icons, Release 1.0
After a few changes in my original plan, the category icons are now working. I decided that it was too cluttered to have an icon on every single post, so there are now three categories:
- Office 12 posts, with the icon you see on this post (above).
- Doug’s Photos posts, with the icon you can see on things like the Christmas Day post below.
- All other posts, which don’t have an icon.
In the past, I always put thumbnails of photos on the posts that included photos, so that you could tell at a glance there was a picture available. Going forward, I think I’ll do that less often to keep the RSS feeds quick and simple.
For those who are curious about such things, here’s the code I added to my post.php file to get the category icons to appear:
< ?php if ( in_category('5') ) { ?>
<img src=”http://www.mahugh.com/images/icon_o12.jpg” border=0 alt=”Office 12 post” align=right style=”margin: 0″/>
< ?php } else { ?>
< ?php if ( in_category('6') ) { ?>
<img src=”http://www.mahugh.com/images/icon_doug.gif” border=0 alt=”Doug’s photos post” align=right style=”margin: 0″/>
< ?php } else { ?>
< ?php } ?>
< ?php } ?>
Note that this code is in post.php so that it runs every time a post is displayed. At first I put it in index.php, but that only makes the icons appear in the blog home page, and not in things like the Christmas Day link above. The legend in the sidebar on the right, however, is in index.php so that it will only appear on the home page.
Category Icons
For the next step in customizing my blog, I’ve decided to go back to using categories, but in a very limited way. Here’s the deal …
I have always had a web site (”blog” for you young kids) where I post stories, pictures, opinions, links and other stuff I think my friends and family might find interesting. In recent years that has become mostly about pictures, as you can see at Mahugh.com.
But now, as part of my new job, I’m going to start posting more technical content related to Office 12 and Sharepoint software development topics. So the site will have two types of content, and two groups of readers that may overlap a little. My Mom probably won’t take the time to try any of the Office 12 code samples I’ll be posting, and I’m guessing that an ISV I direct to my blog may be similarly uninterested in the latest pictures of Megan’s cats. (Well, you never know.)
So I’m going to hack The Wordpress Loop that drives my Wordpress blog, and make it distinguish between these two posts in a visual way. I want all posts to appear in a predictable chronological order, but I want it to be obvious at a glance which ones are from Doug the Office 12 Evangelist and which are from Doug the Amateur Photographer.
When I’m writing as an Office 12 Evangelist, I’ll categorize those posts in a way that makes the Office logo appear on them, as shown here.
And when I’m posting my pictures or other non-business stuff, I’ll make it show a little icon of me with my camera.
Now I just have to get that working, of course …
Can You Draw?
I sure can’t. So this link, which my brother Ken forwarded me this morning, may be even more impressive to me than to most:
http://www.pelourinho.com/movies/c003702/
Click on the 16X option if you’re in a hurry. Thanks, Ken!
(Does anybody remember that guy who used to give performance-art shows where he would draw on a screen with sand, and it was projected up on the wall behind him? This link reminded me of that stuff. Who was that guy?)
