Caught Up

So I'm finally caught up on my blog reading. After being on vacation for five days, I had over 500 unread entries. Read some, marked most as read even though I hadn't. This problem is going to only get worse as I find more interesting blogs to read.

What I want is for my news reader to suggest to me which of my unread entries I am most likely to be interested in. The question is, how to rank all the unranked entries?

Visualizing Information

My friend Matt blogged ReMail, a research prototype email client from the IBM Watson Research Center. Matt's right that many of these features of ReMail are already in Outlook 2003 (List Seperators, Annotations, Threads, Collections). But what makes ReMail really cool is their visualizations. "The visualizations in Remail were designed to help people see connections between messages and people that would otherwise be invisible." I'm going to need to read more about Thread Arcs.

This cool visualization reminds me of a research talk I got to see by Alison Lee from IBM Watson Research on campus a couple of weeks ago. Among other things, she showed off eTree: "A Browse and Query Interface for Online Communities". Basically, its a tool for visualizing the activity of a web discussion forum (such as the ASP.NET Forums). In this idiom, each branch of the tree is a forum and each leaf on the tree is a thread. "Hot" threads become flowers on the branch. Older posts are dark green while newer posts are lighter. Members of the community are rendered as circles around the outside of the tree - selecting a user highlights the threads they have participated in.

What's really exciting is that researchers are starting to look at blogging. I know lots of people were interested in the Wallop project from the MS Research Social Computing Group that was highlighted @ PDC. I want to see this technology make it into blogger tools.

Interoperability Pattern and Practice

There's a new Pattern and Practice out: Application Interoperability: Microsoft .NET and J2EE. This is complementary to the .NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit by my teammate Simon Guest.

FYI, I have links to many of the Patterns and Practices under "Architecture" on my Linkroll. This new one is under "Guidance". There are also sections for Application Blocks, Lifecycle Management and Patterns.

True Fresco

For vacation this past week, my family went to Los Angeles to visit friends and family. We got to see some of my old college friends as well as Julie's brother, dad and best friend. We also went by our old apartment building to see iLia and Elena Anossov, the apartment managers, as well as their son Phillip. In addition to managing our old apartment building, they are both artists. Ilia is one of the few fresco masters living in the US. In addition to his art, he also runs a variety of online properties dedicated to fresco painting. You can check out his portfolio, read his bio, learn about fresco painting, take a fresco painting class, view the fresco image database or read the Fresco Painting Society Weblog (RSS subscribed).

I'm reading Jeff's account of the mural for his wife with great interest. I don't think I want to invest in such a project in my current house, but in a few years when we move on to something bigger (hopefully) then I hope I can bring Ilia (and family) up to paint a fresco mural for my house.

Custom dasBlog Macro

I'm back from vacation and I just had to deploy a small dasBlog update that I hacked up while I was on the plane and my wife and son were sleeping. Clemens posted on the GDN workspace about registering your own macro classes. The theme that my wife wanted for her weblog comes with a variety of different sayings for the top of the page (My Journal, Welcome, Listen To My Cheery Chirpings, etc). I thought it would be cool if the image rotated or changed every time you came to the site. So I built my own custom macro class that overrides the radio.macros.imageUrl macro. Now, if you pass in a series of images seperated by vertical pipes (i.e. "image1.gif|image2.gif|image3.gif"), it will split out into an array of image urls and pick one at random. Pretty cool. Anyone want to see the code?