To me Wikis are an excellent means of eliciting distributed knowledge for the purpouse of creating a loosely coupled knowledge exchange. Think of collaborative team blogging and you are pretty much on the mark with what a Wiki does. 

Within organisations we would call that intellectual property (IP) or a knowledge management system, but to everyone else its basically a public knowledge base on a particular topic.  

Right now Google seems to be the indexing engine for everything including Wikis. But once people start to realise the power of contextual recursive queries (a mouthful I know - ie. recursive search refinements), you will end up with a very powerful "Oracle" of wisdom.  

Google presently with its page raking technology sort of does this, but a truely semantic web will seriously benefit from improved contextual search semantics.  However, this means sharing all our search queries with search engines - and we don't want to do that just yet.  Detailed user profiles can be quickly built that way – sadly that kind of gets in the way of privacy on the Internet.

But not so within the corporate boundaries. Now picture this...

Is it any surprise that the Microsoft SharePoint team has now added Blogging and Wikis into their latest version? Nope.  Sharepoint is supposed to be the enterprise knowledge management system with document libraries on steroids - right?  And they are continually improving their search technology - its not contextual yet but they will get there or perhaps an ISV will beat them to it with a plug-in. 

So while initially most people (corporate especially) are going to be very surprised at the inclusion of a Wiki and Blog support in Sharepoint, the end game strategy behind the product is pretty clever.

Next I am just going to have to wait for the Sharepoint Community Edition product which only does blogs and wikis. Until then why don't you guys browse over to the new MSDN Wiki and contribute a few brain cycles and keystrokes to improvements in the MSDN documentation.

Click over to it here http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com.

I've had a pretty interesting day today.  Heck, I could almost say I have one of those every day, so much usually happens in it.

Let me start and work it backwords.

• I just released the #2nd episode of the Microsoft Developer Show that I have started. You can click right thru to it from here: http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/msdev/2005/04/13/the-microsoft-developer-show-2/    I got Dr. Neil Roodyn (www.roodyn.com) on the show and we had a pretty fun time talking about all things Software and Microsoft.  The audio seemed to play up at one point but the rest of the show turned out ok. Neil's audio was a little crackly by its not too bad overall.  The next interview should have even better audio quality - I am still learning.

• The project that I am currently on, desperately needs a VBA developer so I frantically made calls and posted to the aus-dotnet mailing list.  Got a few interested guys, but nothing concrete as yet.   Good .Net devs are easy to find but VBA people, hmmm.. not so easy from what I am finding.   So, if you're a senior developer and awesome in Excel VBA , and you happen to be free for the next 2 weeks drop me a line.  I need an onsite resource to maintain an application for me.

• Earlier today I also had a phone interview with Sarah Stokely for her story that should be making an appearance in the next edition of the Microsoft MSDN magazine.  It's about all things User Group and Online Communities related.  She's also doing the rounds calling a few other community guys, so if you haven't got a call yet expect one soon.
• Got up at 6:30 am to hit the road and discovered that for some reason the traffic was a shocker. Dandenong Rd, what is happening to you!! My melbourne is growing so fast that the roads are not handing the masses of traffic.  The Weekend Age had an article about how Melbourne has grown more than Sydney this year. We have around 102K new people living in this great city of ours. I just wish we had wider roads to cope with then all.  
• 4:30 am - woke up for no reason
• 3:30 am - house door bell went off. Went to investigate and found that noone was there.  We have a wireless doorbell, one of the bugs in the system is that once the battery start to go low (in the bell or remote buzzer) the stupid thing starts to ring for no reason.  Funny that, it seems that they always seem to go flat around 2am every year or so.

Enuff of my rummblings... Adios Amigos and hope you tune into (download!) my PodCast MS Developer Show... I need some sleep now! ZZZzzzzzzzz

Yes! I have finally done it!

Cameron Reilly from The Podcast Network asked if I would be willing to do a developer centric show on their network. After some thinking about it, I did agree to devote whatever spare time I have in my day to delivering a radio-like show.  Thus The Microsoft Developer Show was born!

The first episode is now available from the podcast network at the following URL:  http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/msdev/

Go and check it out RIGHT NOW! Have a listen and let me know how I can make it better and more interesting. I want to make it unique and listener centric so I am TOTALLY open to suggestions and ideas!

Go grab it and let me know your thoughts!

Admit it guys, you’ve all thought about Wardriving!  Am I right? Common you can tell me, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I confess I have warchalked (minus the chalking) way before people even knew about it. As a matter of fact, a little bit of Australian pop trivia for you all. 

Question: Who set up Australia’s longers WiFi multi-hop link using 802.11?
Answer: Way back in 1998 (the dawn of WiFi) my Monash University buddies and I set up a 13km multi-hop link for the TOOLS Pacific conference here in Melbourne. Back in those days I used the AeroNet gear which cost $4K+ per Access Point, and way before Cisco acquired that company.  Back then, even the AeroNet folks did not believer we could do it… so we told them how once we showed it off 8-)

Well more recently, ahmmm… last night I decided to do a bit of drive around my local neighborhood. The results were a little predictable but also unexpected. I had my GPS with me so ended up recording the locations as well, which gives a whole new depth to the kinds of data that is available now on my trusty laptop.  With my Microsoft MapPoint account and Australian maps I could plot these now. Hmmm..Would anyone want to see these? 8-) 

As it turned out, the business section and the mall had a lot of WiFi APs but most of them were WEP enabled. Which was great to see - well done folks!

However, there were some completely open and almost all the ones in the private areas of my drive by area were completely insecure.  I didn’t stop and try to access of these but these certainly looked very “available” for abuse!  Very very scary stuff indeed!  Esp since one handed me an IP a little too quickly.

So here are the statistics. In the 20 minutes that I spent driving around (covering as many blocks side by side consistently) I found a total of 38 access points (APs). Of those 12 were completely insecure, which means that approximately 31.5% of all APs in my region are open to abuse.  Sadly, most of these are domestic which means that I am sure there are people taking advantage of “Free downloads & bandwidth” and getting unusually high MB counts on their bills.

Guys, so what sorts of stats are you seeing in your neighborhoods and regions?  Does any one know or care?

Also, would any of you be interested in WarDriving activities in and around Melbourne? I had some ideas for WarDriving games on weekends, if I can find enough of interested people to get the numbers up. I was thinking of FoxHunting like games with mobile APs! 8-)

Well it seems that Google is also trying to grow their competitive technology in the similar online mapping space of Microsoft MapPoint - they call it Google Maps.

Check it out here.

It seems that this technology appears to shares the same underlying map data that Microsoft and most other parties are using to generate their rendered vector map -> raster images.

With this in mind - I wonder when the Google team will open this up as a web service! And start to charge for the experience. With so many "googliservices" (new word?) they are doing a pretty darn good job of innovating the search space.

Which reminds me, has anyone seen the Amazon owned A9.com street level Yellow Pages searching? The one with maps and street picture searching? It's very very cool! Check it out here! I especially love the way you can scan left and right down the street to see what other shops are next to the store you are looking up.

I think the digital world is finally starting to mix with the real world - Oops! I think I swallowed both the red and blue pills!

For those of you that came along to the Microsoft Security Summit in Melbourne would have most likely been overwhelmed with the masses of people that showed up – 1400 as I have been told by my MS buddies!

For those that came along to visit and caught up with me at the WinXP Media Center Edition stand (the one with 50+ people at it at any one time and loud music) hope you got bitten by the “I want this at home” bug. Lots of folks want one now!

I found that standing on my feet for most of the day was rather tiring so when I retired to the MSDN Connections lounge (You’re all members right?) I got chatting with a whole bunch of interesting folks in there (they had seats to chill out on) and ice cream to munch on (to keep you chilling further - thanks to Kathleen Koo).

Andrew Coates and I, even geeked out while he showed me the latest version of Visual FoxPro. Rather freaky as I still recall some of the Dbase console commands which still work (with intellisense amazingly) in it! 

Biztalk Bill introduced me to www.iburst.com.au (web site seems to be down) and some of the cheapest wireless access in the country.

And I made some predictions about IT outsourcing and why things will not work, and when they actually will work really well.

After the event we all headed out for drinks and then off to dinner.  We ended up at the Blue Train in southbank where we waited for ages for food and sweated in the head of the warm day. But the conversation was good along with the company.

Matt Trentini took a whole bunch of photos at the Summit and also over dinner. Our mug shots are making an appearance here!

I am still operating on a different time zone so I am feeling remakably awake at 11pm Melbourne time! Since the brain is kicking over in 4th gear, I've been catching up on my blog reading addiction. It's almost impossible for me to read everyone's blogs in one sitting but I am trying.

I also read lots of the blogs from the Microsoft folks and came across an interesting link. The sitename is certainly an interesting one, but the page content is what might be of use. If you like the MSN Desktop Search tool, there will be some cool shortcuts for you here!

http://www.bibleplayer.com/toolbarshortcuts/

BTW, I've also just discovered by reading Frank Arrigo's blog that he has been sick again! Hope you're feeling much better Amigo... 

I am slowly setting into post-Sri Lanka trip life again. And while preparing (ahmm.. reminding myself) to deliver a Training course this week to a local ISV on .Net and v2 bits.  I've come across the download location for the MS Anti-Spyware I blogged about before my trip.

If you want to download it and check it out it is available from http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

I am OK and still in Sri Lanka! Here’s a quick update before I return home in the next 48hrs or so.

This is the first time in the last 3 weeks that I have touched a PC keyboard. My inbox has 2700 emails to be read. So for those of you that have written to me, I’ve seen a couple previews in my Outlook Web Access (my access is very slow here), thanks for your comments & concerns guys! And Happy 2005, despite the troubles in this part of the world.

I am an unaffected by the Earthquake and the Tsunami. I woke up during the earthquake in my hotel room, and then saw (& filmed) a huge cargo ship in the Colombo Harbor on it side - it sank later!

I’ve been fortunate that I have not been caught up in the Tsunami. We had planned to go to Galle (east coast tourist resort area of Sri Lanka) but we couldn’t get rooms, so decided to do a day trip instead. Later, the day trip was cancelled due to having to coordinate too many people – so it did not happen. If we did manage to go, I might not be writing this right now.

I will blog some more when I am back in Australia about what I have seen happening in Sri Lanka during this time. But before I go, please donate whatever you can to the international relief funds as Sri Lanka and the other affected countries really need a lot of help - these people have nothing and the relief is not getting through as fast as you may expect.

A lot of people here have been directly affected by the Tsunami, their relatives; work colleagues, friends, etc have lost their lives in the disaster. New Year’s Eve celebrations were cancelled across the country as a day of national mourning was declared.

I don't know about you guys but I've had this feeling every time Steve Ballmer or Jim Allchin made a reference to tackling spyware head on and with a lot of energy. I kept thinking of two things each time I heard those guys talk about the customer "pain" that we are all feeling. These were:

Q1 - I wondered which group at MS Corp was working on anti-spyware? I certainly never came across anyone even making references to these things in all the groups that I know at MS.

Q2 - Who would MS acquire, should they really needed to deliver something to customers in an aggressive speed-to-market time frame?

Well the answers turned out to be as such:

A1 - The M&A (Merger and Acquisition) team was working on it 8-) A group I do not have any visibility into.

A2 - the GIANT Company... read the public MS press release for more info on this below. And get ready for a new tool for your fav operating system.

And before you guys start to ask me when will MS be getting into anti-virus software? Well you did know that MS bought the Romanian antivirus GeCAD technology company back in June 2003 right!?

REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 16, 2004 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has acquired GIANT Company Software Inc., a provider of top-rated anti-spyware and Internet security products. Microsoft will use intellectual property and technology assets from the acquisition to provide Microsoft® Windows® customers with new tools to help protect them from the threat of spyware and other deceptive software. In addition, key personnel from GIANT Company will be joining Microsoft’s security efforts.

“Spyware is a serious and growing problem for PC users, and customers have made it clear that they want Microsoft to deliver effective solutions to protect against the threat,” said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of the Security Business and Technology Unit at Microsoft. “Through this acquisition we’re excited to be able to provide near-term relief to Windows customers by offering new technology to help keep spyware and other deceptive software off their PCs.”

Microsoft plans to make available to Windows customers a beta version of a spyware protection, detection and removal tool, based on the GIANT AntiSpyware product, within one month. The upcoming beta will scan a customer’s PC to locate spyware and other deceptive software threats and enable customers to remove them. The tool will be configurable to block known spyware and other unwanted software from being installed on the computer. It will be available for Microsoft Windows 2000 and later versions.

Spyware is an emerging breed of malicious software that can range from unwanted pop-up ads to unseen programs that record keystrokes or take over a person’s PC. Spyware and other unwanted software can slow PC performance, change a computer’s configuration, and steal passwords and personal information. A November 2004 IDC study estimated that 67 percent of consumer PCs are infected with some form of spyware.

“Spyware is an industrywide challenge, and it is encouraging to see Microsoft take strong action to protect Windows users,” said Chris Christiansen, vice president of security products and services program at IDC. “This announcement and the release of the free beta will help consumers regain control over their PCs.”

“Microsoft’s investment in GIANT Company means Windows customers will benefit from our anti-spyware technology, which puts the control of software back into the hands of users where it belongs,” said Ron Franczyk, co-founder and president of technology at GIANT Company. “The GIANT solution uses extensive spyware-signature databases, real-time security agents and an innovative ‘neighborhood watch’ for spyware to protect customers from the threat of spyware and other deceptive software.”

Terms of the acquisition were not announced. Details of the Microsoft solution beyond the planned beta, including product plans, pricing and a timeline for delivery, are not yet available. The anti-spyware technology will complement the enhanced security features available in Windows XP Service Pack 2 to provide a higher level of protection for Web browsing and other Internet computing activities.

I caught up with a long lost friend this evening - Mark . We had a great catch up over a few drinks and a fun chat about all things geek and business.

Eventually the conversation turned to more technology focus as is the norm. So we started talking about search engines and things. Thus www.a9.com came up. It seems that this little wonder was not on my radar. Having checked it out, it looks pretty cool. I especially like the images that the results page returns and the buttons on the side to turn your multi-searching on or off.

They also even have a toolbar for IE and Mozilla - every search engine seems to have one these days.  In doing a bit of reading it appears that a9.com is also hiring and that they are owened by none other than AMAZON.com!

And there is still google! Mark also mentioned that recently google has been indexing the academic research papers and publications. I've made a large number of academic publications over the years. So in the tradition of self-googling I had a look at the scholar side of google.

The results are pretty impressive as some of my recent research papers have been already indexed. All very cool!

To get there just punch the following into your fav browser http://www.google.com/scholar

Yesterday I posted about the Beta Google service called Guggle Suggests.  It kind of got me thinking about the partial posts in ASP v2. The one's that will not cause a page refresh. And then about the new MSN search tools.

Let's start by looking into how the Google kids implemented their Suggestion UI feature.

I appears that they use some JavaScript to capture the keystrokes and then mixed it with the XMLHttpRequest Object - for more information check out this online article here.  And dynamically render the content to do the pop-ups.

More Googling around, sent me to LiveSearch. So the google suggestions UI is not entirely their invention so it seems. At the LiveSeach site they give away their source code, under the Apache license. Anyone know of a short and sweet summary of the Apache Licence? I can't be bothered reading through the full length version.

Also, the release of the Beta MSN Search tools has been the rage on the web. I've just downloaded it so will be figuring out how it works. But from the sounds of things it uses the indexing service that has been built into Windows. Umm, you know the "find files" that contain a given keyword. I am sure we all used it at some stage to find that missing word document.

Since the Windows Indexing service uses iFilter interface to talk to document filer providers, it should be a pretty extensive search tool. I've not used the Google desktop search tools, but I am sure they all have to use it. The alternative is to write their own doc filetrs which is NOT an option kids, and should not be tried at home, the office or in a search company like google. The folks that built their applications, should be writing iFilers and making these available. The Adobe PDF folks certainly have.

As for searching of Outlook content and applications. Again, its down to the document filters. So since the Outlook PST store is a secret MS format. I am sure the MSN Search team would have shipped their own iFilter that talks to the Outlook COM API, and any other secret data stores.

Wow! I guess I just figured out how they would have build it.  Time to install it I think. 

As for the web searching component, MS is now using a new search engine behind the scenes (Not being able to buy Google kind of makes a large company write their own- actually improve their existing one they had to be more precise). So perhaps they too have a beta *internal* Web Service to access their searching result sets.  Since I have not actually used the search tool. I better go and try it before I make stuff up and possibly get it wrong.

And finally for the WinFS search features... In just having described the iFilter interface above, this should give you a feel how the WinFS will be sucking in information out of binary (your secret format) document formats that can then be indexed and searched. All the linking and registration for file eventing is a completely different part of WinFS. But the searching and indexing should be performed in this same way. But no one will know until they actually ship the RTM version.

Looks like if the Australian Federal Police does not like you (ahmm wish to investigate you) and would like to "tap" your phone, they can also "tap" your PC with spyware. The SMH reported on this here.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this whole digital tapping is that it is/will be a legal act.

So here is an interesting dillema. Will this act indirectly promote the creation of SpyWare in Australia? Also, will these authorities use their own version of spyware they've created locally or go out and purchase legal copies of these spy tools from overseas?  

If they decide to buy from someone, who will be the provider of these tools? Will they need to publically disclose this information? Perhaps go to tender? Many spyware organisations have backdoors into their spytools which could be another dillema.  I say, build your own guys and come and talk to Dr. Pete for some tips.

And finally, how will they be able to install it on your PC? Will they have to resort of software bugs in known products or be allowed to come into someone's house and install it there and then? 

However, with transparent proxying and DNS control by your ISP, some of this stuff could be done very very easily. But, I better stop there, I am getting too paranoid.

Ok one more... Perhaps windows update could be made to deliver some of these lovely operating system extensions

Today (or rather yesterday if you live in the US) Microsoft has made available the Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Member Management Component Prototype on the ASP.NET site.

So what is it?

The Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype contains classes that allow a developer to more easily authenticate users, authorize users, and store per-user property data in a user profile. The authentication feature validates and stores user credentials which a developer can use to manage user authentication on a web site. The authorization feature lets you treat groups of users as a unit by assigning users to roles such as manager, sales, member, and so on. Combined with ASP.NET's built-in authorization functionality, Windows Shared Hosting developers have end-to-end support for maintaining user-to-role mappings and authorizing users based on this information. The profile feature enables you to provide users of your Web site with a custom experience. By defining and using profile properties, you can track any custom information your application requires, including user information and user preferences.

There already two applications in beta using this component; DotNetNuke by Perpetual Motion and Community Server by Telligent Systems.

Download:
You can download it at http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=6&tabid=41
Comments, questions, bugs should get posted on the forum at http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?tabindex=1&ForumID=186

Important: The functionality provided by this component is a preliminary version of the Membership, Roles, and Profile functionality coming in ASP.NET 2.0 and will change in the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. This means that any ASP.NET v1.1 applications you develop using this component will need to be updated when you migrate to the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. This is also a non Microsoft supported component.

Have you heard of Google Suggest? Check it out here.

A picture tells a thousand words... see the picture below. And this is very fast on my little TabletPC

I've been thinking of adding some graphing to one of my applications that I have been building in my downtime.  And it just so happens Roseanne Stamell (My MVP lead) e-mailed me to say that all MVPs are entitled to a free license to Graphics Server controls.

I'm still waiting to get mine, but it's worth checking them out at www.graphicsserver.com as their controls seems to generate pretty snazzy looking graphs. I had a look at an online review, and these graph controls have the ability to RaiseEvents, which is fantastic. So it means that you can have user interactions and respond to user initiated clicks. Great idea guys!

Plus, if you do have to buy a license to their products they have the simplest model of all charting control providers. Basically, they just charge a per developer license fee. That is it.

For those of you thinking of WUS (Windows Update Service), the MS folks have set up a Wiki for it. So if you are planning of running WUS which is the better version of SUS (ie SUS v2) check it out here.