You can see a demo of Meebo’s proposal at http://www.meebo.com/xauth and also there’s a YouTube video of Seth Sternberg explaining XAuth

Google, Microsoft, MySpace and Yahoo have signed up and implemented a first-pass at this. As the @Mashable article about XAuth says Twitter and Facebook don’t appear to be supporting it at all. “That means, rather than uniting these sharing services, the runner-up services are all banding together. That doesn’t simplify things for users or publishers” – Pete Cashmore.

And Pete goes on to suggest that Facebook and Twitter are big enough players to not dance to anyone else’s tune. So will this usage of the new ‘cookie’ implementation in HTML5 be tempting enough to create harmony across the big players? I doubt it, but XAuth looks like an interesting idea.

My main Twitter stream is like an RSS reader; my Mentions stream is like my Email inbox and my Direct Messages are like my Instant Messenger service(s). I can reduce my RSS spam by subscribing to less feeds and I have direct control over my Instant Messenger communications.

The biggest culprit for unwanted communication in my life is Email and as a concept it’s not moved with the times to block this abuse of the internet and my time. With Twitter I can be @mentioned or replied to through use of my username in a tweet so anyone can get a message to me even if I don’t follow them. This is the equivalent of getting an email from a previously unknown source. Twitter, though, allows me to Block the sender at the first sign of trouble. Suddenly, I am no longer plagued by messages from this source and without them knowing.

Whilst the ability to not follow people or block them gives me apparent control, most Twitter users are aware of the quantity of fake Twitter accounts registered on a daily basis. By fake, I mean an account being used for other purposes than to send genuine micro-updates to the world.  My Twitter follower count peaks and troughs based on these fake phishing accounts trying to persuade me to follow links in their timeline just because they’ve done me the ‘honour’ of following me. And I’m sure for some, the vanity of this spam attempt works. However it does also mean that a newly registered fake account could still mention me in a tweet and I’d, once more, get the notification in my Mentions stream and I’d have to move to block it again. Cat and mouse once more.

Most Twitter fake accounts at the moment are passive. They list bad or spam URLs in their timeline and just follow other users. It won’t be long before they start to actively tweet those they follow to try and get users to click on a link, probably compressed by a URL Shortener service to obfuscate the spam or even malware destination.

Twitter does offer the Privacy option which will batten down the hatches so that only people you authorise can contact you. This does have the desired effect of blocking all but validated users but does turn you into an island limiting your communications. Which as an email replacement isn’t exactly useful.

Compared to the ‘open door’ policy of email, without some additional junk mail service running on our behalf, the Twitter subscription model does take us a step closer to reducing spam.

The eternal question of how you verify that a newly registered account is a real person will always be difficult to find a solution to. We need to take steps to put us, as the consumer, in charge of what we receive.

If Twitter’s user model was applied to email, could you see it reducing your spam traffic? As service providers are running out of bandwidth and we might face being charged on data quantity downloaded isn’t it about time we fixed email to stop the large slice of the world’s traffic being wasted on spam?

Your thoughts, as ever, gratefully received in open discussion.

(Of course, we’d need to lift the 140 character limit to make it a true replacement, unless we simply link to our email text in Google Docs or some online source. )

Social networks have their uses in finding out what your friends and contacts are up to, but what if you wanted to unlock the power of these connections?

Aardvark seems to have hit the nail right on the head with their offering to the social network revolution. Their service, usable via their website, email, IM and now iPhone, aims to get you an answer to any question you care to pose to the collective brain of its connected users. Sure, you can post a question to Twitter and hope one of your followers (or someone searching at the time) can answer it. Chances are you’re just shouting into the darkness. Alternatively, you could just hit your favourite search engine and try any combination of keywords to try get a tailored answer.

Aardvark increases the likelihood of a better answer to your question through three important advances over any other social network

1. You can list topics which you’d like, or would feel able to, answer questions about.
2. You have ‘The Vark’ as a central co-ordinator who looks at questions, figures out what they might be about and goes off to find people who might be able to help. Through a single contact you interact with everyone on Aardvark.
3. The most important difference over any search engine is that Aardvark connects you to real people. Sure, people are biased and fallible but you get the power of the human mind interpreting your question. The lateral thinking and real-world experience this brings can far outweigh a search engine gleefully returning 2 million results when all you wanted was an answer.

So I’m a convert. Aardvark is an exciting way of getting and giving assistance without it feeling like hard work. There is a fantastic community which has been brought together by a dedicated team of people over in San Francisco. And one of the reasons there’s fuel to this idea is that they listen. The Community section of the Aardvark website allows users to suggest new features which the team have started to work into the product.

There are other sites out there offering answers, like Yahoo Answers and others, but they present answering questions in a far more selfish manner. By offering ‘points’ for answering questions, users find questions by browsing around a website looking for easy pickings. One sentence answers on questions getting no attention, along the lines of the dreaded forum post answer of ‘me too’, eventually leads to a user getting the points for being the only one to bother answering.

Thankfully, as Aardvark generally approaches things from the other end by asking for topics to answer rather than leaving users with free time on their hands to climb pointless ranks; the whole experience is much more rewarding. You just get answers fast, which at the end of the day is all you need from the service. By allowing access to the service through many means, it’s easy to interact with it wherever you are. The new iPhone application (available through the iTunes App Store) supports push notifications so you can get your answer even faster on the move.

If you’ve not joined the growing Aardvark community yet, I’d advise you give it a try. I consider it a part of my daily toolkit for helping to find answers to problems, and giving a little help back too in my spare time.

Thanks to a post by Zmeeagain I found the very handy trick of pasting the Base64 encoded text into an HTML Image tag to quickly render the message in a web browser.

Simply create a new HTML file and paste your Base64 text replacing BASE64TEXT and ensure that the data: type reflects the MIME encoding type of the attached image (image/jpeg in this case):
<html><body><img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,BASE64TEXT"/></body></html>

Save the file as an HTML document and open in your favourite browser. Voila! Simples, hey?

Make sure that any string matching you’re doing is looking for a preceeding ampersand (&) or question mark (?) so that you match the ‘q=’ parameter correctly.

I’m going to write up my notes as I go, but the fact that Visual Studio 2010 has had its IDE re-written using Windows Presentation Foundation means that a lot of exciting new add-ons are coming. Also the ability to specify transforms for web.config files is a welcome addition after the frustration I’ve had with Web Deployment projects.

Well, its the Welcome Drinks party here at CCIB in Barcleona now so I’m off for more ‘networking’ (where networking = free beer, nibbles and XBox 360 stands ) It’s hard work being a developer on the cutting edge of Microsoft technology you know ?

If any of you are twittering and are here, send a message to JBJon and I’ll try and catch up with you.

Gracias!

The challenge: the remote web server was not in the same domain as the machine with Team Build on it.

Initial research found plenty of helpful advice on how to do a copy using the <Copy> task. I tried various different methods of specifying the files I wanted to copy but all hit the same trouble. I tried adding on some community extensions to MSBuild to FTP Copy but didn’t get far with that as it seemed to want to transfer only one file at a time.

In the end, our Operations Team came up with the answer in the form of a Trust Relationship between the two domains in question. Now, my share was browsable without needing to enter remote domain credentials.

So the Target I wrote overwrites the behaviour of the ‘AfterDropBuild’ target and looks something like this:

<Target Name="AfterDropBuild">

<CreateItem Include="$(DropLocation)\$(BuildNumber)\Release\_PublishedWebsites\PROJECT\**\*.*">

<Output ItemName="ItemsToDeploy" TaskParameter="Include"/>

</CreateItem>

<Message Text="Found items: @(ItemsToDeploy,'%0d%0a')" Importance="high"/>

<Copy SourceFiles="@(ItemsToDeploy)" DestinationFiles="@(ItemsToDeploy->'\\REMOTESERVERIP\PROJECTDROPSHARE\%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
</Target>

If you open a new RDC instance and expand the ‘Options >>>’ button you see the following screen :

Remote Desktop Connection dialog box

At the bottom of the dialog is the option to ‘Save’ the current settings. Fill out as much as you normally would to connect to a remote box and then Save the file onto your local machine somewhere.

Edit that file with the text editor of your choice and add the following line to the bottom of the .rdp file you saved:

smart sizing:i:1

This will force RDC to scale the window when you shrink it and will stretch back to full screen when you click ‘Maximise’.

I create a collection of these .rdp files for each of the servers I need to communicate with and have a directory of them as a custom toolbar on my task bar.

Just remember to start your RDC session from your saved .rdp file to take advantage of the scaling trick

The gotcha here is that C#/.NET doesn’t allow you to catch exceptions from an abstract class. If you want to catch a base class Exception, avoid that abstract.

You have been warned! This is for .NET 2 by the way

Well in case not, I’ve included it after the break. So I get the fact its got people talking because its obtuse, I get the fact that its not tying them to advertising one product but seriously have they thought about what this advert is saying?

Spoiler alert:

So Bill Gates is having trouble buying shoes from a cheap shoe store where the stiff shoes he’s buying don’t just quite fit? That says Microsoft is inflexible but cheap to me and Bill’s ‘shifting shorts’ move just says ‘well we’re promising to do something amazing but we can’t say what and we can say when we’ll deliver it’ which also sounds typically Microsoft.

Right direction, Microsoft, welcome to the video viral age finally. You’ve got two years of catching up to do on Apple’s bashing of Vista and how Mac OS X ‘just works’. There is a lot of healing that needs to be done after all of Vista’s promises seemed to fail so I accept that they need to do something but I’m not sure this is enough.