nes page 15 - Dave's Blog

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Released with Activities

2008 Mar 5, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available now. I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been working on for the past year or so: activities. Activities let you select a document, some text on a document, or a link to a document and run that selection through a web service. For example, you could select a word on a webpage and look it up in Wikipedia, select an address and map it on Yahoo Maps, select a webpage and translate it into English with Windows Live Translator, or select a link and add it to Digg.

IE8 comes installed with some activities based on Microsoft web services but there's a page you can go to to install other activities. However, that page is missing some of my favorites that I use all the time, like del.icio.us. Accordingly, I've put together a page of the activities I use. MSDN has all the info on creating Activities.

Activities are very similar to other existing features in other browsers including the ability to add context menu items to IE. There's two important differences which make activities better. Activities have a preview window that pops out when you hover over an activity, which is useful to get in place information easily provided by developers. The other is that the interface is explicit and takes after HTML FORMs and OpenSearch descriptions. Because the interface is explicitly described in XML (unlike the context menu additions described above which run arbitrary script) we have the ability to use activities in places other than on a webpage in the future. And because activity definitions are similar to HTML FORMs, if your webservice has an HTML FORM describing it you can easily create an activity.

microsoft technical activity openservice ie8 ie activities msdn

URI Addressable Text Adventure Games

2008 Mar 2, 9:18

This post is about creating a server side z-code interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost Pig.

I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.

But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.

There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.

zork frotz interactive-fiction zcode if technical uri fragment

Old Miscellaneous Thoughts

2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:

• A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well show me one who will be entertaining.
• There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view the ads for yourself.
  
• Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary XSLT =).

popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical

California Trip

2007 Dec 23, 11:18Sarah and I went down to California at the end of last month for a Thanksgiving visit with my parents. We visited the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium (fun fact: the aquarium scenes in Star Trek IV were filmed here) and saw many jelly fish. We wandered around Capitola where we visited many local shops and ate on the wharf. We shopped in Carmel and ate at the Forge in the Forest (fun fact: Clint Eastwood was the mayor of this city in the late 80s). We visited the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk which was very cold and closed.
My parents took us out to dinner on the first night and the rest of the nights we ate dinner at their house. They had the Shelton's over and I got to see Chris and Alison. It was fun to talk with them and catch up since its been quite a while since I'd seen them.
We stayed in the lovely beach house of our family friend's the Goodwins. My parents have been helping them fix it up and decorate it and it looks great. It was quite a treat staying in a house right on the ocean. Also of note, this was the first trip on which I was old enough to rent the car and accordingly I did all of the driving. This trip was very fun and relaxing.aquarium friends parents personal beach california vacation

Windows Media Center and Zune Integration Hack

2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format (with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.

The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.

1. Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
2. I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:

   C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o "D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"

   For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
3. Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
4. Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.

technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast