Rob Relyea: Miscellaneous

Visualization of progress for self measurement and public pressure/support

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:03:59 GMT

The other day I blogged in "My car runs on oil from a baby seal" that people would be able to conserve gasoline, reduce driving, etc.. better if they could visualize the amount of gallons they used per day (GPD).

Now I tripped over this site that talks about a similar measurement, visualization and motivation technique that Jerry Seinfeld used (and maybe still does).

Rob Burke - with Objectsharp now

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:20:12 GMT

Glad to see Rob Burke blogging a bit about WPF again! Looks like he has landed in Toronto. Look forward to seeing you @ Mix?

Hardware experts: laptop to multimonitor adaptors?

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:14:23 GMT

A friend just asked me if I knew how well something like the Matrox DualHead2Go works? Any users out there that could comment on taking a laptop and helping it scale to 2 or more external monitors?

Improving large, multi-part downloads

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:17:34 GMT

US ISV Developer Evangelism Team points to some ways to improve large, multi-part downloads in "Solution for Download Blues".

Microsoft publishes too many things for you to download and install...we need to make this easier...

Information Aesthetics: Color matching coffee cup

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 11:09:34 GMT

Clever idea: color matching coffee cup

Alexandra: how to reply to you?

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:00:24 GMT

I got a short message via my blog, but Alexandra's spaces profile won't let me reply...if you are reading, send me another message with your email info, or change your spaces profile...

Blogging: analyzing traffic patterns and origins on your blog...and adapting

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:23:51 GMT

An interesting thing to do when you blog is look to see how people find information that you've published. When you see links from other blogs, I go see what comments they may have had. When the link is from a search engine (google, yahoo, live, etc...), it is interesting to see in the querystring of the URL the search terms.

For eaxmple, today I see somebody viewed What tools generate .g.cs from XAML? Can it be done at runtime? after having searched for "compile XAML to cs" with: http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=compile+XAML+to+cs&meta=

I realize that post isn't the best answer for somebody searching for that information, so sometimes I'll do a new post with a better named title that more concretely answers that question.

To help make this info easier to find, I just created a new post: Compile Xaml to C# (.cs)

Warning: Don't use speech recognition to code

Thu, 24 May 2007 14:19:39 GMT

Trying to use Vista's speech recognition to write a Perl script - humorous video shows Vista's speech recognition is definitely not tuned for programming! :-)

Tabletized!

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:46:59 GMT

I recently was shopping for a new laptop for work...I finally made the plunge into Tablets.

I was debating between the Lenova ThinkPad X60 Tablet and the Toshiba Tecra M7 Tablet...the Tecra won my choice in the end.

So far, I'm really enjoying it. It is a convertable tablet, so I can always just use it as a laptop if I want. It is beefy enough to run Vista Glass & do all my Visual Studio work, while running Outlook, IE, Times Reader, etc...

:-)

Triathalon...er, long workout

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 14:54:10 GMT

I done 5 or 6 sprint triathalons over the years...including one this past weekend.

Although I'm working out regularly over the last 4 weeks, I hadn't seriously prepared for it...I had to pump up my bike tires the night before. It is short enough that you can do one without major prep, and it is long enough so that it is a very good workout. I cross the finish in this picture.
(I am trying out a beard for the first time in my life...)

My 6 year old son has started to do the triathalons as well. It is a blast to see him do it. This was his 3rd. It is only a 75 yard swim, 2 mile bike and 1/2 mile run.

Getting in touch with Michigan Crew Alumni

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 14:25:56 GMT

Rowing at Michigan

My 3 years rowing for the University of Michigan Rowing Team (1990-92) were some of the best times of my life. I met great friends and we pushed ourselves to do amazing things. I have a bunch of great memories. I even met my wife.

Team History

The rowing team started in 1976 as a small club sport. Our team has progressed over the last 30 years to be a very strong team.

The Women's team has become Varsity, so they are extremely well funded now. The Men's team is still a Club sport...relying primarily on dues and fundraising to pay coaches salaries, buy expensive equipment, etc...

Me as an Officer

I poured time and energy into rowing more than I did my classes for a few years. I was VP, in charge of fundraising, one year. I helped start the Rent-a-Rower fundraiser...we'd do just about any yardwork, chore, etc... for $10 an hour.

My last year I was President of the team as well.

After 3 years of rowing, and putting so much of myself into the team, I decided I needed to actually graduate, so I didn't row my senior (5th) year and took a very heavy class load.

Now, I am again trying to help the team reconnect with some of the Alumni that they have lost track of. I am now in search of all of the class of 1992...

Wanna help the team by Shopping?

If you are going to shop at Amazon, please consider helping the team by clicking on this image:

5% of all purchases will directly benefit the team. Click on the picture to start shopping.

Never Change Your Blog Address - oops

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 17:30:21 GMT

Scoble has a list of recommendations for bloggers.

The one I remember is:

12) Never change the URL of your weblog. I've done it once and I lost much of my readership and it took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust.

Oops.

I started off at longhornblogs.com/rrelyea
I changed to spaces.msn.com/rrelyea
MSN changed their URL scheme again...so I'm now at rrelyea.spaces.live.com

Given that the stats tool on Spaces is currently not as good as what I had at LHBlogs, I don't know how my readership compares...

Windows Live Writer
I'm finding myself enjoying posting more, now that I am using Live Writer.

Web Apps, Vacation, Seafood, OneNote

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:31:22 GMT

Too many web apps still stink

Web Apps, and specifcally MSN Spaces, need to understand common operations (like deleting a bunch of spam trackbacks) and make it so each deletion doesn't require a navigation.

Navigations drive me crazy. 1) Delay. 2) Scroll.

This is why several years ago Henry, Markus and I worked with a bunch of smart IE devs to build SmartNavigation for ASP.NET. It still used navigation to communicate to the server application, but hid it from the user.

That team also built the IE Web Controls.

Had a great vacation

Went with the Family and friends to Provence, France for 2 weeks. Had a great time.

My wife and kids went on to Ireland for another week afterwards…but I had to get back to work.

2 weeks vacation in a row is long for me. After my kids were born, I did take 4 weeks of paternity leave…but outside of that, this 2 weeker is my longest since right after college.

Time off does help refresh you!

I'm taking this weekend to do a bunch of things around the house that need focus I don't usually find with 2 boys running around.

I pick my family up at the airport Monday night.

Environmentally friendly seafood

Cleaning up my home office, I ran into a Seafood Watch West Coast Seafood Guide that is a Consumer's Guide to Sustainable Seafood.

If you live in the US, it looks like they have a Regional Seafood Guide for you.

Vista & Office & OneNote

My laptop is now reformated, with the July CTP build of Windows Vista and a build of Office 2007.

Vista is coming along nicely, but I have a bug that I need to file (screen saver doesn't let me unsave...).

I'm using OneNote 2007 heavily for the first time.

They've added a bunch of great features. Top features: great hyperlink support and great tagging support.

This is just going to increase my OneNote addiction!

Name Fluency

Wed, 31 May 2006 13:15:36 GMT

Name Fluency

I was reading an article in the NY Times this morning and I ran across the term "name fluency".

The article discussed a study that looked at stock performance based on a number of issues included how pronouncable the name was.

Although I had never heard a term for this before now, I'm a big believer in name fluency. Back when we had to pick a name for Avalon's markup language, many names were considered. I favored XAML (eXtensible Avalon Markup Language). A coworker was arguing for AXML (Avalon XML).

Name fluency was my reasoning.

Shortly before our largest customer preview of Avalon/XAML, perhaps in 2003, we decided to make the A stand for Application, since we didn't think the term Avalon was going to ever be shared externally.

NY Times Reader

I'm using an internal version of the New York Times Reader...this is the first time I've sat down with it to do some reading. Very nice! In fact, I'm going back to finish the paper! When was the last time you heard that term in reference to an electronic newspaper?