The past couple of weeks, as I worked on my focus areas for DotNetNuke Open Force '07, I have been thinking a lot about presentations and presentation techniques. In the past couple of days, Guy Kawasaki made two very interesting posts -- today on Speaking as a Performing Art and yesterday on Steve Jobs' WWDC presentation. The latter got my attention. In it, Guy links to this amazing post by Garr Reynolds comparing Bill Gates and Jobs' presentation styles. Even though it's an old post, if you speak in public, this is a must-read. What Reynolds describes as the "Microsoft Method" of presentation he nails it. I know exactly what he's talking about.

At the MVP summit in Seattle earlier this year, while sitting through Bill Gates' keynote, I couldn't help noting the utterly boring presentation style of the world's most successful technology entrepreneur. It was probably the fifth or sixth time I have been to a Gates keynote and each time, no matter how exciting the announcements, the presentation was unfailingly underwhelming.

The contrast to Jobs' simpler and minimalist presentations is stark. He could be talking about something totally mundane, but still somehow get the audience to listen with rapt attention. Reynolds' post makes it all clear -- Jobs uses the Zen aesthetic of kanso or simplicity. 

"Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means."
                                 — Dr. Koichi Kawana

He emphasizes how PowerPoint encourages you to visually spell everything out in bullet points, when what you should be doing is the exact opposite -- have less on the slides and arouse the audience's imagination. This is a very simple concept, but thinking back on past presentations, I know that it is very difficult in practice. Nevertheless, now that I know about kanso I am determined to see if it will work for me.

Have you noticed that when using Internet Explorer the Flash content on many websites requires you to click before the content is activated? This is due to an automatic patch which causes IE to do this by default for "active" content i.e. add-on controls/objects.

You might assume this is a security measure, and you would be wrong. You might also assume this is a technical issue, and you would be wrong again. Although it's hard to believe, this behavior is a deliberate crippling of IE in order to comply with a patent dispute from a company named Eolas. It's hard to decide who is more to blame for this -- Eolas or Microsoft -- but one thing's for sure...the end-user experience has taken a nose-dive with these changes.

There is hope. Geoff Stearns has created SWFObject, a simple Javascript script that enables Flash movies to be embedded with script. Apparently, objects rendered dynamically are not constrained by the patent issue. SWFObject provides a simple and elegant way to insert Flash and circumvent the click annoyance.

This is so wrong. Apple's announcement of Safari for Windows means we have YAB (Yet Another Browser) to test our web apps against. I am going to stick with testing for IE and Firefox for now.

I recently re-paved my Media Center computer because I was getting occasional lock-ups for no discernible reason. It was a good time to do some media management and get more organized and also document the hardware configuration (since it's a DIY system, it's nice to have this handy for when there are problems).

• Antec NSK2400 Case
  
  

  

• ASUS M2A-VM Motherboard
  
  

  
  

• Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ CPU

• 2GB DDR2 800 RAM
  
• Two Adaptec AVC-3610 Dual analog tuners
  

  

• Hauppauge WinTV HVR-980 Digital Tuner
  
• Four SATA2 500GB internal disks
  
• Two 2TB Buffalo Terastations
  
• Windows Vista Media Center

I have two of the 500GB disks setup in a RAID1 configuration and they are used for the system files and recording television. The other two contain mostly ripped DVD's that I don't care too much about (kids shows, How To videos, music videos etc.) The Terastations contain my ripped DVD's and about 70GB of music. They are on the same gigabit network as the media center PC which makes the DVD's play almost instantly.

I will need to add more storage soon, as I have ripped about 420 English DVD's and have another 60 to go. I haven't yet started to rip my Bollywood DVD's (about 300) as the movies tend to be longer and require more disk space than my wallet can presently bear.

Last week was a big one for DotNetNuke with two major announcements:

Visual Studio Magazine Editor's Choice Award for 2007

This was a pleasant surprise, especially considering that last year's winner was SharePoint and this year's other winners are Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Expression Silverlight. You can read all about it here.

OpenForce '07 Conference

I am very excited about the DotNetNuke OpenForce '07 Conference for three reasons:

• It's the first major mainstream event for DotNetNuke, highlighting how far the project has come and how much it has grown;
• It's co-located with the DevConnections conference which is one of the premier conferences for Microsoft technology professionals; and
• It's in Vegas!!!!

I will be presenting one session and participating in one panel discussion. My session is:

DotNetNuke Modules: Beyond the Browser
DotNetNuke modules are generally designed to function with a web browser as a client. In this session you will learn how to extend your module beyond the browser and onto the desktop. We will review how to use the “Widget Toolkit” to create Vista Sidebar Gadgets and widgets for various other platforms that act as clients for DotNetNuke modules. You will learn how these same techniques can be used to quickly extend DotNetNuke to mobile clients.

The panel I will participate in is:

DotNetNuke – The Road Ahead
In this panel discussion, the four co-founders of DotNetNuke Corporation will share their vision for the company and the DotNetNuke Open Source project. The resources, approach and business model required to manage and grow a large Open Source project such as DotNetNuke are substantially different than those required for a commercial software company. Get an inside look at how DotNetNuke Corp. is addressing today’s challenges while preparing for the future.

I hope to meet many from the DotNetNuke community at the conference.

When importing photos from a digital camera or phone, the Windows import wizard allows me to give all the files a more descriptive name than "DSC10011.jpg." The problem I run into all the time is that I don't import photos more than once a week and this makes a common filename prefix pretty useless since the imported sets may contain multiple events.

Although it has bugged me to no end, until today I left this at the default and organized files manually into more descriptive folder names. Today I decided to fix this annoyance. I briefly checked out BatchPhoto and a couple of other utilities and concluded that they were all overkill. So I wrote a quick console app to take care of this problem.

FileNamer (not feeling very creative today, hence the lame name) is a very simple app that will accept one parameter -- a local or UNC path. It will then recurse every folder at that path and rename most photo and movie files (*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.mpg;*.mpeg;*.avi;*.wmv;*.mov) with the same name as the parent folder followed by a numeric serial number. If your photos are in C:\Docs\Picnic, the photos in this folder would be renamed to Picnic 0000.jpg, Picnic 0001.jpg etc.

The program has very limited error handling and I have no idea what happens when there are more than 10,000 files present (you should not have that many files in the same folder anyway). You will need .Net 2.0 to run the app. No installation is needed -- just copy FileNamer.exe to a location of your choice, fire up a command window and type:

FileNamer <path to rename>

The zip has the source which you can ignore if you don't intend to modify. Use the program at your own risk and be sure to test it with some junk files first.

When opening an HTML file that sits on your desktop, IE will throw a security warning which you must click before the page is rendered. This is annoying, especially when the file is your own creation and there is no security risk. You can suppress the security warning by adding the "Mark Of The Web" (MOTW) to the top of your HTML document:

<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->

After adding this, you can launch the HTML file locally without any annoying warnings.