I was pleasantly surprised to notice that http://maps.live.com (Live Search Maps provided by Microsoft) shows the traffic alerts in some of the major local roads in Greater Seattle Area.

Most of the online traffic or map services only show the Freeway and major Highway traffic.

This is definitely a wonderful value add to the Live Search Maps Service.  We used this today to decide the route to take to downtown from our house. It was great to be able to see the interior road condition and also see the alerts (such as traffic due to soccer game b/w Mexico and China in Qwest field :-)).

-santosh

Demo -

Savas Parastatidis (architect of the Microsoft repository platform) created a demo for Open Repositories Challenge 2008 that shows the ability to pull data from two repositories, create the appropriate relationships and display the relationships in a WPF based network graph.

He pulls the relationships b/w people and resources from MyExperiment, and resources from Microsoft Research Output Repository Platform. He then creates a network graph displaying relationships b/w people and resources from the two repositories. He also displays a preview when the appropriate resource or person is selected. For ex. in the demo, you will notice upon selecting a video, the video is played.

This kind of visualization of relationships using network graphs on web pages (using technologies like Silverlight) is truly very useful to visualize the social networking relationships.

Additional info - http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/04/03/2e308e65-a670-40a3-80ae-a283de1ee917.aspx

Blog - http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001591.html 

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Slides - http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/84/1/Research_Output_Repositories_-_Microsoft_Initiatives.pdf 

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The Presentation at the Conference today went well (Monday session was held by Microsoft for interop b/w repositories, with a few known members of the community). This session was open to all members of the conference - we had a decent turnout.

Lee Dirks went through the charter of TCI team, and Microsoft, in the Scholarly Communications space, followed by my presentation and Savas' demos providing the "Wow!" factor.

Overall the response/questions were positive. We had a few folks talk to us after the presentation for additional information and explanation.

-santosh.

While doing some research on features for a HTML text editor for work, I came across the FCKeditor (through a colleague). This is an open source  HTML editor that is easy to use, and has a lot of rich features for content editing.

Apart from regular rich text editing features, such as font, style, color, etc., it also has a good selection of features such as insert from word (maintaining styles), insert flash, tables, images (resizing, alignment etc. of images), special characters, anchors, spell checker, localized menus, and few other text and content editing features.

They have included the ability to embed form controls such as creating drop down lists, radio button lists, etc., and form actions (which I have not played with).

One of the most surprising things about FCKeditor, apart from the name, is that the feature of a Universal Keyboard was removed from the editor. I find that feature very interesting, as editing content in various languages is essential in certain situations. I realize that creating the content of an entire page using the small online keyboard is very painful, but it is a great feature for people who want to add words in different languages. I have asked in their forum the reason of removing the feature. Lets see what I hear back.

I will be playing around with the features and the code of the latest version and the older version (with the Universal Keyboard) to see the merits of this editor..

Do let me know if you guys have played with other rich text editors, and have liked it.

Link to gadget download - here

Well finally I got around to playing with creating Vista Gadgets, and my first try was a gadget to search the Microsoft Research Web site. I personally like the concept of gadgets in Vista. I love to have gadgets for actions I do frequently. With my current Microsoft Research Web Portal redesign project, searching for data on the site was a frequent task. :-)

With regard to developing the gadget, here's to great MSDN documentation. I was able to find tons of information on MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms723694.aspx that enabled me to easily create the gadget. I also looked at the code base of many different gadgets. It was a fun experience, and allowed me to play around with the code. Hopefully this starts the development of more fun gadgets.