<whoops, found a bug/feature request: only one distinct image is supported -- looks like the 2nd one is used>

Get it here... shape recognition, editable shapes... It even lets you mark up images as shown below.

Arstechnica, one of the sites that made my "techy" news macro, has posted a nice review of Vista audio enhancements.  Bass tweaking sounds great, and one feature is quite interesting from a psychological perspective:

Speaker fill

Speaker fill is a technique that is used when there are more speakers available than channels in the source music. In other words, if you have a music file that was recorded in stereo with only two channels, Speaker fill will synthesize additional channels and direct them to the appropriate speakers. It works by manipulating the channel sound in subtle ways—such as adding small delays or applying a filter—and then channeling the appropriate frequency levels to the appropriate speakers.



From http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060907-7682.html, 9/7/2006 7:57:50 AM, by Jeremy Reimer

I'm not sure how well this works, but the principle sounds right. Your senses, and in fact cognition, have time limited buffers for information and have to be good at filling in the gaps. Vision has a remarkably tight high-rez view of 2 degrees with a fairly rapid refresh rate, potentially twitching in minor ways almost as fast as your tv's refresh rate but creating greater than 1/10 second "blindspots" while you make larger eye movements. So while the delay doesn't quite emulate true positioning, the mind can accomodate and integrate the sound with a likely interpretation of position.

It's been a month of heads down time getting ready for our refresh over at live.com (search). I expect to be posting with accelerating frequency as we start to really showcase our new stuff (and I get some time to look outward).

I’m off to the World Wide Web conference tomorrow. I re- imaged my tablet to recover from a rather promiscuous attitude towards trying new software and thought I’d play with the latest office dogfood . Note only was this post hand written, but Word uploaded the pretty graphic below depicting my travel plan.

 Whoops, it looks like the image upload story is not quite ready for spaces blogs.  The basic posting story worked great though, and I'm jazzed to try out OneNote 12 on my tuned-up tablet.

I'm exceptionally jazzed to be attending CHI again this year. It's one of the premeire user interface research conferences -- quite unique for the strong mix of scientific rigor and innovative work. MSR, as usual, has a strong presence, along with a huge presence from practicioners across product groups from Microsoft.

I'm doing demos for Windows Live Search. I'll be showing off some of the same data stream I snuck into Dave Sifry's Etech "Data Dump" session. At any other conference, I'd be demoing our latest high end engineering outputs on live.com. Not at CHI -- oh, I've prepared a few sexy demos: macro:andyed.actr searches the link space of the so amazing ACT-R cognitive computational modeling system (yumm, LISP) and the live image search for visualization or user interface is exceptionally impressive from aesthetics and engineering POVs.

Nope, at CHI, I'll get to shop talk cognition by tantalizing attendees with snippets of data. Or more specifically, conversing on data-driven inferencing about cognitive processes. In academic psychology research, getting data is hard work. At internet scale, getting data is easy (or at least tractable, see WWW'06 workshop). Analyzing the stuff, now that's hard work.

Hope to see you in Montreal.

Commons category: chi2006

It's always awesome to see one of your favorite tools from behind the Microsoft firewall make it out for public consumption.  Phlat bootstraps on the SQL API into the desktop search store to experiment with a more browsing like desktop search experience.  Some of the views available are really inaccessible in Outlook and the switch time between them is really low, due to a structured way to add and remove tokens from the search query.

Very cool, Ray Ozzie's using firefox to demo some new stuff.  Copy and paste from internet calendars into windows live calendar or Outlook 12. "Live clipboard"

Next up: enabling copy paste of feeds.  This solves the critical RSS subscription issue -- one that google desktop solves with observation, auto-subscription, and later editing.

Excellent step forward for micro-formats.  Ray's got another trick up his sleeve: enabling subscription for micro-content, like location data.  The screen is showing some of his colleagues moving around San Diego via a live.com virtual earth gadget.

Beta code, but Ray's promising details, downloads and data formats, on his blog.  Looking forward to following this up at Tantek's microformat session.

Bonus feature: copy paste images (via thumbnail) from flickr to windows explorer.