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Friday, March 08, 2002 [4:37 PM] Stunning If you have a couple of minutes and have a decent pipe, check this out. ILM, what a company! [3:48 PM] Mac Is there anyone out there willing to buy me one of these, or maybe one of these? My wife seems to think I don't need one, but really I do! Sigh... [10:26 AM] Wacky weather! I guess it's snowing in Seattle this morning. No wonder I couldn't get a hold of anyone! That's something I really miss, the snow! Sued again! DOH! Hot off the presses! Microsoft sued by Sun for more than $1 billion. Holy greenbacks Batman! This is truly ridiculous. To my knowledge the Sun Java VM runs fine in XP? I can't see that we purposely wrote code to make it fail. By law we can no longer update the Java VM because Sun sued us and won, fair enough. Thus we no longer license their product and don't ship a Microsoft maintained VM. Hopefully I'm not missing something here, maybe I am? Larry, how do you see this? [9:21 AM] Busted! I'm busted! I was just asked to pull information regarding an upcoming Visio thing, oh well. I'll post it again when I can. Sorry for any confusion. [8:45 AM] Movie line of the week answer Zero guesses! DOH! That's ok, I guess it was a tough one. The answer is 1982's Creepshow. That particular line was from the short story "The Crate" when Dexter(Hal Holbrook) had just fed his wife Billy(Adrienne Barbeau) to the monster under the stairs. Great line. New discovery I ran across excess bloggage yesterday. Very cool design! Thought I'd share it with y'all. Thursday, March 07, 2002 [2:12 PM] Visio makes your garden grow! Well not really. Plan your garden now, with Visio? I had no idea we did articles like that. Thanks for the link Mr. Cole! Does anyone remember Visio Home? [8:58 AM] Movie line of the week I had a really nice line to share today thanks to my lovely wife, but I can't remember the order of the words. That's important so I'm putting it off until next week. So in it's place we have... "Just tell it to call ya Billy." Ok, quick what movie! Send your guesses here! STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I will not share your e-mail address with anyone! New Visio stuff NOTE: I got in trouble! For the time being information about some new Visio stuff has been pulled at the request of my employer. Sorry guys. Rest assured once I can post about it I most certainly will! It's fun stuff! Wednesday, March 06, 2002 [5:26 PM] Don't break the build! Well since I don't want to be labeled a build breaker I'll share some random stuff with you while my build bakes. Peter Drayton: "License to Thrill" - Better watch out Peter, living in the Valley with plate may get you in some trouble. Can you figure out what my wife's plate says? Technology Review: "Online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot coms." - Ok, done. Read on, there some interesting point in there. This scared the living daylights out of me today, gee thanks Jim! Turn your speakers DOWN and remove your headphones, trust me. CAUTION: If you have a heart condition, or have another serious medical condition DO NOT click that link. Your mileage may vary. Made a new friend today. [9:53 AM] Oh my! Niklas Gustavsson has done something totally sweet! He's taken my states.vdx output, applied an XSL transformation, and generated SVG! Oh my! This is EXACTLY the type of stuff I'm talking about doing!!!! Sweet! I'm so excited I'm about wet myself. So now we can go from OPML to VDX to SVG! Yes, yes, and yes! Nice job Niklas! NOTE: To view his SVG you'll need to install Adobe's SVG Viewer. It's worth it! Morning funny Internally we have someone that puts together a weekly summary of "News about Visio". This morning I get a call from a good friend on the team saying "Hey did you see that your site was listed in the weekly summary?". Too funny! Sure enough someone had followed the link from Scripting News to this site, apparently they didn't notice I'm a Microsoft employee working on Visio. Tuesday, March 05, 2002 [2:16 PM] Helicopters? NO, it's not a helicopter part. It's a portable CLI! Rotor, Microsoft Rotor. Get to work on that CLI port today! Security fixes? Office News Service: Microsoft Visio® Standard 2002 Service Release 1 (SR-1) Update is a planned service release providing the latest product updates to Visio Standard 2002. Updates include Microsoft SharePoint™ Portal Server integration, Hebrew composition support, and ClearType® control, as well as several security fixes. - Who said we haven't done any security fixing? [9:23 AM] Mornin' Y'All Yesterday was kind of busy so I didn't get a chance to post a couple of items regarding OPML --> VDX. Here's a link to a question posed by Bernardo Carvalho(For some reason the link isn't working for me? You'll have to scroll down to it, March 01, 2002. NOTE: Bernardo's site is a little racy!). The answer to Bernardo's question is "Yes" you could do that. We don't currently have something that would do what you're looking to do but the engine is completely open! You could create your own add-on to the product that could do what you want to do, heck you might even be able to sell it? Check out our site on MSDN for more information on our object model. It's quite flexible. The product ships with quite a few solutions in the box. We have a great Organization Chart solution, it takes care of relationships and layout for you. That's what I "drove" to create the states diagram! The Enterprise Architect edition of Visual Studio.NET ships with advanced Visio solutions for UML modeling and database modeling. All of those solutions are built using our automation model, no tricks folks. Remember it's only software, you can do anything given a bit of time. Another fella to keep an eye on is Niklas Gustavsson. He's messing around with XSL transformations on Visio VDX's. Here's an e-mail I received form him yesterday. I've been reading your blogs on Visio and turning OPML into VDX and the other way around. While this is of course cool, what I would really like is to turn a VDX file into SVG for easy viewing on any site. So, I've started looking at doing this using XSL... just wanted to let you know and also wanted to hear if this is anything you would be interested in and if you have any pointers to documentation on the VDX format (couldn't find anything on MSDN) :-) Check here for information on VDX(our XML format). The ball is definitely rolling! Monday, March 04, 2002 [9:10 AM] Thank you! WOW! I've received so much e-mail from the OPML to VDX post! Thanks so much for the support folks! It's nice to see there is still a need for good graphics. I'm hoping to post some of the e-mails to this site as soon as I get permission from the authors. It's also spurred some great conversation about Visio as a technology. The hardest thing about creating an extensible product is teaching people how to find, and use, the things that make it extensible. I will correspond with each person that's asked a question about this little experiment. One thing to note, the answer may be "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" or maybe "I need more information". So far I haven't seen anything in the questions that cannot be done. Hey it's just software, you can do anything with a bit of time, blood, sweat, and tears. I even got an e-mail from someone that used to use MORE to do their organization charts and wants to know how they could use Visio to this today! Sweet. I'd also like to give a HUGE THANKS to Dave! Without the link from Scripting News people wouldn't have found the post to begin with. What a great community! Larry Staton has decided to explore this idea using AppleScript and OmniGraffle, ahhhhh I love it when a plan comes together! Visio on the Mac anyone??