*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

For years my wife and I have argued about Dinner vs Supper.  Believe it or not depending on which part of the country you are in saying dinner can actually mean lunch.  My wife thought I was just stupid for years when I would argue with her that I had heard people use dinner to mean lunch.  I searched the Internet over for proof that I wasn’t crazy and finally found something.

Standard Version

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Dinner

Southern Version

• Breakfast
• Dinner
• Supper

The word “supper” typically means the last mean of the day but for whatever reason it isn’t used much outside of the South.  I lived in Michigan for eight years and cannot recall a single time I ever heard someone say supper.  The word “dinner” means the main meal of the day.  Obviously this is more vague and since you are not suppose to eat a heavy meal before going to bed I think this is why people have adopted saying dinner to also mean lunch.  Dinner is usually eaten in the evening, but it can be eaten at lunchtime.

To fix the world’s confusion I think this is what we should do.

My Version

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Supper

This solves the problem of even using the word dinner and avoids confusion since supper is the last meal of the day.  Logical, easy, no confusion.

One of the new additions for Windows Workflow in .Net 3.5 was the ability to host Workflows using Windows Communication Foundation.  Two new activities were added to help with this.  The ReceiveActivity and the SendActivity.  I was recently playing with this and ran into a configuration error so I thought I’d post this to help others. 

After I had configured my workflow with a ReceiveActivity I added a WCF IIS project to my solution.  I configured it the way I thought it would work but I kept getting this error.  This was suppose to be a simple “hello world” experiment with WCF and WF but a few minutes later I was still scratching my head.

Service ‘Service.YourService’ has zero application (non-infrastructure) endpoints. This might be because no configuration file was found for your application, or because no service element matching the service name could be found in the configuration file, or because no endpoints were defined in the service element.

My service file in my IIS project looked like this:

<%@ ServiceHost Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WorkflowServiceHostFactory" Language="VB" Debug="true" Service="CHCWorkflow.Prescriptions" %>

And my WCF configuration was like this:

For some reason when I configured the WCF service and when I configured the Workflow I changed my naming convention.  Here was the fix. 

1. Go into the properties of the workflow by right clicking the workflow and pressing properties in the menu.
2. In the properties window expand the WorkflowServiceAttributes node
   
3. Make sure the ConfigurationName property matches the name in the WCF configuration.  Here is a screen shot of the WCF configuration utility side beside the property to show you were I goofed.
   

Once I got the names in sync the service started working.  I’m sure someone will run into this so I hope this saves you the headache it caused me. 

Alexa.com is an interesting site that tracks web site usage based on the installations of its toolbar within browsers.  Alexa then mines those numbers to come up with web site reach, rank and page views.  Google’s toolbar does something very similar but isn’t reported publicly.  Today I was visiting Alexa.Com curious as to what the top traffic sites were.  I usually browse by Alexa occasionally just to see how things are shaking up or down.  To my astonishment, here is what I saw.  Live.com was ranked higher than Google.Com.

Reach

Taken back by this I started to dig further and here is what I found.  I took Live.Com, Google.Com, and Yahoo.Com and put them into a history graph on Alexa and I went back six months to see how the progress was going.  Here’s the results.

The trend shows that Live has steadily been gaining and recently Yahoo and Google are tapering.  Alexa describes “reach” as the following. 

Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that of all global Internet users measured by Alexa, 28% of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa’s one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The three-month change is determined by comparing a site’s current reach with its values from three months ago.

Rank

I then decided to throw out Yahoo.Com and focus on Live and Google.  About one third of the way into January Live.Com started gaining a lot of ground and overtook Google in terms of rank.  Rank is defined as:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Page Views

Page Views tell the real story of how users are using a web site and what is interesting about the Alexa stats for page views is in order to see where Live overtook Google one has to go back about six months to the middle of October.  A page view is defined as:

Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The three-month change is determined by comparing a site’s current page view numbers with those from three month ago.

What Does All This Mean?

Honestly it can mean very little or it can mean a lot depending on how you look at it.  Remember that Alexa’s data is tracked based on their set of toolbars.  There are obvious known biases such as:

• Users visit sites more that are featured on Alexa
• AOL and Opera browsers aren’t counted
• Rate of adoption of Alexa software (who is using it)
• Sites with secure pages Alexa turns itself off
• Computer geeks don’t install tool bars and we are the ones using the Internet more

One of the first things I thought of as to why the number of users using Live was growing was Windows Vista adoption.  However, when I visited Alexa’s toolbar download I found something that was interesting.  Alexa doesn’t even work with Windows Vista yet. 

The toolbar currently does not work with Windows Vista. We are working on a fix and hope to release it soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!

The theory of more users using Live.Com because it was the default search engine in that operating system was now impossible.  So how is Live.Com gaining?  My next thought was IE7 installations was spurring on the usage of Live.Com.  It turns out that when we look at these stats more closely it has nothing to do with search at all!

What Are They Doing?

Before you start writing hate mail to me explaining there is no way people are using Live.com for search let me just say you would be right.  Only 1% of users using the Live.Com domain with Alexa are using search!  What are they doing?  The majority of users are reading email.  Email accounts for 79% of Live.Com’s traffic according to Alexa. Yet another interesting stat.  Here is the break down.

• mail.live.com – 79%
• login.live.com – 14%
• spaces.live.com – 5%
• search.live.com – 1%
• get.live.com – 1%

Now compare this to Google.

• google.com – 62%
• mail.google.com 17%
• images.google.com – 10%
• video.google.com – 2%
• picasaweb.google.com – 2%
• translate.google.com – 1%
• groups.google.com – 1%
• maps.google.com – 1%
• Other websites – 4%

What have we learned?  For starters none of the Live.Com users even know that Live.Com has http://maps.live.com .  The next thing is either users are signing up for Live.Com mail because they like it or because they have to.  Could a reason be because the word beta is attached to the Gmail icon and that scares off users? 

I have no idea.  Maybe it is because for a user to do anything on their computer they have to register a Live.Com account?  Or maybe it is because of the 12 million Xbox Live users who have Live accounts to use their Xboxes?  Whatever the reason is, people are using their Live email.  And enough in fact to trump Google’s traffic.  Call it a small victory. 

We can also see that Google still has a serious strong hold on search.  By the way, Yahoo’s top two entries are mail at 46% and search at 14%. 

I doubt if you asked 100 people the first word that popped into their head when they were asked about Live.Com it would be “Email”.  Are people really using it that much?  Yet if you ask the same 100 people about Google, you’d definitely get the word “Search”.  Is this the Live.Com plan?  Get everyone hooked on email and then switch them over to other services?  Am I onto something here or just reading too much into it?

Remember the audience that is using Live.Com. It isn’t the computer geeks, but everyone else qualifies.  What do you really think about Live.Com?  Do you even understand what it is?  Do you care?  Discuss.

Already on Twitter?  Follow Me

Twitter is hard to explain to those that aren’t using it.  Even I was skeptical about how much I would use it at first. For a long time I have avoided sites like MySpace and Facebook but I’ve always had a blog, a cell phone, and email.  Those three items made me feel connected.  If I had something to say, I’d blog it.  If someone wanted to reach me electronically they could send a text message or email.  Lastly they could just call me.  Little did I realize how disconnected I was until later on.  It took Twitter to really show me how disconnected I was.  After becoming a Twitter fan I started to spread the word.  Some people I convinced to start using it.  Others are still holding out.  Maybe this will be enough to put them over the edge.

Not Until They Use It

I remember when I first told Alan Stevens about Twitter.Com.  He reluctantly joined and said “oh great, another social networking site”.  It wasn’t long until he started to see Twitter’s potential though.  Alan’s first tweet was on Oct. 25th at 11:04 PM.  About a day later he said this and as we can see he was starting to get it and work his way through it.

I met Alan at the TechEd conference in Orlando, FL earlier in in June.  We met up again at DevLink in Nashville, TN and we talked a lot in the speaker’s room as a matter of fact.  After Alan joined Twitter I started to get to know him better.  I think his major break through with Twitter came about a month later. 

By the way, for those of you that aren’t computer programmers, TDD stands for test driven development.  It is a methodology that developers should use to test their code, but a lot don’t.  Alan’s point is that until people use it, they won’t get it.  I guess he was doing some self retrospection at that moment.

The Twitter Battle

A few weeks ago I found myself in a battle of sorts.  It was a Friday night and several of us were hanging out the night before a conference.  Twitter kept dominating the conversation.  It was amazing at how much more stuff I knew that was going on around me just because of Twitter.  During the conversation I picked my phone up and tweeted (the action for posting to twitter) that I was down the street from the hotel hanging with a few fellow speakers.  In literally 1-2 minutes later my phone rang.  It was Alan Stevens who was also speaking at the conference.  “Dude where are you guys at?”, he said.  I told him and within a few minutes later Alan and another speaker Michael Neel showed up to join us.  Wow.  Name me another medium that connects people that way so quickly.

Once Alan and Michael got there (both twitterholics), the conversation was twitter, twitter, twitter.  Doug Turnure finally caved and said he would give it another go.  A few days ago he posted this to his blog:

After a lengthy discussion, and Keith’s *value prop* on it, I’m twittering again. I haven’t decided whether to thank Keith or yell at him about it. But it’s a lot of fun, especially when you’re at an event and trying to find people.

Doug was at Mix08, a large Microsoft conference in Vegas, when he wrote that.  Are you starting to see the connections now?  Twitter is about “What you are doing”.  For me Twitter is about what I am thinking, or what I am reading, or what I think about given a certain topic.  Sometimes I post links I find interesting.  Sometimes Twitter is conversational if someone posts something that is controversial.  Sometimes it is about replying to friends with one liners (cough cough, @RossCode and @mjeaton).  It is what you make out of it in a sense. 

How Twitter Has Changed

My Twitterversary (the anniversary date you joined Twitter) will be on May 18th of this year.  I can’t believe it has been almost a year.  Since I joined Twitter it has evolved into a lot of things.  There are desktop applications like Witty Twitter which is an open source project several of us contribute to.  I even made a simple one click install of it so anyone that wants to install it can. Click the link below (it will install Witty Twitter and keep itself up to date on your machine).

http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application (requires .Net 3.0 BTW!)

Having a single URL people can go to to use Twitter has proven very handy in getting people to adopt it.  There are also mobile applications like Tiny Twitter for Windows Mobile and even spin off sites like http://tffratio.com which allows users to track their friend-follower ratio.  A couple of my Tweeps (friends you follow on twitter) came up with it and started it.  We haven’t seen the end yet, more sites and ideas are popping up everywhere.

Tagging

Recently at the Mix 08 conference (which I didn’t attend) I was following key notes as they happened and knew where friends were hanging out and which sessions they were going to.  How?  Hashtags.org.  A Twitter hash tag is a pound sign in front of a noun.  Like #mix08 or #food and so on.  Hastags.Org organizes all the things people twitter about into one place.  I doubt we see many more #mix08 tags since #mix08 is now a thing of the past.  What is interesting about the Mix08 tags is how it spiked and then disappeared a few days later.

Not Enough Reasons?

I’ve already given anyone with a sense of curiosity enough reasons to give Twitter a try.  However, I know there are those of you that are holding out.  For those of you, I give you the best video I have found that explains Twitter.  Just remember that no matter how much stuff you read about it, you won’t get it UNTIL you start using it. 

To get started with Twitter create an account at http://www.twitter.com. 

Visual Studio has long supported the concept of opening more than one file.  Most all IDE tools and text editors support this concept so it is nothing new.  In Visual Studio as files are opened they are displayed along the top in tabs (also a standard convention).  This allows developers to switch between files they are working on easily.  However there are times when developers need to compare two files at the same time.  Using Tabbed Groups developers can view files vertically or horizontally.  There is also the ctrl-tab feature which allows developers to quickly switch between files they have open.  Here is a video that shows how this is done.  (the video is below, requires Silverlight)