Eh. Mr. King could've stayed in retirement. His style is engaging as ever. He knows how to make sympathetic characters. But endings? The ending for this one is pretty flat.




I finished it, but I probably won't reread it. I'll give this one to Mom.

So I was somewhat surprised that I didn't get a First Class upgrade on either of my flights today. Not that I'm guaranteed an upgrade, or anything; but usually I get them on about two out of three flights since attaining NWA Gold status. Oh, well...

Then I get to the airport in Seattle, and I notice that it's really, really crowded. And slowly it dawns on me...

What has been the big topic on the radio here in Seattle all week? The Superbowl.

Why has it been the big topic? Because Seattle is playing in it.

When is it? This weekend.

Why was it the big topic on the radio all last week in Michigan? Because it's in Detroit this year.

What's the big airline with hubs in Seattle, Minneapolis (where I'm stopping), and Detroit? NWA.

Am I going to have incredibly crowded flights and airports all day? Yep.

Do most of these people have any clue at all how to make the security and check in procedures go smoothly and efficiently? Nope, none at all.

Is my day going to be nothing but hassle? Probably...

The main thing I wanted from the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing was simple numbers: how large is the Tablet PC market? That, ultimately, is what determines the market for Tablet UML.

And the answer is: 1,000,000 Tablet PCs shipped so far, with 850,000 expected to ship in 2006.

Bonus numbers: 300 known Tablet PC apps in production, 125 of which are for sale on Handango, an online site specializing in software for mobile devices. Those 125 come from 30 ISVs. Maybe I should make that 31.

Now I can start calculating market potential...

The MS folks at the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing are showing off Sidecar, a new technology that lets hardware manufacturers embed a small display and controller in the lid of a laptop. That way, you can get at some information — maps, appointments, music, etc. — without having to open up and boot from standby and so on. That would be really, really, really handy for mobile users like me.

Unfortunately, the Sideshow team isn't talking to the .NET team. The developer tools group have been pushing managed code (i.e., .NET) for pretty much everything; but Sidecar has only a C++/COM API. This, I find, is a consistent, recurring problem for Microsoft: some of their leading edge stuff in one area hasn't kept pace with some of their leading edge stuff in another area. The Speech API (SAPI), for example, is still only available as a really poor COM wrapper around a C++ core. When I hear MS haters scream how unfair it is that MS app developers have unfair access to the internals of MS platform code, I can only laugh: it seems like the market as a whole is much farther ahead in adopting MS technologies than are some parts of MS itself.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse.'" — Henry Ford, quoted by Frank Gocinski (Tablet PC evangelist) at the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing.

We have a new video up at TabletUML.com. It's in line with the "show, not tell" school of communication. I find that I can talk about Tablet UML all day long without making an impression; but if I just start drawing, people get the point, and some of them get excited.

This video was created with Camtasia Studio Screen Recorder. Josh Holmes recommended it, and I have to thank him for that. Camtasia Studio creates much smaller videos than other tools I have tried. More important, it doesn't slow down the performance of the system while it's recording, so the videos look natural. It's a great tool.

And for those who are interested: that video is of Tablet UML 1.5 in action. It should be available within the week. I distributed copies at the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing this week, and I'll update the Web site shortly.

Never would I have guessed that a presentation on the architecture of handwriting recognition systems would be a source of great hilarity. At the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing, Jay Pittman has us rolling in the aisles. Some examples.

"So you write 'dictionary', but the recognizer comes up with 'dictum'. So we let the user select the 'um' and rewrite it. But we have to do that in context of the first part. Otherwise, Bill Gates tries this, and he writes 'ionary', and the system looks it up in the dictionary and finds the first matching word, 'ion'. And then Bill Gates uses... 'colorful' language."

"I never imagined when I was planning my career that some day Bill Gates would pay me to look up dirty words in the dictionary."

"So we have to mark certain words as being in the dictionary, but being 'restricted'. That means that, when the recognizer can't recognize something but the F-word looks like a possible match, we still don't put it in the match list. We have to put it in the dictionary, or else when someone types it, it will show up as a misspelling. Then someone will write a letter to the editor: 'Microsoft doesn't know the F-word.' But that doesn't mean they want it showing up in the suggested word list. That way, we'll get letters from Senators. Or Archbishops. (Audience laughs.) It has happened."

"KKOMO: That means 'Krispy Kreme's Outside My Office'. It makes you very popular here at Microsoft."

"We don't pre-announce things... usually because we don't know!"

Mr. Pittman is one funny speaker!

On a more serious, business note: at this briefing, Microsoft announced that the Richard Hale Shaw Group is now their official partner for developer training for enterprise Tablet customers. If you're not quite large enough to be one of their enterprise customers, you can get the same training directly from us.

UPDATE: "We also get asked about Klingon text recognition. The answer's still no."

UPDATE: Fixed a dumb spelling error.