The Surface Meta-App

Surface
Just a quick little blog post about one more app you're going to want to track down for your Surface. Great Windows Apps. Why do you need this? Well, how to put this, the Store, looks nice. But it doesn't work terribly well. Trying to see the top rated apps, or looking for new apps, you can get different results at different times and I find it quite frustrating. But, Great Windows Apps is running some sort of queries or something against the Store and displaying the information in a much more meaningful, and quite accurate, representation of the apps. It's just good.
Read More

Microsoft Surface: Top Apps… So Far

Surface
After living with the Surface for a month and trying hard to make it work as a tool for production, not just consumption, I feel like I've got a handle on this thing. There are several that are built in that I'm using all the time like Word, Mail, Internet Explorer, OneNote, Music and Video. But there are a few others that you need to know about if you're looking to get more functionality out of your Surface. One note, I tried to find links to the Windows Store for all the apps, but I can't seem to do that, or at least I couldn't find how to do it. Here's the list: Tweetro: This is the single best Twitter app that I've tried so far. It functions as I…
Read More

Experimenting with Social Media

Professional Development
After multiple talks with Jason Strate (blog|twitter) and Denny Cherry (blog|twitter) about how they are working on automating more of their blogging and social media interactions, I'm going down that road... a little ways. The first thing that I'm trying out is Pocket. It's a way to capture web sites that you want to read later. You don't want to have to try to manage book marks in your browser. They all suck (and Google Chrome on the Mac sucks even worse) in this task. So this app lets you quickly mark a site and tag it for reading later. Further, you have an account that you can access from multiple devices. I'm already trying out two different readers that will work with Pocket on the Surface and I already…
Read More

HDInsight, Finally

Azure, HDInsight
See this: That's right. The install worked. All I had to do was get a completely clean server set up. No domain controller. Now to get my learn on. Microsoft has a web site with a number of introductory samples. I'll start there and work through them. The very first example gets me set up with some data that it builds by running a Powershell script, importdata.ps1. But I'm not going to just blindly follow along. I want to see what the heck is happening so I can start understanding this stuff. By the way, thank you Microsoft for making the samples in PowerShell and not forcing me to relearn Python or something else. That would have been frustrating. The script is really simple. It has two scenarios you can…
Read More