Home - Rob

2/1/2008

We regularly grill our support engineers on their VE knowledge. After all, without humiliation and public exposure of your ignorance, how do you learn? In any case, the last grill session resulted in a follow up homework assignment of figuring out how many VE tiles there are.

It turns out that you can't caclulate an exact number because you just don't know how many tiles Microsoft actually created, or how many layers there are over the vast amount of oceans in the US. However, with some knowledge of how the Tile Server Works (article is v4, but the concpet holds for v5 and v6), you can make an educated guess.

My intrepid support engineer put this together:

There are 19 zoom levels with a maximum number of tiles of 4^x tiles per zoom level x.
There are three zoom levels that have 19 zoom levels: road, aerial, hybrid.
There are two birdseye zoom levels that are equivalent to zoom levels 18 and 19.
The earth’s surface is approximately 70% water. Water is only covered to zoom level 4.

These facts lead to:

The calculation for maximum number of titles for road view (same for aerial and hybrid):

Sum (0..19) 4^n or (4^(19+1) - 1)/(4-1) - 1 or simply 366,503,875,924

Calculation for maximum number of birdseye view tiles:

4^18 + 4^19 or 343,597,383,680.

Calculation for total maximum number of tiles (aerial, hybrid, road, birdseye):

3 * 366,503,875,924 + 343,597,383,680 or 1,443,109,011,452 (1.4 trillion).

To account for water, we need the total for the first 4 zoom levels, plus 30% of the total for the remaining zoom levels. The first four zoom levels is only 340 tiles (times 3 for the different views), which is rather meaningless. Simply taking our previous total and multiplying by 30%, we get 432,932,703,435 (432 billion).
Assuming each of these possible tiles is 15 KB on average, we have about 6493990551534 KB, or 6048 terabytes, or just under 6 petabytes of data.

In reality, there are far fewer tiles as coverage for birdseye is much more limited than simply "land". Similarly, coverage for aerial and hybrid isn't down to zoom level 19 for the full land surface. However, you can see that the number of tiles and data really add up quickly.

Posted at 1:58 PM by Robert McGovern | Category: Virtual Earth | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/24/2008

Writing Deja Vu

Recently, I've been working on reviewing and editing the online trianing course to accompany the new Microsoft VE Certification Exam. I'm pretty excited about both the exam and the training as they both show just how far VE has come as a product.

Have you ever gone back and reread something you wrote several years ago. In the case of the training material, most of it was based of a set of white papers I either wrote or revised over the past 3 years. I found myself amazed at the content I had put into the original sources. I've had the same experience going back and rereading the CodeNotes series. Hopefully, as you go back, you are pleasently surprised by the quality and quantity of what you produced. Sometimes, you are going to be depressed by the sheer awfulness of it all. :)

Wether you are a writer or a coder or an architect, it's often easy to forget what you did a few years (or even a few months) ago. As a coder, that's why you want good documentation and comments. I always try to have at least a one page box and arrow architecture diagram stashed away, plus some step by step instructions for getting started.

As a writer, it's even worse because you can't really comment your writing. Have you ever tried to recreate that amazing visio diagram that you now only have a paper copy of? What about that screen mockup that was built in Photoshop? Do you have the original with all the layers, or just the flattened version for publication? Figuring out which artifacts of a writing project need to go in source control is a big challenge that I personally haven't solved yet. Some stuff is just too one shot to be worth saving (that 5 line program you built to test methodX), while other stuff is surprisingly valuable (that 5 line program that was the testbed for testing methods A through Z). Telling the difference is tricky.

--Rob

Posted at 10:04 AM by Robert McGovern | Category: Writing; Virtual Earth | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/10/2008

Windows Live... and me?

Several people have asked me about Windows Live. Specifically, my colleagues want to know what it is, what we are doing with Windows Live and whether it's useful at all. Since I’m not the marketing anti-genius from Microsoft who came up with the branding, all I can really talk about is the parts I’m familiar with:

· Hotmail –I am not a hotmail expert, but I’ve been using it since way before Microsoft bought it. I can use Hotmail for normal personal emails, but I’ve never done more than that.

· Messenger – I’m on Messenger all the time. We (Infusion) are also working with the Microsoft Product Manager to put together some demos, white papers and SDK material around the forthcoming beta of the Messenger API (sneak peek here).

· Contacts – We’ve used Contacts for several proof of concept projects, primarily leveraging Silverlight and other Live services.

· Virtual Earth – Although someone at Microsoft keeps telling me it’s “Live Search” or “Live Maps”, I refuse to bow to their terms. We’ve been part of the VE team since it was just MapPoint. We do extensive commercial work with VE. We also work with the dev community, having two different VE MVPs on staff (myself, and Derek Chan).

· AdCenter – Also technically part of Live Search, we’ve been working with the AdCenter team for several years helping them build out non-.NET language samples. Every time we get a request, you can hear the screams as we dig out the old Perl, PHP and Java work environments.

The other parts of “Windows Live” that I don’t know as much about include MSN (news and news API), Live spaces (the social networking stuff), Live Photo Gallery, or OneCare.

Posted at 11:57 AM by Robert McGovern | Category: General; Virtual Earth | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/31/2007

Update on 2008 goals

So my goals from the beginning of December were to:

1. Blog more often - I've more than tripled my blog output from last year!
2. Replace my cell phone - This idea was vetoed by our CFO who thinks my antique cell phone is cute. Turns out one of our developers has the same phone!

3. I'm definitely LinkedIn and doing more with it all the time.

4. My last trip to Toronto got me elite status, so no more long lines for me!

Now I need to come up with tougher goals for 2008. Maybe tomorrow. :)

Posted at 4:19 PM by Robert McGovern | Category: General | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/17/2007

Sleepless... it's not about the caffeine

Have you heard about the Infusion/Microsoft Sleepless tour? Earlier this year, Infusion and Microsoft joined forces to create the Sleepless in New York event. Basically, we brought a bunch of smart developers together and put them in a hotel in New York City for a weekend. They were locked up with a bunch of SharePoint resources and were given a mission to create a working application. To keep it interesting, we offered a bunch of prizes and rewards. The event was a huge success. Microsoft has now sponsored us to take Sleepless on the road.

If you think you can hang with the best (and want a chance to win lots of prizes), go to http://www.infusion.com/sleepless/Home.aspx and sign up. Sadly, if you are an Infusion employee, you are excluded from this offer unless you want to help run the event.

Posted at 4:23 PM by Robert McGovern | Category: General; Management | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/12/2007

What does it take to be a good writer?

So we've been looking for a good technical writer for a long time now. The problem is that our definitions for technical, writer and technical writer don't always match the industry standard. To keep this post short, I'm just going to focus on what it takes to meet my expectations for a good writer. We'll leave the technical part, and the combined term for another time.

In my opinion, a good writer needs to:

Know how to write - This seems obvious, however it isn't. I read an article recently that somewhere around 70% of new high school grads fail a basic writing competency test. I see it all the time in technical articles, blogs, forum posts, books and in some of the students we work with. Although the authors can speak English and read English, they can't write English. You have to be a master of fundamental concepts like subjects and verbs, verb tense, spelling, and punctuation. If you want to be really good (at least, for our kind of writing), you might even brush up on Instructional Design, Component Design Theory, or the ADDIE model. However, that's all high end jargon. What you really need to do is WRITE GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT SENTENCES!
Read like a maniac - I don't really care what you read, but if you don't regularly pick up a book and read every day, you probably won't be a good writer. I personally tend to stick with Science Fiction, Fantasy, Military History and regular History. I've known good writers who preferred biographies. I even knew one writer who really only read poetry books and romance novels. He was a bit strange but one of the best technical writers I've ever met.
Know when to quit - The worst enemy of a writer is perfectionism. Most amatuer writers get so caught up in making "it" perfect that "it" never gets done. You might get away with that if you are working on the Great American Novel and aren't published yet, but even JK Rowling's publisher pushed her to finish the series. You have to invest yourself in the writing but realize that you also have to meet deadlines. Good enough actually is good enough if it's on time. Great is useless if it's late. Writer's block is for people who aren't serious about writing, or don't have real deadlines.
Be curious - Not only do you have to keep reading, but you have to always question and poke into things. A technical writer who isn't also an armchair coder or part time human factors expert, or an untrained architect probably isn't a good writer. The best way to understand something is to teach it, and technical writing is one of the better ways to mass teach something. You might be paired with a subject matter expert during a writing project, but at the end, you better show yourself as a fair approximation of a subject matter expert.

And that's it for now.

Posted at 4:01 PM by Robert McGovern | Category: Writing | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

12/7/2007

Another Post? What's going on!

So I'm a terrible blogger. I either write way too much, or I ignore my blog for months (years) at a time. As part of my new years resolutions, I'm going to:

1. Blog more often.

2. Get a new cell phone to replace the one I bought in 2000.

3. Actually use my LinkedIn account

4. Finally get my elite status on United Air Lines

Posted at 11:42 AM by Robert McGovern | Category: General | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/13/2007

Things to do in Denver

I live in Denver. However, I rarely get downtown. I spent most of this week downtown at the WWPC enjoying the big blue bear at the convention center and taking people on an unintentional tour of carpool lanes that don't end, ugly art buildings, one lane streets and other exciting places. I will say the highlight of the tour was getting our sales team out to Jack-n-Grill, which is the best "New Mexican" style resturant in Denver. If you think all Mexican food is the same, you also probably think that chilie is spelled without an "e" and somehow involves beans.

In terms of the World Wide Partner Conference, I learned an a lot about how Microsoft works. I also discovered a huge range of opportunities that are out there for exploration. I think it was hard to tell which new technology stole the show. The candidates are:

Microsoft Surface - http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ - This product just blows me away in terms of what it does and how it works.
Microsoft Silverlight - http://silverlight.net/ - Silverlight just gets better and better. Even in it's infancy, Silverlight is an amazing revolution in web development. Brian Goldfarb's demo during Steve Ballmer's keynote was one of the highlights of the show.
Photosynth - http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ - Although still mostly a Microsoft Research project, photosynth plus Silverlight is going to create a web 3.0 wave for retail.
Seadragon - http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx - Wow. From a sheer "cool" factor, Seadragon wins hands down.

Combining these technologies makes me think that in the next 3 to 5 years, almost everything we know about UI and man-machine interface is going to change.

Posted at 11:51 AM by Robert McGovern | Category: General | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

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