Will we get a Google Reader API?

I've been using Google Reader pretty extensively the past few days. I even have firefox 2 configured to work with Google Reader. You can go to Preferences->Feeds and select Google Reader. I've been wondering when Google will release an API similar to Bloglines API or Newsgator API? It would be nice to have an API that a native reader could sync to. Google is pretty fast at releasing API's:

Google Office to Get APIs:

"As for Google APIs in general, as of now, there are these 12 Google APIs listed here."

Rickshaw

f06692bf.jpg
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Missing my country, so I thought I'd blog about it. Travelling on one of these to get to tuition or a friends house wasn't cheap but its safer than trying to get of a minibus (minibus drivers used to make stops when they felt like it, otherwise you have to jump while the bus is moving!).

You can read more about the rickshaw here:
"Rickshaws are also a mirror of our society. Rickshaw drivers use back of the rickshaw as their scrap book. "

IE7 and Google Reader

ie7andGRproblem
Originally uploaded by adnan_wasim2003.

I just installed IE7, and the first thing I did was visit Google Reader to check out my feeds. But as the picture shows all was not well. Dunno whats wrong, but I'm back to Firefox 2.0 pretty fast!

Upgrading Ubuntu

Ubuntu Edgy Upgrades a Disaster for many:

"First off let me state, this release is supposed to be "edgy", but i didn't know by edgy they meant playing with a toy that's been through a woodschipper, now laced with sharp edges for you to cut yourself on."

I didn't know people were having problems upgrading Ubuntu. I had no problems whatsoever upgrading the distro I have installed. I had Ubuntu Dapper Drake installed on my machine, I fired up Konsole, typed:
gksudo "update-manager -c"
Click a button or two, and:
cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 6.10

And we're done.

And in fact, I had kubuntu-desktop installed, which is what I had been using, and still am with no problems what so ever. Firefox 2.0 rocks on this install!

Solution to telemarketters!

A friend forwarded me this link. I might say more, once I stop laughing!

Sysadmins Nightly Mental Pain (SNMP)

Sysadmins Nightly Mental Pain (SNMP) - MySQL-dump

Or better known as "Simple Network Management Protocol". :)

Firefox Extension for Live Writer

 

Hey look what I found! :)

"Blog it from Windows Live Writer."

Python IE Automation - Thorough Tutorial

The Zana Zen » Blog Archive » Python IE Automation - Thorough Tutorial:

"Python IE automation is extremely easy using the InternetExplorer.Application COM object. Using this COM object you can automate IE to do all kind of stuff like automating any login process, downloading files or creating some underground bots"

Here is an interesting tutorial on how to script an IE session using Python. The best part is that if you ActivePython installed, you can actually immediately try the code without having to do anything tedious. You can try it by starting up the Pythonwin IDE and typing the code as is from the page.

Galactica

Picture 2.png
Originally uploaded by awasim.

The latest episode was one of the most amazing episodes of any program I've ever seen. If you're not watching this show, you're missing something great.

Improvements in Samba

New Samba Features Improve Interoperability - News by InformationWeek:

"One of the more interesting new features in the newer Samba releases is the ability to map UNIX services into the Windows service model. In this setup, Samba uses UNIX 'init' scripts to start, stop, and probe UNIX services, and then reports the status of those services back to Windows management stations via the Windows networking Service Control API. Once this is properly configured, you can manipulate UNIX services just like you can manipulate services running on Windows systems, and you can do so by using the same tools."

Their you go, improvements in Samba to let you sneak Linux into the enterprise in an even easier way! :)

When You Pick Your Tools, Pick Those That Can Build Tools

Phil Windley's Technometria | When You Pick Your Tools, Pick Those That Can Build Tools:

"Programmers should be tool builders. If you're not building tools to make your life easier, you're wasting time. That was really the point of Karl's talk. Although he was making the point in terms of open source projects, the concepts apply universally."

I think that Textmate is really popular for this reason. Its malleable, and on top of that its easy to build tools that help you program for Textmate. I use TextWrangler right now, because most of the tools I build use shell scripts, python and so forth. Its also the reason why out of the three operating systems, I am really comfortable with OS X and Linux, but not with Windows. Windows though has its own tools (batch, windows scripting), I'm just not comfortable using them yet. Cygwin is good, but it just doesn't seem natural. Now their is even more to learn on the Windows platform. Power Shell, Iron Python and so forth. I don't like limiting my choices in terms of platform. Use whatever it is that gets the job done.

I am thinking more and more on the lines of emacs, simply because its cross platform. It means though that I am going to have to learn elisp. I already have one customization that I make to emacs on a new install:
(setq scroll-step 1)

Here is a screencast on emacs.

Spammers hack blogs

Spammers hack blogs:

"Nivi, a blog I'm subscribed to, was showing dozens and dozens of entries being updated even though there was no discernible difference. However as I started looking closer, I noticed if you view the source, for example on this post, there is are ton of spam links there. You can click the screenshot to the left."

Ok this is scary. Especially if you are running on someone elses server. You might have no idea that all this crap is in your posts. Usually when some software is hacked it is easy to discern, since the hacker usually wants to get noticed. More covert hacking is the dangerous kind. Where a hacker will have reasons to hide what he has done.

googlereaderbug.png

googlereaderbug.png
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Looks like their is a bug in google reader, where the various panes get out of sync. The main pain says their aren't any unread items. The all items link says their are two unread items, and one of the sub folders has six unread items. The main pain shows no unread items after I clicked on the "All items" link.

ubuntu/kubuntu

I read recently in an article that you can install kubuntu on a ubuntu install by choosing kubuntu-desktop. Now I use kubuntu because I tend to prefer KDE, but I thought it would be interesting to see if you could do the inverse. So I started up the adept package manager, and search for everything -desktop. I found that you can install edubuntu-desktop, ubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-desktop. I chose ubuntu-desktop.

The installer ran, but it seemed to get stuck on preparing to install. It sat their for a while, as I worked on other stuff, for about an hour. After an hour I figured something was wrong. Choosing details showed me that the installer was actually waiting on input from the user, you had to choose whether you wanted to use gdm or kdm. Their should be an easier way to tell if the installer is waiting for input from the user. But in any case, if you try to install a package in ubuntu/kubuntu you might want to check on the details if the installer seems stuck.

You could ofcourse just do sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop, from the command line, which would show you if the command line installers are waiting for input.

IE7/FlashPlayer 9 Beta are out

Internet Explorer 7: Home

Flash Player 9 Beta (Windows, Linux, OSX)

On the browser:


Dave Winer says:

Add to the list of reasons not to switch -- doesn't run on Mac OS.

I am probably wrong about this, but it seems to me that IE7 just gives us another browser to support, without giving much back in return.

Their was a site recently that I had to visit for my Visa/immigration stuff. IE6 only. I am sure if I had IE7 installed on that machine it wouldn't have worked. And its not like I had a choice about it. I can't opt to not use the site because it works with only a particular browser. I am too lazy to go about futzing with the user agent string to make the site believe that I am using IE6 (I shouldn't have to do this in the first place). Which means that I should perhaps leave a box lying around that doesn't have IE7 installed. Which sucks! Whats the point of upgrading to IE7 if you're not sure that all the sites that you have to visit will work on it. We'll have to see how it goes, but as a person who does web development, this doesn't make me happy.

Firefox 2 on the other hand is another story. I can't wait for it to come out. I want to see if it performs better on my Powerbook as opposed to 1.5. Plus the ability to specify an external RSS reader is something I've been looking forward to. Plus it will run on every system of mine (OSX, Linux/*BSD, Windows). Its not like I don't have complaints about Firefox. Each time I have firefox configured with the right extensions and preferences, the software becomes too slow for daily use on the Powerbook. Leading me to try out a whole bunch of other browsers. Camino, Safari, Webkit build of Safari, Shiira! Then back to firefox, with less extensions. Then the browser becomes slow again.

Lately I've been using Google Reader, which is an awesome aggregator, but its too damn slow in Firefox. Hence my move to Camino. Don't know how long it will last though. Firefox has way better web developer tools!

Flash Player
More cross platform video/screencast goodness. Though I must admit I prefer screencasts that are downloadable.

Something amazing has happened!

There was once this project called OpenBeOS. It started after the company that made the amazing operating system called BeOS went down under. A group of people got together and decided to rewrite the operating system from scratch. The path they took seems to be to rewrite each part of the operating system. I've been watching this project for a long time (years now) as the programmers toiled in obscurity. I saw the change from OpenBeOS to haiku.

And today when I visited their site I saw a downloadable alpha version vmware image!

See the screenshots for a first impression.

:D

Media Temples Grid Server

Media Temples Grid-Server

This looks quite interesting. I wonder how it compaires with the Amazons EC2.

search results as a rss feed

I did a search on Yahoo for JSON. I noticed that their was an RSS feed for these search results. Subscribed. I did a search on Google, and I noticed their was no RSS feed. I did a search on search.live.com and their is a RSS feed. I thought the hip one out of the three search engines was google?

http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=JSON&adult_ok=1

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=json&format=rss

eve-online

Diary of a Mercenary Op in EVE Online

I got a 14 day trial for eve-online, so I've been meaning to try the game out. The graphics, screenshots and videos seemed great, and I really like space (startrek, battlestar, stargate). So I installed the client, and spent some time on it. But it seems too involved, and I just can't seem to find the time to really play! I haven't even made it past the tutorial yet! :(

blog integrity

A Commitment

I don't think this issue really effects me that much. A blog must have integrity of course, but the trend in the way I read blogs makes this issue irrelevant for me. Lately I've begun reading particular posts about topics I care about. Using things like Technorati's RSS search results and such. Like the python post below. I think I am going to use this more and more to get information about topics I care about (python, system administration and so on...). Ironic that I was led to this path by Steve Rubel, whose company seems to be involved in this whole thing.

My approach seems like the logical step for the rest of the blogosphere to take. Instead of reading blogs, you read RSS feeds of items that interest you. I wonder when Google will wake up to this? They seem to have moved away from search lately. I loved it when they came out with Google alerts, that sent you search results on specific terms in email. A logical progression/improvement would be to create an RSS feed of these results. But no such innovation seems forth coming. Yahoo is a different story. A story I haven't looked into yet, so I can't say anything.

There are other tools that can make the blogosphere richer. Bloglines citations, technorati trackbacks are great tools to track conversations on topics of interest. These tools will help you gather information from the blogosphere regarding topics you care about. I find it strange though that the people who introduced me to these tools seem to be moving away from them. Jon Udell used to use these tools rather than have comments on his blog to track conversations. He seems to be enabling comments on his blog. Robert Scoble also seems to have changed the way he does all this. That might just be because he is transitioning from one job to the next, I don't know.

Anyways, what using the above tools does is make irrelevant all this paid for marketing material. The result is content that you really care about and like to read. No more "browsing" blogs. I hope companies like technorati keep making these tools, and Google wakes up and starts adding tools that make our online life easier.

Iterating Python Dictionaries

mimeboundarymarker: Python iteritems function:

"The iteritems function returns an iterator over the key and value pairs in a Python dictionary

>>> wordz = {'school' : 'schule', 'weather' : 'wetter'}"

We have a dictionary called wordz above with two items. The usual way I used to iterate over these items was the following:

keys = wordz.keys()
for x in keys:
.... print x, "-->", wordz[x]

The above code would go over the list of keys, and print its corresponding entry in the dictionary. Thanks to the post linked above I learnt about an easier way of iterating over a dictionary using the iteritems keyword:

>>> for key, value in wordz.iteritems():
....... print key, "=", value


I've always been looking to improve the semantic experience of the web. So when I read Steve Rubels article on using technorati RSS feeds, I jumped at the chance to use them. I found the above post as a result of one of those RSS feeds.

The internet gets more enjoyable by the day.

Linux.com | Nexenta combines OpenSolaris, GNU, and Ubuntu

Linux.com | Nexenta combines OpenSolaris, GNU, and Ubuntu:

"Nexenta's Alpha 5 release is available as an installable ISO, live CD, or VMware image. I opted for the installable ISO."

This is the first time I've been in a situation where I can download a vmware image of an operating system that I want to try. This just makes trying out various operating systems really easy. I wonder if nexenta has tools like dtrace?

Here is dtrace at opensolaris.org.

how to pipe perl stdout to a new emacs instance?

I've been trying to get emacs to read data from stdin but haven't figured it out yet. On OSX I started doing this for a script I had written. The script would get data from a remote source, do stuff to the data, and then output that data to stdout. I'd pipe that data to the command line TextWrangler tool edit, which just worked.

To get this working with vi, I learnt that one could do something like
./perlscript someargument | vi -

I am looking for something equivalent for emacs.

IceWeasel

IceWeasel

Due to some licensing issues, debian has forked firefox and renamed it IceWeasel. I don't know about this debate on whether this is a good idea, but I like those icons! :)

I hope Ubuntu/Kubuntu get this release as well.

Bevo 13, longest tenured Texas mascot dies

keyetv.com - Local Sports Wire:

"The longest-tenured mascot in Texas Longhorn history has gone to that big ranch in the sky."

He saw us win before he passed on. He started in 1988. Thats a long time!

Whats funny is that I found this article on digg! I guess we have longhorn diggers! :)

Google Reader, Writely and blogging

I've been using writely quite a bit lately on my Ubuntu box, and mostly to make posts to my blog. I don't see a place for people to put in a title of a post. I would've thought that placing the title of the document as the title of the post would've been the logical thing to do, but I guess not so far. In any case, the flow isn't their. In OS X I used the combination of NetNewsWire and Marsedit. See an item you want to blog, right click the item, and choose post using Marsedit. No such flow in Googles apps. I guess they've been spending time integrating Writely with docs.google.com, but I hope they will spend some time in the future, integrating these apps so that people can use them better. What I would like is an option to go from a post in Google Reader, to writely (with the right title), to my blog.

Embedded Videos on Linux

Embedded videos on Linux seems to be a hit and run type thing. You never know if a video embedded in a web page will run. Youtube videos have no problem running on the machine. Perhaps that is why youtube is so popular. The web is becoming more and more about short video clips, and on my kubuntu install I have the mplayer video plugin installed for firefox. Some videos will play, some will show an empty mplayer plugin and others will just loop continously trying to load (cnn video).

(I haven't seen that video linked above, its something about Jon Stewart, just an example of video that won't play.)

I found this article on flash based video on techmeme.com. The problem with some flash based videos on Linux is that they require a player that is newer than version 7. We anxiously await version 9 of the flash player for Linux, which will bring Linux on par with other platforms.

Here is a different view, a view from the perspective of creators of video in Hollywood. Linux is an excellent system for developers of video content.

Google Reader has a mobile version

Google Reader:

"If your phone has a data connection, you can access Google Reader on the go by pointing your mobile phone's browser to:

http://www.google.com/reader/m "

Things keep getting better with Google Reader.

Google Reader fixes bug while I'm reading my feeds...

Over the weekend, I decided to try switching to Google Reader, for various reasons. Before this I had been using NetNewsWire on OS X, FeedDemon on Windows and kAkreggator/Newsgator (depending on mood) on Linux. NetNewsWire, FeedDemon and Newsgator were synced with each other, while kAkreggator was not. However, these were too many different pieces of software one had to get used to after each switch. The first incarnation of Google Reader did not agree with me, but the second incarnation looked quite good. And so far I haven't been disappointed.

Their are some irritating problems with the reader, but I guess that was to be expected with a new redesign. However I did not expect a fix for a certain bug as I read my feeds. I like the River of News style of reading. In Google Reader, when you read a river, an item is marked as read when it scrolls of the screen. When you reach the end of the river, the last few items don't scroll of the screen, and hence, they are not marked as read. This was a little irritating because it required you to manually mark those items. While I was reading, it seems google applied an update, that causes the river to scroll those last few items of the screen, fixing the bug. Now I had been reading that one advantage of web applications is the ease of upgrade. The user doesn't have to do anything. Here is a perfect example!

One big annoyance still left, is the way the river flows. It seems the reader downloads a certain number of items. Say you have a 100 unread items. It will download 20, and when you have scrolled to the bottom of these particular 20, it will download 20 more. The wait for the feed to download those next 20 is annoying. Perhaps a fix might be that if 10 of the 20 items has been read, the Reader downloads the next 20. So that the user doesn't have to wait for the items.

All in all though Google reader so far seems like a nice aggregator and I love the interface.

Computerworld > Why open source is under-utilised in graphics

Computerworld > Why open source is under-utilised in graphics:

"Similarly, the licensing terms of Jon Hicks’ familiar “fox around the globe” Firefox logo do not permit the logo’s use in versions of the browser built from a modified source code tree. For this reason, many “strictly free” Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, omit the logo in favour of a more generic alternative. If they didn’t, the logo would effectively limit how they could make use of the open-source Firefox code."

Now I understand why in kubuntu the icon for Firefox is teh same as deer park builds.

More RC2 updates

I tried installing the NVidia driver from laptopvideo2go.com for my Quadro NVS 110M card in my Dell D620, but was not successful. The default driver has a rating of 3.1. I remember a higher rating after installing the driver. But none of the drivers would work. The 95 series would say no card found, and the 85 series driver, caused the computer to crash, requiring a boot into safe mode, to uninstall the driver, and install the old one from Microsoft. I guess its still to early to find a driver that will work for RC2, so I will have to wait. Aero works though without that driver, so its not that bad.

I also installed the latest version of Iron Python. I was surprised to find that it doesn't have modules such as os. Hence, import os fails. I guess Iron Python is meant specifically to work with dotnet only. I thought it was a complete python implementation. In my eyes, a complete Python implementation would definitely have the os module.

Vista RC2 so far

I installed Vista RC2, and I ran into a problem during installation that I hadn't run into before. After the files had been copied Vista resizes the video, and then asks questions such as username/password. Before it went to that screen, the video resized, and it was supposed to bring up that dialog. But nothing happened. The system just sat their doing nothing for about half an hour. It hadn't done that on any of the previous builds that I've tried. I thought the installation was fried. In any case, I hit the power button, with the intent to do a hard reboot, but vista seems to have understood that and gone into some sort of standby mode. I hit the power button again, and the system came up, at the right dialog. I entered this information and the installation went along fine.

I've been using the system for the past two hours and so far, I haven't had any problems. Its worked flawlessly after that. I haven't installed cygwin yet, I hope it works! Thats what got Vista of my machine last time.

Oh and I installed Firefox 2 Rc2 and everything seems to be working fine without any problems so far.

Also cygwin seems to have installed just fine, and I didn't find any problems with it like the last time.

Pluggd, Woz, and seven minutes of Flock

Pluggd, Woz, and seven minutes of Flock:

"Woz (co-founder of Apple) was lots of fun tonight, had more than an hour of asking him lots of stories about his experiences at Apple and other things. Even talked about his love of Tetris, laser pointers, and the new US Festival that he’s planning for next year. The interview I did with him was the eighth speech he did today alone. Damn that guy has a lot of energy. I got three of his very collectable metalic business cards. I have more than 1,400 business cards and his is definitely the coolest. It’s all metal and etched out. He told me that someone sold one on eBay for more than $500. I’m not selling mine, though. They totally rock and I’ll treasure mine forever."

(Via Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

Wow! check out that business card! Who wouldn't remember one of those!

I was surprised by the flock demo. Its shaping up to be quite an interesting browser. What worries me though that flock is a browser that is deeply integrated with web services. But I don't consider web services reliable. Their are three apps that I use that are each integrated into a specific web service.

1. Cocoalicious and del.icio.us


2. Marsedit and blogger


3. NetNewsWire and newsgator

Each one of these has caused problems on occasion. The service is down, the client has problems communicating, something goes out of sync and the app is left not knowing how to sync back and the list goes on. If flock had been an extension for firefox rather than a fork it might have been different.

Still, I'm going to try out the browser. The demo was pretty good.

Anybody notice scobles shows are getting better at video quality. Looks like Podtech bought him a new camera! :)

Windows Vista RC2 available for download

Windows Vista RC2

Downloading as we speak...

Upgrading to Blogger Beta

I tried to upgrade my blog to the new blogger beta, but the upgrade failed. The reasons listed for a failure in upgrade were:

• A blog publishing via FTP to a non-BlogSpot server.
• A blog with a Plus upgrade (we stopped offering this upgrade a couple years ago, so this will not affect many people).
• A team blog.
• A very large blog. (More than a couple thousand posts + comments.)

Since the first three don't apply, I guess its because I have a very large blog! Don't know whether that should make me happy or sad!

My Commonly Used Apps on OS X

Here is a list of my commonly used apps for OS X

1. Firefox
2. Thunderbird
3. AdiumX (Instant Messaging, port of GAIM for OS X)
4. NetNewsWire (RSS reader/aggregator)
5. Marsedit (Posting to weblog)
6. iTerm
7. Unison (News reader)
8. Transmit (FTP/sFTP/scp)
9. TextWrangler (Text Editor)
10. VoodooPad (Desktop wiki)
11. Chicken of the VNC
12. Transmission (Bittorrent)
13. VLC (Video Media)
14. iTunes (Music)


15. fink (fink.sourceforge.net)

For those of you buying a new macbook and looking for good apps for OSX! If I missed something, let me know!

Vista

I upgraded to the Vista release that came out after RC1 on the Dell D620. It installed fine without any problem. The laptop has an Nvidia NVS 110M graphics chip, and I had to install the drivers manually last time for the Aero interface to work. Not any more. Everything worked right out of the box. I'm impressed.

Once the build was installed, I installed Firefox 2 RC 2. Things stopped working at that point, as it became the default browser. Changing it back to Internet Explorer 7 fixed the problem for now. I'm using LiveWriter to make this post. Feed Demon doesn't work similar to the flow that I had developed with NetNewsWire. Its probably me. I'll have to keep using the app to get used to it.

I'm installing Visual Studio Express, but what I really wanted to try out was IronPython. I'll get to that right after these installations.

So far so good. But I don't know how long I can last on a system without bash!

Linux.com | Replacing init with Upstart

Linux.com | Replacing init with Upstart:

"For years, most Linux distributions have been using an init daemon based on the one found in Unix System V. The init daemon is spawned by the kernel itself, and tasked with booting the rest of the system, starting all other processes, and taking care of them when they need to be stopped or when they die. While the System V init setup has worked well for Linux in the past, it hasn't aged well -- which is why we're replacing the aging init system with Upstart in Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft."

I haven't tried edgy eft yet so I had no idea init was being replaced. I'm glad to see this is finally being done in a well known Linux distribution. Apple replaced Init in OS X when they released 10.4 (Tiger). It would be interesting to see a comparision of launchd vs. upstart.

Here is another article I found on upstart.

Amazon's EC2

Amazon's EC2:

"I agree with all of the commenters who believe that Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (the name's a bit much), AKA EC2, is a Big Deal. The very idea of provisioning a server with expandable storage in the cloud for almost an order of magnitude less cash than it would cost to obtain a dedicated server - let alone run your own - is impressive enough on its own. Pair that with some of the available web services and it's that much more interesting."

(Via Planet Intertwingly.)

It was interesting reading first hand experience of people using this service. This service is impressive in just that you have a machine running in a cloud. But pair that with the fact that its a dedicated server with you deciding what services to run on it, and it makes it even more interesting. Though I've read in other places, that its not as cheap as some dedicated server offerings. But this is just the first incarnation of the service. It will be interesting to see how this service evolves, and if it gets cheaper with time.

Testing Live Writer

Live Writer does try to show the layout of your actual weblog, but its not doing that good a job with my web log. What I truly want to see is if it will provide better interaction with blogger servers than Marsedit. Over the past few days, Marsedit occassionaly refuses to post. I'm pretty sure its the blogger servers. If their was a problem with Marsedit, I'd assume it wouldn't post all the time, instead of being intermittent.

screencasts, Linux and LiveWriter

I was trying to watch Jon Udells latest screencast on my Powerbook, but the screencast resolution is too large for a powerbook with a 12inch screen. It has a max resolution of 1024x768, so I had to switch to my Kubuntu desktop (1280x1024).

The flash version would not show video, I'm assuming its because the version of flash required is version 8 or above. The plugin installed on the desktop is version 7, I believe thats the latest so far for Linux. The wmv format wouldn't play, even though I had the mplayer plugin installed. The version that I thought most definitely would not play, the quicktime version, ran fine. This too was run by the mplayer plugin for the firefox browser. I'm just glad that of the three, their is at least one format that ran without a problem on Kubuntu.

The Screencast is about Windows Live Writer, the blogging tool that has been released by Microsoft. But I think the most interesting thing would be the use of the Live Clipboard. As Jon says,

There's quite a bit going on in this half-hour screencast. Live Writer is both a .NET-based WYSIWYG editor for blog posts and a prototype for the integration of microformats and Live Clipboard across a range of Microsoft products and services.