The latest issue of BusinessWeek covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, advertisers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude approximation of who is watching what. With such thin information, advertisers can't target specific neighborhoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its sophisticated per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore, "is that there's not enough math in [the TV] business."

But aQuantive Inc. (AQNT ) aims to change that. ... Despite the hoopla about advertisers moving online, the $70 billion television ad market dwarfs the Web business 5 to 1. Says aQuantive CEO Brian P. McAndrews, once an ABC executive: "TV is the largest medium out there."

... 

That's why aQuantive is taking baby steps. Starting in June, the company's Atlas on Demand unit will begin testing technology that measures video-on-demand (VOD) viewers for Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR ) VOD's Web-like interactivity is what sold aQuantive. Besides, the medium is taking off, with digital cable now in 25 million homes, far ahead of TiVo's 4.4 million.

By gathering data from the same set-top boxes viewers use to order shows and movies, Atlas on Demand plans to figure out how many people watched a show and when, as well as how many watched the ads vs. skipped them. From there, company executives hope to help advertisers determine precisely how much attention their money buys. "You know people watch Lost," says John Chandler, Atlas on Demand senior analyst. "[Now] you'll know if they watch the ad."

... 

Proponents of VOD hope the medium will become as interactive as the Web itself, allowing viewers to get discount offers, enter contests, and even buy stuff. Burger King is considering running ads offering drive-through deals to late-night VOD viewers. Such ads could be priced based on the number of leads or sales they generate rather than the number of viewers they attract. "The intersection of video on demand and interactive TV is the next frontier," says Time Warner Cable (TWX ) Executive Vice-President Peter C. Stern. "I look for it to emerge in 2007."

... 

Despite myriad challenges, the cable guys have little choice but to become more Web-like. Every other day, it seems, marks the launch of yet another ad-supported online channel. Karl Siebrecht, Atlas' general manager, bets Web video will become a major ad market sooner than VOD, but he says on-demand TV eventually will be bigger. He and the other Atlas folks don't care whether the next great video market is TV or the Web. They plan to make money either way.

Read the full article here.

By the way, the Atlas On Demand team is hiring. We have current and future openings for a dev manager and for senior developers. There are other openings at Atlas in Seattle too: look at the Atlas Careers page.

If you want to send résumés through me, email me at George.Reilly @ AtlasSolutions.com

Emma now has a personal blog.

Via James Wolcott and Jane Espenson, a pilot for a sitcom called Depressed Roomies by Charlie Kaufman.

Funny stuff.

I often complain about being busy, no doubt because I have a talent for complicating my life. Things were relatively quiet for a while, but that's not true anymore.

At work, we're close to releasing the first version of our product. Happily, crunch time at Atlas isn't nearly as bad as it was at Microsoft. Instead of working eight-ish hours a day, it's more like nine or maybe ten. The pressure level has risen, of course, but it's far from intolerable.

The real busyness is in my extracurricular life. I'm the president of BiNet Seattle, a bisexual community group, and have been for the last three years. I also do a hell of a lot of the work and I'm burning out. I recently gave notice that I'm stepping down. (It looks like a successor has been found.) Meanwhile, a lot of planning is going on in an effort to revitalize BiNet, as attendance has been dragging.

For the last few years, I've also been heavily involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, as the webmaster and the co-dramaturge. We do readings of Irish literature, particularly that of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Every June 16th (Bloomsday), we do a staged reading of a chapter of Ulysses. This year, the longtime director has moved back to Northern Ireland. Currently, I am acting as the director, on top of my other roles, but I don't think I'm the right person for the job, and I'm hoping to find a replacement soon.

I'm a member of Freely Speaking Toastmasters, an LGBT speaking club. I've been working on my CTM for far too long, and I intend to knock off the final three speeches this year.

I resume my woodworking class next week, which is going to tie up ten Tuesday evenings. I haven't decided yet what I'm going to work on this time. In previous years, I built a very nice set of nesting tables and an unsatisfactory pair of bar stools.

In my Copious Spare Time, I'm also making occasional contributions to two open source projects, DasBlog and Vim. I made Vim compile with VC5-VC8, and I promised Bram that I would provide some documentation on debugging Vim with WinDbg and dealing with minidumps. I'd also like to produce a native Win64 version. With DasBlog, I've provided some feedback on the usability of the installation instructions, as well as a fix for dodgy permalinks. I'd also like to make use of my former expertise on IIS performance (see 25+ Tips, 10 Commandments, IIS 5 Tuning, and Professional ASP 3.0) to do some performance tuning of DasBlog.

I'd also like to fit in some time for photography; for reading my way through our enormous backlog of books and magazines; writing the occasional blog post; cooking; bicycle riding; traveling; working out; hanging out with my wife; socializing with my friends; movies; and more. Not to mention all the very dull projects around the house and garden that I've neglected.

I was born 41 years ago today. (Technically, yesterday, as it's now the early hours of March 16th.) I was to have been called Vincent after my father, but my mother's father, George Victor Clery, had died just 12 days before. I was baptised George Vincent Reilly on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day.

Beware the Ides of March, I tell people: You might have to buy George a present. Better a birthday present than the reception that Julius Caesar received on March 15th, 44BC.

I've never liked the name George all that much, but I've never disliked it enough to do anything about it. (Emma legally changed her entire name about ten years ago.) "George" has the advantage that it's largely gone out of fashion, but everyone recognizes it. How many Jeffs and Mikes and Scotts do you know? And how many Georges?

I realized over dinner with Emma that 15 years ago today, I took a momentous step: I came out as bisexual. It scared the hell out of me at the time. It hasn't always been easy. But it was definitely the right thing to do.

WashTech has a piece on frustrations with Microsoft's compensation system. Sounds about right to me. I don't miss the horseshit of Microsoft's stack ranking one little bit.

I just saw Mozart's Così Fan Tutte at the Seattle Opera. I had a great time. Lots of fun. Well acted. Great music. And a modern dress production that works.

The plot, in case you're unfamiliar, involves fiancée swapping. Two officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, accept a bet from Don Alfonso that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are fickle and will easily betray them. They pretend to go off to war, then disguise themselves and each woos the other's fiancée under false pretences. Don Alfonso, along with Despina, the sisters' personal assistant (maid) sows mischief. Dorabella, the flirt, wears down quickly. Fiordiligi is tougher, but eventually yields. Ostensibly a comedy, by the end, everyone has been hurt. The three men are shits and deserve what they get; the sisters do not.

In most of the operas that I've seen, the acting has been pretty wooden. Most of them seemed to be glued to the spot. The acting was a lot better than usual. Perhaps because it was directed by the legendary Jonathan Miller.

There's an interesting interview in the program with Jonathan Miller.

JM: ... It’s not even about fidelity, which is what most people think it’s about, it’s about identity. It’s about people. You see, feminists often object to the opera because it depicts the women as gullible and foolish; but the fact is that the men are much more deceived than the women are. The most dangerous thing is to get into disguise in the belief that your original identity is invisible. What happens, of course, is that you actually bring to life aspects of your identity which you didn’t suspect. And I think that’s what happens here. It’s very dangerous for a man—or anyone—to disguise themselves because, in addition to deceiving the person who in fact you intend to deceive, you actually find that you’re behaving in ways which you wouldn’t normally behave if you thought your identity was apparent.

EH: So you’re letting a little too much of the beast out, as it were.

JM: Well not so much “the beast;” but all sorts of alternative versions of yourself which you didn’t suspect come into existence. I was partly inspired by a novel which my mother, a very successful English novelist [Betty Spiro Miller], wrote after the war about the experience of being an officer’s wife. My father was a medical officer. She noticed that as soon as all of his colleagues got into uniform, they suddenly started to misbehave in a way which they wouldn’t have done if they were in their professional civilian clothes. They somehow felt that they were not recognizable and therefore not culpable.

That’s one of the reasons why people get into disguise at masked balls. It allows them to be someone else. It lets out an alternative version of yourself—not necessarily a beast, but something that you didn’t expect.

Awww! Ain't he cute!

Via Emma, from CuteOverload.com, a cornucopia of terminally cute animal photos.

A couple of months ago, the Science Times section of the New York Times had an article on the Cute Factor.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

And if you do overload on cuteness, head over to Dependable Renegade for some really snarky, political photoblogging.

I needed to add some declarative error checking to some XSLT templates recently. Specifically, I wanted to throw an error if my selects yielded an empty string, indicating that the input XML was wrong.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way of doing this in XSLT, nor in XslTransform. The approved way is to validate against an XSD schema, but for various reasons, I didn't want to go to the hassle of creating one.

I found a partial solution using xsl:message with the terminate="yes" attribute. Under XslTransform.Transform() the following code throws an exception if the XPath expression is empty.

 <xsl:if test="not(/some/xpath/expression)">
     <xsl:message terminate="yes">Missing expression</xsl:message>
 </xsl:if>
 <xsl:value-of select="/some/xpath/expression" />

It doesn't do anything, however, in XMLSpy.

The downside, of course, is that you have to maintain the expression in two places, and the template becomes littered with those annoying tests.

A very interesting piece in last Sunday's New York Times magazine: A Talib at Yale. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is the former "roving ambassador" for the Taliban, now studying at Yale. An interesting and improbable life story.

The right-wing blogosphere is furious about it. I say it's better to co-opt moderate former Talibs than to freeze them out.

Besides, his B grades at Yale are better than George Bush's "Gentleman's C".

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have no use for organized sports. Watching baseball or basketball bores me. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of being a sports fan. I'm too much of a watchful outsider to want to throw myself into rooting for a team.

I actively despise American football. It reminds me far too much of the rugby of my youth. I spent 11 years at an Irish rugger-bugger school, so I come by it honestly. The ugly jock culture that permeates football repels me. The veneration of football in small-town America annoys me. The fans are obnoxious; the players, thugs.

I exaggerate, of course. There are plenty of agreeable people who (incomprehensibly) like football, and other sports cultures are often obnoxious. But I was not pleased when Seattle went to the Super Bowl, and not disappointed when they lost.

My dislike of organized team sports doesn't automatically extend to individual sports. Not that I spend any time watching other sports.

Normally.

I've spent a lot of time in the last week watching the Winter Olympics. The drama of Frode Estil, the Norwegian cross-country skier, who stumbled in the first second, leaving himself at the back of the field of 77, and pulled all the way back to win the silver. Shaun White flubbing an earlier round in the snowboarding half-pipe, and then going on to win the gold. Apolo Ohno touching a competitor's skate and spinning out of control. Lindsay Jacobellis showing off in the final stretch of her snowboard cross, squandering the gold. Lindsey Kildow taking a really bad fall during training, then coming back a couple of days later to compete. Defrasne pulling past Bjoerndalen in the last few seconds after 12.5km of skiing and shooting in the biathlon.

And of course the high drama of the pairs figure skating, where each of the three medals couples had a compelling personal story. The Russian couple, where the woman concussed herself after a bad fall a couple of years ago and the man took months to regain his confidence. The Chinese couple where the man had barely recovered from ripping his Achilles tendon last year. And the other Chinese couple, where the woman took a hard fall seconds into their routine and had to be helped off the ice. Five minutes later, they came back out and skated their hearts out, winning the silver.

I'm amazed at how many of the sports have results that are incredibly tightly clumped, even when they're not competing at exactly the same time. The long-track skating: they skate in pairs, but all the top times are within a second or so of each other after thousands of metres. The point spread in the freestyle moguls. Likewise for the figure skating.

It's especially true in the downhill skating. Darren Rahlves came in ninth in today's event, a mere 0.72 seconds behind the winner. Think of it. Nine skiers hurtling down a hill one at a time at high speed for 90 seconds, and their times are less than three-quarter of a second apart. There's no margin for error. None. The slightest misstep and you're an also-ran.

Makes for great watching.

A friend sent me a Word document with a parody of the Department of Homeland Security's Ready.Gov website. I googled and found an HTML copy of the parody here.

If you are sprayed with an unknown substance, stand and think about a cool design for a new tattoo.

Seriously, there is some useful information on Ready.Gov. Which reminds me that Emma and I are long overdue in putting together some disaster planning.

Here are some links that I put together a while back:

• AlphaGeek's 5-part series on disaster preparedness at DailyKos

• 3 days, 3 ways

• City of Seattle Emergency Resources

• Scott Hanselman's 2006 resolution

• ICE (In Case of Emergency) entries in your cellphone address book

If there's any lesson that should be learned from Katrina, it's that you need to have your own disaster plan in place.

Via Dependable Renegade, it's Cheney playing Folsom Prison. (Not work-safe.)

I've been using Beta 1 of Microsoft's AntiSpyware for the last year. Beta 2 is finally out, and it's now known as Defender.

Paul Thurrot has a favorable review.

Download Defender.

I've been hanging out on the dasBlog developers' mailing list for the last couple of months, and I've made some minor contributions to the code.

I sent the following email to the developers' list last night.

My wife has decided to start a blog for Team Ireland in the 2006 Knitting Olympics, and she asked me to install dasBlog on her site. I decided that this was an excellent opportunity to do some usability testing on the installation instructions for dasBlog. I asked her to try installing dasBlog, while I watched. I promised that I would bail her out if she got mired too deeply.

Emma has worked as a black-box software tester for several years. She writes SQL scripts by hand, but is not otherwise a programmer. I figured that she could probably install a project like dasBlog, with an intended audience of Advanced End Users.

First, we obtained a graphical FTP client (FileZilla) and checked that she could successfully upload a one-line ASP.NET program to her website:

 The time is <% = DateTime.Now %>

Then it was time to start installing dasBlog. I told her to start at http://dasblog.info and figure out how to get dasBlog and how to install it.

She totally ignored the alphabetical table of contents on the left-hand side, which is formatted as a rather large set of RSS feeds. Instead, she read through the long blogpost on the right-hand side, which didn't enlighten her. After a while, I pointed to the left column. Her reaction: why do I want to subscribe to feeds? I pointed out to the Install/Setup feed. (Reviewing the frontpage post now, I see that the Install/Setup link also appears there.)

There needs to be a prominent link on the front page to a Getting Started guide. http://dasblog.info and http://dasblog.us are a huge improvement on the state of the documentation a couple of months ago, but they still need work.

She found the Install/Setup instructions confusing. They don't cover well the case of doing a remote install to a commercial host provider. Obviously, it's not possible to write a comprehensive guide on this, as providers have many different configuration utilities. Our provider is using Ensim's WEBppliance, which I find painful to use.

There needs to be a Point #0 on the Install/Setup instructions: download the files. After some more headscratching, she found her way to the download page. She was pretty sure that she didn't want to download DasBlog-1.8.5223.2-Source.zip, but she wasn't too sure if she should download DasBlog-1.8.5223.2-Web-Files.zip.

She created a local directory, C:\dasblogce and unzipped the files there. That of course meant that the files she needed to upload were in C:\dasblogce\dasblogce.

Point #1 of Setup/Install is unhelpful to the uninitiated. Point #2 isn't all that clear either.

Using FileZilla, she uploaded the files from C:\dasblogce\dasblogce to \inetpub\wwwroot\dasblogce on her server. Then, with some help from me, she figured out enough of the horrible Ensim interface to create a virtual directory, TeamIreland, pointing to the dasblogce folder.

At this point, we went to http://thewheel.biz/TeamIreland but we weren't able to get in. We got some fairly unfriendly ASP.NET errors. I had to wade through the Ensim UI and grant write access to the content, siteconfig, and logs subdirectories, per the Install page.

Finally, we saw the default page provided by dasBlog!

She had read enough of the Install instructions earlier to know that she needed to modify site.config and siteSecurity.config, but she wasn't sure how to modify them on the server. I suggested modifying the local copies and uploading them.

Her first reaction on seeing site.config was that there needs to be some paragraphs (blank lines) for readability. She nearly overlooked the <Root> setting, but got that configured correctly.

The default installation of site.config needs some comments. The stuff that you really have to modify should be in a clearly delimited block at the top. Something like this:

 <!-- Modify this section before installing -->

 <!-- Important: set this to the base URL of this blog, such as
      http://example com/joeuser/blog/ -->
 <Root>http://localhost/DasBlog/</Root>
 <!-- Banner text. (Note: not all themes show the Subtitle or Description.) -->
 <Title>My DasBlog!</Title>
 <Subtitle>newtelligence powered</Subtitle>
 <Description>A blog about my interests: computers, games, beer, etc.</Description>
 <!-- Email address of blog adminstrator -->
 <Contact>dasblog@example.com</Contact>
 <Copyright>Your Name Here</Copyright>
 <!-- Default visual theme -->
 <Theme>dasBlog</Theme>
 <!-- End of essential modifications -->

She was less sure what to do with siteSecurity.config. She thought she needed to use the same Name and Password as she uses to log in to the server. (No. It's arbitrary.) She also needed to add a few additional Users, since it's going to be a group blog.

There should be a commented-out example of a contributor user in siteSecurity.config:

 <!-- example of a non-administrator user
   <User>
     <Name>SomeOtherUser</Name>
     <Password>blog-password</Password>
     <Role>contributor</Role>
     <Ask>true</Ask>
     <DisplayName>Some Other User</DisplayName>
     <EmailAddress>SomeOther@example.com</EmailAddress>
   </User>
 -->

She uploaded the modified site.config and siteSecurity.config. It failed horribly when she went to log in. I had to download the events.log file to realize that she had deleted the </Users> in siteSecurity.config.

That fixed, she was able finally log in and create a post. I won't detail the pain we went through to upload images via FreeTextBox.

The dasBlog admin interface has not been working for her. It's unable to write to the siteconfig directory. At some point last night, the content directory somehow became unreadable and the site started throwing ASP.NET errors.

I was able to fix that tonight by blowing away the content directory in FileZilla and uploading a backup. I think I've fixed everything, by explicitly granting read and write to the siteconfig and content directories and everything contained therein.

Epilogue: Every new entry in the TeamIreland blog is being created with the wrong permissions, causing dasBlog to puke. It can be fixed by setting the permissions for each new file to read/write through the Ensim interface, but it's hardly a good experience for a group blog. I'm still waiting for iHostSites' support people to set the ACLs properly.

I installed dasBlog at Emma's The Wheel site, so that she and the other knitters in Team Ireland can blog during the 2006 Knitting Olympics. What an ordeal that was! But that's a post for another time. (It's not working yet, due to permissions issues that require the intervention of support at our hosting site.)

I decided today to create a favicon for The Wheel, based on the logo that I drew last year with Inkscape.

A favicon is a 16x16 icon which shows up in the tab in a tabbed browser, such as FireFox or IE with MSN Search. For example, the little gvr icon that shows up if you're reading this on my personal blog. I think I created this with a trial copy of Microangelo Creation, but I've repaved my laptop since then, so I'm not sure.

Initially, I drew the favicon by hand with the icon editor in Visual Studio, since it was the only tool that I had handy at work. It looked like crap.

This evening, I remembered about the automated FavIcon from Pics service over at HTML-Kit. I stripped the wording off the logo and submitted that. Much better! And much easier than using Visual Studio's horrible icon editor.

If you look at it with Magnifixer, you can see that this image has effectively been heavily anti-aliased. Or rather, FavIcon from Pics did a good job of shrinking the original image.

I had to flush Firefox's cache before it would pick up the new favicon, whereas IE picked it up after Ctrl+F5. Score one to IE.

I consider myself to be an expert WinDbg user, when it comes to debugging unmanaged x86 code. I haven't used WinDbg much on managed code, and when I did, I found it quite painful.

Via Scott Guthrie's blog, I discovered Tess Ferrandez's blog. Tess is an escalation engineer in PSS who specializes in ASP.NET and a WinDbg virtuoso. Scott has a list of her best posts. Mind-blowing stuff, but not for the faint of heart.

I blogged before about KeePass, a free password manager utility. A few minutes ago, I added the 200th entry to my password database, when I registered to download VMware Server.

200 entries! At one point or another, I've registered on a hell of a lot of websites. I also use KeePass to keep track of credit card numbers, software registration keys, and so on. KeePass not only lets me use distinct, strong passwords for each site, but it also lets me remember which sites I've registered on. Some sites want me to use my email address; others prefer an alphanumeric username.

One friend reliably informs me that KeePass runs just fine under Wine, giving him a cross-platform way to manage his passwords.

Via AmericaBlog, it's Brokeback to the Future.

Back in October, I joined Atlas Solutions as a senior software engineer. The company just held its first "partner summit", to educate some of our key partners on the kind of work we're doing and new developments. An attendee blogged it. I'm working on video on demand, the stuff that Scott Ferris talked about.

I saw some of the presentations being rehearsed last week, but a lot of this is stuff that I've never seen before. I come from a software background, after all, not an advertising background.