Inside the Insiders is a series of interviews with some of the most recognized and outspoken Microsoft influentials, journalists and enthusiasts I know. I plan to go around interviewing as many of these peers as possible to find out more about their background, life outside of Microsoft and their darkest Unix fetishes. At least that’s what I tell them. Little did they know their answers will help me annihilate them and my other competitors.

With such a serious face, I dare not caption anything humorous.

Sandro Villinger was one of the nicest people, out of a whole groups of nice people, whom I had the chance of meeting at this year’s CES show. He’s German, but let not his background fool you. He’s fluent in English, probably more fluent than I am and is one of the top Windows Vista writers in a non-English speaking country with several books and magazines under his belt. But don’t just take my word for it, a lot of other Microsoft bloggers and journalists feel the same way. I had the chance to chat with Sandro to find out exactly what makes him tick.

So who is Sandro Villinger?

Credit card number please. So what do you think makes you a “Microsoft influential”?

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Step 1. Write a rant about how Microsoft might be shooting itself in the foot.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!

This March I wrote a post about Microsoft Australia’s “It’s not cheating” offer which sold Office 2007 licenses directly to university students at a 94% discount. At the time I thought whilst it was great for students who would like own a legitimate copy of Office, it was also bad practice on Microsoft’s behalf – for example severely undermining the value of Office. But nevertheless, a discount is a discount.

At the same time, Microsoft was also running a competition called the “Golden Blog Awards” which students could submit their blog entries about “It’s not cheating” for a chance to win a few prizes. The entry criteria stated you must at least include the word “Office” and a link to the website to be eligible, so I thought I might as well give it a chance since I’ve easily met that criteria. With nothing to lose, except my dignity, I entered without thinking twice about it.

I’d almost forgotten about it, only to find out today that I’ve actually won – fourth prize. The prize is a music downloads subscription plus a Samsung or iRiver MP3 player. Having my beloved iRiver Clix only pass away last night, one might almost call this fate. If it turns out to be not the iRiver Clix, or some non-video-capable Samsung alternative, I might even give it away here. Stay tuned.

But wow, first prize winner Robert Kingston truly deserve something. A whole Lego-animated storyboard about King William (Gates) waging a war against the evil Lord Macintosh and Linux-Hood set in the land of Microsoft. He’s got even more time on his hands than I do.

It’s no exaggeration when I say I don’t read books at all. Beside the compulsory text books – and even then I only read the paragraphs required, the number of books I’ve read in my entire life can be counted with fingers and toes. Call me lazy, but why read a book when you can see a movie? 😉

Back in January, Peter Bruzzese, author of “Tricks of the Vista Masters” contacted me about the “DPI setting” blog post I had about Windows Vista. He was interested in quoting a bit of my post for his book, and of course I agreed in quest for my superstar status. Today I inched a little bit closer to fame when I got a copy of Peter’s book for review. Having mentioned my neglect to read books, I can’t wait for the action-thriller, “Tricks of the Vista Master – The fellow of the masters” movie adaptation.

What sets this book apart from a few of the other ‘expert’ books I’ve seen is that Peter does not assume the person to “know-it-all”. Currently there’s a lot of these ‘missing manual’ books going around whenever a new software launches, so it’s more of headache to find the right books than to find the tips themselves. What Peter has done is source the best materials from other “masters” to bring out the best talents in each field, without the fluff like the paragraphs you’re reading now. (If you just to win a copy, skip to the end.)

Out of the 350-or-so odd pages, I was quick to find the DPI section with my quote in it. I thought I should follow in Google’s footsteps and scan the page to give you a better idea of what the book’s about. I feel honored by the title, but I should point out my bank unfortunately does not cash “respect”.

I find the book very diverse in the topics it covers because of the number of contributors sourced, but it also means not every topic is as in-depth as it should be. However in return, additional links and places of interests make up for the more complicated topics. On a side note, it icked me a little to find most screenshots still using the “Vista Basic” UI theme whilst some used Aero Glass. Granted books do not have pixel shaders so I’ll forgive them for that.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to judge this book since I’ve already read probably too many blogs and help files to begin with. But certainly it would be a great resource for someone who hasn’t been living and breathing Vista for the last couple of years.

And to end on that note, I’m going to giving away my copy of the “Tricks of the Microsoft Windows Vista Masters” book by Peter Bruzzese. To be eligible to win, please reply in a comment with your name, email and the answer* to “What resolution would you need on a 12” display to properly appreciate 480 DPI?” The answer can be found in the picture above. The winner will be contact before the 8th of June, 2007 by email. Cash bribes accepted.

* Users using a 28.8k modem or text-only browser are exempt from the above requirement.

Update: The winner selected at random picked by a randomly selected person on my instant messengers list is Pharod. To everyone else, you’re all winners to me.

AMD today published a handful of desktop wallpapers today showing off their new Phenom brand of processors, more precisely the architecture of the four-core Agena processor. Three of them can be found on the Neowin Forums at the gorgeous resolution of 2100×2100. Not sure who has a 30″ 1:1 ratio cube monitor, but what the heck.

I’m not too sure if they came straight out of a photo-shoot, but they’re a little bland. The (pee-yellow) colors are washed out, the gradients have visible banding and there’s no branding – surprised AMD’s branding team didn’t go nuclear over this.

So I took some time making a little modification to it, redoing the radial gradient (with AMD’s official colors), touching up the lighting and shadows, cleaning up the colors and added a fun message plus fake brand logo.

If anyone likes it, you can download it in these convenient resolutions

• 1280×1024 (5:4 ratio)
• 1440×900 (widescreen)
• 1600×1200 (normal)
• 1680×1050 (widescreen)
• 1920×1200 (widescreen)

It’s pretty easy on the eyes and there’s plenty of room around the sides for icons and dancing women (if you got those).

Don’t read this if you are easily disappointed or are already disappointed with Windows Vista compared to Longhorn, since it just adds more fuel to the flame. A patent application published yesterday (May 31) reveals a little more about the other ideas Microsoft had for Aero Glass. The key characteristics of Aero Glass, colorization and reflection, are explained in two separate patents, “Glass appearance window frame colorization” and “Dynamic reflective highlighting of a glass appearance window frame“. The latter brings up an interesting idea, it writes,

As described above, a reflective highlight of a glass appearance of an application window frame may be configured to change during a move and/or resize operation based on a set of rules that describe a reflective highlight image’s placement relative to the current position of the application window within a desktop space. Concurrently or alternatively, a reflective highlight may be configured to change in response to a time of day event.

If you’re not familiar with the techno-babble-patent-language, what it means is that the reflection in Aero Glass (the white stripes) was designed to change based on the position of the application window on the desktop, on the time of day, or both. Since the reflection already moves with the position of windows in Vista, then it is obvious the time of day configuration was cut from the final release.

To illustrate what that might have looked like, the follow diagram gives us some ideas.

As shown in FIG. 7, a 24-hour time scale 707 is shown and a window 705 is shown in dashed lines. Window 705 is associated with the desktop space 201 and represents the reflective highlight image bitmap 701 portion that changes over time. Window 705 is shown to be the portion of the reflective highlight image bitmap 701 utilized by an operating system in rendering a glass appearance window frame of an application window between the hours of 2 AM and 8 AM. Again, it should be understood by those skilled in the art that the configuration of the reflective highlight image bitmap 701 may be different and/or the configuration of the time scale 707 and/or portions shown of the image bitmap 701 may be different. The present invention is not so limited to the examples provided herein. For example, although shown in a horizontal and linear manner, the window 705 may be configured to move around a circular type image bitmap, a non-linear image bitmap, and/or some other configuration.

Because the patent office doesn’t believe in high-quality imaging technology (irony) such as a color scanner, we can only imagine what the final result might have looked like.

Not that it would have been very useful, too subtle and inaccurate to tell the time of day by looking at the intensity of reflections. However it would have been that extra attention-to detail-and subtle-surprise much of the enthusiast community has come to expect from Microsoft Design. The feature might have been cut down to technical or feasibility problems, but it shows at least the idea was there.

In related news, these patents were filed by none other than our fanclub-idol, Tjeerd Hoek (now Frogger) amongst former MSXs Don Lindsay (now design director for Live Labs, formerly Apple Design Director responsible for Aqua, go figure) and Greg Melander (now art director for Windows Mobile).

If you’ve never heard of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, then you haven’t seen anything. It’s the equivalent of 100 Steve Jobs keynotes compressed into one conference (without the “Boom!”s) – if you’re interested in the topic, it won’t disappoint. The name doesn’t really catch on as a hip technology conference, but every year, some of the brightest and most entertaining minds come together to talk about how great and grim our world is. Check out this 7-min awe-inspiring documentary about TED.

Best of all, it is probably the only conference in the world which offers the best talks available online in fairly high resolution within a reasonable time after the people who’s paid thousands of dollars to see live (Rupert Murdoch, Al Gore, Bill Gates), all under Creative Commons, showing that this isn’t just a conference of smart people, but also a conference hosted by smart people.

Today Natasha from TED kindly contacted me about a new presentation which has just been published concerning Microsoft. It is of course the “Photosynth demo” by its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas. This was recorded quite recently, only in March, and contains probably one of the better demos of Seadragon and Photosynth – more screen action than talking. Although indirectly, Blaise also showed off Flickr-integration in Photosynth – fetching geographically-relevant photos real-time from Flickr, proving it can be done in a practical manner. That will be a killer app.

If you like what you see, then I urge you to check out some of the other talks available on the site. Some of my favorites include: Ze Frank’s comedy act, Sergey and Larry’s Google talk, Seth Godin’s sliced bread, Hans Rosling’s mind-blowing statistics, Savage-Rumbaugh’s apes that play Pac-Man, and one that will probably make you weep, James Nachtwey’s photo-story about the world.