Microsoft’s Invasion of the Robots contest came to a close on the 15th of September, and this week the winners were announced on the MSDN Forums.
Out of 53 submissions, the grand prize went to LiveBot by Juzzi, who originally posted about the competition on the forums back in May, and he was also the winner of the World Best App competition. That’s dedication!
First prize went to Mother Nature, a bot which lets you “find and research national parks closest to you for a day outside in the fressh air and wilderness”. It seems to be having problems at the moment, and messages aren’t getting through to it.
Old favourite Spleak came in as one of the second place winners.
Take a look at Todd Biggs’ post with a full list of the winners, and what they won.
The author behind MSN Webcam Recorder, Ramiro, has released documentation of his reverse engineering studies on the communication protocol used by video conversations in Windows Live Messenger.
The main goal of reverse engineering the protocol is to have alternative means to decode it, and make it easier for open-source software to also implement it and be able to communicate with the official Messenger client.
You can find multiple formats of the article at the developers page.
I’ve been wanting to add a poll feature to the site for some time now, so now with the WP-Polls plugin, I will be running regular polls.
You can find the poll in the sidebar, just after the syndication buttons. First question is Are you using Windows Live Messenger?
We already have 108 votes, with 86% of visitors using Windows Live Messenger, among them 28% are not entirely impressed with its new features and look. 14% of visitors are not using Windows Live Messenger, but doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “still” using MSN Messenger, it could just be they’re using a third party client — I never thought of this possibility when creating the poll.
I will post again soon with the results and a new poll. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, go ahead and vote!
If you want to elaborate on your vote, leave a comment for discussion.
Did you think Fanatic looked ugly? I did, so I gave it a makeover.
This wonderful theme is known as K2, an advanced open source template for WordPress. It is essentially version 2 of the default Kubrick theme for WordPress, having more heart and soul.
Apart from the header, I haven’t done a lot of design customizing to it, but I will be tinkering with things in the future. The downside here is it’s not unique, you are bound to see similar looking blogs on the internet.
For the curious, these are the plugins I am using:
I’m pleased to now be using K2 after discovering it a few months ago. At the same time I heard about Ultimate Tag Warrior and realized the author lives in the same city as me, which I thought was quite cool considering how small New Zealand is.
As usual, if you think I’ve missed something that needs attention, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll get on it.
What does everyone think of the new look?
There is a new version of MemSkin+ up at the download page. This version has support for skin reloading in Windows Live Messenger 8.1.
Hopefully from here on out the skin reloading should not need to be updated for each Messenger build.
On a separate note, now that Messenger Plus! Live 4.10 has been released, you can use MemSkin+ and MsgPlus at the same time with no problems.