Blog List

October 22nd is Windows7 day, I didn’t think I’d see anything new but the HP TouchSmart 600 has really impressed me. Like many I’ve been running Windows7 on my daily machine since beta2, I love the windows management, new taskbar and speed. Mainly everything just works and works well. So what makes this new “all in one” computer so amazing? It’s because it’s the complete package!





When you combine all the new features of Windows7 with all the latest hardware and then wrap it in a sleek all in one unit you get the HP TouchSmart 600. And the best part is this thing is actually affordable – RRP for the top of the range model is AU$2,499.

Let’s talk features

Windows 7 Home Premium 1920x1080 23” LCD Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T6600 2.2 Ghz 4GB DDR3 750GB SATA HDD Slot load Blu-ray NVIDIA GeForce GT230M 1GB, DirectX 10 DVB-T Digital TV Tuner 10/100/1000 network Wireless 802.11b/g/n Slim Cordless Keyboard, mouse Media Centre Remote The screen is 1080p, crisp and very watchable, Blu-ray movies like The Dark Knight look amazing. This machine isn’t your 9 to 5 development machine, this one is for your home, your parents home or your friends. Its for photos, surfing, games and movies.

So what is the out of the box experience like? Its got one cable to plug in, the power. HP...

Read More »

Back in February Microsoft had a special promotion that allowed you to get 10% off you Microsoft Certification exam and if you failed, you got a free retake. The MVP’s were given special discount codes that they could give to people to claim the 10%.

Today I received this shiny plaque in the mail: ASIA MVP Certification Hero Award 2009.  This was given to the top 3 MVP Australia and New Zealand contributors to the promotion.

I’m not sure who the other 2 were but if you’re one of them, let me know so I can add to to this post.

Who is invited?

If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women in IT.

This month we're having an open mic night. Please let us know if you'd like a 5 min speaking slot to talk about a topic of your choosing.

Who pays for dinner?

This month is not sponsored so you will have to pay for your own dinner

Where + When

Date: Tuesday 24th November, 2009

Time: 7:00 pm

Where: Greystone Bar & Cellar - 7/116 Grey Street South Brisbane QLD 4101

Menu: http://www.greystonebar.com.au/sites/default/files/Enitre%20Menu.pdf

We’re in the process of building a new house here in Brisbane. It will serve as our new home upstairs and as a much larger home office downstairs. Since we’re working with clients around the world we do spend much of our time working from home.

To remember the “experience” we have been taking a tonne of photos, I have been taking a panorama (about 8 photos across) from each of the four corners of the property every time something interesting happens. They are about 25 Megapixels each and capture all the detail.

Although we are only a few days into the build I thought I would see how well things would line up, here is a small taste:

(Animated Gif – 1MB, I’m swamped with work at the moment to do any more)

The end goal is to make a full resolution DeepZoom with a temporal aspect, allowing you to zoom into the detail and then wind through the calendar to see the construction.

I’m still not sure on the interface but since I will have 4 different angles all synced I should be able to do some sort of a cube with perspective 3D, need some time to make a POC.

Let me know what you think and any ideas.

At TechEd Australia this year I sat down with the Delicate Genius to talk about all the software Microsoft makes for those that love taking photos. You can see the video here:

http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=2a425f94-3718-46fe-8269-4c4bcfad7c61

It runs for 20min, we don’t get through everything and get way too side tracked with Multi touch in Windows7.

These are the products we covered with links to download and play for yourself:

Windows Live Photo Gallery

http://download.live.com/photogallery

Part of Windows Live Essentials this photo viewer is aimed for all windows users. It offers many ways to sort and tag your photos including people tagging. If you have a multi touch Windows7 device then pinch-zoom, rotate and flick through your photos.

Pro Photo Tools 2 ...

Read More »

Here at Tech Ed Australia 2009 we are presenting on the Bing Maps Silverlight control, it’s session WEB302. If you’re in the crowd or simply reading this after the event you can follow along with our demos here.



http://about.soulsolutions.com.au/

First up is a little visualisation of where we work and play. This data is hard coded into the application and took less then an hour to put together. The minimap, custom navigation and custom image pin are part of the open source DeepEarth project.

 



http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net/

...

Read More »

Sarah Vaughan, the Windows 7 Group Lead in Australia, today demonstrated our Silverlight 3 / Windows 7 Multi touch application in the keynote of the Australian Partner Conference.



The Silverlight application is built on top of Bing Maps and uses our open source controls called DeepEarth. This particular application allows you to annotate the map, drawing polygons and lines and adding points. All of this data can be captured and stored into a SQL 2008 database. We added a custom tile layer of the exhibition venue itself.

In order to support multi touch you need to be running Windows7 and have a multi touch enabled screen and drivers. HP, the hardware sponsors of the event supplied the nice screen Sarah is using and also lent us a TouchSmart Tx2 tablet for the development.



If you have such a device you can see the application here (works with just a mouse as well):

http://multitouch.soulsolutions.com.au/

The gestures are:

pinch zoom in / out 2 finger swipe left / right to show / hide the drawing panel 2 finger hold 1/2 sec for AerialwithLabels, 3 finger hold for road, 4 for plain aerial. Drag the map with one finger. One thing to note is that multi touch doesn’t currently work in full screen mode.

Commercially we are working with a Mining Company here...

Read More »

Just an update to the sessions we’re presenting and activities we’re involved in at Tech.Ed Australia this year on the Gold Coast.

WEB 302 - Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control  Wed 9/9/2009 13:45-15:00 in Meeting Room 7 Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) provides a slick and powerful data visualisation engine for your spatial information. Join John O'Brien for a look at how the core control can be combined with other Silverlight components including DeepEarth and Photosynth to produce a rich and engaging interface. See how SQL Server 2008 spatial data can be rendered in real time and how this whole interface can be integrated into your Sharepoint site.

THG007 - 3 the New Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit for Social Websites Thu 10/9/2009 15:00-15:30 in Green Interactive Theatre

See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and build brand loyalty.

WIT Women in IT Wed 9/9/2009 12:45-13:45

Hosted by Catherine Eibner, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Dynamics, Women in IT is about growing strong female leaders in the IT industry. Leading women in IT and industry experts will lead discussions...

Read More »

The project I’m working on at the moment I’m taking a bunch of content that in the previous system was stored as HTML and I’ve re-written the application in WPF and displaying the content as a FlowDocument.  Today I sat down to look at how to do the data conversion, basically I needed to convert HTML to XAML.  After looking at it awhile and thinking it’s quite a bit of work, someone else must have done this before I stumbled upon the HTML to XAML Prototype Conversion Utility. Now the code has a lot of todo’s but the HTML I was working on was pretty simple..basic font sizes, bold, italic, text align etc and this worked a treat and saved me a lot of code and testing. Just had to tweak it a bit to output the document the way I wanted it and it was all good.

It is very common to have a some of your spatial data sources still in SQL2005 and sometimes you don’t have the option to have this upgraded to SQL2008. Rather then having to deal with the data differently we decided we would treat every data source as Well Known Binary. If your data is simply some Latitude and Longitudes you can do this:

 

WKB:

select 0x00+0x00000001 + cast([Longitude] as binary(8)) + cast([Latitude] as binary(8)) WKT:

'POINT(' + cast([Longitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ' ' + cast([Latitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ')' GML:

'' + cast([Latitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ' ' + cast([Longitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ''  

Important to note that WKB and WKT are XY, Longitude, Latitude while GML is still YX, Latitude, Longitude.

...

Read More »