Blog List

Yesterday we mentioned Parnter Maps had been released with Virtual Earth support.  Check out a few other people who have been blogging about it:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmayhew/archive/2007/08/30/new-find-a-partner-site-virtual-earth-enabled.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/archive/2007/08/30/find-a-partner-in-australia-with-virtual-earth.aspx
• http://blog.sbsfaq.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=269e4081%2Dac58%2D42a6%2D9a54%2D383a6a3fb0d8&ID=11
• http://blogs.msdn.com/sbsc_australia/archive/2007/09/13/new-find-a-partner-website.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ausptsiw/archive/2007/09/12/partner-finder-tool.aspx

I was playing today with some logos in Photoshop and noticed our graphic design team had inverted our gold logo on a black background to be a nice blue logo on a white background. For fun, I happened to have a Virtual Earth project open at the time and I inverted the default road map in Photoshop. Wow now thats actually pretty cool, not sure what the usages would be but I wonder how to do this on the VE control?I know that IE provides filters that can be applied in CSS and this got me thinking about what effects could be acheived.The syntax I used was to apply the filter to all objects within the Map div. This should eliminate all the other parts of your interface changing but since there is no class set on the tiles themselves this is the best solution I could find. .MSVE_Map img {filter:Invert;} Now there are other filters to play with also like:XrayEngraveAnd just to freak someone out how about a bit of a flip per tile?I'm not sure of the practical applications for this but I actually think the inverted map is easier to read at nighttime.Click on each image to see it live on the Virtual Earth map....

Read More »

One of our latest projects went live yesterday... the new version of find a partner.  It allows users to find Microsoft Certifed, Small Business Specialist and Gold Certified partners and visually see them on a Virtual Earth map.  Users can also filter by certification level, competency, postcode and company name.

This was done by our new company Aptovita.

Having installed our Panasonic 720p projector over 12 months ago I’ve always been struggling to get HD content. For my Birthday my Dad bought me the Pioneer BDC-S02.



The drive can’t write to Blu-ray but the trade off is it is half the price at around AU$400, at this time this is the cheapest Blu-ray part I have found. For the media centre this is perfect as I should be able to simply swap out the DVD writer for this.

Having shopped around we bought it online from www.auspcmarket.com.au, these guys are really good at being accurate about stock levels and including postage in the cost. I ordered on the weekend and had the drive ready to install Tuesday morning.

Of course nothing is ever easy.

So first up I swapped out the DVD writer for the new Blu-ray drive, I have a rather slim case so this was a two person job. I rebooted and.... nothing.

Problem 1. Choose the correct sata port on the motherboard. I had chosen port 4 that clearly was not the one to use, port 3 (port 1 and 2 are running two sata HDD in RAID0) was the way to go.

So the drive now appeared in Vista, installing the bundled cyberlink software took hours, later I would discover this to be a cable issue.

Time to play my first Blu-ray movie, we had chosen the recently released “300” from Target.

Problem 2. HDCP (content protection). For some reason when I had build the media centre last year the passive cooled 7600GS card I used didn’t support HDCP. Cyberlink has a nifty tool that tells you your compatibility issues. So at this point I’m dead in the water. Interestingly my CPU, the P2.8D (also doubles as a good heater in winter), wasn’t rated as powerful enough. Time to upgrade. So I popped into Umart in Milton and grabbed a new CPU, Motherboard, RAM and Video Card. One thing I had in mind was tring to keep the power consumption on the system and the noise level down. I don’t need to play 3D games and every watt I save is better for the planet.

...

Read More »

When I built these two gadgets they never looked like this:

Yes it is raining in Brisbane.

You can add them to Vista sidebar too, download them from here:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=558b2088-0106-422c-8b67-da067db2360a&bt=1&pl=1

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=fd7fd7af-32e4-43b9-bbf3-3cf9233f0117&bt=1&pl=1

They are dead simple to edit also

I came across this today when setting up a Virtual Earth map to run in an Iframe on another site. The issue is the content of the Iframe is on another domain and any calls to the ajax helper function "Sys.UI.getLocation" under IE will throw the error as it attempts to access "top.document.documentElement.scrollLeft".

The solution was posted back in Jan:

http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2007/01/31/how-to-work-around-the-quot-access-denied-quot-cross-domain-frame-issue-in-asp-net-ajax-1-0.aspx

Basically you have to replace the IE solution in the ajax js file with:

Sys.UI.DomElement.getLocation = function(element) { if (element.self || element.nodeType === 9) return new Sys.UI.Point(0,0); var clientRect = element.getBoundingClientRect(); if (!clientRect) { return new Sys.UI.Point(0,0); } var ownerDocument = element.document.documentElement; var offsetX = clientRect.left - 2 + ownerDocument.scrollLeft, offsetY = clientRect.top - 2 + ownerDocument.scrollTop; try { var f = element.ownerDocument.parentWindow.frameElement || null; if (f) { var offset = 2 - (f.frameBorder || 1) * 2; offsetX += offset; offsetY += offset; } } catch(ex) { } return new Sys.UI.Point(offsetX, offsetY); } break; Fortunatly I am already running a specific location of the file using:

""

after problems we had early in the year with sessionless web farms and asp.ajax.

...

Read More »

After John won 2nd in the Mark.Ed competition at Tech Ed we received a shiny new HP 19" widescreen monitor.

I used it for a day..and while it was a sweet screen I found the 900px high a bit restrictive and the colour difference between it and my laptop monitor too different and distracting.

So John plugged it in..but it doesn't really work well with his 24" monitor...so what to use it for?

We had a crazy idea late Sunday arvo...we could get a settop box and turn it into a TV for the bedroom.  So we ran off to JB hoping they were still open, and grabbed ourselves a $99 HD set top box.

We got it home, plugged it into the 24" dell and it didn't work...plugged it into the HP and randomly pushed some buttons and TADA we have a TV...and a very nice picture at that.

And we have a spare monitor if we ever need to install stuff on the media centre and don't want to use the projector screen

John was awarded 3rd Place in the Vista Gadget Competition on Tuesday at the Brisbane MSDN User Group Meeting.

Full Webcast on how to build the gadget can be found here.

Have you been trying to sign-in to Skype and it just won't connect?  Have you tried rebooting, an getting the latest update?  You're not alone....

Skype is having a "software issue".

Some great news...Windows Live ID Web Authentication 1.0 has just been released!  So for anyone who was using the Alpha this is great news...it means you can now access your liveid in production accounts (the ones you use everyday for msn etc) rather than the int accounts.

Check out the download of the SDK here

• Onliine doco for sdk