Marinautics

I came across this watch purely by accident. If you like to reprogram things this is just the ticket. A platform for doing any number of things, for example (taken from TI wiki):

• Data Logger
• Wireless Door Lock
• Motion Based MIDI controller
• Count Down Timer
• Pro Swing Analyser
• Automatic Lighting System
• Home Automation
• Tennis Game
• Altitude Accumulator
• Light Control
• Google Time Based One Time Password Authenticator
• PC Mouse
• … and more …

It comes with a developer IDE and a bunch of examples. Even wireless updates!

Like it or hate it. HTML email does seem to carry a more professional image. The trick is to make it look good even without the images. I hope it works out!

This is just a short blog entry to see how well the latest WordPress blogging app for the iPhone works.

Entering text seems fine, where is the photo editor?

Found it! You need to exit the text editor!

I have played with Virtual Machines off and on for ages but had earlier found them a bit wanting. The performance and maintainability of the virtual systems just did not seem to stack up. Time to try again with Hypervisors at the hardware level. This sounds the most promising so far! To get my feet wet I am putting the latest VMWare ESXi software on a Dell SC440 server I have lying around (Xeon 2GHz CPU, 4GB RAM and a RAID 0 install of SAS drives).

Install was dead simple and getting the old images on was also very straight forward using the VMWare vCenter Converter. Just point the source at an existing virtual machine and the target as the new ESXi infrastructure box. Done!

Now. To see how the virtual machine behaves.

There has been a web services interface to the ASPFNSF eCommerce system for some time now but not too many people have built interfaces to it. eSeeds.com is working with GFR Software on the development of a MS Windows based interface coded in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Things are starting to progress nicely and we hope to be able to use it shortly!

Rumour has it the ASPDNSF people have something similar in store but I shall wait and see.

BBC Radio 2 has a video of Chris Rea performing his new single. Nice.

I was having trouble getting my ATI drivers upgraded as I could not uninstall or install what I had on my machine due to the ATI installer crashing part way through the installation. Apparently it has something to do with the installer GUI conflicting with some of the DLLs installed with the Visual Studio 2008 IDE. Having no time to sort this out I discovered you can run the installer as a command line task.

Open up a command prompt window (I did this as Administrator) and navigate to wherever the download unpacks the install files (e.g. C:\ATI\Support\9-9_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu) and then navigate into the Drivers folder. From here choose Bin64 (or Bin I guess if it’s 32 bit). You will find ATISetup.exe.

Uninstall

ATISetup.exe –Uninstall –output screen

Install

ATISetup.exe –Install –output screen

That’s it! Just remember it is always best to uninstall the your old drivers before installing newer ones.

Some bad news, and some good news.

Bad News: In 24 days from now, the free Express Edition v3.1 will be updated to v3.2, renamed to Standard Edition, and no longer available for free.

Good News: There is still time to get the grid for free by registering at http://xceed.com/freegrid

I use this grid all the time in my WPF apps and have found it very easy to use and very powerful. Give it a try.

Xceed DataGrid for WPF data grid view gridview presenter control XAML XBAP .NET 3.5

This is something that I have been trying to find for a long time. When I go visit our servers (which are co-located at an ISP) I always have to lug around a keyboard, mouse and display panel. Either my own or a crash cart provided by the ISP.

Now, with this device, I can just bring along a laptop and get wired up just through the USB port on the laptop. Fantastic!

CS661 Application: ATEN Laptop USB KVM Switch

I have decided to start using Twitter and see what is going on in that part of the virtual world. To kick things off I looked around and found what I think is one of the better Twitter clients. It is called TweetDeck and is built on Adobe AIR.

If you want to follow me I can be found at @gfr