Barnaby's Blog

Links for 2009-10-22 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Windows Native VHD Boot Deployment Scenarios

Links for 2009-10-20 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Step-By-Step: Turning a Windows 7 DVD or ISO into a Bootable VHD Virtual Machine

Links for 2009-08-23 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : BLinq - Linq to Bing Search APIs

Links for 2009-08-13 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Oomph - A Microformats Toolkit - Home

Support my Ride to Conquer Cancer

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:27:31 GMT

If you are reading this blog post then chances are we have met at some point in the past. You’re either a friend, family member, colleague, classmate, business acquaintance, or someone I have met as I have travelled across Canada and around the world.

As you may or may not know, my wife (Michelle) and I have been involved with fundraising events for cancer research since 2003 when Michelle’s aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer and the weekend to end cancer walk first came to Toronto.

Since that time we have either walked or crewed in 7 more events in Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and London (UK).

We have been away from these events for the past few years while raising our family, however, in January 2009 Michelle’s mom was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of lung cancer, and within 3 weeks of the diagnosis, had passed away. You can read the full story at http://snipr.com/bernice_white. The speed and aggressiveness of cancer made us realize we needed to get back into fundraising to fight cancer and in June 2010, I’ll be on the bike to ride the 200km from Toronto to Niagara Falls. It will be a challenge in a number of ways, but with my bike, my helmet, and your generosity, I know we can make an impact.

Please contribute to this history-making event with a donation. Funds raised in The Ride to Conquer Cancer will support breakthrough research, exemplary teaching, and compassionate care at The Princess Margaret, one of the top 5 cancer research centres in the world.

To give you a sense of perspective, according to the National Cancer Institute of Canada, over 153,100 new cases of cancer and 70,400 deaths from cancer were estimated to occur in 2006. Men outnumber women for new cases by 5% and mortality by 11%. That's why I'm riding. To do something BIG about cancer. I hope that you'll share this incredible adventure with me by supporting me in my fundraising efforts.

To donate, please visit http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/Barnaby

Thank you in advance for your support.

Barnaby

Flickr Tags: RideToConquer

Twitter Tags: #RideToConquer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Links for 2009-06-29 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Web Site Story is Today's BIG Thing - JUN 29, 2009

Links for 2009-06-23 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Create a panorama from Lightroom with the Microsoft Composition Editor ...

Links for 2009-04-02 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

APRS to Twitter Gateway (source code)

barnabyjeans.ca goes IPv6

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:32:00 GMT

A couple of months ago I got IPv6 up and running at home, now that I have that working, the next logical step was to setup a server that I could connect to using IPv6. Over the last few weeks I have been working on getting http://barnabyjeans.ca to not only speak IPv4 but also be accessible over IPv6. The good news is that this is now working and you can access this site over IPv6. If you are experimenting with IPv6, you should automatically connect over IPv6 as there are both A and AAAA records setup for that server. However, if you have IPv6 setup but name resolution isn’t working you may want to try accessing the site via the following http://[2001:470:1f04:39a::2] (depending on your operating system, this may or may not work). You should notice down at the bottom of the page (under the community server logo) is the IP address you are connecting from. If you are hitting the server over IPv6, you should see your IPv6 address down there, if not, you will see your traditional IPv4 address.

Now that I have that out of the way, how did I go about getting the server to talk IPv6? I'll try to outline the steps below, but as with anything, you will probably want to try this out in a controlled environment before rolling this out more broadly.

Decide how you are going to get your IPv6 address. For this server, I decided to try Hurricane Electric's free tunnel broker which you can find at http://tunnelbroker.net.
Once you have registered and signed into the tunnelbroker.net site, you will need to request a new tunnel and provide the current IPv4 address of your endpoint (server). As we are setting this up on an Internet facing server, you will likely have a public IP so this step should be pretty straight forward. If your server sits behind a firewall they you will need to use the firewall IP address and, very importantly, make sure that your firewall passes protocol-41 traffic.
After you have requested your tunnel, you will be provided with some important pieces of information, specifically:

Server IPv4 address:72.52.104.74 -- note this isn't your server IP address - this is the tunnel server endpoint

Server IPv6 address:2001:470:????:???::?/64

Client IPv4 address: aa.bb.cc.dd -- this should be the public IP address of your server

Client IPv6 address:2001:????:????:????::?/64 -- this will become the IPv6 address for your server
you will also notice some instructions on how to configure various operating systems to use the information above. In our case we'll select Vista/2008 (this seems counter-intuitive as we are using Server 2003, however, this option provides you with the "netsh" commands that you will need to get this working.
Enable IPv6 on the server. In this case Windows Server 2003 so the following command should do the trick

netsh interface ipv6 install
once you have ipv6 installed on the server, you can make use of the commands as mentioned in #4 above. They will likely look like the following (I've replaced the actual values with $ClientIP, etc):
netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel IP6Tunnel $ClientIP $ServerIP
netsh interface ipv6 add address IP6Tunnel $ClientIPv6
netsh interface ipv6 add route ::/0 IP6Tunnel $ServerIPv6
once you have completed these steps, you may want to try the following commands to see if you are connecting via IPv6:
ping -6 www.kame.net and ping -6 www.sixxs.net. unless you have a firewall that is blocking ICMPv6, these commands should be successful
lastly, if you have any websites currently running, you will need restart IIS to have it listen over IPv6. The following article discusses IIS and IPv6 specifically: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6ad3cff7-10f7-4499-8673-e866795607d1.mspx?mfr=true

There is a great page on Technet site that covers a lot of the background on IPv6 and is worth a read - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/network/bb530961.aspx

Life, Death, and Technology

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:56:31 GMT

The past few weeks have been a roller coaster of emotion as my Mother-in-law (Bernice) was flown home from her winter RV’ing in the US southwest and in Mexico only to find out that the health problem she was having was lung cancer and she only had months to live. Unfortunately the timing wasn’t nearly correct and she passed away early last week. The full write up and timeline is posted on my in-laws’ blog at http://www.whitesrvjournal.com/archives/2009/02/one_final_journ.html. Once you have read that, continue on with this post as I want to share the role technology has played over the past few months.

As I mentioned, my in-laws spend their winters RV’ing somewhere much warmer than Southern Ontario, so they spend a significant amount of time away from us. One of the main ways that we stayed in contact, and maintained a connection was to webcam with them. The tool of choice – Windows Live Messenger – quick, easy to use, and great video quality.

Now skip forward to early January, after flying home and being admitted to hospital, Bernice was transferred from Cambridge Memorial Hospital to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton. One of the first things we did was get her setup with a phone in her room, however, with her being in Hamilton and us being in Cambridge, she was going to have to pay long distance for every call to us. Fortunately we use Vonage for our home phone service and in a matter of minutes I was able to get on the Vonage.ca website and add a virtual number to our account to provide a local Hamilton number for her to call. As you can imagine, sitting in a hospital room in Hamilton with the family living in Cambridge, having a convenient, and free (for her), way to get in touch was crucial.

Unfortunately Bernice’s battle with cancer was short-lived and she passed away on February 2nd, 2009. While there is lots of grieving to be done, there were also the details of the memorial service and celebration of life to take care of as well as sharing the news of her passing to friends and acquaintances. As you have already read the blog post, you know that they blogged about all their travels, so this was the easiest place to share the news broadly. In the past it had been Bernice who wrote the blog posts, so we needed a quick way to put together the announcement. As I use Windows Live Writer to author my blog, it was a simple matter to point it to whitesrvjournal.com and get setup to post over there. With the blog posted it was time to focus on the memorial service.

After meeting with the minister, one of the things my father-in-law was looking for was a version of Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. As I didn’t have it in my CD collection the quickest way to (legally) get a copy was to purchase one from iTunes, and after a quick search I was able to provide him with a version by Ian McGregor & Scottish Pipe Band.

One of the other things that we needed was a good photo of Bernice that we could position at the front of the chapel as well as use in the blog post. Trying to find photos of specific people can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, however, I had just finished tagging my most recent photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery. In doing so, I could quickly find all the photos that had Bernice in them. The photo that we finally selected is actually a crop from a much larger photo. In order to print it at the size we wanted, it was going to need to be resized. The tool of choice – Genuine Fractals. I was able to take a crop that was about 1000 pixels wide and blow it up to print a beautiful 10x14” print. Thanks to the folks at Print Three in Cambridge getting the printing done last minute after my Canon S9000 stopped working.

With the memorial service was taken care of, we turned our attention to the celebration of life luncheon that followed. The family wanted to have a slide show to share photos of Bernice’s life. After scanning all of the old photos, putting the slideshow together was quickly accomplished using the Slide Show feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery (specifically the Travel theme). Lastly, we needed to make sure everyone new how to get from the memorial service to the luncheon and a map and directions was quickly created using info from maps.live.com.

While this has been a very difficult time for the family, there have been the little bits of software and the services they connect to that have helped to accomplish what needed to be done quickly and easily and allowed us to focus on mourning the loss of a great woman.

Bernice White

1942 - 2009

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Sharing information visually

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:39:43 GMT

I have just found a very cool new application on the Microsoft site called Microsoft Tags (http://www.microsoft.com/tags). Basically what this does is allow you to encode either a vCard, a URL, or a phone number into a 2D image that can then be read and decoded with a camera phone.

If you visit http://gettag.mobi from your mobile phone (including Blackberry and Android) you’ll be able to download the reader that will decode this file and provide you with my vCard. For iPhone users you can visit the App Store and download Tag Reader.

If you want my work contact info, all you need to do is scan. I may just have to include one of these on my next business cards.

Tags: Microsoft

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Getting Ready for TechDays

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:01:00 GMT

With two weeks to go until we kick off TechDays in Toronto, the team is doing the final preparations to deliver an amazing experience to everyone who attends.

One of the things that I’ll be taking care of during the events is photography. I’ve already got the Nikon D200 and D300 ready to go, and with any luck I’ll have Nikon D90 in time for the conference as well. The guys at Nikon are absolutely amazing and make sure that my team have access to the latest gear to capture and share the experience at the event for those of you who aren’t able to attend. Of course I’ll be posting the photos to my flickr page as well as to the TechDays group on flickr. I’ll also be tagging everything with TechDays_CA.

One thing I have learned from previous events is that sometimes you need to be in more than one place at once. Normally as a photographer that is hard to do, however, with the help of a little technology life just got easier. I have been using PocketWizard Plus IIs for a while now to trigger remote flashes, but after reading the PocketWizard blog and Vincent LaForet’s blog post on remote cameras at the Olympics, I realized I had only been using my PocketWizards for half of what they could do. A quick search turned up FlashZebra.com and the cables that I was looking for – the ones that allow me to remotely trigger a camera. I have placed my order so I just need to wait for the package to arrive and I’m one step closer to being in two places at once.

If you are attending TechDays and want to chat about cameras, I’ll be the guy with all the Nikon stuff hanging off me. If you haven’t already bought your ticket there is still time to get your ticket before the early bird pricing ends on October 15th – visit http://techdays.ca for all the details.

Tags: TechDays_CA,Pocket Wizard,Nikon,Canada,Microsoft,Photography

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Social Media for Government Conference (Ottawa)

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:51:42 GMT

I’ve just arrived in Ottawa to spend a couple of days at the Social Media for Government conference. I will be speaking at this conference on Wednesday afternoon. I spoke at a similar ALI conference earlier this year and blogged about that experience.

While it’s too early in the day to comment on the conference you can follow along on twitter, the posts are being tagged with #ALI.

If you are attending the conference and want to connect you can find me at the following:

Twitter: bjeans
Facebook: Barnaby Jeans
Flickr: Barnaby_Jeans

Finding my photos on the web

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:02:33 GMT

I’m pretty open about people using the photos I post to flickr as I have them under a Creative Commons license. I always enjoy seeing where they land.

The most recent one is a Paul Tracy photo that I took with my Nikon D200 in Toronto on July 6, 2007. The photo is included in a post about Paul Tracy making his return at the Edmonton Indy this weekend - The 'Thrill From West Hill' Is Back! | Element of Speed

Here is the original photo and link back to the set on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnaby_jeans/sets/72157600689404182/

Technorati Tags: Nikon,Paul Tracy,Edmonton Indy,Creative Commons,Flickr

What’s eating up my disk?

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:02:39 GMT

I’ve just finished catching up on my RSS reader and came across the following post from Sarah on the Channel 10 site.

WPF Disk Space Finder | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

In summary this application gives you a quick and easy way to see what is using the disk space on your machine. What makes this even better is the fact that it is a WPF app and is deployed using ClickOnce deployment.

Direct link to Disk Space Finder: http://www.diskspacefinder.com

Sears National Kids Cancer Ride

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:31:52 GMT

One of the things I love about working for Microsoft (and I think I have mentioned before) is the fact that I get to take days off to volunteer my time in the community. Today was one of those days.

Today I spent the day volunteering with the Sears National Kids Cancer Ride (SNKCR) during their stop in Toronto. It's a ride from coast to coast to raise money to help children live with and beyond cancer. My portion of the day was spent at Trinity Square as well as Sick Kids Hospital for various parts of the event.

Not only did I have the chance to photograph all the cyclists that have been riding from Vancouver, but also the local riders who are riding on this stage of the route.

At Sick Kids there were speeches from Dr. Blanchette from Sick Kids as well as the President of Sears Canada. While down at Trinity Square there were speeches from Toronto Mayor David Miller as well as the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, David Onley. I have met David Onley a couple of times in the past during his time at CP24, so it was a pleasure to say hello to him again today.

I'll be posting all my photos to flickr over the next few days, so keep checking the following address: http://flickr.com/photos/barnaby_jeans/sets/72157605602589479/

A day at a social media conference

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:13:37 GMT

I spent most of my day today at the Advanced Learning Institute's Social Media Summit Canada where I was both a case study speaker, and had the opportunity to listen to some great presentations and meet some great people.

While the summit is a 4 day affair (full agenda), I was the lead off speaker for the first of the two main summit days. Being the first speaker in the morning usually means people wandering in late, and still getting their first cup of coffee into them. The group this morning were ready to go right at the start and had some great questions for both my session and the sessions that followed.

Right after my session the organizers did a quick speed networking session, which basically meant going around the room and having the 50+ attendees identify who they were, what they did, and what they hoped to get out the conference. This not only helped to set the tone and the conversation for the rest of the day, but also helped identify people you may want to connect with.

As I mentioned, part of the value of these events is in the people that you meet and get to chat to. There were a couple that I found particularly interesting today:

Carmine Porco, GM & VP at Prescient Digital Media was the chair for the day and kept everyone on track, as well as jumping in a few times to help out speakers with technical issues.

Eli Singer, Director of Social Media with Segal Communications. I've had the chance to chat with Eli at a couple of these types of conferences and he is definitely a resource to connect with if you have the chance.

The team from Region of Waterloo. As I live within the region of Waterloo, I was particularly interested to hear that there was a group at the conference from my part of the Southern Ontario. I had the chance to chat with them over lunch and I think they have some great ideas to take back to the office. As a resident, I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Preston Lewis, Director of Talent & Partnerships at Bonfire Communications. As Preston is based in San Francisco we had great conversation about one of my past employers and one of his current customers.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to stick around to hear how my colleague David Crow did on the panel that Eli was hosting. I'll keep an eye out for a blog post on that.

Overall, a fun day, and a great learning opportunity for those people looking to get a better understanding of social media and how they can start to incorporate it into their plans.

Are you a tagging Hero?

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:38:00 GMT

One of the things that is keeping me busy right now is the upcoming Heroes Happen {Here} launch wave that kicks off in Toronto on February 27th at the Direct Energy Centre.

My team and I are heads down putting the finishing touches on both the Community Connection Events and the main Launch and Technical Readiness events.

However, as these events are for you, the audience, we wanted to provide a consistent way for you to participate and share your thoughts and experiences. If you are planning on blogging about the events, if you are taking photos, or if you are uploading videos to YouTube or SoapBox, there is one standard tag that we are using to aggregate all this content: HHH_CA. We will be launching a community site in the next few days that will aggregate anything we can find that is tagged with HHH_CA. Additionally, our PR team has already launched their online digital newsroom for these events at http://launchwave.ca/ and they will also be on the lookout for content tagged with HHH_CA to include on their site.

Having said all of that, here are some of the places you can either contribute content or find out more about the events:

Flickr photo pool: http://flickr.com/groups/hhh_ca
Toronto Event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8420923311
Digital Newsroom: http://launchwave.ca/

Team (member) blogs:
Community Connection Events - diamond in the rough
Heroes Happen Here, eh- What's going on up north for Launch 2008 Activities

edit: updated Heroes Happen {Here} URL to http://www.microsoft.ca/HeroesHappenHere

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Canada,HHH_CA,Launch 2008

[Video] CP24 Popfly interviews posted

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:31:13 GMT

Over the last few months I have had the chance to visit the good folks at CP24 and appear on their Homepage show to talk about Microsoft Popfly.

For the first show I talked with host Ann Rohmer about Popfly and what you could do with it.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage talking about Popfly

For the second interview I showed host Jee-Yun Lee how you can embed your Popfly creations into your Facebook profile.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage (again) talking about Popfly and Facebook

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, and don't forget to try this stuff out. It really is easy to use.

Technorati Tags: Facebook,Popfly,Microsoft,CP24

[cross post] Walking for a cure

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:53:00 GMT

One of the great perks of working at Microsoft Canada is the ability to take paid days off to volunteer in the community. For the past four years I have been actively involved with the Weekend to End Breast Cancer (http://www.endcancer.ca) events all across Canada. This year, due to family circumstances, I was not able to commit to the entire weekend, but instead spend Friday and Saturday photographing various aspects of the event.

This year's event had over 5,500 walkers and raised $17.3 million (CAD) in support of breast cancer research. For those of you not familiar with this fund raising event, they are held across Canada and consist of a two day, 60 kilometer walk including camping overnight.

Microsoft has participated in this event in the past, both with a team walking the event in 2006 as well as donating copies of Streets & Trips to aid in the route planning.

The full photo set is posted on my flickr site at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnaby_jeans/sets/72157601927998560

If you are a charity or non-profit organization and are looking for Microsoft Software Donations, take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/canada/ican/howtoapply.mspx

Technorati Tags: WEBC , Weekend to End Breast Cancer , Toronto , Canada , 2007

[Originally posted at: http://on10.net/Blogs/bjeans/walking-for-a-cure/]

Day 1 at the Toronto Grand Prix

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:43:13 GMT

[Originally posted to http://on10.net/Blogs/bjeans/day-1-at-the-toronto-grand-prix/]

Every year I spend a few days down by the lake to enjoy the Champ Car and support series races. Every year they seem to tweak the name in some way - so this year it is the "Steelback Grand Prix of Toronto". For the last couple of years I have had media credentials which means I have access to the media centre and a wifi connection so I can post this stuff real-time. Unfortunately shooting video in the pits isn't an option unless you are one of the broadcast outlets (fair enough) so I'll resort to telling the story with photos, and besides, it's a great first outing for the Nikon gear that I'm trying out - I'll post on that later.

Given that I can't shoot video, one of the things I have been on the lookout for is the interesting use of technology and specifically what the teams are running on their laptops in the pits. The good news is I have yet to see a machine that isn't running Windows. While every machine I saw in the pits was running Windows XP, almost every PC I saw in the photo lounge was running Windows Vista - very cool.

At the end of the first day - here is the provisional top 3

Position	Car #	Driver	Team	Lap Time	Speed (KM/h)
1	1	Sebastien Bourdais	McDonald's Racing Team - Newman Haas Lanigan Racking	58.783	172.972
2	7	Oriol Servia	INDECK - Forsythe Championship Racing	58.801	172.919
3	9	Justin Wilson	CDW - RSPORTS	59.099	172.047

If you are in Toronto and at the race send me an email if you want to connect, or if you have a questions you would like to see if I can get answered, let me know.

All of my photos are online at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnaby_jeans/sets/72157600689404182/

[Cross Post] Microsoft Vista: What's in it for Photographers?

barnaby@barnabyjeans.ca (Barnaby Jeans) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:51:15 GMT

[Cross posted to http://on10.net/Blogs/bjeans/windows-vista-whats-in-it-for-photographers/]

I just came across the following article on PopPhoto.com that talks about some of the features in Vista that are most relevant for Photographers.

Without reprinting the entire article they outline 4 key areas:

Windows Photo Gallery
RAW support
Media Center
Forward-Looking Approach

If you are a photographer and wondering about Vista, I encourage you to read the article and let me know if you have any questions. Additionally, you may want to take a look at the Microsoft PhotoBlog at http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/ and specifically their FAQ at http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/pages/FAQ.aspx which address some of the common questions.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista, Photography, Windows Photo Gallery