Phil Wheat's Knowledge Matters

Zombie walk in Seattle sponsored by XBox team!

Philip Wheat — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:53:40 GMT

So if you’re tired of shooting Zombies in Left4Dead on your XBox, or have beaten the “I, Zombie” level on Plants vs Zombies one too many times, and you’re in the Seattle area – try the live action event!http://blog.seattlepi.com/digitaljoystick/archives/172804.asp?from=blog_last3

Real-time surround air traffic control

Philip Wheat — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:43:00 GMT

I want! http://nevver.tumblr.com/post/128929601/realtime-3d-airtraffic-fubiz Of course I mean the display hardware mostly. The controls seem like they could be refined a bit more.

Hotfix available for SharePoint SP2 activation issue.

Philip Wheat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:19:25 GMT

You may remember the high priority post back in May (Important information on SharePoint Server 2007 based products and SP2) about an issue with the state of activation after SP2 is installed on SharePoint Server and associated servers. There was a pretty simple fix posted, but if you want to script the fix or just use the officially blessed correction to the issue, Hotfixes have been released for both the 64bit and 32bit versions of the SharePoint servers.

You can find the 32 bit version at office2007-kb971620-fullfile-x86-glb.exe and the 64 bit version at office2007-kb971620-fullfile-x64-glb.exe

(Blogged for my reference and to close the loop on the follow up action with the release.)

Private Cloud Architecture to be discussed at Worldwide Partner Conference in July

Philip Wheat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:04:48 GMT

It’s been up a couple of days, but I just saw a tweet fly past about it. If you check out session CI011 on the session track (https://www.mspartnerconference.com/public/sessionlist.aspx?keyword=CI011) you’ll see that there’s some great information about the Infrastructure strategy behind Microsoft’s cloud computing. We expected to see a good bit about that, but there’s also a nice little spot in the end of the session description - “and the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises (available Q4 CY 2009) that enables building the foundation for a Private cloud.”

Hmmm, I need to try a lot harder to get to the conference – it isn’t that far away!

Michael’s Networking Toolkit for Micro Framework

Philip Wheat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:58:31 GMT

While I’m looking at my Micro Framework notes, I wanted to push this one out as well. over at CodePlex (http://mftoolkit.codeplex.com) you can find Michael’s toolkit for networking Micro Framework boards. To get your interest, let me just quote directly from the latest release notes:

Web server improvments, fixed several bugs and added Cookie and Mime (POST) support

NtpClient initial version

uALFAT initial version

fixed several bugs in Dns library

Oh, did I mention there’s XBee support in there too? OK, I’ll stop typing because you’ve already clicked over and are downloading the toolkit!

Why pay $300 for a programmable Remote Control when you can make one yourself?

Philip Wheat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:48:21 GMT

Pavel sent this to me a while ago, but I haven’t been keeping up. You know those super expensive universal all in one programmable remotes? Well he put together one all on his own, the great part is that he can can keep adding to it or tie it into other systems to work. On his post below he shows how to take a simple IR LED and a Micro Framework board and create his own multisystem IR remote. But once you do that, you’ve got the basis for LOTS of other stuff – add an RF transceiver and you’ve got a bridge/extender. Add an IR photocell and you’ve got a learning remote. Take advantage of the networking capability, and you’ve got a house controller that doesn’t have to be hard wired in any particular location…

Oh, and did I mention that Servos work off the same concept of pulse modulation? No, I don’t have to, you’ve already figured that out!

http://bansky.net/blog/2009/04/microframework-device-controlled-via-tv-remote/

Microsoft Hohm enters Beta

Philip Wheat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:26:43 GMT

Some of you may have already seen the Hohm site – but if you haven’t you can take a look over at www.microsoft-hohm.com (and sign up while you’re there.) I’d also recommend taking a look and possibly subscribing to the team blog – http://blog.microsoft-hohm.com.

So why the blog post? Well lots of people saw what Hohm is about – letting you know your energy usage and allowing you to plan and optimize what you’re using (which is pretty critical as I type this and look at my weather station readings – 107.32F right now.) This helps us survive the bills and the weather and our power grid survive the demand load that summers generate with record breaking heat and expanded populations in the hotter parts of the country.

But there was something in the announcement that I don’t know that a lot of people caught. That was this line in the release – “… if you are a customer of a Hohm-partnered utility company you can choose to automatically upload your energy usage data into the application in the near future.” Hmmm. Now that’s interesting. I was hoping for something like this eventually, but it sounds like the feedback loop of our “Smart Power Grid” efforts are actually starting to come about in the real world! Now that’s progress!

BTW, why did I put this also under Robotics? Because that feedback loop that’s starting to happen is exactly what mobile robots have to do all the time. Not just send instructions on power consumption, but monitor usage, monitor needs, prioritize, and then manage that consumption to goal. Lots of crossover opportunities.

Robotics Developer Studio R2 just released

Philip Wheat — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:28:40 GMT

Just in time for BrickWorld this weekend, Release 2 of Robotics Developer Studio has just come out. You can watch the release video here, pick up the express edition at the download center, and visit the updated robotics site off the main Microsoft page.

Oh, and the Standard edition update is available from your MSDN subscription as well!

Smart Environments/Green IT

Philip Wheat — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:56:18 GMT

Just uploaded the deck I used today at the Green IT sessions here in Austin – it’s a slightly modified version of my Nerd Night presentation that I had neglected to push up. I’ll use this post as a placeholder for any comments or discussions as well.

Deck at Smart Environments

More links and posts on the Coding Outside the Box series coming up, but for right now you can follow the sensor tweets at www.twitter.com/philtweetlab.

The Embedded Processor Components (How, Pt 2)

Philip Wheat — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:06:44 GMT

This has been a long post in arriving. Why? I keep finding new stuff to throw into the project. I’ll do some of the major items right now, but there will be more as we go along – there’s a LOT going on in the embedded and low power processor and sensor spaces.

Let’s start with the processors:

This is my SJJ Micro Framework board (I’ve stuck the breadboard on top.) I’ll be using this for where I need a small, low powered remote processing unit that has access to an Ethernet cable (very handy feature that last one.)

Next is my GHI USBizi board – again, Micro Framework, but smaller and with more serial ports. This is useful for even lower power situations, and those with the need for local storage and USB Host capabilities. Note no Ethernet onboard, but I’ve got some ways around that a bit further down.

And a base Arduino (with prototype shield.) Useful for quick and cheap, but fewer control lines and memory/storage size. It is worth a note that the Arduino Mega is out and answers a number of these concerns.

And (not quite stand alone but even easier to prototype with) my old V1 Phidgets 8/8/8 controller. Requires at least a USB connection to a PC so it’s not for remote usage, but it’s really easy to put together various configurations, has a LOAD of great sample code, exposes functionality as a web service, and has Robotics Studio support for features. Oh, and the wiring is keyed for the analog I/O so I don’t fry all my sensors when I get distracted and forget to make SURE that everything’s hooked up right. (Yes, I tend to multitask far too often.)

A number of XBee radios – not the processors themselves, but allowing me to do wireless serial over some nice distances. Handling point to point communications right out of the box, this nice little radio is fairly inexpensive, pretty good with power, and it has a good many tricks up it’s sleeve (including star network and mesh networking configurations.) Below I show the radio itself and one of the several breakout boards that are used to talk with the radio both from the embedded controllers above and my main controller computer.

The Sparkfun weather board. This is a prototype from Sparkfun that gathers up environmental data and reports on it in a text format through a serial interface at a rate of 1Hz. I’m throwing this in on the controller section because it really is stand alone – the processing happens locally and then opens up that data for remote usage. I could even rewrite the firmware for different local functionality (but I probably won’t.)

Next time – OK, so you’ve got a bunch of procs floating around – what are you going to use them for?

Windows Mobile 6.5 Dev information

Philip Wheat — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:47:19 GMT

The Windows Mobile 6.5 dev kit is now out, if you’re interested in seeing what’s new and trying it out, you can scoot over to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=20686a1d-97a8-4f80-bc6a-ae010e085a6e and pull it down to test.

And if you’re like me and want to see a good demo of how to work with the devkit and all of the new capabilities of 6.5 – the Widget implementation walkthrough on the Windows Mobile Team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/06/04/getting-started-with-widgets-on-windows-mobile-6-5.aspx) might just be for you.

PHP SDK for Windows Azure

Philip Wheat — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:57:17 GMT

I had a number of people ask me about PHP and Windows Azure at this past weekend’s Startup Weekend. To spread out the info a bit more, I wanted to point out that the PHP SDK is now up on CodePlex - http://phpazure.codeplex.com/. There’s a lot of info there on PHP and how it fits in with Windows Azure.

Deck I used for ArcReady

Philip Wheat — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:13:08 GMT

I just got reminded that I promised to get the ArcReady deck up after Dallas, but got distracted by some internal planning meetings. So here it is - http://www.slideshare.net/PhilWh/architecting-for-the-client I’ve left the speaker notes in, and you can find the videos I used at http://www.officelabs.com/projects/futurevisionmontage/Pages/default.aspx

Important information on SharePoint Server 2007 based products and SP2

Philip Wheat — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:13:24 GMT

If you have installed (or are in the planning stages of installing) SP2 on any of the SharePoint Server 2007 based products (this includes Form Server, Search Server, Project Server, etc) then you NEED to head over to the SharePoint Team Blog and take notice of an issue that has been found. The post on the issue is at

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

The short version is that the SP2 install has an issue with the activation date – this will not affect any data or settings, but can affect your SLA’s if you haven’t taken the action described in the article.

Austin Nerd Night

Philip Wheat — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:08:31 GMT

Michelle connected me with the Austin Nerd Night series, and things worked out (not going to be able to make it to Maker Faire Bay Area this year :-( ) so I’m going to be presenting on the 28th on Smart Environments. If you’re in town, come down to 6th street and hear both my talk on Bits and Atoms and a great talk on Innovation and company processes. Find the details at http://austin.nerdnite.com/