Blog List

Our 6th Girl Geek Dinner was held on the 2nd July. We were fortunate to have Kay Lam-Beattie as our guest speaker, who runs her own legal IT business and answered many legal questions from our geek girls. 

Kim Weatherall, a UQ Law Professor, also helped out with many of the questions and conversation.  The discussions ranged from politics with a hot topic being the proposed Internet filter, file copying and sharing, how copyright can be changed etc.  The discussions went well into the night and it was great to see a bunch of new faces!

The guys at the Hutch Bistro were great. We even had our own personal menus made up which was a really nice touch. The food and service were great too!.

Thanks to Tim for taking photos on the night an look forward to seeing more ladies at the next dinner. His photos can be seen on Tim’s Flickr stream here.

We’re fortunate to be presenting a session at Tech.Ed 09 on the Gold Coast. Here’s our session details:

WEB302 – Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control

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.











For those of you who have been following Catherine’s blog, it’s been confirmed that the Wednesday lunchtime is the Women Build LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) Women in Technology event.  Details on the event:

The Women in IT function at Tech Ed this year is specifically designed to address the decline of female talent and leadership in the IT industry. We’ll ask why is this happening and discuss...

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I was excited to read on my fellow Girl Geek Dinner Brisbane organiser Jenine’s blog that the Tech girls are chic! book, which she was one of many authors as well as compiled and edited, is now available on Think Geek!

About the book:

Tech Girls are Chic is a fun new book showing that it takes all types of people to work in IT. Inside, you'll find stories by 16 'tech girls' - awesome techie ladies working in a range of technology jobs across Australia (and even though they are all Australian, they serve as a great sampling of techie jobs all over the world). They are a bunch of fun and funky women who find working with technology challenging and interesting, and they are far from fitting the stereotypical 'geek' image portrayed by the media. They use their technical and/or non-technical skills (usually a combination of both) to have a successful career in IT.

Aimed at girls aged 12-16, Tech Girls are Chic also has wide appeal to educators and employers. As the number of females studying and working with technology is at an all time low, this book hopes to inspire girls to think a little deeper about technology - what they like about it, what they are good at, and what are the things that are important to them in their...

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I have an application where the user configures what video should display on the screen. When the user changes the video source I want to show a frame from the video so they can see they’ve picked the correct file. On the MediaElement in WPF there’s no ShowFirstFrame property. So on the Source change of the media element I had to do the following:

videoMedia.ScrubbingEnabled = true;
videoMedia.Stop();

I needed to assign a foreground colour to an item in code-behind and all i had was the HEX value of the colour. My first instinct was to set the foreground directly from the string e.g.

textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = "#FF97315A";

but Foreground takes a Brush so I then thought about casting the string to a Brush e.g.

textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = (Brush)"#FF97315A";

But that doesn’t work and creating a new Brush takes no parameters. So I thought maybe create a SolidColorBrush and give it my colour e.g.

textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = new SolidColorBrush("#FF97315A") But it takes a Color, not a string. So I needed to convert from a hex string to a Brush. Enter the BrushConverter. The solution ended up being:

var bc = new BrushConverter(); textRichTextBoxEditor.Foreground = (Brush)bc.ConvertFrom("#FF97315A");;

 

Technorati Tags: WPF,HEX,Brush

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We the release of Silverlight3 I thought I would share this skunk works project I have been working on. We have the Photosynth Silverlight control running inside our Silverlight3 application. We pull all the geo-referenced synths and display them on a Bing Maps CTP Silverlight control. You will see two types of icons, the big ones are clusters with many synth, zoom in till you get a smaller leaf, click on this to load the synth using some Silverlight3 magic.

http://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au/

So go and explore all the public synths throughout the world! My favourites are:

• Pyramids at Giza
• Machu Pichu Peru
• London Eye
• Mount Rushmore
• Statue of Liberty

Let me know what you think of the more integrated experience and how you think Photosynth should be better integrated spatially.

What are your favourite locations?

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

I’m pleased to announced my project has launched for the Azure #newcloudapp international competition. Its called Traffic in the Cloud and provides a rich interactive location twist on public webcams throughout the world.



So what makes this new and worth checking out? Well apart from the slick DeepZoom Silverlight control  (you need another reason?) here is why:

Give context to the camera images, browse by location and see what is happening live around the world. Sit back and enjoy a tour around the world. An Azure worker process caches 10 frames of each camera so you can now add some motion to your view even if the source website doesn’t. Those frames are made into a sprite as recommended by Jose Farjardo which means CPU usage and scalability rocks You can add your own cameras by signing in with a LiveID and filling out a simple form (Approval is needed before it goes live) All the controls used are available open source from the DeepEarth project on Codeplex....

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

A friend sent me a link to the You Tube video below. It’s a great example of using 3D virtual environments in learning.  The extra cool part is it’s done in a school in Sydney, Australia. 

It really highlights how innovative, creative and resourceful the kids can be when they are enjoying learning.  There’s a great example in the video of a student who set up a shop selling “virtual clothes” to wear in the environment and will sell other student’s designs for a commission. 

In terms of sharing what other’s at the school are doing there’s a few cool areas in the environment. There’s also an art gallery showing off all the great artwork the students have worked on and a radio station highlighting different school bands and classes.

 



 

It really makes my mind go wild with ideas on what you could do with the environment. I wish we had access to this technology when I was at school. We never got to see what the art students worked on or what the sewing students had designed.  It would make the business classes where you used to sell sandwiches at the tuck-shop for a week and do up an account statement so much more meaningful if you could set up your own virtual business, do marketing, hire employees etc.

Anyone know of other schools doing this sort of thing in Australia?

Technorati Tags: 3D Environment,Learning

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I always struggle to find the full list of SQL 2008 Spatial methods for Geography when I need them so this is really just a helper post so I can find them again later but maybe it will help you also. Since they are case sensitive and don’t have intelisence I can never remember the syntax.

STArea STAsBinary STAsText STBuffer STDifference STDimension STDisjoint STDistance STEndpoint STEquals STGeometryN STGeometryType STIntersection STIntersects STIsClosed STIsEmpty STLength STNumGeometries...

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth

I noticed my old code samples around the place are a little outdated so I created this little sample based off the Bing Maps iSDK today. This is a little helper function that calculates 360 points around the location provided at the given radius in KM. The co-ordinates are quite accurate and you will notice the effects of adding a circle at different Latitudes on the Mercator map.





Full source:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> html> head> title>Circle Example Bing Mapstitle> meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2">script> script type="text/javascript"> var map = null; var pinid = 0; function GetMap() { map = new VEMap('myMap'); map.LoadMap(); map.SetZoomLevel(2); } function AddPolyline() { var ll = map.GetCenter(); var shape = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Polyline, getCircle(ll, 100)); shape.SetTitle('My circle'); shape.SetDescription('This is shape number ' + pinid); pinid++; map.AddShape(shape);...

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth