Blog List

Last year Catherine organised a great lunch and award for contributors to Womine In IT and it’s back again this year.  So it’s time to nominate yourself or someone you know for the Annual Women in IT Community Contributor of the Year Award! The 2011 Women in IT Community Contributor of the Year Award will be awarded during the Women in IT Lunch at Tech Ed 2011 on the Gold Coast. So come on – tell us your story, share your challenges and successes!

Last year’s winner Raina Mason - Associate Lecturer & Women in Technology Program Coordinator for Southern Cross University said:

“It's wonderful to receive this award for so many reasons, but particularly because it gives greater visibility to our program. It's important that people know what we are doing, particularly with our local schools program, and the planned remote school program, where we will get to talk to kids that normally wouldn't hear anything about careers in IT, and encourage girls to get involved.”

  Women in IT Lunch at Tech Ed 2011 This year, the Women in IT lunch will feature internationally renowned Lynn Langit, Developer Evangelist from...

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We had lots of fun showing off the Kinect SDK in New York over the last few weeks and seeing what the Imagine Cup students were able to do with the Kinect in their solutions. It’s great to see so many people interested in what we thing is a game-changing device. Thanks to Ed from N3UG and Ben at Alt.Net for  having us.

After our Kinect SDK presentations at the N3UG New Jersey and Alt.Net in New York everyone wanted our list of resources for Kinect so I’ve put them here so everyone can enjoy.

Microsoft KinectSDK Coding for Fun – Kinect Toolkit Kinect Power Supply Kinect VS2010 Templates Kinect Gestures Speech Recognition / Text To Speech – Other languages...

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While Bronwen is busy judging the students at the Microsoft Imagine Cup I’ve been out and about New York taking some photos.  The Rockefeller centre is my new favourite view over Manhattan and Central Park, with little to no queue and no glass to get in the way the only thing it was missing was the ability to take my tripod and gigapan. I’m not too unhappy, the view is amazing and it wasn’t too crowded at the top.

From the bottom of the building you do get a sense this is a monster of a building.

From the top the view is amazing! I really like the view north looking over central park. Without a tripod or gigapan I took 179 photos freehand at 200mm and this is the result, a 1 Gigapixel panorama powered by Photosynth:

The view south shows how dense New York is, the statue of liberty can be seen clearly on this gorgeous July day.

Woke up early this morning and we wandered about looking for things to nearby. Headed into M&M World which was disappointing..was expecting to find some cool stuff there. We did spot the green M&M lady liberty though.



We wandered about Time Square as nothing seems to open before 10am and killed sometime taking pics of ourselves



There’s some really massive screens here and some interesting marketing ideas. One of the clothing companies takes photos inside and posts highlights to the massive screen outside. My favourite is the one below where the interaction loops around a few option like: taking a “polaroid” of the crowd, drawing on people with lipstick and magnifying the crowd. At first I couldn’t work out why so many people were standing in that particular spot taking so many photos of a billboard but now it’s clear…they like seeing themselves in the mirror.



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We got up fairly early this morning to head to the airport as we couldn’t online check-in for our New York flight. The plane was packed not a single seat spare. We managed to get a seat together but were on the very back row. Flight went well and we had a fairly quick turnover at LAX and got a fancy “Express” ticket that got us through immigration and customs quicker. We then tried to stay awake for the LAX to JFK leg. After a few circles in the air we landed fine at JFK, grabbed out bags and were driven to the Marriott at Times Square.  By then it’s about 7:15pm NY time on Thursday so we’re pretty tired from a massive day of travel. There’s a bunch of banners around the building and keen to checkout the Kinect level and see what they’re doing with the Kinects

We scored a room with an awesome view over the square. We can see the clock face in the pic from our bed so no wondering what the time is



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What do you get when you combine the Kinect SDK with the Mercury Particle Engine? Awesome fun !

Check out a small video:

I’m off to New York this week so rather then just tempt you with a video, how about the full source code so you can run this demo yourself and modify?

You will need to:

• Install the KinectSDK
• Install the Voice SDK and language packs
• Buy a Kinect, rumour is big specials current – AU$160 with powerpack.
• Visual Studio 2010

Source code is here.

Catch me on twitter with your feedback, ideas and how you use this.

Yesterday I headed down to Sydney to be a mentor/trainer for the Developer Developer Developer Kinect SDK Funday in Sydney. Lewis had organised a bunch of Kinects and some a cool prize for the winning application. A bunch of people turned up and we gave them a really short introduction session to the Kinect SDK before they self-organised themselves into groups and set off building for the day.

I was impressed by the low number of questions and the fact people seemed to be busily working away meaning it must have been pretty self explanatory. A few questions came up multiple times so I thought I’d share them here.

“I bought a Kinect bundled with XBox – how do I use it on my laptop?” – I was lucky to have bought a standalone Kinect but if you bought the xbox bundle you’ll need to get a power supply cord. I found one this morning on the Microsoft site:



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I’ve been playing with the DatePicker and TimePicker controls in the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit and

was thinking I was crazy for awhile as my application bar icons were not quite right as you can see in the red box in the picture below.

After searching around for a bit turns out there’s a few steps you have to follow to get this working:

• In the root of your project create a Toolkit.Content folder
• Copy the icons from the PhoneToolkitSample project – ApplicationBar.Cancel.png, ApplicationBar.Check.png to the new folder
• Make sure the build action is set to Content.