By Soul Solutions on
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
  Last night a bunch of new and returning faces turned up to the Lock ‘n’ Load Bistro at West End to watch Jessica Coates present at our 4th Brisbane Girl Geek Dinner. Jessica suggested the venue for this month’s event and it certainly was a great pick! The venue had a private room with our own TV and sound system to hook up Jessica’s laptop to and watch a few Creative Commons videos. This allowed us to have a presenter when we wanted and not disturb any of the other customers in the restaurant. The staff were absolutely fantastic so would highly recommend them for any future events.
Jessica did two mini talks, one on her view of Women in IT just before dinner and then some information on Creative Commons. It’s great to see familiar faces from previous dinners as well as new faces at each event. I’ll be posting details soon for our April event. We’re going to try something a bit different to continue the variety in the Dinners and hopefully add a new crowd to our group.
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 23 February 2009
 I noticed on Tim Warr’s Blog that there’s a Virtual Earth Developer Event happening in Reading on the 19th March. We were fortunate to have one of these events in Brisbane last year and it was certainly a worthwhile event. So if you’re in the UK the details are:
Registration here with invitation code of 3C27C2
When: 19 March 2009 9:30-16:30
Where: Thames Valley Park, Chicago 1, Microsoft Campus, Building 3 Thames Valley Park, Reading Berkshire RG6 1WG, United Kingdom
Overview: If you are a developer and want to take working with Virtual Earth to the next level then this event is for you. The first session will comprise of a platform update to bring you up to speed on the latest version of Virtual Earth. Later, Johannes Kebeck, Tim Warr and Alexis Harakis will show how Virtual Earth interacts with other Microsoft technologies to create a powerful tool that can be used for much more than placing pins on maps. Whether you need to analyse or display data, or create an immersive end user experience, this event will make you eager to get back to your PC to put the code you have learnt into...
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 21 February 2009
We mentioned this to those at our Azure presentation this week, but I think it’s worthy of a blog post. When I first started playing with Azure in preparation for our talk, I made the classic Hello Cloud project, deployed it and then forgot about it for awhile. I came back a few weeks later and looked at my analytics and remembered I was chewing up vital VM hrs. So I clicked on the big Suspend button thinking that would fix it and then forgot about it for another week.
To my surprise, when I came back a week later and looked at my stats page, I was still racking up hours!
Not wanting to run out of hours before our demo, I did the only thing I could do late at night and deleted my project. This fixed the VM hrs accumulation problem but I lost all my stats. I posted on the forums to check if this was indeed the correct thing to do and expressed my concern about the possibility of inadvertently running out of hours and this is the response I received:
When your deployment is suspended, the machines are still reserved for your deployment. That means that your hours are still used. The only way at the current time to not use VM hours is to...
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 21 February 2009
 This week we’ve been fortunate to have been invited to present at the Politics & Technology Forum: Campaigning Online Event on Thursday 26th February in Canberra.
Event details:
Join government, business leaders and political bloggers at the second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum.
On this informative morning, Keynote Speaker Joe Trippi details the impact of new technologies on modern politics. Heralded by the US press as the man who “reinvented campaigning”, Joe has run Presidential, Senate, Gubernatorial and Mayoral campaigns. His innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and have become the model for online campaigning.
There will also be a Q&A panel discussion, new technologies will be demonstrated, and some revealing insights and statistics around Australian digital behaviour will be shared.
We are delighted to welcome Lindsay Tanner MP, Minister for Finance and Deregulation, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, Leader of the Opposition to this exciting event.
Event Location:
Parliament House - Parliament Theatrette Capital Hill, Canberra, Australia
When:
26 Feb 2009, 8:30 AM to...
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By Soul Solutions on
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
 There’s a couple of Virtual Earth Webcasts coming up how a quality mapping system can help boost profitability delivered by Technical Evangelist, Chris Pendleton:
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) or February 19, 2009 4:00 AM for Brisbane
Show Your Retail Customers the Big Picture with Virtual Earth (Level 100)
In the retail industry, quality mapping solutions delivered by Virtual Earth help increase profitability in a challenging economy. Tighter budgets mean that retailers need strong customer connections to build loyalty, boost their businesses, and grow profits. Companies need to visualize areas of growth and opportunity and identify branches or divisions that may need special attention. Virtual Earth is a platform of integrated services providing quality geospatial and mapping data, rich imagery, and cutting-edge technology that can integrate with your existing business systems to provide unique views of data. Attend this webcast to learn how you can deliver immersive end-user experiences on the desktop or on mobile devices that connect customers with your locations, products, and services.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) or February 26, 2009 4:00 AM for Brisbane
Virtual Earth Empowers Developers to See and Show the Big Picture (Level 200)
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By Soul Solutions on
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
 Last night we presented a session called – Windows Azure – A developer’s introduction to coding in the cloud at the Queensland MSDN User Group in Brisbane. We had a great turnout of around 60 people. It’s always good to present to a home crowd with lots of familiar faces. Big thanks to Mike for inviting us to present and for sponsoring the night’s pizza and drinks.
For those that want a copy of our slides, list of resources and/or code examples you can download them from:
Resources – here
After a few demos we asked the group what they thought would be a good use for Azure and here’s a list of ideas that people came up with:
Surveillance systems – integrating terabytes of data, image facial recognition processing Document management systems – infinite storage, indexing capabilities Monthly Letter processing – fast, only for 1 hour / month Large CPU computations – rendering Toy Story 6 Engineering design – high CPU computation, occasional usage User tracking and data mining Torrent Large scale spam processing Data warehousing Processing component to Live Mesh Replace Folding @ home, SETI etc. Web stress testing Bulk PDF creation from online sources And of course…Deep Zoom :)
What do you think is a good use for Windows Azure?
Technorati...
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 7 February 2009
This one catches out every developer when they start coding in JavaScript. The issue is that you can’t change the DOM in IE before it has fully loaded. Usually everything is fine locally and in Firefox but when you deploy you get this:
In the case of Virtual Earth it heavily changes the DOM, turning a simple DIV into the fully AJAX map control. What has happened is you have called map.LoadMap() while the page is loading, you need to listen for the body onload event, there are a couple of ways to do this:
The VE SDK simple attached in the body tag itself:
Now this is great in examples but rarely can you do this do to Master pages, CMS or other issues. Instead you can do this in code:
//the map object
var map = null;
//set page event handlers for onload and unload
if (window.attachEvent) {
window.attachEvent("onload", Page_Load);
window.attachEvent("onunload", Page_Unload);
} else {
window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", Page_Load, false);
window.addEventListener("unload", Page_Unload, false);
}
//load map
function Page_Load() {
//add your map loading code here
}
//Clean up all objects
function Page_Unload() {
if (map!=null) {
map.Dispose();
map = null;
}
}
Notice I also dispose the map on unload.
If you are using a javascript library like MS AJAX or JQuery they have helpers to do this also. If you want a more complete sample using jquery have a look at my article here:
http://www.liveside.net/developer/archive/2008/11/13/virtual-earth-basics-part-1-loading-the-map.aspx
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 5 February 2009
So you have built yourself an Azure worker process to crunch through your work, but how do you keep an eye on things? Facing that question I investigated and then built the world’s first Vista / Win7 Gadget to monitor your Queue size.
The cool part is this is a pure JavaScript solution! Yes I managed to set the headers, do the Hash-based Message Authentication Code using SHA256 and the base64 encoding. I’ll put together another post to explain all that very soon.
Calling all beta testers Are you testing out the Azure services? Do you want to test this Gadget out and provide some feedback so we can turn this into the ultimate Azure Gadget?
*Update* The gadget has been posted to the live gallery:
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=a0de936a-4a5a-4f59-b74c-d80f49e90f5d&bt=1&pl=1
Out of the box it doesn’t do anything, you need to go to the settings window.
Put in your account name (prefix to the queue domain) for example mine is simply “ssdz”, from the full “http://ssdz.queue.core.windows.net” Then paste in your shared key from the Azure site for that account. Click on Update and it will bring down your Queue’s names into the dropdown. Choose the one you want to monitor from the dropdown Optionally you can change the threshold for when the gadget will turn “I’m working hard” Yellow and “Time to allocate more workers” Red. Lastly set the poll time, the request itself is really small and the result is empty, the approx number in the queue is just a header value so it...
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 5 February 2009
 Girl Geek Dinners Brisbane Dinner 4 is set! This month we’re fortunate to have Jessica Coates as our guest speaker.
Being a Copyright Geek Jessica will talk about being a geek who doesn't know anything about programming, and the importance of support industries, like copyright, to the geek world.
Jessica Coates is the Project Manager of Creative Commons Australia and the Creative Commons Clinic, a program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. The Clinic aims to further the implementation of the international open content licensing movement, Creative Commons, through the promotion of Creative Commons research and usage in Australia.
Where + When
Date: Tuesday 24th February, 2009
Time: 7:00 pm
Where: Lock 'n' Load Bistro, 142 Boundary Street, West End
Menu: http://www.locknloadbistro.com.au/menus.php
Technorati Tags: Girl Geek Dinners,Brisbane,WIT,Jessica Coates
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