Blog List

Last year over 80 attendees rolled up their sleeves at Tech Ed and got hard to work playing with Lego at the Lego Serious Play Women Build Event. We challenged each attendee to suggest ideas on ways to contribute to their local community to help encourage and support women working in IT.

Catherine has been hard at work organising this year’s event and since then has heard many a great story of the contributions both male and female attendees have made back in their local communities as a result of last year’s event. Microsoft want to recognise the people who have achieved great things in their local community in the last year and thank each of them for their efforts!

So, how did you do?

Tell us your story or the story of someone you know. Share the challenges and successes experienced. Go in the running to receive recognition from peers, win some cool prizes from our sponsors and possibly be awarded the inaugural 2010 Women in IT Community Contributor of the Year Award!

Nominate yourself or someone you know here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WIT2010

Tech Ed Australia 2010 WIT event

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As part of the launch of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft has provided a number of seeding cards to selected MVPs around the world to drive the adoption of the tools and platform. We were lucky enough to receive 3 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscription cards to distribute to the community.

For his effort on the Deep Earth open source community project, we have given David Theissen (aka DotNetNoobie) one of the subscriptions.

So we’re on the lookout for any Aussie developers out there who you think deserve the other two.  Leave your comments or email us your suggestions for someone you think is worthy and why.

This year we’re back presenting at Tech Ed Australia on the Gold Coast. It should be massive this year as the event is already sold out!

If you want to see our session our abstract is below. If you want to catch up and say hi drop us a line or find us on your favourite social media platform.

WEB303 – Showcase your ideas on Bing Maps

Wednesday 25 August 15:30 – 16:45

The exciting addition to Bing.com is the new Bing Map Apps. Showcase your ideas and reach even more people by developing a dynamic solution to be featured on the Bing Maps site. Come join John and Bronwen to learn how to develop your application for this new SDK and start building yours today.

Today my Solid State Drive arrived so I rebuilt my main development laptop, the difference is amazing.



The drive I’ve chosen after some research was Crucial’s newest 240GB SandForce drive, rated at 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write. My real world results were significantly less but a serious improvement over my previous 500GB 7200rpm drive.



So on the flat out sequential reads and writes it is well over twice as fast, while on the hard crunching 4K random blocks the conventional drive looked like taking 30min to complete the test (so I cancelled) while the new SSD did it in 30 seconds. I didn’t have the patience to run all the tests on the old drive.

On the Windows Experience Index side of things my DELL XPS 16 got a good boost with the new drive getting a 7.6 rating, as it was the thing holding my system back before I now get an overall score of 6.3, not too bad for a 1 year old laptop prior to mobile i7 cpus (I’m running a Core2 9550 with 4GB DDR2 RAM).

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Today Bing Maps updated their base Road style tiles, the results are amazing.

New:



Old:



The new map symbology is significantly cleaner, easier to read and more appropriate for us to rendering data over the top.

We often ran into issues where the vibrate orange roads were to dominant and if, for example, we wanted to draw the user’s attention to the route of a vehicle we had to make they visualisation louder. With the new style we can be more subtle, we can use colours that compliment the users site.

Overall Bing has made a significant investment in adding some high quality to design to all of its assets. I’m very proud that the Bing Maps team have been able to take on a significant challenge like this and deliver.

View the new style yourself and see if your location is easier to find, clearer and works better for your application:

http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ 

What do you think of the new style? You can reach me on http://twitter.com/soulsolutions

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Symbology

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  Back in April I sat the 2 WPF Beta Exams: 70-518 Pro: Designing and Developing Windows Applications Using Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 and 70-511 TS: Microsoft .Net Framework 4, Windows Application Development. The Beta Exams are free to sit, but there’s no books or practise exams to use to help you study and you have to wait a few months before you find out if you passed.  So end of June I finally heard back that I’d passed both exams. I still find these exams focus on memory type content rather than process which is a real shame as I don’t remember the function signatures as intellisense makes me lazy and do I really need to fill my head with stuff I don’t need to remember.

Yesterday Bronwen and I introduced 500 Brisbane schoolgirls to the Microsoft Surface and taught them some geography via a simple game using Bing Maps, you can read about the event and their reactions here. In this post I’d like to share some more technical information about the application itself.



The game is a simple find the location as a fast as you can geography challenge. It is effective with a large group as the they can combine their knowledge and help each other to find the location. The locations themselves are famous landmarks represented by real life replica pencil sharpeners, we have stuck a Surface tag on the underneath of each so the table can see them. To win the game you zoom into the location as close as you can, around the physical object a circle appears with your time and indicates red if your not even in view or green when it is. When you when the Circle is yellow and the time stops. I think we need to launch some serious fireworks and add some sound in the next version.



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Yesterday was Brisbane’s annual Technology Takes You Anywhere (TTYA) event at Brisbane North Institute of Tafe. The event brought together 500 schools girls aged between 8 and 15 to participate in workshops, lectures and hands on activities. The event is aimed at increasing girls' interest in technology and their confidence with using it.

 



Soul Solutions, in our third year of supporting the event, provided an opportunity for the girls to experience a Natural User Interface (NUI) via a Microsoft Surface table. Building on our successful geography games from previous years we created a new Surface game to locate famous landmarks around the world. Some of the girls attending for their third year in a row recalled our previous efforts navigating the globe on a projector with an xbox controller or flying around by shifting their weight on a wii fit controller.



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The Brisbane Girl Geek Dinners started in August 2008. In that time we've had some fun dinners and some great guest speakers.

Over the last few dinners we’ve noticed there a lot of people registering for the dinners but a dropout rate of over 70% at the dinner itself.  While the events are “free” we feel quite embarrassed asking for a large area at a restaurant only to have many empty tables on the night that could have gone to other paying patrons. This also sends warning bells that we’re doing something wrong.

It’s time to re-evaluate whether these events are wanted or needed by the community. We need your input on how to make the dinners worthwhile and successful.

This dinner is a call out for those that see value in these dinners. If you want them to continue we need your help us make them better.  If nobody is interested in helping us plan and improve the dinners we feel it would be better to shut them down as they take up time that we could devote to other things.

So we’re going back to where it all started at the Caravanserai Restaurant.

The Plan

A brainstorming session where you bring along your ideas and suggestions for venues, speakers, formats, activities, sponsorship and how you can help us make these dinners more worthwhile for you.

What if I can't make it but want to help?

If you can't make it but still want to help, please get in contact by email: bronwen@soulsolutions.com.au

Who pays for dinner?

This dinner is not sponsored so you pay for your own food and drink.

Where + When

Date: Tuesday 10th August

Time: 7:00pm

Where: Caravanserai Turkish Restaurant, West End

Today was a massive day of travel. Brisbane to Singapore to Frankfurt to Warsaw. Previously when I’ve flown this far I’ve had at least an overnight stopover. This time it was just a few hrs at each airport. I must say that while the long lot of plane trips is painful I really think it’s better just to get it over and done with. At some point you’re just so sore and uncomfortable you’re almost numb.

I found Frankfurt airport quite confusing. Firstly I wasn’t sure if I had to collect my bag here as I didn’t have a boarding pass. So after watching all the bags on the carousel was told that I just needed a boarding pass. This sounded easier than it was. Wandered around in circles for awhile looking for LOT check-in until someone was really helpful and pointed towards the Lufthansa counter.

The other odd thing here was none of our credit cards worked at the restaurant which was quite disturbing. Luckily the ATM happily spat out some cash and returned my card. Fortunately my credit card and atm card have both successfully worked in Poland.

Tomorrow I have some free time before the meetings and opening ceremony so I’m hoping to go for a bit of a wander and take some photos.