Blog List

Recently I reached my 2 year anniversary of having my 6 KWh solar system installed at home so I thought it’d be nice to work out how much we’ve saved.

In 24 months we generated 18518, and in the last 12 months 9474 which is pretty good considering we’ve had 2 really wet and overcast years. We use about 12 KWh per day so it’s great that we’re generating about twice the power we need and it means the electricity company gets to send me a cheque at the end of each quarter. The good thing in the last few months is AGL now does Direct Deposit into bank accounts rather than cheques which means you get the money back so much faster but you still have to call up and ask for it.

Based on the Small Business Carbon Footprint Calculator – which only allows you to enter the number of KWh says 18518KWh is 20.68 tons of emissions and equivalent to having 124.1 trees.

So we’ve had 2 consistent years of output so I’ll keep monitoring it to see how we fair over coming years.

Yesterday I showed you how to display a bing map in an IPhone Application. The next thing I wanted to do was show, and keep showing the users GPS location on the map.

To do this, we use the watchPosition call to get and keep getting the user’s gps positing using the following script:

document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);

function onDeviceReady() {     var options = { timeout: 30000 };     watchID = navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(onSuccess, onError, options); }

function onSuccess(position) {     alert(position.coords.latitude + ',' + position.coords.longitude); }

// onError Callback receives a PositionError object // function onError(error) {     alert('code: '    + error.code    + '\n' +           'message: ' + error.message + '\n'); }

Now we want to display the position on the map, but we only want to show the current position. We can use the bing maps control to do this as follows:

var pushpin= null;

function onSuccess(position) {     updatePushpinLocation(position.coords.latitude, position.coords.longitude); }

function updatePushpinLocation(latitude, longitude) {     if (pushpin == null)     {         pushpin= new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(map.getCenter(), null);...

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We’ve done a bunch of Bing Maps development before and we’ve done some work with Windows Phone, but we have a client who wants and IPhone application to show some spatial data as most of their internal users have either got an IPhone or IPad, closely followed by Android devices. They’re happy with Bing Maps that we’ve used with them before so are fine with sticking to what’s familiar to them. Only problem is I’m not an IPhone developer…

I did a bit of research and have had recommendations from a number of people that Phone Gap is quite good. So I’m going to try and build a good app for them using it and hopefully learn a few things along the way.

To start, I needed a Mac (which I’m borrowing to start with), with OSX Lion, XCode 4 and the other pre-requites that are set out in the really useful Getting Started with iOS guide for Phone Gap. So I’ve got all these and worked out how to install them on a Mac – you know, things like where’s the file explorer and how do i right click with the trackpad. Yes, all those things you want to do but don’t yet know how to do on this device.

I follow the instructions and helpful videos and get a hello world...

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Last week we helped out at the first Kinect Bizspark Start-Up camp at the Microsoft Brisbane Office as part of the Queensland Microsoft Innovation Centre. The goal of the 3 days was for teams to build out an idea with Kinect and pitch it as a business opportunity.

We wanted to give the teams an option to have a bit of fun or use some different ideas in their projects so we built a Kinect sandpit using the depth camera , laser projector and 40 kg of sand.



The idea being the sand closer to the kinect we represented as the colour white, medium from the kinect green and far away blue which turns into icy peaks, green moutains/grass and blue water.



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Last day in Beijing today. We ventured out on the very long subway ride to the Summer Palace. The subway was packed by towards the end of the journey we managed to get a seat.



The summer place grounds are quite massive.



It overlooks a big lake that you can catch boats to/from various parts of the shore.



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After giving up on getting a clear day, let alone a blue sky we’d planned to go to the wall today. We must have spent enough time at the Department of Perfect Picture Day at the Taoist temple yesterday or something as today was the first clear blue sky we’ve had in Beijing! We set off at 7am and got to Mutianyu right on 8:30, grabbed our cable car ticket and were one of the very first people up the wall.



That meant not only did we get a blue sky but pictures without people!



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This morning we braved the subway again and headed over to Dongyue Temple – a Taoist Temple which is seemingly in the middle of the business district. After switching lines and wandering out of the train station we walked about 700m east till we found what looked like a temple. The person at the gate nodded at my Mandarin name for the temple so we set off inside for 10 yuan ($1.50). I’d found this place on the internet so knew what to expect. It’s not your usual temple – all the statues are a little “different”.



Even the ones just of people didn’t have the standard smiling face.



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Today we did the touristy stuff. First we wandered down from the hotel to Tiananmen Square.



Then we got in the queue to enter the Forbidden City along with 100’s of other tourists.



It was a pretty grey day so not great for taking photos. The city is massive but in need of a bit of TLC.



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Today we were up early to head to Beijing. It turned out to be a big day of waiting. We were told it could take 1.5 hours to get to the airport so we left at 7:30am with a cab that was sitting just outside our hotel. The cabbie got us there in 40 mins – there wasn’t much traffic and he seemed to know the back way to get to the airport avoiding all the freeway tolls.

We tried to check in but were too early so had to come back an hour later. We found a chair with power, John played on the computer for an hour and back we went. This time there was a much longer queue. When we checked in there was no gate allocated. So we sat around hoping a gate number would appear. Turns out in that hall it only shows which checkin counters are for your flight. So about 40 minutes before our flight we went to information and they sent us back to the check in queue. After a long wait in the checkin queue I had our gate  and more importantly which security gate to go through.

Through security we went only to find our flight has been delayed for 2 hours. 3 hours later we head to Beijing. 45 mins waiting for our bags and an hour to town and we were where where our hotel was supposed to be (see top picture). It looked like a camera store but was the correct address and turned out you go inside and there’s a set of stairs to the rooms etc. Couple of other tourists turned up while we were checking in asking the same questions as us. I’d read a few newer reviews on our hotel recently that left we wondering if our stay would...

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This morning we set off for Mt HuaShan. Gave ourselves plenty of time to find a cab and get to the train station. Luckily there was one sitting outside our hotel so that was nice and easy.

Driving around in Xi’an is interesting. They have lights that count down to the change of green/red, seems that everybody kinda ignores that and quite often runs red lights. There’s pedestrian crossings and crossings with the red/green man. Cars, buses and bikes seem to ignore those too so you have to be careful crossing the road. It’s much like crossing the road in Egypt – you have to talk out in front of oncoming traffic and be prepared to stand in the middle of lanes until you get enough of a break to get to the next lane.

The Xi’an North Railway station is a fair way out of town. Our cabby found a fellow cabbie to drag off at each set of lights we went through. On one set, the light went green and our cabby missed 1st gear so the other guy got ahead. Then BANG! A car smashes the other cab, does a 180 spin in front of us and stops a car width to our right. No worries, our path is clear so off we go. Seems you don’t have to stop for accidents here. Lucky he missed 1st of that coulda been us getting our bumper taken off by the other car running the red light.

So we made it to Xi’an North with heaps of time to spare and in one piece. The train station is really massive, new and tidy. Jumped on our train in our allocated seat and off to the mountain we went. It’s a bullet train that can go pretty damn fast be we “only” made it to...

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