Post date: December 20, 2008
Very interesting topic for discussion about the next “big” thing……cloud computing.
However, many people still have reservations about moving mission-critical systems and data (or control of data) to outside cloud providers.
Data Ownership. “The problem is the EULA normally give IP and ownership rights to the cloud vendor, not the enterprise. So keeping trade secrets on the cloud is a no no and pretty much anything other data you might want to keep secure and secret. The solutions put forth so far are “Build your own data center for storing trade secrets and sensitive information.” Hmm. If have have already incurred the cost of a data center, why not use it for my business???”
Technical Support. “As soon as an enterprise can’t use Excel and Powerpoint because a network server at Microsoft is down and you lose a big deal, the enterprise will start to value a service that is up 95% and has a support structure that meets the enterprises schedule not the vendors schedule.”
Exit Strategy. “No matter how big the play they can still go out of business. If you are an enterprise dependent on a vendor to supply your software, or storage over the internet and the cloud vendor goes out of business, what do you do? Xdrive was a storage company that offered cloud storage. They went out of business and only gave their users 48 hours to save data to another place. For an enterprise, this can’t be exceptable risk.”
Long-Term Data Storage and Accessibility. “If you are fortunate enough to get a cloud vendor to stay in business longer than 4 years you might have 6 year old documents stored with them. Can you still read the documents? Can you still open them up? If you keep tax records on the cloud you might need them as much as 5 years. What happens when the file format is no longer supported or there isn’t a file reader that can open the file any longer? Will the U.S. Taxation Office give your enterprise a pass on paying taxes because of technical difficulties or will your enterprise have to pay huge fines?”
Joe McKendrick highlights some “devil’s advocate’ arguments. There are some careful considerations for mission critical appications stakeholders.
Post date: December 18, 2008
Ning Zhang, truly gifted programmer, has a great look into Silverlight debugging. 
…Visual Studio is the best tool for debugging managed applications, and it has lots of advanced features that may not be very well known, like the commands in Immediate and Command windows. Not all features are available for Silverlight debugging, particularly SOS and Silverlight source code. I hope SOS be part of Visual Studio, and all NTSD (and most extension) commands available in Visual Studio.
Check it out
Post date: December 15, 2008
Well it’s official Microsoft has joined the iPhone world. Kinda of like finding out Luke’s father is Lord Vader. But I digress,
Microsoft’s Live Labs released an application for the iPhone called Seadragon that allows you to view (and zoom in on) Gigapixel images.
Seadragon Mobile brings the same smooth image browsing you get on the PC to the mobile platform. Get super-close in on a map or photo, with just a few pinches or taps of your finger. Browse an entire collection of photos from a single screen. You can browse Deep Zoom Images that you can create from your own pictures or your Photosynth collection (or anybody else’s).
Actually, this is a very cool application. The original article discusses the venture into the Apple iPhone applications world by Microsoft.
Post date: December 15, 2008
ZDNet is reporting that there is a nasty exploit lurking for IE users. Here’s the details of this vulnerability according to Microsoft:
Based on our stats, since the vulnerability has gone public, roughly 0.2% of users worldwide may have been exposed to websites containing exploits of this latest vulnerability. That percentage may seem low, however it still means that a significant number of users have been affected. The trend for now is going upwards: we saw an increase of over 50% in the number of reports today compared to yesterday.
Microsoft Security Advisory (961051)
The new IE exploits for Advisory 961051, now hosted on pornography sites
Clarification on the various workarounds from the recent IE advisory
Go check out the details to prevent any headaches.
Post date: December 9, 2008
Finally some creative thinking around using the power which is created naturally everyday.
Tokyo’s Shibuya train has a special installation for Christmas that uses its pedestrians’ footsteps to generate electricit. A mat using piezoelectric gadgetry runs a LED display board and a small holiday lights display.
The roughly 35-inch squared mat near the Hachiko dog statue at Shibuya station generates roughly 0.5W every time someone weighing 132 lbs steps on it. The amount of foot power it’s already harvested is displayed on an LED wall.
Think about the power that could be genrerated having these “mats” in Times Square at News Years Eve.
Post date: December 8, 2008
The science of how Santa will do it.
If you’re skeptical of Santa’s abilities to deliver presents to millions of homes and children in just one night, North Carolina State University’s Dr. Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, can explain the science and engineering principles that allow the Jolly Old Elf to pull off the magical feat year after year.
Full details reveal how Santa can make the trip.
Post date: December 8, 2008
Want to read E-books on your shiny new iPhone? Wired takes a look at popular software for reading e-books and more.
The free app Stanza is a favorite e-book reader of many an iPhone owner. You can also use it to search and download thousands of free books.
Here’s a roundup of the best e-book reader software for the iPhone:
Stanza (
App Store link)
Far and away the nicest e-book reader for the iPhone, Stanza also happens to be free. Once you install Stanza and download some books (Stanza offers a large library of downloadable books, see below for more sources) reading is just a matter of flicking your fingers down the page.
Stanza also offers the ability to import your own e-books into using a free computer-based app from LexCycle (available for both Windows and Mac). It’s currently a beta, but worked well in our testing. E-books you create are then available for download on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and computer.
eReader (App Store link)
An iPhone version of the e-book reader popular on the Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms, eReader isn’t quite a iPhone-esque as Stanza but it’s still a capable app. And eReader has done a good job of porting to the iPhone, embracing the platform norms like accelerometer support for reading orientation and gestures for page-turning. Another very nice feature in eReader is the ability to look up words in a built-in dictionary app.
EReader is primarily tied to two online book services — eReader.com and Fictionwise.com — where you can buy and download texts. Sadly there’s no way to purchase directly from the iPhone app, but the website does have an iPhone-optimized version to make purchasing a bit easier.
But despite some nice features eReader was a bit buggy in our testing, crashing repeatedly. EReader is a free download.
BookShelf (App Store link)
Another very nice option, BookShelf will set you back $10 but offers some nice extras not found in the others, like different color schemes (black on white, green on black and more), customizable fonts and more.
Other great features include custom bookmarks and the ability to make your book collection publicly available. The latter feature requires a desktop app which itself requires a recent version of Java
The free app Stanza is a favorite e-book reader of many an iPhone owner. You can also use it to search and download thousands of free books.
The
full article covers other various details finding books and DRM formatr issues.
Post date: December 4, 2008
Boeing’s Hydrogen Planes
Boeing is betting there’s a big future for hydrogen-fueled aircraft and is developing an unmanned plane that would use liquid hydrogen — the same stuff used in rockets — to reach altitudes topping 60,000 feet and stay there for days at a time.
Post date: December 1, 2008
Found this article by Wei-Meng Lee about sending SMS message using .NET and a desktop client.
When you think of SMS messaging, you probably think about your mobile device. But what if you could SMS someone from the comfort of your own desktop? This article shows you two messaging applications: One application to write the messages on your desktop and one application to send the messages from your device.
