Google Code, Opensource projects

Software engineers at Google are allowed to spend one day per week—that’s right, twenty percent of their work time—working on personal projects. Many of the engineers at Google are interested in open source, here are some of their projects

Google Code

The Google Maps and CraigsList for Rented accomodation by Paul Rademacher is impressive.

Get IE 7 features today, Avoid phishing scams with a toolbar that gives detailed info about the site your viewing

Okay, what about phishing, then? Well, I don’t know exactly how IE 7 will protect against phishing attacks; Gates
seemed to indicate that it would involve offering more information about the websites users visit, to give surfers a
better idea of whether they are really visiting the sites they think they are.

Another company got there first. Netcraft introduced a plug-in toolbar for IE that displays information about the site you’re visiting. The information includes the site’s popularity, Internet address, and the country in which the site is hosted. It even lets users know whether other surfers who use this toolbar have flagged the site as a possible phishing scam!

Netcraft Toolbar

Promises, Promises, the next version will do everything!

A Cautionary Tale About the Burning Edge

Paul is having a bad day, I reckon he is suffering from marketing hype overload.

Winforms .NET Apps with plugin architecture

Create Extensible .NET Apps

Good article on creating WinForms applications that contain a plugin architecture, it scans the Bin folder for available DLL plugins which can extend via inheritance the Controls on forms and their Event handlers. Some good approaches suggested, including security considerations.

AJAX library for ASP.Net

Thanks to Rob Burke for this information AJAX library for ASP.Net

The Visual Studio 2005 Beta Experience

Visual Studio .Net 2005 betas with Training DVD now available in Europe

The Visual Studio 2005 Beta Experience

Microsoft are not even charging for shipping (to Ireland anyway) for this media pack which is an unusual but welcome development.

Back to the training

Now that I've got the all clear from the physio I have been checking out the upcoming fixtures on Irish Runner

Looks like the Walkinstown 5 Mile is a the next target to train for. Lets hope it will not be in the sweltering heat experienced last year for a complete amateur like me.

Kieran Lynam made Microsoft MVP in ASP.net

Congratulations to Kieran from Digerati and IrishDev for being make a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in ASP.Net, well deserved.

I look forward to his Most Valuable comments at coffee breaks in LGCSB when he gets back from new york ;-)

Kieran's Blog

Geo Mapping Solutions

Following on from the current limitations of UK google maps I mentioned yesterday here are a few more excellent mapping products

Map24 Ireland

This has the street names and directions functionality and uses the same mapping data as Google Maps (from Navteq) but its contained in a Java Applet with nifty zooming functionality. It also has a measuring tool which is very handy as I have started training again for a few 10k runs so I will be able to measure my training routes. I have done a few tests along courses in the Phoenix Park that I know to be 10k and the accuracy is slightly out but acceptable.

For alternate mapping data and address searches there is also the IAVI SkyView product. If you zoom in far enough it will provide satellite images (a few years out of date though, just look at the M50 route).

Google Maps comes to Ireland & UK

Google Maps UK & Ireland

You can zoom and pan around the major cities but it appears they have not indexed the street names for "directions" or the businesses for the "Local search" functionality in Ireland, they have in the UK though

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2

VS.Net Beta 2 is available for download

great bunch of related links available at:
Robert Burke's weblog : Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 Goes Live!

Visual Studio and .Net 2.0 Beta 2 and SQL Yukon Beta 3

Just got a whirlwind hands on tour of these products from Rob Burke of Microsoft which is great reinforcement for all the stuff I have been reading to actually see it in action. Beta 2 if VS.Net is offically released next week.

AppDev.com are providing a free intro cd on Beta1 with the basics but its very high level, perhaps the full course goes into it in more detail.

VS.Net Express will be released for free and will be well worth downloading even if just for the XHTML support so all generated code and controls will only output XHTML to the schema you choose XHTML 1.1, Transitional etc.

The Demo of VS.Net Team Developer edition was cool with code coverage, integrated unit and system testing, bug tracking and a new source control system. Microsoft are using this system to build Longhorn which is a 1st aparently that they use their public tools to build internal products.

SQL 2005 Beta 3 was also very impressive, the demos included: SQL Management Studio, integrated XML data types, running .Net assemblies in SQL server, Web Services exposure of stored procedures. Also mentioned was new SQL Queue manager I tip to replace MSMQ

Location based positioning for your GSM Phone without a GPS receiver

Interesting open source tool that uses the position of your GSM Mast and triangulation to estimate your location on a map CellTrack - Cellphone Tracking by SPV-Developers.com

GeoMedia WebMap training

On an interesting training course all day today about GeoMedia WebMap 5.2. Provides for generation of a SVG (as opposed to the heavy Active CGM plugin) maps with good interactivity. The site code that is copied from the template is still ASP3 so initial conversion of the standard site template to ASP.Net and the removal of the frames would be beneficial but it appears to be more of an integrated product than its previous versions.

A big win is the config information is no longer scattered amongst ASP include files but instead its in an access database. This access database can be retrieved from a live site and imported into your test configuration site to get all their customised properties up and running very quickly. This would have taken an age before.

More experimentation needed with this product, perhaps lessons learned from Google Maps will eventually filter through to Intergraph.

iMate Jam Observations

It would appear that Skype does not work very well with the iMate JAM even though it meets the 400Mhz processor requirements. I found it completely unusable with a SanDisk WiFi SDIO card and SkypeOut to landline numbers. I don't think its my Wireless home connection or My EsatBT 1MB broadband connection because I can use Skypeout from my ThinkPad Laptop using 802.11b Wifi with little distortion.

It seems many others are also having the same trouble
forum.skype.com :: View topic - iMate Jam with 256 Sandisk wifi vs Skype

One comment on the phone edition is that there is no facilty to redial a number when engaged, my old Nokia 6610 gives an option to redial and gives a load beep when it finally gets through. Its a feature I miss when ordering my saturday night take-away from a busy chinese.

Battery life seems good so far, seems to last almost 3 days when making minimal phone calls, have no hard stats about this yet though.

My new toy, i-Mate Jam PDA Phone

Just got my new phone from expansys.ie, an I-Mate Jam and I am delighted with it. Its far and away better than the old iPAQ I was using and is marketed as a "convergence" device which can act as a PDA, GSM phone, MP3 player etc.etc.


The imate is make by HTC Corp and is also branded as the o2 XDA II Mini and T-Mobile

Its one of the smallest pocket pc devices around (about the same height as my old Nokia 6100, and 1.5 times as wide) so I can easily carry it around in my pocket and don't feel like a plonker holding a brick to my ear when taking a call.

There are lots of good reviews of this device worth checking out:

Victory is ours: T-Mobile MDA Compact (aka HTC Magician) is the best PDA phone of them all !

Pocket Now Review

i-mate Jam Pocket PC Phone Edition review

ZDNet review

GeekZone Review

Here are some of my observations:

- A phone theme would be useful such as on a nokia phone to assign preferences for ring tone, vibrate alert etc. I mostly miss the ability to set a "Silent" Profile when going into a meeting so it only vibrates instead of ringing. This can be accomplished by clicking with the stylus on the Audio speaker icon on the title bar and choosing "Vibrate" but its cumbersome. An "Outside" and "Car" profiles could also be useful for turning up volume to Max etc.

- Bluetooth stack is Microsoft's own which is far inferior to the WidComm (now BroadCom) stack. This means I have a lot of difficulty getting ActiveSync or any other comms working with the Targus USB bluetooth adapter on my laptop.

- The new version of the Pocket PC OS, codenamed Magneto promises a few improvements including the same OS for smartphone and PocketPC devices which should provide more phone friendly software apps from Microsoft and 3rd party developers.

More to follow on using:

- WiFi using SanDisk 256MB SDIO WiFi

Future Proofing, buying a new Processor with 64 bit support

If you are buying a new pc anytime soon you would do well to keep 64 bit support in mind. There is no fanfare but CPUs from AMD and Intel are already shipping and because they are still using a 32 bit operating system such as Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003 the 64 bit benefits are played down.

In the next 12 months there will be major OS releases from Microsoft and others that support true 64bit performance.

To the casual user, these x64-compatible PCs are ordinary PCs. They run 32-bit versions of XP and are compatible with all the software and hardware that other PCs use. But these new PCs--which typically use Intel's confusingly named Pentium 4 630, 640, 650, or 660 series chips or AMD's more logically named Athlon-64 processor--contain the crucial x64 compatibility that virtually guarantees they'll have a longer shelf life than comparable 32-bit chips.

For example Dells April mailing offers contains a Dimension 8400 with an Intel Pentium 4 630 chip.

Throwing Tables Out the Window, CSS guide

Good intro to positional CSS

Watch the Video, 54 Mins

Full slides available here

Throwing Tables Out the Window