There aren’t too many Acer 1420P netbooks out there – this is the one given out at PDC 2009. I was recently having some problems with it and needed to disassemble (to the bone). If you’ve ever disassembled a laptop, you know you pretty much need a service manual to guide you. I love my laptops, but working on them makes me really appreciate the modular ATX design in many desktops.
The problem was finding the service manual – I’m not exactly sure where I ...
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Thanks to the folks at Infragistics, there’s a new reporting site for Worldmaps! This Silverlight application not only looks great, but provides many new ways to drill down into the data: One of the cool things you can do is easily compare to sites – the app has tabs that allows you to add multiple sites (unlike the still-existing old dashboard which showed only your neighbors in the leaderboard): What’s even cooler is playing around with the Gapminder stats: A Gapminder chart is idea...
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I recently sat down with Peter Laudati, my cloud colleague up in the NY/NJ area, and discussed Worldmaps and the migration to the cloud in Peter’s and Dmitry’s Connected Show podcast . Thanks guys for the opportunity! Connected Show - Episode #40 – Migrating World Maps to Azure A new year, a new episode. This time, the Connected Show hits 40! In this episode, guest Brian Hitney joins Peter to discuss how he migrated the My World Maps application to Window...
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Wouldn’t you know it! As soon as we get admin rights in Azure in the form of Startup Tasks and VM Role, the fine folks at Stanford have released a new SMP client that doesn’t require administrative rights. This is great news, but let me provide a little background on the problem and why this is good for our @home project.
In the @home project, we leverage Stanford’s console client in the worker roles that run their Folding@home application. The application, h...
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I wanted to make my app experience as open as possible, so now that reporting for Windows Phone 7 app sales is out, I’m going to share my details with the world for those interested in developing for Windows Phone 7. First: device sales, as of this writing, have not been released by Microsoft. I don’t know them, and won’t speculate on what that means. As Joe B pointed out in his interview with Walt recently, it will be a process over time. But, now that reporting fo...
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Over the long weekend I decided to start cleaning out the garage – a project, by my estimates, will take several years to complete. I came across some old software that has been hiding in some box for … well, decades. I found many 5 1/4” floppy disks of some old favorite games I used to play. Recognize any? (Many of the labels are in pretty bad condition.) First up is the original Zork. Nothing more really needs to be said on this one. I probably put the most number...
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It has been awhile since my last post on this … but here is the completed project – just in time for distributed cache in the Azure AppFabric! : ) In all seriousness, even with the AppFabric Cache, this is still a nice viable solution for smaller scale applications.
To recap, the premise here is that we have multiple website instances all running independently, but we want to be able to sync cache between them. Each instance will maintain its own copy of an object in th...
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Ah, closer to launch and more apps in the marketplace than a single byte could hold! This is my personal look at what’s hot and what’s not in the phone marketplace. Surely I’ll miss a few things but hopefully will catch them next time. What’s Hot: Netflix (Entertainment), free Really not much more to say, is there? Browse titles, view your instant queue, play back, etc. It’s clean and simple. What I haven’t done is tried to use this over 3G while in a moving car,...
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While this is by no means an exhaustive list, here’s what is catching my eye this week in the phone Marketplace: Shazam (Music & Video), Free Sample a few seconds of a tune, and Shazam uploads and parses what tune you’re listening to. Pretty cool. I’ll be honest, I’m much more interested in this technically than practically, wondering how the algorithms work, fuzzy matching, etc. Practically speaking, I would get a lot more use out this if radios didn’t do the “song ID” t...
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This post has been updated on 21-Oct-2010 with new information contained in the last paragraph. Most developers realize you can bring in revenue through advertising, and the Microsoft Ad Control lets you do that easily in your Windows Phone 7 application. For most simple apps, you might offer a trial version that is fully functional but supplemented with ads, and a paid version that is ad free. Or you might just make your app free, supported only via ads. This is what I wanted to do with...
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