All posts by Julie

My field of Lupine

Vermont
Rather than a big lawn to mow, we have about 1.5 acres in front of our house that is a field with wild flowers. It’s history is that it was a big field with an old house down closer to the road. Ten years ago that house was removed and what is now our house was built further back. The original owners wanted “lawn, lots a lawn”, so they let people from all over town come dig up the wildflowers to transplant

at their homes and they turned the beautiful field into a lawn. Much to the chagrin of the neighbors, the owner mowed about 4 times a week. He loved his lawn. Then he sold his house to the next owners about 5 years ago. The first thing they did was dig up  a swath of about 10 feet perimeter around this area and seed it with wildflower seeds from the Vermont WildFlower Farm . So right now the lupine are at their peak and the Sweet William (dianthus) and early phlox and flax as well are all over. It is phenomenal. I tried to take pictures but it just doesn’t capture what is really there. So I walked around the path with my little digital camera on video and made a few videos. They might make you sea sick as I’m walking around and it’s not very still. And it still isn’t really very good but the best I can do. too bad the previous owners didn’t do one – he is an emmy award winning filmmaker for National Geographic. Or maybe I can get Eric King to come and do it? Heh.

And turn off the sound – it’s just the wind hitting the camera. These got saved as QuickTime videos – I have no control over that.

The first one is (egads) 17MB and lasts about 3 or 4 minutes. The second is the tail end — about 2.2 MB. Also they don’t seem to stream very well. I think it downloads the whole thing first. No way my folks can see them on their 56K dialup!

WTF is going on?

Purely Personal

I’m sorry but I actually wrote and did not post a similar paragraph last week after seeing yet another horror story in the news – a woman and her grandmother being murdered and dismembered by her former boyfriend and then a man in NYS lining up his 4 kids with the intention of killing them all. Now today a story of another murder and beheading in Hollywood. I have never seen news like this in all of my life. Well, over the years a few. But recently there have been more than a few. Is it truly a daily event but has been covered up until now?

New things we can learn from Steve Smith when he returns to the conference scene

Community Cheerleading

As many of you may know from experience, Steve is a great presenter and an incredible source of knowledge on ASP.NET.

So now that he is learning things like this:

The training today was on mines, including how to detect them, how they’re employed, and how to react if you find yourself in a minefield.  The instruction was good, and next week we are scheduled to hook back up with the same EOBC class to go through some boobytrap classes, which will be the remainder of our training here.  Unfortunately, two things I was hoping to get in, demolition training and US weapons (heavy stuff) training probably isn’t going to happen at this point.

I look forward to the analogies he may pepper his presentations with. If you have ever sat in on one of Patrick Hynds talks on security, you will understand! Patrick’s military background shines through when he is talking about internet/network security – because as we all know, it’s a war!

I have to point out a funny trend here. Brian Johnson, who is the content strategist of the MSDN Developer Security Center also has a military background. Hmmm… maybe Steve, too, will be drawn more to security when he gets back!!

New presentation from MS on INETA website

dotNET

 Feed: Geekswithblogs.net Main Feed
 Title: New Presentation: Microsoft Services Oriented Architecture
 Source: XML Bill Evjen’s Blog 		Author: Bill Evjen 
0 Comments 

Another presentation for .NET User Groups to use from Microsoft has been made available from the INETA website! Microsoft is giving INETA user groups a new presentation each month. You can find this month’s presentation here. The name of this month’s presentation is: Microsoft Services Oriented Architecture and includes discussions on the following topics:

  • Overview of Service Orientation (SO)
  • Web Services and Service Orientation
  • Microsoft’s Service Orientation offerings
  • How to do Service Orientation today
  • Roadmap to get to Service Orientation
  • Migration to Service Orientation

Feel free to post your comments about this presentation here (in Bill’s post). Also, what other presentations are you interested in?

“Why I bought a tablet pc” (Michael Hyatt)

Tablet

Because I subsribe to the blogs of a number of tablet pc people, I am seeing this a lot and then realized that I can still share it with people who do not subscribe to those same blogs (www.whatisnew.com, www.kstati.com/tabulapc, www.tabletpctalk.com, http://journals.tuxreports.com/lch).

This is from a weblog by Michael Hyatt. He is not a programmer. He does not sound like a techno-geek. He is an end-user. So he fits into the same category of consumer as my friend who is the UVM Business School Dean who is nuts for her tablet pc. THere is a market out there besides the vertical markets. And these people don’t even require “the killer app“. As Rocki said to me, pointing to Excel, Word, I.E. and PowerPoint… “what more do I need?“

Below is what Michael Hyatt says in his blog. Perhaps he will continue to write about his experiences.

About three weeks ago, I bought a Toshiba M205-S810 Tablet PC. I’ve always thought it would be a big boost to my productivity if I could actually take my computer with me to meetings. Then I would have access to everything I need—my calendar, e-mail messages, documents, spreadsheets, etc. I tried using a PDA, but that didn’t really cut it. The interface was too primitive and scrolling documents was a drag…So far, I have been very pleased. The biggest problem has been getting used to the Toshiba keyboard. I’ve used ThinkPads for years, and many of the keys are just in different places. Also, I’m not crazy about the touchpad as a mouse pointing device. I still prefer IBM’s “trackpoint” technology (i.e., the red eraser head in the middle of the keyboard). I think it’s more accurate. But, over time, I’m sure I’ll get used to both.

Referencing the tablet api’s in your .net app

Tablet

Just as an FYI, when you are referencing the Microsoft.Ink assemblies in  your applications, there are a few you need to use. The Microsoft.Ink assembly is the 1.0 version which has most of what you will need in it. The Microsoft.Ink.1.5 has the PenInputPanel and InkDivider Objects in it and the 1.7 has those things that were added for what is the current beta (eg web enabled controls and context tagging). So you need to combine these assemblies in your application. I am mentioning this because, twice now, I have started out by just adding the new assembly into my app and then wondering where all of my darned classes were!

Programming Hand Writing Recognition

Tablet

I have not had to work with the part of the tabletpc api that deals with hand writing recognition. I only have used the results of other’s labor – in other applications.

As I am digging deeper into this part of the sdk in preparation for my upcoming DevTeach presentation I am amazed at how complex the API is and how far one can go with the tools and some creativity. I am looking forward to talking further with Arin Goldberg to understand some more of what’s going on in the background here.

Here is a link to the recognitionresult object which is just part of the puzzle. If you can imagine what must be going on when the reco is doing it’s thing. It has to look at so many possible combinations of what your ink can represent and it goes through and readjusts for every stroke. If you are drawing and H and not using cursive, then you are picking your pen up after each of the 3 strokes it takes to write that “H”. The machinations that the engine has to go through just to get that you are working on an H is amazing. It’s first best guess is a “1” and then it has a whole bunch of alternates. Then my next stroke is the other vertical so it’s next best guess is the number 11 (with alternates). FInally I draw the horizontal line and it’s guess is now an H. And that’s just the first letter of a word. So as you build the word, upon each stroke it reanalyzes the entire combination and tries to guess what the word is. It doesn’t even wait until you say “ok, now that was the whole word…go for it”.

So add to that the fact that there is a pool of guesses somewhere that it is drawing from. An entire dictionary? I guess it goes for the letters first than based on the letters it goes for the words. So it’s not guessing at words from your strokes, just at the letters. Or something like that. Whatever the case may be it’s mind-boggling. Especially when you realize that the reco works for quite a few languages including some asian ones which means not just different words but different characters! Wow.