Archives for posts with tag: System

How to Implement a Greywater System for Your Garden

May 14, 10 //

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Google Tech Talk May 12, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Laura Allen and Gregory Bullock. Laura Allen and Gregory Bullock describe how Greywater can green an increasingly parched California, and what Googlers can do to help. Are there such things as waste, or just resources that are currently misplaced? Greywater (water that comes from sinks, showers, and washing machines) turns wasterwater and its nutrients into irrigation water, saving time, money, and fresh drinking water. Whats more plants love it, especially fruit trees, berries and vines. Last year California rewrote its greywater code, making simple greywater reuse legal and affordable. Learn the why and hows of greywater reuse, and how to transform your household plumbing into a greywater irrigation system. Laura is a founding member of Greywater Action and has spent a decade exploring low-tech, urban sustainable water solutions. She has a BA in Environmental Science, a teaching credential and a masters in education from New College of CA. She is a co-editor of the anthology Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Laura leads classes and workshops on urban ecological sanitation technologies of rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse and composting toilets. Laura also works with the Greywater Alliance to help remove institutional barriers to sustainable water use. Greg is the founder of Bang for your Green Buck, an environmental enterprise that designs sustainable, productive landscapes that grow food through <b>…</b>

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The Access Show: Restaurant Demo

April 30, 10 //

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Today’s guest is Jeff Conrad, co-author of the book, Access 2007 Inside Out, and a tester on the Access Services team. During this episode, Jeff talks about his upcoming book, Access 2010 Inside Out, discusses how he built a completely web-based restaurant management system using Access, and walks us through the system’s features, including data macros, custom reports, filtering, and client functionality.

Miami311

April 23, 10 //

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The Miami311 System is a Windows Azure/Silverlight-based solution which enables City of Miami citizens report and track issues reported to city management. The system uses Bing Maps to plot the location and relevant information about each issue reported. Citizens now have the ability to easily see the status of the issue without having to call the city office.

The system offers significant benefits to the city and its citizens: Expediency, Low Cost, and Enhanced Citizen Services. Miami is making this solution available to other jurisdictions to enable then to derive the same benefits.

The system was built in collaboration with ISC; a Microsoft gold partner.

Using Your Voice to Paint

April 1, 10 //

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Susumu Harada is a Ph.D grad in the Computer Science and Engineering department at University of Washington. He invited me over to see a system he built, which allows someone to paint pictures using a voice-controlled mouse. Though the practical applications of this include other uses, drawing is the most intricate application because it involves lots of curves and mouse movements, which don’t lend themselves to other methods of accessibility.

The system uses a method of vowel sounds to move the mouse, and discrete constant sounds to click the mouse buttons. You can see more about the technology behind this at the Vocal Joystick Project.

TWC9: MIX10, Tweevo, Silverlight Augmented Reality, testing

February 27, 10 //

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This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

Mike Swanson – MIX 10 Recap
- Interesting because: MIX10 is going to be BIG this year and Mike discusses everything going on with the event
Coding4Fun – Brian Peek – Tweevo (download) – A free, open source application to have your Tivo Tweet what you’re recording
- Interesting because: This is cool if you’re a Tivo user and want to know what your Tivo is doing while you’re busy at work
Ayende Rahien – LINQ to SQL Profiler released, enables you to see which LINQ statement created a query
- Interesting because: It shows the SQL being generated by your LINQ queries
Mike Taulty – Silverlight 4 TCP Sockets video
- Interesting because: Mike has an 8 part series on networking with Silverlight
Somasegar - Key Software Development Trends
- Interesting because: Brian makes the point that testing is now a 1st class citizen
Adam Kinney - Ryan Lee creates Gesturecons, a set of free icons to describe touch gestures
- Interesting because: For touch interaction, a picture is worth a thousand words, and they look cool
System.Net team – FAQ on System.Uri, via Greg Duncan
- Interesting because: You should really use System.Uri instead of strings where you can
Code Project – How to automate software using WPF UI Automation
- Interesting because: It’s an underused, yet incredibly handy feature that lets you automate manual tests of an application
Mercurial Integration with Visual Studio on CodePlex, via DotNetKicks
- Interesting because: It’s a visual step-by-step tutorial on how to use CodePlex’s Mercurial integration inside of Visual Studio
Automated Tester: How to use Selenium and NUnit together
- Interesting because: Selenium is a good, free option for Web testing and Brian compares it to Visual Studio’s Web testing tools
Web Distortion – 60 .NET libraries every developer should know
- Interesting because: It’s always interesting to find new and useful APIs

Picks of the week!

Dan’s pick – Rene Schulte’s Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit (SLAR) is now available on CodePlex, via Alvin Ashcraft

Brian’s pick Robocode .NET Beta – A Terrarium-esque programming game where you build a tank and battle against other tanks programmed in C# of Java, perfect for C# versus J#

The Ansel Adams Zone System: HDR Capture and Range Compression by Chemical Processing

February 5, 10 //

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The Ansel Adams Zone System: HDR Capture and Range Compression by Chemical Processing

Google Tech Talk January 21, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by John mccann. We tend to think of digital imaging and the tools of Photoshop(TM) as a new phenomenon in imaging. We are also familiar with multiple-exposure HDR techniques intended to capture a wider range of scene information, than conventional film photography. We know about tone-scale adjustments to make better pictures. We tend to think of everyday, consumer, silver-halide photography as a fixed window of scene capture with a limited, standard range of response. This description of photography is certainly true, between 1950 and 2000, for instant films and negatives processed at the drugstore. These systems had fixed dynamic range and fixed tone-scale response to light. All pixels in the film have the same response to light, so the same light exposure from different pixels was rendered as the same film density. Ansel Adams, along with Fred Archer, formulated the Zone System, starting in 1940. It was earlier than the trillions of consumer photos in the second half of the 20th century, yet it was much more sophisticated than today's digital techniques. This talk will describe the chemical mechanisms of the zone system in the parlance of digital image processing. It will describe the Zone System's chemical techniques for image synthesis. It also discusses dodging and burning techniques to fit the HDR scene into the LDR print. These techniques introduced spatial changes in the print causing dynamic range compression <b>…</b>

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A Deeper Look at Speech NUI

January 8, 10 //

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Rob Chambers from the Speech at Microsoft group stopped by to show us a little more about our Speech platform and where developers can get started and a look at some of the things that are possible. What you see (and hear) today is built on the backbone of our work with the Tablet PC platform. One of the bigger changes for users is that where before we had two branches of speech recognition, one for command control and one for dictation, it’s now been rolled into a single system. I’ve used speech in the past with my Tablet, but honestly I hadn’t used it much in Windows 7, but seeing someone who knows what they’re doing really got me motivated to dive back in. For instance, I’m looking at using the macro system to build some speech commands that control different functions in games.

Jeffrey Van Gogh and Bart De Smet: Inside System.Interactive

December 29, 09 //

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With the recent release of the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) on DevLabs, you’ll hear quite a bit about reactive programming, based on the IObservable<T> and IObserver<T> interfaces. A great amount of resources are available right here on Channel 9. The dual of the System.Reactive assembly is System.Interactive, which provides several extensions to the LINQ Standard Query Operators for IEnumerable<T>.

Here, software developers Jeffrey Van Gogh and Bart de Smet dual it out at the whiteboard and laptop to teach us all about System.Interactive. Pay attenion, take notes, fire up Visual Studio and play along. Thanks to Jeffrey and Bart for taking the time to drop by the C9 studio to provide a great lesson for developers interested in reactive programming with the .NET framework via Reactive Extensions.

Tune in. Enjoy.

Nick Baker: Xbox Architecture

December 3, 09 //

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Nick Baker is General Manager for Xbox Architectural Design. After graduating from Imperial College London in 1990, he found his way to Apple and worked on the team that tried to create a specialized video card. He then went to 3DO where he worked on their high-end gaming system, which unfortunately failed in the market.

In 1997 he joined Microsoft to work in the WebTV team on their next generation set-top-box known as UltimateTV. It was during this time that Microsoft’s Xbox was entering its initial design phase, and because Nick and his team had already done some research at adding game-play capabilities to UltimateTV they provided some useful guidance on the first Xbox hardware design. Nick’s assistance with the initial Xbox design was seen as pivotal enough, that in 2002 he was asked to head up the team that would design the next generation hardware, which would eventually become known as the XBOX 360. It is there, that Nick Baker finds himself to this day, working hard at fine tuning the design of the system, its costs, and its performance.

C9 Conversations: Yousef Khalidi on Cloud Computing

November 11, 09 //

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Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer with a rich history in both operating system design and distributed computing. Yousef is responsible for the overall design of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud operating system (which includes the Azure development platform in addition to the “OS”, aka Windows Azure). Windows Azure is an operating system in the sense that it supplies a host of core services, process scheduling and management, identity management, etc, that we typically expect from a general purpose operating system.

In this first installment of C9 Conversations (we sit down with various Microsoft technical leaders to discuss a wide range of topics related to general purpose computing; all in high quality video and audio (big thanks to Tina Summerford for producing this new series)), the topic is cloud computing. What is it, exactly? Why does it matter? What are the challenges involved in taking software to the cloud? What does that mean, exactly? Is Windows Azure an operating system by analogy? What is Windows Azure, exactly? And more..

Yousef will be presenting his ideas on cloud computing and its future at PDC09 as part of the Technical Leaders track. Make sure to attend his talk if you’re interested in how Microsoft thinks about the future of cloud computing.

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