Mobile Mainframe

Some organisations have a policy of testing any new software in a virtual PC, before they deploy it on their networks and looking forward, many applications might permantly run in such a configuration. We are pleased to say that rfid Learning Table works just fine in a Virtual PC space as you can see below and indeed, we run it like this often, when building and deploying interim builds for testing.

We use and recommend VMWare (www.vmware.com) which supports virtual USB ports, so even the reader works fine in this environment. :)

Well we finally have got around to putting up a video about rfid Learning Table, that gives you an overview of the system. Comments Welcome.

Sometimes I like to kid myself that I have some spare time and Dans Simple RSS Reader is the result! While there are a ton of RSS readers already out there, I always end up being frustrated with them, because they have a feature missing or more likely too many features! So I decided to create a simple RSS Reader that I could use across my intranet, that was database driven and had a simple, but effective group of tools for keeping up to date on the blogs and websites I like to read. Nothing fancy, just something quick and easy to use, that would synchronise my feeds across multiple PC's.

Well today it came to life for the first time! Ok it has some rough spots and needs a few more features put in the code, which becomes rather obvious when you see I only have a file menu! :), but it does work and progress was good over the last couple of days. I reckon another couple of solid days work should see it in good enough shape that I can use it as my daily reader. When it gets to that point, I'll make it available to anyone who might want to try it.

Anyway here is a screenshot I took of it today. More news when I get a chance to work some more on it.

 

The BBC Micro or 'Beeb' wasn’t widely known in Australia, but it certainly was an important story in the adoption of the PC. It was a unique product that came out of a unique cooperation of a British microcomputer maker, the national broadcaster and hundreds of school teachers across the UK. The goal was simple – to educate people about what a PC was and teach them how to use one through television shows and schools across the country, using an affordable microcomputer that parents could buy for their children and themselves.

I don’t think any other country had such an organised and frankly clever program such as this. You can read more about the reunion and see a video here.

Just watching the videos from Mix 08 and in particular the demo's for Silverlight. Microsofts Flash/Flex killer.

Wether you like MS or not, this technology is going to be huge on the Internet and the WPF equivalent on Windows will be just as big. Whatever Web 3.0 is suppose to be, you can guarantee that Silverlight will be a big part of it. It's that significant.

Dan

What is 360desktop?

360desktop extends your Windows^® desktop as a user generated, photo-panoramic space and delivers a personalized web, free of the browser, into a virtually unlimited desktop.

This is very cool and worth a look just for the demo video. Check it out here:

http://www.360desktop.com/

If you would like to view Office 2007 documents on your Mobile 6 PDA or Smartphone, you can find the installer here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4b106c1f-51e2-42f0-ba32-69bb7e9a3814&DisplayLang=en

Well a few weeks back I released rfid Learning Table to the wild and was surprised to find that not everyone else’s PC was identical to mine. ;)  Turns out some folks really did buy Vista and install it on their PC. After sitting down and thinking about that for a while, I realised I would have to find out what was going wrong for my newly found Vista customers.

I booted Vista in VMWare’s excellent VMware Workstation and got to testing. The Learning Table Editor worked fine, but for some reason the Player application kept complaining it couldn’t find the multimedia files to play back.

A little more investigation found that Vista had determined the files were user data and media files and had simply changed the physical location and path to where the files were stored on the PC! Now it wasn’t a bad location it put the files in and really, I probably should have put them there in the first place, but I didn’t and instead had them in the same folder as the executable. Vista was doing a good job of redirecting the Editor to look in the new location, but didn’t do the same for the Player and that’s where the fun started for our Vista customers.

So back into the code and after a day and a half of testing the new and improved rfid Learning Table was Vista compatible.

Anyway it was a good lesson and reminder to delve into the world of Vista a bit more and learn what else has changed...