Berndt's Weblog

PMDG 737 NGX

2012-01-15T23:24:00.001+02:00

Another upgrade to the sim. This time around I installed the PMDG 737 NGX aircraft. Really amazing work done by the PMDG team. The whole sim implemenation is just great and the aircraft is very easy to setup and fly. The tutorials are great and you get quickly accustomed to the procedures for setting up a flight. Right now I am flying a Norwegian Air Shuttle flight from Stockholm (ESSA) to London Gatwick (EGKK).

The future by Airbus

2011-11-22T23:00:00.000+02:00

Airbus has created a stunning video featuring the future of flying and the experience encountered. They are now talking about flight experience rather than having been forced into a box in a small chair with minature windows like it is in todays aircrafts.
Me like it! Look at the video, it's really great.

VATSIM

2011-01-02T17:36:00.002+02:00

I was inspired by a friend of mine to join the VATSIM network and today I make my first flight with the ATC control using the VATSIM network. I did a flight from Arlanda ESSA to Helsinki EFHK and went OK. I made a few mistakes but I finished the flight without being banned from the network. I consider that to be a good achievement :-)

METAR and TAF on your iPhone

2010-11-07T16:32:00.003+02:00

Today I discovered a very good iPhone app. It is called AeroWeather and there is a light and a pro version available. The lite version is good enough for me since it gives me the weather and forecasts that I need for flying in my area.

Highly recommended for those of you flying and equipped with the right phone :-)

iPhone 4

2010-08-21T23:21:00.004+03:00

I have ordered my new iPhone 4. Unfortunatelly I probably need to wait another three weeks for it to arrive. Finland does not seem to be that fortunate to get a large bunch of phones delivered from Apple. Especially not the 32Gb model that I have ordered.

The problem is that my iPhone 3G (yes the old model) is now more than two years old and the battery is no longer holding the charge as it used to. Moreover the iOS 4 update meant that the phone is now so sluggish in its behavior so it is almost unusable at times. A real pain in many situations.

Look at this video from Youtube. It really shows how sluggish it can be!

The Hudson Miracle approach

2010-08-18T21:53:00.004+03:00

Jeppesen is among other things makers of approach plates (maps for approach and landings at airports using either instruments or visual references).

They have published an approach plate for Capt. Sullenberger's involuntary but successful emergency approach and landing on the Hudson River. Quite fun actually. Have a look at the vertical profile in the middle of the plate with markers named, Goose, Think, Focus and Splash :-)

Real DC-10 simulator

2010-08-09T20:47:00.003+03:00

This summer I visited the Västerås airport during their annual flight show. This was great fun and there I found out that they had real simulators that can be used. See their web page for the sims (sorry for the link into an frame but they are using frames on the site).

So I intend to be there for a sim session on the DC-10. In preparation for that I got the DC-10 simulator from Commercial Level Simulations to get accustomed to the panel layouts and handle locations on the DC-10. Works pretty smoothly I say! Here are a few pictures from the CLS website on the DC-10.

The simulator is an authentic simulator previously used by Scanair when they flew DC-10s.

Here is a link to a YouTube video from the simulator

Gästgivars Gård

2010-05-11T22:19:00.005+03:00

I've put some time on updating our farms website into a more contemporary web design. Look here for the new updated website of Gästgivars gård. Any positive or negative feedback are welcome. Let me know what you think!

For the future I would like to add a schedule for the grain dryer so that our customers can view the current schedule when they can come with their harvests. I would also like to add some information about development projects that I would like to start, developing acgricultural software products. But I guess these are added when time permits...

Engine trails from the Airbus

2010-02-25T22:02:00.003+02:00

Here you can see the trails generated from the heat of the engines of the Airbus 340. We are traveling at a true air speed of 453 knots with a ground speed of 428 knots (small headwind). Still another 7 hours to go before reaching Los Angeles.

Wide body Airbus sim

2010-02-25T21:23:00.006+02:00

I have upgraded my sim again and this time I added a Airbus 330 and 340 simulator from Wilco. I has been great fun to learn about the very advanced systems that are onboard the Airbus and I can now realize why Airbus has gained a market advantage over Boeing. It really protects the pilots from themselves. It just will not go outside the flight envelope. If you do something stupid, it will try to fix it for you. If you forget something, it will tell you.

Tonight I have planned a flight from Arlanda (ESSA) to Los Angeles (KLAX). The flight time is about 10:47 hours and the route of flight will be over the northern part of Greenland. I have ben using FSBuild to create a flight plan that would be as close as possible to the great circle route.

Here are some nice pictures from the trip.

Passing in over the east coast of Greenland looking down at the ice covered land masses and fjords.

Nice cockpit view from the captain's seat.

PMDG Jetstream 41

2009-12-30T22:02:00.002+02:00

I got myself a new toy... added a Jetstream 41 sim to FSX and it is just a plain fun aircraft to fly. This is also the first time I am using an all 3D cockpit simulator. It takes some getting used to, but really it seems like it is worth it.

This is one screen from the cockpit after having landed and parked at EFTU on a short trip from EFMA.

RIA Services

2009-09-30T14:03:00.000+03:00

I must say that I have not catched up on the new technologies emerging now. RIA Services seems like a real effectivity booster when using Silverlight applications. It is not constrained to data centric applications since it can use POCO objects. Need to look into this more.

ReMIX 2009 Helsinki

2009-09-30T12:46:00.001+03:00

Today I am attending the ReMIX 2009 seminar in Helsinki. There are two tracks (web developer or web designer) and I would rather have attended both but I had to choose and chose the dev track because of the MVC session in the afternoon.

ProLiant DL380

2009-09-07T18:36:00.005+03:00

Just got myself a new toy...

Our cellar is now complete with a real server. This one is 19" rack mounted server with 6 raided hot-swap disks and two Xeon processors. I might admit that it is a bit too much for a home server but I got a very good deal.

F-Secure a performance thief

2009-08-21T11:58:00.002+03:00

We have had F-Secure as our standard anti-virus solution for a number of years now. Almost all the users have complained about their computers being sluggish. Today I got an old XP based computer that I was going to fix. It was really painfully slow! Guess what! Uninstalling f-secure fixed the problem. So we will be looking for another anti-virus solution that does not kill our machines.

F-Secure will not enter these doors again, that is for sure. I just felt that I got a new computer today at the cost of a new anti-virus solution. :-)

Windows 7

2009-08-12T08:45:00.002+03:00

Ahh... finally!

I have really been waiting for this moment. I know that many have reported that the RC of Windows 7 have been very stable but I was able to resist installing it until the RTM version was available. Now that is is here, I went about installing it. According to the instructions, an upgrade of my Vista installation was recommended and it was commenced. It took 6 hours! But it was worth the wait. A lot of improvments, good improvements as I have seen thus far.

This is really what Vista should have been from the beginning.

Artificial Neural Networks

2009-07-10T08:51:00.003+03:00

At work we are using very extensive modelling techniques to try to model the world we are trying to measure. We have so far been very successful in achieving this. Lately, a new project will add a very large amout of parameters to the model and I have really started to question if this model will really be possible to maintain. The problem with models is that they are only valid for a number of set conditions. Once a condition is not set, we don't really know exactly how to use the model or if the values produced by the model can be used in this "out of condition" situation.

I have come to realize that ANN or Artificial Neural Networks might be another way of trying to avoid the complexity of modelling the very complex world and instead concentrate on trying to measure, for each input into the system, how good or bad the result was. If this is done continously, we will very soon have a good knowledge of what consititutes good or bad behaviour. The good thing with this is that the system might also be able to learn to achieve better in situations where the traditional "model" would be out of condition, i.e. certain conditions are outside the bounds specified by the model itself. This is usually refered to by the term Artificial Intelligence in where the system seemlessly seems to be able to adapt to changing conditions. It will not be able to deduce new information from old knowledge but the adaption part is still a very good step forward.

The tricky step in using ANNs is to code the reward function properly. This function needs to learn the ANN what is good and what is bad and usually at levels inbetween the good and bad. In our situation I belive that it is easier to determine the good and bad compared to trying to find a model properly models the world. However, I see one critical aspect of using ANNs. If the reward function does not work properly the system will learn the wrong things. This is of course a very bad thing since the effect of that will be long lasting. Much like if we humans learn to perform a thing the worng way it is very difficult to re-learn.

ANNs are a very interesting concept for replacing complex models with a completely different approach. Unfortualtelly it seams that this is not yet generally accepted by software engineers. ANNs appears yet mostly be University products rather than products delivered from component vendors and such.

CBT in .NET

2009-07-02T06:55:00.000+03:00

I am currently searching for a CBT or e-learning solution that would enable me to create an e-course delivered in a web browser. Ideally I would prefer to use some sort of asp.net / MVC / Silverlight solution if one would be available. I have not been very successful in finding a solution yet...

Of course I could start building my own solution, but to quote someone saying "if the wheel has already beed invented...". Building on an existing solution would be much faster.

If anyone reading this have any information that would point me in the right direction, please make a comment on this post.

Dynamic WT9

2009-06-24T07:01:00.004+03:00

Last night after the tower closed at Mariehamn airport I had the opportunity to fly a WT9 Dynamic ultralight airplane.

I am very impressed by the performance of this type of airplanes. Ultralight is not what it used to be 10 years ago! The development of this category of airplanes has been very rapid wereas the "conventional" category of airplanes have pretty much stagnated.

The cost for flying an ultralight category airplane is just a fraction of the cost of flyging a conventional airplane.

Thank you Gustav for letting my try! I really appreciated it.

SimCharts by Jeppesen in FSX

2009-06-18T20:12:00.004+03:00

Unfortunatelly, Jeppesen has decided to discontinue it services to the FSX flying pilots to provide it's approach plates as a plug in to Flight simulator X. SimCharts, as it is called, is a very good service and you are able to see the plane's position directly on the approach plate when you are doing the approach.

Apparently Jeppesen is not making money on it and therefore no longer accepting further subscriptions. My subscription terminates in April next year and they are not accepting extensions for the service after that. I am really sorry to see it go and need to find a substitute before that date.

SAAB 340 simulator

2009-06-17T18:28:00.001+03:00

I am desperately trying to find a good simulator for the SAAB 340 aircraft that would run on FSX (Microsoft Flightsimulator X). It looks like no one are interested in the aircraft any longer since it went out of production many years ago and therefore no simulators are produced.

A number of creative people have created aircraft models and cockpits for the 340 but none of ones that I have found so far are seriously trying to simulate all the aircraft's systems, including the FMS (Flight Management System), just like the MD-80 sim from Coolsky.
If anyone know where to find a good 340 simulator, please let me know!

I am currently using the FFS Saab 340 on Flightsimulator 2004. It's the best I have seen so far, but since the company that made the FFS no longer exists, I would not expect any new developments for this sim. It's a dead end. The biggest drawback with this simulator is that it does not simulate the FMS in the Saab.

MD-80

2009-06-16T21:41:00.001+03:00

I have done a lot of sim flying lately and I particularly like flying the MD80 simulator produced by Coolsky. I have both versions of the sim, the original MD-80 version with an Omega navigation system as well as the Pro version featuring the latest cockpit upgrade to the aircraft.

The sim is based on FSX and works really well and there are very good features for automating the checklists if you don't feel like going through the very extensive checklists in an MD-80. Just hit the Auto config for "cleared for takeoff", push the TOGA button, advance the throttles while checking the engine instruments and hit Auto Throttle and you will be in the air before you know it. Keeping the airplane on the Take-off profile, following the flap retraction schedule and keeping up with ATC procedure is a full workload. I guess that this is just like in the real world.

Windows Azure

2009-05-27T21:44:00.001+03:00

The biggest announcement that Microsoft did during the PDC 2008 was Windows Azure. I have participated in a large development project for a mission critical system and I painfully know how much time you have to spend with non-functional requirements and operational issues. Windows Azure lets you concentrate on the business logic and leave the hosting, scalability and availability issues to to the services framework. That's just plain excellent.

However, I see one big drawback of the Windows Azure framework. The lack of a CMS system! I am sure this will be fixed in due time or CMS providers will be adapting their products to run on Windows Azure. If you are developing a site, there is a good chance that you would like to have a CMS component in the solution since the site should be "live" in a sense that content providers should be able to easily and quickly change contents of the site. Yanking a CMS component into a Windows Azure solution might be difficult since most of these solutions require some form of database access and that data access layer needs to be completely re-written to work with .NET Data services.

So, if you are writing the entire application from scratch, Windows Azure might be a good thing to take the deployment issues out of your hair, but as for a Website with CMS requirements it might be very tricky to use the Azure services platform.

Anyone that know a CMS solution that would just work inside the Azure cloud? I have found just one, the Adxstudio CMS!

Twitter

2009-05-13T08:32:00.002+03:00

Last year when I was at the PDC in Los Angeles I realized that twitter is a very very big thing in the US. So I was inspired by the twittering at the PDC and when I got back to the hotel room, I signed up for a twitter account. I't not really been used any frequently since but I think that I might give it a try now. I'll be posting my tweets here using Twitterific on iPhone.

CoPilot for iPhone

2009-04-19T12:31:00.002+03:00

I have purchased my most expensive iPhone application yet. Its the CoPilot application for iPhone available on the AppStore. For 15.99€ you get a good VFR flight planning application that not only performs flight planning functions but also performs weight and balance calculations. Really neat application. Once you have the airplane characteristics setup in the application, planning a trip will take just a few minutes.

Its really amazing how much the iPhone has taken the mobile applications in just a couple of years, its really a great leap forward. This application together with metar/taf weather available on mobilemetar.com (a Safari on iPhone suitable format) is a good companion when flying VFR.

iPhone OS 3.0

2009-03-18T21:18:00.001+02:00

iPhone software will be updated to the new major version 3. This includes a lot of features that I have currently been missing.

Copy paste is for sure one of the items that is missing. Maybe not that important but since the iPhone is supposed to be easy to use, it is a bit annoying that this feature was missing. Apple is fixing that now.
Maps application is not really very flexible. Turn-by-turn directions is something that I need when driving. Without it, it is not really usable in the car. It turns out that Apple is locked into some sort of licensing issue but at least they are opening up for other vendors to provide mapping software on the AppStore.
Push notifications. I am not really sure that this is the way I want it! Background processing is more natural, I think. They say it hurts battery time... Ok, I can't argue against that. Let's hope that this push notification thing really works well and the IM apps can change their implementation so that the user really does not see that the application really stopped between sessions. It's a more complex programming task to use push notifications to simulate background tasking.
Tethering. Honestly I was very surprised when I understood that this was not possible on the iPhone. Such an advanced device and this was not possible? I have seen posts about why. Apple seems to blame AT&T for wanting this feature removed. I am not really sure that I buy that excuse. Why would they want that feature removed? Having people use the data network would give them income. Well, it looks like tethering using USB and Bluetooth will be added in 3.0. Swell.

There are a bunch of other features as well, but they are not really important to me. If you would like to know more about the features slated for the iPhone OS 3.0 you can look here.

Language problems

2009-01-12T09:13:00.003+02:00

A number of months ago we tried to change our Microsoft Embedded partner membership to the Swedish partner organization instead of the Finnish due to language problems. That proved to be difficult. We were unable to get any information in either Swedish or (believe it or not) English.
Finally I decided to draft an email to Steve Ballmer about it. He promptly responded to his subordinates and the situation was quickly remedied. We are still connected to the Finnish partner organization but we are given all the information material that is sent from the Swedish counterpart automatically.

The interesting thing with this case is that Steve Ballmer seems to read all his emails. During Mix 07, at one of the sessions were Mr. Ballmer was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki from Apple, he claimed that he reads all his emails. I was acting upon that claim and it really had the desired effects.

Now, one of the local newspapers wanted to write an news flash about the incident. Unfortunatelly the news article was concieved just as a language political statement between Swedish and Finnish. Really unfortunate. We are not a political party. We are trying to do business on a day to day basis and this was a company to company conversation were we had a problem and the problem was rectified. End of story. The comments on the article are predominantly language war posts that are not contributing to anything....

SAAB 340

2008-12-18T07:19:00.002+02:00

This afternoon I will do something very interesting. I'll have a chance to ride in the jump seat of an AirÅland flight on a roundtrip to Stockholm. I'll have a good opportunity to study the multi crew cooperation procedures performed in the cockpit on a SAAB 340 on a short haul trip. I'll be taking notes of power settings and procedures so that I can run the same flight in the sim as realistically as possible.

Check in time for the crew is 4:15 this afternoon and I will follow every procedure including the preflight procedures. I just can't wait. I feel just like a kid at Christmas Eve!

IE8 crashes

2008-11-30T20:32:00.001+02:00

I have been running IE8 for a while now and one annoying bug is that it consistently keeps crashing if you paste anything into the address bar. This is something that I do very frequently and I always remember that I should not do this when I have actually already done it.

But the fix was quick and easy once I got around googling about the problem. Just turn on the auto complete for web addresses and everything starts working as it should. Here is a link to a forum post that points out where the solution is; http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3817630&SiteID=1

This brings me up to another philosophical question. Why do I always have to be annoyed or angry to a certain extent/level before I try to find a solution to it? Clearly this was a 2 minute search and fix issue that should have saved me from a lot of frustration during the last month or so. Well, I don't have an answer to that question. That lies way to deep into my inner soul to be easily comprehensible.

Support chaos

2008-11-24T18:56:00.001+02:00

We have installed a new support ticketing system. This ticketing system is called SupportSuite and created by Kayako. Up to date we have been using a CRM system to keep track of the customer cases and issues. The problem is that the system is not really searchable which makes it difficult to use. Very often we have a situation where we know that we have had the same problem earlier but unable to find any documentation about what the resolution of this problem was just because we could not find it in the CRM system. We really hope that this new system will address this problem and help us provide better services to our customers.

VB6 and VB.NET interop

2008-11-24T18:47:00.001+02:00

In order to try to eliminate the DCOM configuration hell I have been blogging about earlier, we are trying to build a proxy-wrapper solution that would eliminate the need for DCOM. The idea was to build a proxy stub for the client that would be functionally equivalent to the server and actually using the same COM clsid to make the client use either a locally installed server or the proxy version of it. However, when trying to create a COM visible server that mimics the server I discovered that VB6 and VB.NET handles enums differently. VB6 treats each enum entry as a global entry whereas VB.NET prefixes the enum entries with the name of the enum. This is bad news for me since I wouldn't be able to use the exact same code for the real COM server as opposed to the VB.NET proxy server.

I am trying to search for a workaround for this by creating constants for each enum value that I use in code. Not pretty, I know, but I don't know any better way right now....

DCOM hell continued...

2008-11-19T19:50:00.000+02:00

Have been struggling with DCOM for a very long time now and it seems impossible to get it to work the way we need it to work.

In order to ease future configuration hassles we have decided to ty write a communication layer that would communicate using WCF rather than configuring COM to use remote calls (DCOM). The basic idea is to use a transparent communication layer that would transport the call to the server wrapper and then make the COM call and return the call back to the caller again using WCF. I really thing that this would work. However, the only challenge in our scenario is to be able to use callbacks...

A small test project to verify the technology is probably the best answer.

DCOM hell

2008-11-10T11:19:00.002+02:00

Once in a while I get to have the dubious opportunity to configure DCOM for an installation. Our previous system is based on a COM server with clients connecting either via COM on a local system only or using DCOM for a remote machine.

It is a freaking miracle every time we get things to work. This time it seems to be one of these times where it is NOT possible to get the bits properly working together. I hate DCOM... it is by a large margin the worst technology ever invented. It feels as if you would have to add the title magician to your business card.

At the time of making this system there were no better technology available and unfortunately the system did not evolve together with new technologies as it should have. We now have to struggle with the limitations of DCOM until we have an upgrade available that removes the dependency to DCOM. I am really waiting for that moment. It will be a day of celebration.

Internet Explorer 8

2008-11-08T10:00:00.002+02:00

Since a couple of days ago, I have been running Internet Explorer 8 Beta. There are a few glitches with the rendering of the pages that is not working as it should but on the average I think that this version delivers some of the functionality that Firefox has had for a long time. For example, the google search box with suggest. Once you start using that feature it's really something that helps you out when searching the internet.

Another thing that is important is that Microsoft promises that IE8 will more conform to standards than IE7. When creating internet pages and applications you previously had to debug the pages on FF as well as IE (including different versions). That was very time consuming. Hope that MS can deliver on this promise....

The only thing that is missing now is a good boomark manager plug in that keeps my bookmark synchronized between computers. I am using Online bookmarks StartAid for FF and that works great. That's why I mostly use FF.

GhostDoc

2008-11-06T09:38:00.002+02:00

Just found a nifty little utility to generate C# documentation. It is called GhostDoc and it does and it does a real good work at crating an initial skeleton comment section. Just hit the shortcut key and you instantly have a comment section to review and provide more details in. It picks up the parameters and even creates cref sections for known types.

I do recommend you to try it out. It's not open source but free to use.

PDC08 is over

2008-10-31T04:18:00.002+02:00

This year's PDC08 is over and I am just going to get a good nights sleep before getting on the plane back to my beautiful island where my family lives. I've missed them a lot and it will be great to get home.

If I reflect back on this PDC there were really not so much news that one would have expected for this type of event. Windows 7 was also another good thing but personally I don't think that it is really big changes in the OS, but rather bug fixes and cleanups. I haven't been looking into dept of the news in Windows 7 but the changes are clearly not as dramatic as with the introduction of Vista.

For me the Silverlight components will probably be the ones I will use most as well as eventually the cloud computing platform.

I saw a post that PDC will be back again 2009. Isn't that too often or do Microsoft already today know they have great news to deliver in November next year? Hopefully I'll get a chance to go here then. We'll see about that.

REST Services

2008-10-30T19:03:00.003+02:00

The talk for REST services using WCF just finished. I must admit that I am completely new to RESTful services. I started hearing about them when I got here to LA. The origin of RESTful services is a dissertation of a guy named Fielding. Apparently he was aslo involved in creating the HTML protocol.

When listening to this session about REST I do get a feeling like. Yes, its a good thing. You can always reference the states or objects with unique URIs. But but.... that is theory, why should I use this in practice? Yes, I'll be able to do a GET instead of a POST and allow for proper caching... but other than that? There must be something more to it to get me into using yet another toolkit for being more RESTful in my service implementation. Just because it is prettier and more conforms to computer science standards does not justify switching to this.

But I must have missed something vital. I'll just have to go deeper into this to get a clearer view of why RESTfulness is such a good thing.

Windows Embedded

2008-10-30T03:59:00.003+02:00

In the last session today I went to a talk on Windows Embedded and what is happening on the embedded front in the future. We currently have av version of Windows XP Embedded used on our system but the question is how newer versions should be handled in the future. Last year on the MEDC conference I asked (and many others too) if Vista is coming to the embedded part of windows. Now we know that it doesn't. The Quebec project for Windows Embedded is based on Windows 7 and Windows 7 is based on the same kernel as Windows Server 2008.

The developer experience for Quebec will be very much different from the experience with Windows XP embedded. This is due to the fact that there is a big difference in the way the os:es are constructed, but also because the share amount of components you need to configure in Target Designer for Windows XP Embedded was just on the limit of being unmanageable. Now the concept for configuration are around 100 feature packs at release time. The base bootable OS is called Core and contains the minimum set of features needed for booting the device. According to what I now did see during the talk indicates that this is a more logical way of creating embedded images. But it sure is different from what we have today and will need some getting used to. Prepare to spend some time in the lab to get things setup properly...

The futures of C#

2008-10-30T01:30:00.004+02:00

Anders Hejlsberg just had his repeat session of "The futures of C#". It is always very interesting to listen to what he has to say and he is also a very good talker. In his talk today he gave us insight into what is coming in C# 4.0 but also what is coming in future releases.

Basically, the topic for C# 4.0 is going to be dynamic language integration. Today we use a number of different APIs to use any dynamic language from C#. That is going to change with the possibility statically declare a dynamic type. This dynamic typ is essentially a System.Object with a dynamic flag. The compiler will treat the dynamic objects as an Objects but defer the method or operator resolution until run time instead of as as previously done by at compile time. This is made possible by the introduction of the "Dynamic Language Runtime" system that is the foundation for adding the dynamic capabilities of the .NET languages. IronRuby, IronPython, C# and VB.NET will all get the dynamic features offered by the DLR.

Anders also showed off what is coming in later versions with "compiler as a service". This means that we can compile and execute code run time.

3rd day keynote

2008-10-29T19:23:00.002+02:00

The keynote today was totally devoted to showing off Microsoft Research. It is quite an interesting and impressive operation they are running over the world.

The first part of the presentation was a bit abstract and did not really relate very much to my interests. However, at the end of the presentation a presenter did manage to catch my intention. He was showing off Boku. Boku is essentially a programming environment for kids and teaching kids to program. The system is driven by an Xbox 360 controller and the basic idea is to program a game with characters and objects. These objects can interact with each other using rules that can be programmed in a very graphical way. The presentor really did a very good job of showing of the graphical rule maker.

Another interesting technology that they showed off was based on the Surface technology but now they are able to display two pictures. One picture on the surface such as a table and the other picutre could be catched by a cheap surface such as plastic and just plain paper. Not really any finished product but it proves a good point that we are going to see a lot of innovation related to surface related products in the coming years. For example we could have a tv monitor in a surface table that would be made out of plastic instead of expensive lcd screens. Only the imagination seems to be the limits. But that is probably why this is delivered by Microsoft Research.

Atendee party

2008-10-29T17:20:00.002+02:00

Yesterday, I went to the attendee party that Microsoft holds for the attendees here at PDC08. The party was held at Universal Studios in Hollywood just as PDC05. This year the theme was Halloween and they have turned off the lights in the park and were scaring people waking by. Really a nice setup. All the attractions were open for attendees. In fact, the park was only open to PDC08 attendees which meant that there were no cashiers. You could just do whatever you like without having to pay for it. Real nice, thank you Microsoft.

Silverlight on mobiles

2008-10-29T00:53:00.002+02:00

Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 for mobile phones. I am now sitting and viewing the session. Silverlight applications can run unmodified on the mobile. No recompilation required. During the questions section at the end, one gentleman asked if they will support iPhones. The answer was very quick. No. :-(

2nd day keynote

2008-10-28T20:13:00.002+02:00

The first of two keynotes today was just finished and I really must say that there were no surprises delivered today, yet anyway. The second keynote is held by Don Box and Chris Anderson. Let's see if they have something special to deliver.

The first keynote was mostly about Windows 7 and how they have learned from the not-so-successful successful launch of Vista. To me, Windows 7 really seems like Windows Vista as it should have been released.

Later, Scott revealed some news about VS2010 that will actually, to a large extent, be built on WPF and feature an extensibility model that would make it easier to make great tools that plugs into VS.

Another interesting thing was to see how Live Mesh works. It's completely new to me, even if it has been around for some time. Online collaboration and simultaneous updates in office documents that are updated when multiple users are updating the document at the same time. Very interesting indeed but not really my area of interest.
Now the second keynote begins...

Windows Azure

2008-10-27T19:17:00.004+02:00

The first keynote at PDC 2008 just finished and I am just assimilating the news...

Microsoft just released a new version of Windows. Windows Azure. This version is not really a new version of Windows that you would install on any hardware, but rather a cloud services platform that is a sort of hosted service provided by Microsoft with a very high level of availability, security and service offering.

Of course keynotes are, by nature, very convincing, but I the thing is really interesting due to the fact that the hosting part is really just an annoying cost factor that takes valuable time from developing the core business functionality.

During the keynote they showed how easy it was to develop services for the Cloud service (Windows Azure) and deploying it to the cloud just within Visual Studio. And then there is a application management tool that you can use to configure the services on staging and production environments. It is also possible to deploy new versions without any downtime and loss of connections.

The SDK will be available today at noon. I'll just have to download that and make my first could service....

Creating Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight

2008-10-27T07:17:00.002+02:00

Todays topic for the PDC for me has been in the lines of "Creating Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight". The speech was delivered by Jeff Prosise from Wintellect. He was a very good speaker that was able to make the talk interesting. He managed to get my full attention the whole day, even if the jet lag kicked in seriously just before we finished off at 6pm.

Silverlight looks very promising when set to deliver the next generation internet application given the fact that large portions of the .net framework is available that are relevant for the web clients. There are still a number of limitations that seems a little annoying but on the whole you can do a lot with Silverlight that would be almost impossible to do with html/css/javascript.

A large part of this talk was to identify what features Silverlight 2 provides and what goctchas you have in terms of differences with its cousine, WPF. Jeff also managed to convey reasons why things are the way they are and why the Silverlight team decided to cut a feature just because to limit the footprint for the Core CLR (the name of the CLR implementation for Silverlight runtime).

I would have expected a little more information about how to use Blend effectively. Blend is a new tool for me and a little difficult to master directly. Transformations and Animations have powerful editor possiblitities in Blend that takes some getting used to before at leas I can master it. I am just going to have to look for another breakout session on that topic.

Arriving in LA

2008-10-26T16:14:00.003+02:00

Arrived late last night to the Holiday Inn hotel here in LA. The trip was enormously long and I just went to bed almost directly.
Now I am preparing to go to the registration and for the pre-conference sessions about creating rich internet applications using Silverligt. That will be a very interesting session and I hope to be able to get a good beginners perspective how to go about creating our new interface to our existing system.

Now I am leaving för the PDC

2008-10-25T07:46:00.001+03:00

Now sitting on the morning ferry to Kapellskär. The ferry is just set

to leave. In a few hours time, I'll be in LA in my hotel room. Feels

like very distant right how.

PDC is getting closer

2008-10-24T11:34:00.003+03:00

PDC 2008 is getting closer and closer. Tomorrow morning I'll be on the morning ferry to Sweden to get on a SAS flight westbound. I trust that the PDC will be an equally interesting experience as PDC 2005 that I previously attended.

The expectations are high and I really hope that this occasion will give me a lot of new ideas, knowledge and insights.

Vista MediaCenter and HD

2008-10-18T23:10:00.001+03:00

We are currently using a Vista based computer as our Media Center for viewing TV in our household. This has worked out very well together with our IPTV solution and the Kreatel (now Motorola) set top box. The media center application controls the set top box automatically and changes the channels as we are moving around in the guide.

Our IPTV provider is currently trying out transmitting HD quality tv transmissions using a upgraded set top box. I have not yet purchased the set top box because they are not sending out HD quality channels in the network yet. But I am not really sure how I am going to tackle this in my current setup. Today I am using the s-video output from the Kreatel box and sends that signal to the Hauppauge HVR 1300 TV card. I am not really sure that the s-video signal will cope with the HD picture quality. Buying HD equipment but loosing the fidelity in the s-video signal is not really an attractive solution.

I have been googling around to find a solution that would work well with HD channels. I even called the Hauppauge office in Sweden to find out if they had a product that would work well with Media center and HD set top boxes but they could not recommend anything. I am pretty sure that I am not the only one faced with this problem and I have the feeling that hdmi or yprbr would be the way to go since s-video is a rather old technology. However there seems to be no products that would be providing hdmi or yprbr output from the set top box and accepting the these signals into a TV card that would work in Media center. The only hdmi I am currently using is DVI to hdmi from media center computer to the lcd tv. On the Xbox 360 I have the yprbr signal to the lcd tv and it really gives stunning graphics. Why can't I have this all the way from the HD set top box onto the tv screen. Arghhh.... it's too complicated!

Asterisk PBX server

2008-10-13T18:57:00.003+03:00

If you are serious about cutting down phone cost, you should really consider installing IP base pbx software instead of the old style phone systems. You will see an enormous flexibility in the solution and also be able to use any ip phone provider that provides good rates.

In our setup we have been able to cut the price by up to 95% on phone calls from Finland to Korea. That's great savings...

Our telephone company provides us with ISDN trunk lines for the incoming traffic. This is needed for the Finland phone numbers we are using. We have configured our Asterisk installation with a dialplan to always select the operator with the minimum rates for every type of call. This usually does not favor the local phone company since SIP providers can make phone calls very much cost effective, to say the least. Of course it could be a bit of a hazzle to figure out which operator is cheapest for each call, but really it is worth it.

An additional benefit is that when using a SIP server like Asterisk, you can make phone connections just about from anywere. Recently we had a service engineer working a week from South Korea. He could call internal calls as well as external calls just as if he was in the office. He only needed to establish a vpn connection first (not really necessary but in our network setup he need to do that).

And of course you can use fring for iPhone (or some of the other traditional, not so cool phones ;-) ) to connect to the Asterisk server to make and receive calls wherever you are. Nice!

Fring for iPhone

2008-10-05T18:16:00.003+03:00

Yes, yes, yes

Finally. I have been waiting for this a long time now. Today I finally found that Fring has published their phone application for iPhone on the AppStore. Earlier they only had versions that would only run on jailbreaked versions of the phone.

Now I will be able to use my SIP provider for making phone calls and using our IP based phone system at work. With an unlimited data plan, this makes good sense. This is really cool. I can answer my extension when at work or wherever I am connected to a 3G network even if I am working from home.

iPhone SDK

2008-10-02T20:52:00.003+03:00

When I got myself an iPhone a couple of months ago, I also signed up for the free iPhone SDK that is available from the Apple site. The intention was to try and create applications for the iPhone, but I really hit my head in the wall with this. The first hurdle was to learn Objective-C, which is very much C like language not like C# that I am used to. The second hurdle was to try to understand how to use Xcode, which is the IDE that Apple provides for creating iPhone and OS X applications. The IDE is so much different than the Ides that I have used so far (Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ) and and the concepts seems, at least initially, so different that I really don't know if I have the time and energy to get myself through the first iPhone application.

I would need something like "Developing iPhone applications for dummies" type of book title to get me started. On the SDK site, there are a number of sample applications but some of them are really advanced and requires good knowledge of Objective-C to begin with. Since I am a little lazy by nature I would really like someone to create a tool for building C# applications for iPhone. Maybe I should check what the mono project is doing nowdays....

Bluetooth and json in .NET Compact framework

2008-10-02T18:43:00.007+03:00

Lately I have been working on a smaller project to create a calibration client application that would be running on a Window Mobile phone. The choice to use a mobile phone as a calibration client was logical since that would cut down on the devices that the installation engineer would have to carry with him. He has a mobile phone with him anyway.

The basic idea would be to create a .NET service that would communicate with the server. The client would collect the required data and communicate with the service using a bluetooth dongle.

As it turns out, the support for bluetooth is rather limited in the .net framwork as well as in the .net compact framework. My guess is that this is due to the fact that bluetooth support from Microsoft came in rather late. I believe it was not until Windows XP sp2 that we actually saw the bluetooth stack from Microsoft.

Luckily I found the 32feet.NET library on CodePlex. That library supports both bluetooth stacks from Microsoft on both the big framework as well as the compact framework as well as IrDA communication. I will not be using IR communication since it seems to be more of a problem to find IrDA hardware these days.

The 32feet.NET library works really well and I am using the BluetoothClient class to get network streams on both the client and the service side. Then I use the Read and Write methods to send command objects that are serialized/deserialized using the Json.NET library provided by James Newton-King. Thank you Erik for telling me about this lib. I can really recommend using json. Very easy and straight forward implementation indeed. It also supports the CF with assemblies created for the compact framework. The code is available, so if you need to make any changes to fit your suite, it is up to you to do it. Of course I could have used XmlSerialization, but json is more like a lightweight protocol to use so I prefer it for that reason alone.

PDC 2008

2008-10-02T12:30:00.002+03:00

I am going to LA later this month to visit the PDC 2008. It is the event for a Microsoft developer like myself and I am fortunate enough to have an employer that realizes that it is important to keep up with the latest developments. I'll try to manage to publish a few posts on my experience during the event.
/Berndt

Unreachable windows 2003 server

2008-10-02T10:12:00.000+03:00

Yesterday morning when I started working, I went by the server room to restart the development server. This server has caused us a lot of trouble in the past months since it was on its way to becomming a "thumbstone server" (alian to the domain controllers). Now I can no longer log int to the server and since it is a domain controller I can no longer use any local accounts.

I had a session with Microsoft support on this issue and trying different techniques to get into the server, via DRM mode and setting product type via the registry manually we could not log into the server when booting the server in normal mode. I can log in using any of the Safe Mode options that are available in the boot menu, but when booting in normal mode, it is just impossible to log into any account. The support engineer stated that the SAM database seems to have been corrupted for the normal mode operation, practically rendering the machine unusable.

Right now the machine is sitting there and running it's own operations without anyone being able to touch it. What a bummer. Anyone out there that have experienced the same problems?

The question is now... should I start from scratch with installing windows 2003 server again or should I try to break into it? Found this article on the net, but I don't really know if it workes in 2003. http://www.jms1.net/nt-unlock.shtml

/Berndt

Should I blog in english eller på svenska

2008-10-02T09:53:00.002+03:00

Sometimes it känns som if it would be lättare att blog in English..

Det är ju då större antal personer som kan tänkas läsa bloggen och kan kommentera... så det blir nog engelska i fortsättningen.

/Berndt

Första blogposten från iPhone

2008-10-02T09:11:00.001+03:00

Siddubarra, här kommer min andra blog postning. Inget matnyttigt...
Bara för att se om det går att skicka från telefonen.

/Berndt

Siddubarra

2007-08-02T22:46:00.001+03:00

Siddubarra

Nu har jag vandrat runt lite i de applikationer som Google tillhandahåller gratis och om jag vill dela med mig av de fina artiklar som jag läder som blogposter så fungerar det nästan bäst om jag också använder googles blog motor.

Har inte riktigt bestämt mig för om jag skall blogga aktivt, ej heller vet jag exakt vilket tema jag skall blogga om, men det kanske klarnar så småningom.

/Berndt