Technology

Kickstartz Weekend Report

Dave Noderer — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:42:24 GMT

This past weekend (June 18-20) the first South Florida Kickstartz program was held at DeVry University in Miramar, FL.

On Thursday night something like 20 ideas were presented and discussed with each on getting a paste up sheet on the wall with notes.

On Friday, a few more ideas were presented and as a group we culled the ideas and combined a few down to four, three of which were launched into groups for further work.

One of the ideas I had proposed, a home energy monitor was worked on my myself, Lee Culver, Joshua and Alex Mask.

We spent the first couple of hours investigating hardware and concluded that there was no AC control / plug that both controlled the device and also monitored the power.

The other technical area we investigated was control and monitoring software. There are some commercial standards out there like x10 and we ended up looking a bit deeper into Zwave. Did not go too far down this but I did order the sdk.

Then we drew a simple system diagram and posted on a web page with the “company” name PowerLinCo.com.

So… we didn’t start a company but did take the idea a few steps further. Perhaps this will turn into a student senior project at Devry.

The other idea that might end up getting launched was my pet project, www.floridasolarpower.com. This was part of the fourth set of ideas that was still up on the wall but not being actively worked. Jace expressed his interest in the core idea of starting a community around renewable energy much like we have done over the past nine years with the .net software developer community.

So after some discussion we outlined some ideas and came up with a new name.. RenewableEnergyGuild. I’ve included some of the notes below.

What is it

Develop a community around renewable energy

Consumer oriented

Monthly meetings?

Speakers / presentations / demonstrations

Field Trips

Members - Who is it?

Will John Q public show up?

Tree huggers

Sierra club in Florida?

National Wildlife

Horticulture??

Organic

Homeowner associations / condo's

Demo green facility

Boys and Girls club?

Sponsors / speakers

Vendors

Government agencies

SF Water management

Power companies

FPL

Home power magazines

Solar Today – ASES

As for the other groups, Kathy Malone made progress in the area of information pertaining to hazardous chemicals and Jason Milgram and a large group worked out a number of details around a secure document transfer/tracking service.

Marc Asselin did a fantastic job of organizing this first Kickstartz event and we all learned a lot about various technologies and how to improve the next event.

Thanks to everyone who participated and sponsored the event!!

No scoping for SQL Server stored procedures…

Dave Noderer — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:28:19 GMT

It’s always nice to learn something new…

Today I learned that variables in SQL Server stored procedures have no scope rules.

Take this example:

--
Declare @Outer int
Set @Outer = 1

While 1 = 1
begin
    Declare @Inner int
    Set @Inner = 2
    break
end
Select @Outer, @Inner

As a developer I expected that a new “instance” of @Inner would be created on each iteration of the loop and that the ending select would actually get an error saying that there was no variable @Inner.

But this is not true, all variables have a scope of the batch in which they are declared, code blocks be damned!

Lesson learned… re-initialized each loop of the procedure and everything works as expected.

Embarrassing as I’ve been writing stored procedures for 15 years…

Rochester Institute of Technology Imagine Festival – 2009-05-02

Dave Noderer — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:18:01 GMT

Visiting son Michael here in Rochester this weekend, he “scored” a couple of VIP Passes to the RIT Imagine Festival (http://www.rit.edu/imagine/) a free event that over 20000 will attend.

We got there early to see the start of the energy race. The idea was to see which vehicle could travel the 3 mile campus course using the least amount of energy. The winning entry used 27.5 watt hours of energy from solar charged batteries.

The entry below did not win but i thought it was an interesting vehicle.

There were two winners one took Dr Destler’s 1800’s banjo (I hope they give it back!) and the other got a $1000 prize.

This was of particular interest because I graduated RIT in 1975 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. The campus has expanded dramatically, perhaps by a factor of 4. Had to get this picture of me in front of the Gleason Engineering building.

The number of projects and innovative things the students are doing is mind boggling. Here are a few of the things i thought were interesting. The great part is that many of them combine multiple disciplines to build real things. This list is a very small set of things, the range of things on display was simply amazing!

Women in engineering middle school educational sessions teaching kids about fuel cells and electronics
Investigation into the ways that nanoparticles can enter the body through the lungs.
Building real hybrid rockets and related telemetry and electronics
A number of internet developments like http://www.newdigs.com and http://bookmaid.com
Biomechanics simulating human hand operations. I did not ever see some of this close up before. To simulate a contracting muscle they use what look like fiber covered 1/2” or so balloon tubes. When they pressurize it with air it becomes fatter and contracts longitudinally. When you let the pressure out it relaxes and stretches out.
The robotic hot dog assembler but that was packed and it was hard to even get a glimpse of it.
The concrete canoe
A visit with the off roaders club with a collection of killer jeeps.
http:tagg.rit.edu is a way to track the most popular exhibits. By texting the exhibit number, votes are automatically tallied and displayed on screens around the festival. And you can go to the website, enter your phone number, and not only see what you have tagged (try my cell: 9542701186) but also see what other exhibits you might want to visit.

Here are a couple more pictures from the day:

Take a close look at the hat, yes we had propeller heads there!

Computer Science Lobby displays:

Software SDR - the RXTX+Xtall v6.3 kit

Dave Noderer — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:14:13 GMT

I've started construction of a HF (High Frequency vs UHF/VHF ham bands) radio that will cover ~ 1.8 to 30 mhz. it is a kit put together by Tony Parks and supported by a very active community: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/softrock40

I tell you, either my eyes have gone downhill (for sure) or those surface mount components got much smaller in the 20 years since I last worked in a lab every day.

This would be especially hard without community driven detailed construction notes: http://golddredgervideo.com/wb5rvz/RXTX_V6_3/index.htm

I'll make comments here and post pictures as I go!

Pictures at: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/gallery/8589.aspx

I'm almost at a stage where I can point some software at this thing but a while before I will be able to do much with it.

Whats a HAM?

Dave Noderer — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:34:54 GMT

From N1DCN...

HAM = Amateur Radio Operator as defined by FCC part 97 rules.

There are currently three possible licensing levels, Technician, General and Extra. As of last night, I passed the General test. Starting a couple of years ago, you do not have to learn morse code to get licensed.

With the general license you have almost full access to all the frequencies which are split into 16 bands ranging from 160 meters starting at 1800 kilohertz up to 23 centimeters starting at 1240 Megahertz.

The Technician license provides priveliges on the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) and VHF (Very High Frequency) bands of 50 MHz and up. On these bands there is a lot of local / regional traffic.

The lower frequencies, or HF (High Frequency) bands cover a much longer distance and depending on ionospheric conditions allow "skip" or bouncing of the radio waves potentially around the entire earth. It is possible to transmit and hear an echo comming around the world and back to you.

Another difference is antennas. Antenna size is related to the wavelength of the radio wave and typically are at least 1/4 wavelength and typically more. Wavelength in meters can be calculated by the simple formula 300 / frequency in megahertz. The higher UHF and VHF frequencies have much smaller antenna for example the poplular 2 meter band vs the 160 meter HF band. The 2 meter antenna fits on my small balcony, 160 meters, forget it!! Even a qubical antenna with 1/4 wavelengh sides would be over 128 feet on each side.

Lots of information on the ARRL website (http://www.arrl.org), the national association for Amateur radio, originally the American Radio Relay Legue.

Why the licensing??

The difference between amatuer radio and other radio services (CB and Family Radio) is that, in most cases it is not channelized, that is you can dial to any frequency. On top of that, subject to some restrictions to avoid conficts, you can use many modes that include voice using Single Side Band, Amplitude Modulation, Frequencey Modulation or Phase Modulation.. Data wise it might be RTTY, PSK, FSK, various packet protocals or even morse code which is considered a digital mode. There are also people bouncing signals off the moon, using amateur satellites and talking to the shuttle and space staion astronauts, many of whom are also hams.

Why me??

Starting a few months ago, Nelson Winters, one of the organizers of FlaDotNet in West Palm Beach, FL was telling me about his other volunteer life as an amateur radio operator, organizer of a radio club in Boca and partiicpant in supporting Palm Beach government and other agencies during emergencies. There are two emergency organizations ARES and RACES with RACES focused on government and civil defense agencies and ARES everything else like the Red Cross.

This got me remembering when I was an emerging geek of about 10 years old (~ 1962)I use to go to an electroncs store in West Hartford, CT while my mom went shopping. Just around the corner from the store was the headquarters of the ARRL that I visited and thought about getting licensed but never did.

What now?

One interesting activity are "Nets". This is a time when people meet on the air and in time of emergency there is a formal format and messages can be passed all over the world potentially but most of the time is a chance for people to talk, announce meetings and activies and perhaps learn about some technical or other subject. Kind of an on-the-air user group meeting. I think the cell phone companies could make a killing with this. It does work however because there is a "Net Control Operator" who orchestrates "sign in" to the net and controls who is talking.

Another thing I have run accross is software defined radio. There is a company Flex Radio Systems (http://http://www.flex-radio.com) that sells a ham radio programmable with C#. Not sure i want to spend the few grand on it at this point but will take a look at the software.

I'm sure I'll get involved in one of the emergency services organization although my wife says if a hurricane comes I'll be with her on the way to Orlando!!

Ham radio groups, there are a number of clubs http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/club/ around the country. Just like the user groups we are use to and a lot of nice people!!

N1DCN clear.

DayJet Official Launch in Boca Raton, FL

Dave Noderer — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 02:59:34 GMT

Tonight I attended the official launch of the DayJet (http://www.dayjet.com/), on demand, point to point air service to under-utilized airports around the state of Florida (initially)... This was held in the Avitat hanger (a fairly new Fixed Base Operator) overlooking the Boca Raton Airport Field.

Besides knowing some people who work there, I was looking forward to seeing an Eclipse 500 VLJ - Very Light Jet(http://www.eclipseaviation.com/), the first of a new generation of low cost jet aircraft. I did get to sit in one, a two pilot, three passenger plane. Not large but meant to be low cost, fast transportation. DayJet has taken delivery of 12 jets with another few hundred on order. Eclipse was founded by Vern Raburn, former, early Microsoftie.

As Ed Iacobucci, DayJet (and Citrix) founder pointed out. DayJet is the first company to get a fully digital certificate from the FAA. The entire process from customer negotiation/booking through to automatic generation and filing of flight plans to the FAA is a first. Most airlines have hundreds of people doing this work, DayJet has zero. They hired a group brains from Georgia Tech to come up with the algorithms for the underlying engines then built all the automated business software on top of that.

While he was talking about how quiet the Eclipse is given the somewhat rocky history of the Boca Airport and it's relationsship with the surrounding neighborhoods (curved approach path and all).. a DayJet Eclipse took off, made some noise but not bad, he did not have to stop talking. A few minutes later a larger business jet (a Falcon??) followed by a smaller (than the Falcon) took off, both made a LOT more noise so that Ed had to stop speaking.

A point of history on the Boca Airport... it was a very large complex during WWI where both air and ground crews trained on the then secret and evovling RADAR systems developed in England and then at MIT. Sally J Ling wrote an interesting book on the subject "Small Town, Big Secrets". Much of the former airfield is now occupied by Florida Atlantic University with the Boca Raton airport retaining one of the airstrips.

Women of Tech article series...

Dave Noderer — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:41:11 GMT

I received this from Marsee Henon, the user group point person from O'Reilly today. In particular I noticed that Julie Lerman, former INETA board member and user group leader from Vermont is one of the authors.

--------------------- Begin presss release from O'Reilly --------------------------------

Women of Tech: Hear Us Roar, A Special Series from www.oreillynet.com The Mighty Voices of Sisterhood in Tech

Sebastopol, CA--There's no doubt that women coders, developers, designers, and programmers are a powerful force in the modern tech industry, despite their smaller numbers compared to men. At the same time many of the major impacts and innovations of women at every level of the development and evolution of technology--from the first female coders to today's Web 2.0 pioneers--aren't all that well known.

But starting now, O'Reilly Media aims to celebrate and give voice to the real-world experiences and concerns of these female trailblazers by publishing a new online series, "Women in Tech." The brainchild of Tatiana Apandi, an associate editor at O'Reilly, the series features articles solicited from technology's female side--and all focused on what it's like to carve out a career in technology.

The timely new series reveals the challenges, rewards, and, sometimes, frustrations of being a woman in an industry still dominated by men. "Each day, we'll present a different woman's story that I believe will open readers' eyes to her unique perspective," explains Apandi. "We have contributions from conference organizers, authors, programmers, developers, and more--women who have pioneered prosperous careers in technology."

"As the series progresses, I hope readers find that this myriad of female perspectives shows how valuable it is to hear different points of view,"

says Tatiana. "Whether readers think there are issues on which we need to work or that there are no issues at all, one underlying truth is that we need to support each other as individuals and help one another with our separate goals."

With clarity, honesty, and wit, this collection reveals what it's like to be in the minority of the male-dominated geek culture. Here are just a few of the voices in this upcoming series:

- Anna Martelli, Ravenscroft, Pythonista

- Audrey Eschright, independent programmer/designer/publisher

- CJ Rayhill, SVP of Product Management and Technology for Safari Books Online

- Dawn Foster, Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software

- Dru Lavigne, Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc

- Gabrielle Roth, member of the Portland Perl Mongers

- Jeni Tennison, independent consultant and author

- Jill Dyche, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting

- Juliet Kemp, Systems Administrator for the Astrophysics group at Imperial College

- Julia Lerman, Board member of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance, runs the Vermont.NET User Group

- Kaliya Hamlin, unconference Shesgeeky.org organizer

- Kirsten Jones, webmaster for The Perl Foundation

- Lauren Wood, Chaired for the W3C DOM Working Group

- Leslie Hawthorn, works for Open Source Programs Office at Google

- Selena Deckelmann, leads PDXPUG, a PostgreSQL Users Group

- Shelley Powers, software developer/architect, photographer, and author

The "Women in Tech," series starts Sept 4. Find out what they have to share and join the discussion here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/womenintech/

ASP.NET 2.0 - Accessing master page controls

Dave Noderer — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:01:00 GMT

Recently I needed to access a control in the master file of a page. Pretty simple but took a little investigation and experimentation.

I was looking for a control in the footer and in the actual application fetch contact information relavant to the current context.

If Me.Form.Parent IsNot Nothing Then
    Dim olbl As Label = Me.Form.Parent.FindControl("lblRegFooter")
    '
    If olbl IsNot Nothing Then
        olbl.Text = "Set to what you want, will probably be something dynamically generated or fetched from a database!"
    End If
    '
End If

Devry University - Senior Class Projects

Dave Noderer — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:57:00 GMT

As part of Devry's “Advisory Board” I was invited to hear presentations of the senior projects. Much of the coursework revolves around .NET and C# although they do teach other things and one of the projects does not use .NET.

The university and students find companies to sponsor the projects and most of them will actually be in production at these companies. The biggest team was 3 people and it was done part time over a couple of months so the scope of each project is reasonably small.

I do appreciate DeVry as they host our Miramar user group meetings every month!

"Horizon" Project, Royal Carribean

The Developers

Leticia Ruiz
Yadira Hernandez
Jose Luis Pereda

Application

Replaces Aging Application
Written in C#
Consists of 3 projects
Had to incorporate external dll's
Windows form based

Three parts

Data Management

Data Import (of passengers)
Data Export post cruise

Embarkation

Search/filter passenger list
Family numbers, Seapass Number to track passengers
Can edit records, contact info, preferred language, age
Can add passenger picture
Also have drivers license, passport info

Gangway

Enter agent id
Slide card to pull up record for picture id

Lessons

How to work with outside companies
Most of these people work full time and go to school part time
Less sleep was the answer

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mt Temple M.B. Church

Developer

Garrett

Application

App to keep track of members, ~ 50 now
Need roster, addresses, phone, birthdays, contributions
Also keep track of churches they visit
Track volunteer / service hours as later expansion
Windows form app
Be able to expand to web / mobile
Office interface

Use Excel for other use of information
Pulls data from sql server
Member ID / search, will pull contributions

Uses XML data sources + SQL Server
Add web services for future mobile / web applications
Used VS 2005

Beta had lots of bugs

Parts

Member
Fellowship
Household
Tithes / Contributes

Lessons

Do good analysis, need to decipher what they wanted
Track your work
VS 2005

-----------------------------------------------------------------

X-Tech Innovations - Tracking System

Developers

Valarie Francoi - Team Leader
Handy - Programmer Analyst
Ryan Smith - DBA

Company - X-Tech Innovations

Company manufactures fasteners
Was part of Textron
Just worked from a report / spreadsheet

Application

Store information on Employee, Customer, Quotes
Need to make it user friendly
See status of jobs
Able to update/maintain
Not implemented as it is remote
Valarie lives there and will install next week

Security

Login form
Encrypted passwords

Project(s)
Employee
Clients
Quotes
Various filters, details available
Notes on each project
Each project has one quote
Only Administrators can change employee info
User can change password

Reporting

Based on Crystal Reports
Projects, quotes, Employees, Customers
Print or export

Lessons

Group project, split forms, saw ways to improve on original database.
Found that integration was an issue because each made db changes and it took some time to bring together.
Company in IL so interaction with company was a problem.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Realizator - Realtor Online - Advance Realty Group

Developer

Giancarlo Delgado
http://advanced.realizator.com

Project

How to generate leads, manage clients, show properties?
Saves info, forwards to agents
Had to make a partial MLS database for florida.
Communication through email
Show interest rate trends

BankRate.com

Property search with various parameters
Must enter email
Get listings with the ability to drill down.
Paged but no sort at this time.

Sends email and cell phone messages
Alerts allow a client to see whenever new info comes on line via email
Will dynamically load multiple websites
Template with ~ 30 user controls
Will allow customization but will try to fill in with generic controls where possible.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The TLC Project - Devry University

Developrs

Othman
Jeff
Sean Simpson

The Learning Center Web Site

Tutor scheduling
User authentication
Online Tutoring
Interactive tutoring, flash
Lots of admin
Has music in backround

Project

Cool flash??
Was on a board
Needed to move to database
Had security issues with flash chatting
Did it with PHP / MySQL
Looks very professional

Scheduling System

Content management system, administration
PHP, photoshop, dreamweaver
Macromedia Captivate

Cool tool!
Go to website, records what you do
Then will playback what you did
Will only let you do what was done in the demo
Just need to add labels, etc. to put people through it

Use templates for admin
Select tutor
Will show open times
Online, group or private
Enter email / password or reigster
Tutor will confirm
Log into administration site
Had issues with setting true and false
Will be replaced by Accutrack next year

Student resources

Java script to get to information
Links to existing information

Online Tutor

Chat system
MacroMedia flash chat
Chat with tutor
Makes it private, gives more control than MSN, etc.

Database

MySQL + PHP
Open source, it's free
They did not know php but it was easy to use

Lessons

Did not expect to finish but they did!
IT Conflicts, were able to just ftp up

------------------------------------------------------

R&N Jewelers - eCommerce SHipping

Developers

Angel Arce

Company

4th gen family
Designs/manufactures jewelry
Custom wedding rings

Initial Project

Automate shipping
Retrieve rates
Generate labels
Track shipments
For both UPS and DHL

Altered project

Still has automated shipping
Also create a reusable library that would be distributeable with full documentation
Small sites, class rings, etc..
Access via dll and web service

Integrating UPS

HTTP Post
Submit and receive xml
Must carefully check for errors
Diagram shows client, server, xml request/response
Must include credentials "Access Request"
Includes UPS license number

Integrating DHL

Same idea as UPS but different format
A little trickier to insert xml
Shows Class Structure and enumerations

Documentation

Uses XML documentation for all the classes, methods and properties.

PurityRings.com

Prints actual labels, 2d labels for ups/dhl
This is the admin back end to process orders

Comments

Response.write error handling
Hard coded customer info for demo
Response has base64 encoded info for the shipping labels

Computer Museum / Gordon Bell

Dave Noderer — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:57:00 GMT

From Robert Scoble, http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/rss.xml, at Microsoft Channel 9, a two part tour of the computer history museum, http://www.computerhistory.org/, hosted by Gordon Bell.

A good history of the computer museum starting in Gordon's closet, through the DEC lobby in Marlboro into Boston then out to Silicon Valley.

At one point Gordon mentions Encore (it was actually the "Hydra" division in particular) and how the project was out of control. He drove to New Hampshire to buy a Macintosh and Project and spent the weekend entering into project which ended up as a wall sized pert chart (which I remember). Up to that point we had been using Xerox Star systems for documentation.

There are two parts:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=123333

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=123765