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Posted by on 26th March, 2008

Wear sunscreen….such good advice!

Wear sunscreen….such good advice!

Distracted from what I was doing, I stumbled upon this excellent and inspiring clip. Truly one clip we should all watch every single day, first thing in the morning… I mean that. We go about our daily lives not realizing how we are wasting our youth; that precious substance of which we have less of, every day that goes by…. that and other magnificent advice. From the Wikipedia article: “Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen Speech are the common names of an essay actually called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997. The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, credited to Baz Luhrmann.” This version with subititles in Spanish. Listen carefully and...

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Posted by on 18th March, 2008

Boston Dynamics Big Dog…

Boston Dynamics Big Dog…

You just have to wonder that with today’s technology and vast knowledge that we’d have robots in place everywhere, exactly as we were promised 30 years ago. Most attempts at designing and developing robots that emulate human or animal like movements have been, well, let’s say, not so human or animal like… Until I saw Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog: incredibly beautiful and creepy at the same time. The project is funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), you know the same folks that brought you the Internet… Make sure to check out 0:37…the immediate response is simply incredible and behaves so realistically that I think I even felt a bit sorry for the steel beast. Their website is not much to look at and painfully slow, but check out their other...

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Posted by on 5th March, 2008

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available….

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available….

Finally Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 has been released. This is a big release with lots of new features, as Scott Guthrie mentions: “Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser.” Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby)." Of course I will be posting some new experiments very soon. Get the download, documentation, SDK and tools via...

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Posted by on 27th February, 2008

Silverlight 1.0 Video Slidepuzzle

Silverlight 1.0 Video Slidepuzzle

I decided to take some time to learn Microsoft Silverlight. Since version 1.1 is still in Alpha and 2.0 is about to come out, I wanted to make sure I understood the technology, from the ground up and decided to stick with version 1.0. Version 1.0 works only with Javascript (JScript) while version 2.0 will work with any of the .NET languages. As usual, it started out with a small directionless project, just to try to get some experience under my belt; then I saw a cool video about a somewhat unrelated technology: Microsoft Surface. What a cool technology… they had a demo of a video playing that would divide itself in puzzle pieces. Ok, back to Silverlight, so I started reading about using a VideoBrush object, which allows you to “paint” a surface of a shape with raw video. That sounds exactly what I need to emulate the effect I saw in that Microsoft Surface video. So my small project morphed into a video slidepuzzle, just like we...

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Posted by on 14th February, 2008

Controlling spending…

Controlling spending…

I was thinking about ways of cutting unnecesary spending last night and thought that I tend to waste a few dollars on so many things that doesn’t seem so much at the time, but when it is all added up….well, it adds up. A cup of coffee in the morning, a snack bar in between, sometimes a pastry at midmorning, then lunch and maybe another coffee in the afternoon.  A couple of dollars at the time X a few times a day X twenty workdays = a lot of $$$. Think about it, even if it is just lunch at $8 per day for a to go salad or sandwhich is ($8 x 20days) $160 per month! A clever dude has some really good information on how to spend only $6.99 for an entire month on lunch; even if not followed exactly the same, his approach is very good and can be altered to fit your needs and definitively to keep your spending lower than it currently is. [button...

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Posted by on 10th February, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 hotfix

Visual Studio 2008 hotfix

Visual Studio 2008 had several issues in its first release of slowing down or even freezing temporarily when developing web applications, especially large ones. This hotfix addresses some of these issues. A readme file included in the download details every issue covered in this hotfix. For more details check out Scott Guthrie’s post on this release. [button link=”https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10826&wa=wsignin1.0″ color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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