Ballot Debris

Digg Girl

Chad Albrecht — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:03:00 GMT

Just saw this on foo's site. Kina Grannis recorded a song with two of her friends about Digg.com, this girl is AWESOME!

Amazon.com Kindle

Chad Albrecht — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:53:00 GMT

I've heard that this little e-paper reader will change the world...it's pretty cool...but we'll see. They have a ton of pretty innovative ideas. No contract EVDO wireless, online doc conversion via email, cheap books and magazines, etc. For $399 it's definitely worth a look.

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Visual Studio 2008 Released!

Chad Albrecht — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:09:00 GMT

Yes it’s true! Microsoft released VS2008 today. Scott informs me that Microsoft will be doing a launch party for the .NET User Group on Dec. 11th. Sign up here.

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VS2008 & .NET 3.5

Chad Albrecht — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 07:18:00 GMT

I'm very excited to hear that VS2008 will be released at the end of this month sometime! Brad Abrams posted a great diagram of whats included in .NET 3.5.

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Google's .NET Client

Chad Albrecht — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:52:00 GMT

I just discovered that Google has a fairly impressive .NET client library to interface with their services. Looks like you can talk to Blogger, Calendar, Speadsheet, Code Search, Picasa and YouTube just to name a few. I'd love to be able to talk to Analytics, but I'm not sure if I can.

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Multi-touch without and iPhone

Chad Albrecht — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 08:48:00 GMT

Channel 9 has a great behind-the-scenes look at some of the people and hardware involved with MS multi-touch. I can't help thinking of Tom Cruise in Minority Report when I watch stuff like this:

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Comment Spam

Chad Albrecht — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:22:00 GMT

Got more comment spam last night! Even with Captcha turned on! (Thanks casey) Time to try something a little different.

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C4

Chad Albrecht — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:35:00 GMT

That would be Charlie Calvert's Community Convergence. A great list of links related to C#, LINQ, F#, PFX, etc.

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Captcha and 0.95

Chad Albrecht — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 14:33:00 GMT

I've been running .TEXT 0.94 for a couple years now. The amount of comment spam lately has forced me to update to 0.95 and implement Dave Burke's version of Captcha. I'm hoping this cuts down on the amount of spam I'm seeing...fingers crossed!

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Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework (PFX)

Chad Albrecht — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:55:00 GMT

Channel 9 has an interesting video that gives an overview of the .NET PFX framework. PFX is a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, scheduling, and coordination on parallel hardware. Cool stuff!

Cheney's Law

Chad Albrecht — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:26:00 GMT

PBS aired a new Frontline tonight that highlights our current administration's fight to reestablish the power of the presidency. I found some of the actions by David Addington, Cheney's current Chief of Staff, and John Yoo, former Assistant Attorney General, to be especially disturbing.

While I have supported a good portion of this administration's policies, at what point do laws become meaningless? According to The Boston Globe, President Bush has claimed the right to ignore more than 750 laws enacted since he became president. I'm not sure I like where this is going.

Typhoon 3D

Chad Albrecht — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:24:00 GMT

After a 15 year sabbatical from RC planes, cars and helicopters, I broke down and bought an aerobatic RC plane. I told myself, It will be great for the kids! Did I honestly believe that? While I think at some point I'll build a trainer transmitter setup, right now, this is my toy.

Mostly by accident, I ended up with the Typhoon 3D by Parkzone. This is due to my need to buy whatever my local hobby shop had in stock. While definitely not a trainer, this plane is good for me for a few reasons:

Low cost, $180 for everything I need to fly.
Low cost replacement parts, because I'm going to crash a lot.
Easy to repair foam parts, because I'm going to crash a lot.
Long battery life 10-12 minutes, if I don't crash it first.
Full 4 channel radio. This means once I relearn how to fly, I can fly just about anything.
Trainer port on the transmitter so I can teach my kids to fly.
Trainer port interfaces with a simple cable to the PC for flight sim.

With those points in mind, let’s just say the first 4 points were very applicable to my initial flights. The following video is not me, but the plane and the results are the same.

Wanting to save some money, I though it would be a good idea to fly my plane in a simulator. A friend at work had introduced me to Flying-Model-Simulator (FMS) a while back and now was a good time to really use it.

First order of business was to find, or build, a FMS model of the Typhoon 3D. I quick Google search yielded exactly what I was looking for. I followed the FMS instructions for adding a model (drop files into the model directory) and I was in business!

Flying the Typhoon in FMS using the keyboard for a few minutes wasn’t doing it for me. I realized I needed to be able to use my transmitter as an input to FMS. Let me assure you that it was a bit challenging discovering how to do this. Let me just fill you in on the end result.

Go to the SmartPropoPlus Homepage and click on Cables. Scroll down to Mono Jack and click JR. This is the cable you need, a simple 3.5mm male to male mono cable. Once you have this in hand, download and install SmartPropoPlus for FMS as directed on the site. Connect your transmitter to the PC using the cable above. Finally, click on Step-by-Step and follow the directions for SmartPropoPlus for FMS. In the "Connecting your R/C Transmitter" step setup SmartPropoPlus set the Modulation as follows in the SmartPropoPlus Console:

Your audio source will depend on where you have the cable plugged in on your PC. I have mine plugged into my microphone port and it works great! Make sure to run the various Calibration steps outlined in the Step-by-Step on the SmartPropoPlus homepage. Good Luck!

Model V8

Chad Albrecht — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 09:24:00 GMT

I have wanted to build a scale model V8 since the 8th grade! Seeing this video reminded me how cool it is. I'm pretty sure this is from the guys at Weber Precison.

Augmented Reality

Chad Albrecht — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:29:00 GMT

My friend Casey just put up an article on augmented reality which is unbelievably cool! For those of you playing Halo 3, your jaws may drop.

Facist America

Chad Albrecht — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 12:30:00 GMT

I've been VERY busy with work the last year and as such haven't blogged much. I felt that anyone still reading this blog should have a look at Naomi Wolf's article. While I'm not sure if I entirely agree with Naomi's article, it's still worth the read.

Barenaked Ladies

Chad Albrecht — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:47:00 GMT

If you ever get a chance to see these guys in concert, DO IT! The put on a great show!

We saw them in Madison on the 18th and had a blast!

What NOT to put on your license plate

Chad Albrecht — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:42:00 GMT

I saw this plate the other day...what can I say.

I'm a PC, and I'm a Mac.

Chad Albrecht — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 11:33:00 GMT

I think those Apple comercials are pretty lame. But that's always been Apple's approach to marketing, rip on the market leader. This spoof on those commercials is really funny!

Introduction to Grid Computing Presentation

Chad Albrecht — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:12:00 GMT

I presented last night at the Wisconsin .NET Users Group on an "Introduction to Grid Computing." Overall it went well but Alchemi, the open source grid framework I was using, crashed during the demos. :( I had the audience participate in the grid and we had a 25GHz grid with about 16 nodes. It would appear from examining the log file this morning and doing some reading, that my use of the Alchemi Console is what caused the crash. It would have been cool to see some of the demos run on a 25GHz grid...oh well maybe next time!
For those of you that are interested, the PDF of my presentation is here. The grid demos are included in the Alchemi download and the ExcelGrid Demo is here. If you plan to use the ExcelGrid demo, you should note that I could not get the calc.exe to work correctly and wrote my own. If you are interested in this, send me an email.

Dynamic DNS client

Chad Albrecht — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 17:05:00 GMT

For those of you who use a dynamic DNS service (DynDNS, no-ip, etc.), I wrote a C# based updater client. The project contains a class library, console app and service. It is designed to be extended to other mechanisms for fetching the IP and reporting it to the DNS server. Right now it uses the checkip service of dynDNS and updates RegisterFly.com. Full VS2005 project and source code available here.