Just ONE project

For the first time in many years I have just one project that I must work on.

My only assignement, excepting the bird detection software from work (just ignore it :D ), is the bachelor thesis. I have two more weeks to finish the project and the documentation.

Until now I always had two, three or even four projects to finish (ex: Imagine Cup + 2-3 school project, blog article(s) + ASP.NET project + project management assignment, etc.). Now there is just *ONE* (ONE!!) and I really enjoy writing about expert systems (Rete Algorithm) and applications running on Windows Azure. Oh, by the way my thesis is called “Expert Systems – Rete Algorithm” and is about the Rete forward chaining algorithm and it’s implementation as a scalable service on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

I think will publish the final documentation (written in Romanian) here in order to help others understand Rete Algorithm and Software as a Service. By the way, do you know what an expert system is? :)

Let’s assume that we have three rules:

IF is cloudy THEN it will rain
IF is sunny THEN it will not rain
IF it will rain THEN I need an umbrella

These three rules are called the Knowledge Base (KB) and are stored in the system. If I say “I cloudy today” the system will use the rules and infere that I need an umbrella. So an expert system is capable of taking decision based on some rules and some facts. However, based on the implementation, it can be a naive form of artificial intelligence because it cannot distinct between correct and incorrect rules, is highly dependent on the correctness of the knowledge base and is acting on the principle of “garbage in, garbage out”.

So an expert system has a knowledge base and given a set of facts can infere other facts (can take decisions). Will write more about this in the documentation.

Do you think expert system will be used in the future or the future belong to something else?

PS: Oh f***, I have to write part three from “Software + Services: A Modern Approach” article.

Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK is Available

The Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit adds documentation, sample code, header and library files, emulator images and tools to Visual Studio that let you build applications for Windows Mobile 6.5.

A new set of APIs is being introduced that will enable application developers to take advantage of the new Windows Mobile 6.5 touch gesture framework. The gesture APIs allow an application to handle touch gesture input and provide a visually consistent experience with the rest of the device UI. Note that the gesture APIs are only available on the Windows Mobile Classic and Professional SKUs.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit comes with the following Emulator Images:

Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Square Emulator
Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional QVGA Emulator
Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional WQVGA Emulator
Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional VGA Emulator
Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional WVGA Emulator
Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard Square Emulator
Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard QVGA Emulator

In order to install the SDK and integrate it with Visual Studio you must also install the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK. Make sure you install this first. I had problems with the 6.5 SDK because I forgot to install 6.0 SDK. If you somehow install 6.5 without 6.0 you must uninstall the first one in order to reinstall it…

The Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Kit can be downloaded from this link.

Windows Mobile 6.5 on Toshiba G900

Before writing anything else I must warn all readers that changing the operating systems on your mobile will void the warranty. If the upgrade process fails the phone might be damaged and no service will fix that for free. Do it on your own risk and make sure the following list is satisfied:

Ask people about the ROM you want to install. Make sure it did not brake any phone.
The phone’s battery must be at least 50% charged (better 100%)
Make sure you have and UPS. Or a laptop with good battery because if you cancel the process after it started the results might be unexpected.
Make sure the USB cable is firmly connect and is not broken!

I cannot be made responsible for any damages caused directly or indirectly by this article.

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Microsoft unveils new controller

Microsoft has unveiled its new control system for the Xbox 360 console, at E3 in Los Angeles.

Project Natal is a fully hands-free control system that will use face recognition and motion sensors to allow users to play games. Film director Steven Spielberg, attending the launch, said it was “a window into what the future holds”.

Basically it allows you to interact with the virtual world without using any controller at all. There is probably one or more webcams that capture movement and other sensors for voice and other forms of interaction. This is just a prototype and I don’t know if it will be possible to interact freely with the system or just under some constrains (light, body position, movement speed, correct language, etc); remains to be seen but it is fascinating.

It is so hard to describe it in words. You must see what it can do to convince yourself that this might be a revolution:

The previous video might not have convinced you but the following will raise the hair on your head:

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy One Year!

oneyearcake Dear Visitor,

Today this blog makes one year since it is hosted on LunarPages’ servers.

My target was to post this message as the post with number one hundred but I preferred to be 96 instead of writing four more dummy and maybe stupid posts. I hope that at least a part of the posts wrote here were useful and I would like to get more feedback in order to improve what I write.

It was an year full of surprises and discoveries. I found out what Twitter, SEO, Wordpress, PHP, Google Analytics, (etc) are, I met a lot of people through this blog, I won something and I had fun writing all this.

As a present, the blog got the picture of the cake (yeah, just the picture) on the right and a new header. Do you like them?

The most read content of this blog in one year (Top 5 Posts and Pages):

Ok… So this been said, let the party start! [Where are the presents?] Have a drink from the right side (sidebar)

Microsoft Bing (Bang?)

Because Live Search didn’t had the expected impact, Microsoft decided to create a new (revolutionary?) search engine. It is called Microsoft Bing and is said that “is more than a search engine, it is a decision engine”.

One thing is clear, though: a search engine that is only ‘good enough’ will not be enough to gain back any market share from Google, which now virtually controls the search engine market. Remains to be seen how can be used in practice. Until a demo will be available we can only watch a movie with Bing – seems pretty cool.

Watch the movie in high quality: click the “HQ” button in the right-bottom corner.

Bing is available through bing.com but for the moment it sends you to a site where you can discover what Bing is (you can watch the movie above and read some stories about the decision engine).

Software That You Should Install

Here is a list of what I recently installed or I plan to install. It is a list of software (updates) that you might consider useful:

Windows Vista/2008 Service Pack 2

It was released a few hours ago for general audience and it brings some important fixes. I think is a must-have. It is a must have and now can be downloaded through Windows Update.

I have just installed it through Windows Update. It took about 30 minutes to complete (download + install).

Visual Studio 2010 Beta

The lastest version of the well known IDE brings a lot of new features: editor completely written in WPF, a more eye candy user interface, .NET Framework 4 (dynamic types for C#, named parameters, implicit values, etc.). It is available for free and you can download either Professional or the Team Suite edition (I recommend the last one).

Download link.

Office Mobile 6.1 Upgrade

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Software + Services. A Modern Approach. Part 2

Part 2 – The idea

< Part 1 (Intro)

Contents:

A little more Live Mesh (CTP)
The Actors
The Modern Approach

1. A little more Live Mesh (CTP)

Today, online and offline tend to be two different approaches for building software. Most software companies offer either online or offline versions of their software.

If they somehow offer both then mostly sure one is a limited (reduced functionality) version of the other. Moreover companies tend to create a gap between the time when the offline and the online version gets updated. You always hear thing like “the online version does not yet support feature X that is available in the desktop version. Will be available soon”. The bad thing is the soon might mean a couple of months.

Creating software that works the same way both online and offline is not a new idea but until not it would require a lot of overhead. There was the need to simulate either the offline environment online or the reverse.

Now, with Live Mesh, the online environment is simulated on the local machine with no overhead for the developer. The guys from Microsoft resolved this problem and they’ve simplified our lives.

There are some aspects that need to be clarified as pointed in Part 1 about online services and applications:

The user experience: this problems was somehow resolved by enabling applications to be based on Silverlight. This technology enables web applications to deliver an improved experience compared to the classical web apps. It is client-side technology.
The need of permanent connectivity: just like smart clients, Mesh Enabled Applications can run with no network connectivity, persist offline what needs to be processed online and continue the process when connectivity is available. In other words what can be done offline is done anytime and if Internet access is required the task is queued.

2. The Actors

Lets consider a company named InvoiceGuys which offers a service called InvoiceService that exposes functionality for processing invoices. Anyone can subscribe the this service – for the sake of simplicity we’ll just ignore authorization and authentication; just don’t do this in real life!

Read the rest of this entry »

Subject: Problems with my new computer

Dear Mr. Bill Gates,

We have bought a computer for our home and we have found some problems, which I want to bring to your notice.

1. There is a button ’start’ but there is no ’stop’ button. We request you to check this.
2. One doubt is whether any ‘re-scooter’ is available in system? I find only ‘re-cycle’, but I own a scooter at my home.
3. There is ‘Find’ button but it is not working properly. My wife lost the door key and we tried a lot trace the key with this ‘find’ button, but was unable to trace. Please rectify this problem.
4. My child learnt ‘Microsoft word’ now he wants to learn ‘Mi crosoft sentence’, so when you will provide that?
5. I bought computer, CPU, mouse and keyboard, but there is only one icon which shows ‘My Computer’: when you will povide the remaining items? Read the rest of this entry »

Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta Review

As we emerge more and more is a Software + Services world, Panda took advantage of this new wave and released the World’s first cloud antivirus solution.

The protection model based on a thin-client agent and server architecture which services malware protection as opposed to locally installed products. By combining local detection technologies with cloud-scanning capabilities and applying non-intrusive interception techniques on the client architecture, Panda Cloud Antivirus provides some of the best protection with a lightweight antivirus thin-client agent that barely consumes any PC resources.

Of course this S+S approach has advantages and drawbacks.

Advantages:

Always using the latest version of software and protection
Minimum impact on local resources
Detection of threats in less than 6 minutes (this is what Panda announced on the official blog)

Drawbacks:

Need of permanent Internet connection
Without Internet connection the protection is reduced

Panda Cloud Antivirus takes advantage of the cloud world and combines the information from all users in order to detect and stop malware. Using the so called Panda Collective Intelligence, a cloud-based test lab for malicious software, samples are collected, analyzed, categorized and, if needed, disinfection routines are created. Therefore the community becomes the lab. In this way there is no need for software updates, there is no virus definition database on the client computer and everyone has access to the latest protection.

Compared to other antivirus solutions, Panda categorizes local files from “real security risk” to “minimum security risk” and by this criteria the scanning engine prioritizes it’s tasks. There are three types of automatic scanning (as mentioned on the official blog):

On-Access Scan. This is the maximum priority resident scan that is applied only to objects which are truly a security risk in a specific point in time: files which are being executed or used. The file is intercepted, prevented from running and disinfected if found to be malicious.
Prefetch Scan. There are other elements such as files downloaded from the Internet which, while not being executed at a specific point in time, have a much higher risk and probability of being executed at any time. These files should be watched more closely than files which have barely any activity, as we can expect them to be executed, unpacked, copied or moved shortly. A Prefetch Scan basically launches an asynchronous local & cloud query on the file to scan it “as soon as possible” without impacting performance. Of course if any of these files is called to be executed, the file will be intercepted and an on-access scan will be applied to it.
Background Scan. Lastly a normal PC has hundreds of thousands of files in its hard drive. Most of these files are not executing normally and simply just “sit there” until either the use double-clicks on them or they are called upon by another process. These are considered the least dangerous files from a security perspective. Panda Cloud Antivirus will continuously run Background Scans on these in an asynchronous manner while the PC is idle, without impacting performance at all. Of course if any of these files is called to be executed, the file will be intercepted and an on-access scan will be applied to it.

In my opinion Read the rest of this entry »

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Just ONE project

Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK is Available

Windows Mobile 6.5 on Toshiba G900

Microsoft unveils new controller

Happy One Year!

Microsoft Bing (Bang?)

Software That You Should Install

Windows Vista/2008 Service Pack 2

Visual Studio 2010 Beta

Office Mobile 6.1 Upgrade

Software + Services. A Modern Approach. Part 2

Part 2 – The idea

1. A little more Live Mesh (CTP)

2. The Actors

Subject: Problems with my new computer

Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta Review