Bing Maps steps up

While watching a recent Steve Ballmer’s presentation regarding “the cloud”, the new version of bing maps was shown (+- min 30). Interesting? well, SHURE! At last you can experience a serious integration of a set of tools that are coming together (maps, search, flickr, world wide telescope, photosynth, etc.). Just take a look at it and judge for yourself. DO explore:

• Map Apps ( will lead you on the available apps)
• Zoom in and go from map, to aerial generated photo, to aerial photo/bird’s eye, to street watch
• now map available photos to the street level with photosynth technology
• look up and turn off the sun, allowing you to explore the night sky at any time/date you wish

I just took a peek and was really impressed. Still a lot to cover .

Have fun!

Windows 7 Release Candidate

It is out! The release candidate for Windows7 operating System. I’ve been using the beta for some time now and I’m quite happy with the performance and funcionalities. Give it a try. You can get here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx.

Improved taskbar:

Jump Lists:

Desktop enhancements:

Improved device management

Homegroup

Get more details here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx.

Offtopic: Mind broadening presentations

I have recently been shown by a colleague, to a huge presentation application that publish TED contents to everyone. TED is a cross segment forum with ~20 min presentations on topics that go from robotics to how to survive to an atom bomb. This is a chance to listen to excellent presentation skills on some very interesting topics. Check it out at http://www.ted.com.

this.Dispose();

A couple of days ago a fellow Sharepointer entered the non existence phase. In his memory I leave a profound scream: ask for help if you need it; Always be there for those who do so!

RIP Miguel…

WorldWide Telescope

Being astronomy one of my hobbies, I was very excited to read that Microsoft was launching the Worldwide Telescope project. This will allow to travel the sky based on the images of the best/largest telescopes. I don’t know if you ever peeked through a telescope before, but anything beyond our solar system are simple black and white photos of small dots. If you want to see the pictures like the one bellow, normally you have to combine several photos of several minutes of exposure time to achieve this.

(in hublesite.org)

This means that when you peek, you won’t actually see what you can get with post production. Well, I’m drifting here…. sorry. Being outside in the cold nights (typically, the colder the better for observation) with my 7, 4 and 3 years old kids is also not viable. The WWT will be an interesting enough alternative.

There are also other softwares available that can give you night sky imagery, but from what I’ve read, this will use higher resolution images and definition.

Take a look at this presentation from TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/224

WWT will be available this Spring (so they say…).

UPDATE:

A better description on what to be expected: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/02/27/711588.aspx

Why the @£$% can’t a deployment go smoothly, just for once…?

Sorry about this, but I had to spill out my anger…

For the Nth time I was part of a deployment team. This time of a Moss solution; and for the same number o times, if was a living hell…

Does this happens only to me and the ones I work with? Is this some kind of bad carma that goes hoovering the poor IT guys & girls? I don’t think so. We must be doing something wrong.

There must be strict methodology to guide us in this process. The perfect solution is having development environment === qualification environment === production environment. This is not always possible, but provides the higher chances of success.

Virtualization is a big +. You can create production environment replica to both qualification and development. This is highly manageable and very dynamic, allowing easy entry of new members on the team with so little as “newsid” command. Or if you have syspreped the images, a small configuration step will solve this step. On the other hand, this usualy implies a lot of machines to maintain and therefore, a lot of time spent on managing the infrastructure. I actually worked in a development project which had about 30 machines (both physical and virtual) that implemented the infrastructure for the client network and the 7 development team elements. By the end of the project, 6 more were added when demo environments were built.

Well this is great, but it takes you a lot of time. Managing updates, syncronizing versions, solving connectivity problems.

So, its a trade. You must evaluate teh complexity of the environment, the length of the project, the complexity of the solution, etc, etc, etc.

If you read this, drop a line. Share your thoughts on this topic. Throw some like at these shades…

I’m blue

Radios.pt has launched

I couldn’t resist to post a message to wellcome a great project to life: ROLI  a huge radio broadcasting community with streamming.

This is the first of its kind portal for radio stations (all radios from a country anyway), running CMS & Microsoft platform solutions. I won’t get much into detail, before confirming with the owner/team how much I can reveal. Bear with me…

The project was headed by APR (Associação Portuguesa de Radiodifusão). This is a EU funded project that offers EVERY radio station of Portugal (300+) the chance of broadcasting through the net. That’s right. Every single one of them. This is of a huge importance for a small country like Portugal, that has a couple of million emigrants spread all around the world.

The project started some years back and I was part of it as techical manager and architect a couple of years ago. The project is now supported by Link Consulting.  

 Anyway, the portal is in Portuguese only and has launched last weekend. I couldn’t resist sharing this information and congratulating the past and present team for the achievement (some of them you probably know like Ricardo Magalhães).

WELL DONE GUYS & GIRLS!!!!