May 16, 2008 by eileenb
Wow!
I downloaded the Worldwide Telescope today and I’m totally transfixed. no wonder the press has been raving about it so much.
The mission of the WWT is twofold:
- To aggregate scientific data from major telescopes, observatories and institutions and make temporal and multi-spectral studies available through a single cohesive Internet–based portal.
- To re-awaken the interest for science in the younger generations through astronomy and new technologies through the virtual observatory of the WWT. This also provides a wonderful base for teaching astronomy, scientific discovery, and computational science.
When you install it, your computer turns into a virtual telescope so you can roam around the constellations. You can pan and zoom around the night sky - just like you were in space - try visiting the Orion constellation and having a browse around. Right click on something and find out the name of the star, its Right Ascension, RA - distance in degrees from the first point of Aries, Declination - DEC (Angle in degrees from the celestial equator), Altitude (apparent height) and Azimuth (bearing)
My favourite constellation (and the easiest to find in the UK) is the Plough (Ursa Major). When I first learned to identify each star in the constellation (I needed to learn them for my celestial navigation class when I was at sea). I learned that Mixar, or Mizar as it’s sometimes known, is actually a binary star, 2 stars that slowly rotate around each other like a set of dumbbells whirling around in space, bound together by the gravity that joins them (a bit like the pairing that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth). I used to be able to see these 2 stars, but with my failing aged eyes, it’s hard to see them - even with binoculars. But now, with the zoom ability in this amazing tool, Mizar and Alcor are there. whirling around each other - have a look at this.
It’s the 2nd star in from the handle of the plough if you want to go and have a look for yourself.
Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before.
What a great sentiment….
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May 15, 2008 by eileenb
My mother showed me something which has been driving me totally mad since yesterday.
(Click on the icon for the web page with the animated version)
It’s an illusion which apparently tests whether you’re using your right brain or your left brain. I’ve stared at this image of the dancing girl for far too long, and to me, she’s only going round in one direction.
So I asked James, who definitely uses a different side of his brain to me and he can only see her moving in one direction only too - the same way as me.
But both my Mum and my Dad, see her stop and change direction, Dad by breathing deeply, Mum by concentrating. Me? Nothing at all. She steadfastly goes in the same direction - round and round, round and round.
So please please let me know - can you see her moving anticlockwise at all? Can anyone see her moving in both directions. It’s driving me mad!
Or is this moving both directions something only the over 60’s can see?….
Posted in General musings | 1 Comment »
May 14, 2008 by eileenb
Oh heck. I need to phone my friend June after her PC became infested with worms and trojans the other week. McAfee have reported that trojans are hiding in MP3 files (there’s a really great and informative blog post on the site by the way)
Her reaction?
No - they wouldn’t download any Girls Aloud songs…
I also tried to explain that as she bought McAfee anti virus with the PC 4 years ago, you still had to pay about £30 each year to get the updated data files and patches. June was puzzled.
“But I don’t need to do that for XP, and I still get the patches from Microsoft” she said…
Yup - and she’ll still get online support for the product for 10 or more years after its release. Quite a bargain…
But I still feel a format C: coming on…
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May 13, 2008 by eileenb
I was interested to see this article the other day about a new technology we’ve announced to help people who can’t see too well and would prefer things to be read out using text to speech. This add in allows you to translate Open XML documents into DAISY XML (the standard for talking books). It creates a digital audio file which maps to a text file with the XML structure marked up. There’s information on the translator at the
openxml community site
Word 2007, 2003 and XP formats are supported. All you need to do is open the document, and select the Save as DAISY option which then converts the document into a format for Braille and text to speech synthesizers.
This is amazing stuff. Very empowering indeed. And all from Word…
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May 9, 2008 by eileenb
I was amused at Viral’s take on the fact that we’d hacked our own website the other day with the Live to Code ethic that developers seem to embrace so much. More so, as I recently met Josh at our Technical conference this year. Josh had admired my Women in Technology sticker, and gave me one of his Live to code, code to live stickers (like this one) in exchange for one of my Women in Technology stickers like the one on my laptop.
His mission (apart from coding of course) is to try to get more women into IT in the US as they can’t seem to attract enough female developers into his team.
Girls, you’d like Josh. He looks like someone who would be totally at home on a Harley, or building a custom bike, or tinkering around in his garage, or blogging, or writing code, or even out hiking with some large dogs. He’s a really nice guy too - even though he is obsessed with developing and coding (I wonder if he has a tattoo about it?)
But I reckon that instead of a hack, it was just a DNS mistake - and that’s where coders need the infrastructure guys to help out.
“Live for Infrastructure. Infrastructure for life”
It just doesn’t sound the same does it?…
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May 8, 2008 by eileenb
I’ve finally got round to having a look at this video about Operations Manager cross platform extensions. Wow. I wish i’d seen this before. Just look at how easy it is to manage and report the health of Oracle, MySQL, Solaris, Apache, Unix and Linux systems - all in one interface.
Operations Manager with Barry Shilmover
The back end of this uses system uses open source so it’s familiar to Linux and UNIX users. it allows Operations Manager to discover Unix and Linux environments and then uses WS manager to manage them in the windows GUI
You can see all the systems with the agent installed, Operations Manager will view and install the agent on all of these systems. you can then use health explorer to see the availability and health of the systems, configuration and performance of the systems. it all ties in to reporting so that Operations manager can report on all of the systems.
You can have a look at the servers and services - all in Operations Manager, identify problems and components that are giving issues - no matter which platform the server is running.
So powerful - so amazing. - especially if you’re trying to manage a heterogeneous environment. you can now manage these 2 environments - side by side.
Well worth 11 minutes of your time…
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May 7, 2008 by eileenb
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May 7, 2008 by eileenb
TechNet Webcast: Configuring DNS, Certificates, Ports, and Load Balancers for Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)
Tuesday, May 06, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Byron Spurlock, Consultant - Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374265&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: Compliance and Archiving in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200)
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Byron Spurlock, Consultant - Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032372164&Culture=en-US
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May 6, 2008 by eileenb
I didn’t get a chance to blog on Friday due to the words all IT professionals hate to hear from their friends:
“My computer is running slowly, could you come over and take a look at it please?”
My friend June is a nurse who uses her computer for emails, IM and medical research. Her 2 kids use it for all sorts of things, animation, movies, music, puppies and kids stuff. Well lately their PC had been running slower and slower and now annoying websites had started to pop up. So I agreed to have a look at it.
The first thing I notices was that Windows Defender had been disabled on their machine and IE Privacy tab had been set to accept all cookies (there were hundreds and hundreds of cookies on the machine). Every time I reset the settings and enabled Defender, the reboot would change everything back.
I tried all of the spyware killers and spyware destroyers I cold find, deleted lots of roadkill .DLL’s and spent far too long deleting keys from the registry - just to make sure. There were over 100 worms, bots, spies and other nasties in the machine - no wonder the damn thing wasn’t working too well. The malicious software removal tool certainly did it’s job well enough. But I’m still not sure…
And with everyone in the family having Administrator access, I knew I was on a hiding to nothing. Who knows what the hell other stuff could possibly be on there?
So now I need to spend several more hours round there sorting the PC out (totally formatting it) out so it can be trusted again. No more administrator access for them - and no more downloading of stuff just because it looks nice. But the main thing I need to do is to educate them all on the dangers of downloading bits of software whenever they’re asked to.
Just how I feel… 
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May 1, 2008 by eileenb
I get nervous enough when I’m on stage, demoing beta products - especially the first time I demo stuff live (remember all the problems I had when I demoed Exchange unified messaging to a live audience when there was lots of background noise). But sometimes I like to get scared for fun. Like roller coaster rides, horror movies and Stephen King novels.
But this is just scary. Really My legs were twitching and trembling the whole time I watched this video. The man is totally mad!
So I did a little bit of research on the Camino Del Rey. Thanks to Wikipedia and discovered that mad souls have been walking this highway for over 100 years now. Even though the government has closed the road 8 years ago, people still walk the walk. Aargh!
I think I’ll stick to demos - they seem rather safe after seeing this…
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