Okay, I think this is just cool.  A robot that sweats for testing clothing...

Swiss Sweating Robot

I just recently purchased the Canon HG20 HD camcorder.  It has a 60 Gb hard drive and records high-def 1080p video.  It also has a 12x optical zoom.  I'm very pleased with my purchase.  It is an excellent unit. 

I bought it to start recording videos for the Robot Geek projects.  However, it does produce mts or MPEG Transport Stream files.  I attempted to run those files through Adobe Premiere & Media Encoder and MS Expression Media Encoder.  None of those apps would recognize that format.  Then I found AVS Media.  They have a product called AVS Video Converter.  It immediately recognized the format and allowed me to convert to whatever format I wanted.  Sweet!!  And then I realized that they have a video editing app.  I tried it out and it is a full featured editing app.  It has over 200 transitions, video effects and text overlay.  It's simple to set in and out points.  I was able to be productive immediately with this.  And the price was fantastic.  It is currently $59 for the video converstion and video editing apps, plus a host of other apps that are included.  I highly recommend checking it out.

You may be one of the easy going people who doesn't mind the UAC being turned on in Vista and nagging you when you're trying to do most anything on your machine.  All the power to you and you must be a saint.  I, however, immediately turn off UAC because it annoys the hell out of me.  But now Windows 7 beta has the new feature for selecting the nag level of UAC.

After a few days of running Win 7, I've had UAC set to the lowest setting and only a couple of UAC messages have popped up.  I believe that I may be able to live with this setting.  I understand the idea behind UAC and there certainly is some usefulness for the feature.  So for now, I will try using Win 7 with UAC actually turned on and see how it works.  So far, so good.

I'll be speaking at the Madison .NET User Group meeting on Wednesday, January 21.  I'll be talking about virtualization.  You can read more about the presentation by going to:

Maximize your Development using Virtualization

I bought a Pleo a few months ago.  My kids are fascinated by it.  They enjoy petting and feeding it.  The Pleo is a cute little robot, sorry... I mean, artificial lifeform.  Don't expect it to play fetch and run around like a dog though.  The motors can only go so fast moving his limbs.  I've found that after prolonged movement, his battery gets hot.  Which is actually rather interesting because then it feels as though he has a body temperature.

My 1 year old daughter is particularly fascinated with it right now.  She cries if I have him sitting on a shelf because she wants to play with him.  She also cries if he is turned off and not amusing her.  My wife and I laugh watching her react to him.  I think she is going to have these childhood memories of playing with a dinosaur, which could be really interesting as she gets older.  If she becomes a paleontologist, we'll know why...  Of course, if she becomes a roboticist, then that'd be cool too...

The people at UGOBE are working on a PDK (Pleo Dev Kit).  They have been working on that for some time.  I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it cuz I'd like to see what I could do using .NET.  However they seem to be taking a long time getting the PDK out to the public.  Right now we can use their scripting interface to write stuff for Pleo.

Windows 7 beta does not immediately give the user multi-touch demos which is what I was hoping for.  So I loaded up Visual Studio 2008 and started looking for examples out there for multi-touch support.  A few links that I've found so far are below.  Some have source code and some of them also have hardware as well.

WPF Multi-Touch Framework

Sparse UI - Multi-Touch API

Cubit TouchKit - Okay this is just cool cuz they give you schematics and source code for your own hardware/software project

Johnny Chung - Wiimote tracking your fingers

Ken Moore Design - cool projects

I got Windows 7 beta and decided to try loading it onto a virtual machine.  I've been using VM Workstation which has been an excellent product for creating virtual machines for other operating systems.  However, when I tried installing Windows 7 beta x86 into a VM, the install locked up and I couldn't get it to continue.  Don't know what I'm doing wrong.  Now that my laptop is back from repair at HP, I decided to load Win 7 onto my HP TouchSmart panel.  Backed up the whole machine to my Win Home Server, wiped it clean and loaded Win 7 beta x64 directly onto the TouchSmart.  It worked like a charm.  No problems with the install.  After the install, Win 7 booted right up and downloaded updates.  I'm mostly interested in seeing what I can do with multi-touch support on the TouchSmart.  I've got Visual Studio 2008 loading right now.  I read online that it is possible to create multi-touch apps using .NET 3.5 sp1.  It isn't the full support that will be in WPF 4.0.  I will post my results as soon as I get something working.

I bought my first CNC machine, which stands for Computer Numeric Control, for those who only know about software.  I purchased a table-top version called the CNC Shark Pro from Rockler.  It has a USB interface to my computer where I can send G-code to it for milling and drilling.

G-code is a language used to position the tool and do the work of milling and drilling the material.  This particular CNC machine has a Bosch Colt VS Palm Router mouted on it which is used as the cutting tool.  The X and Y axis motors position the tool over the material and the Z axis motor moves the tool up and down into the material.

I will be using this CNC machine for cutting and drilling my robotic projects.

Angela Benkowski and Paul Hacker gave us a lap around Visual Studio 2010.  The main emphasis seems to be test driven development.  There will be more design tools for Silverlight baked into VS2010.  They have enhanced the dynamically generated architecture diagrams.  That looked pretty cool.  I'm gonna need a bigger monitor though.  All the namespaces, classes and methods take up the whole screen.  We will be able to generate a sequence diagram from code.  For those of us who don't like to write lots and lots of documentation, this will be a handy feature for me to generate the documentation.

In addition, there will be testing of user interfaces called CodedUI Test.  It has a record feature that allows you to set up your UI tests and record the user actions.  Once you're finished recording a set of user actions, you will be able to generate code.  Once the code is generated, then you can go back and modify and/or add assert statements.

They will be introducting Dotfuscator Software Services.  Big brother is watching.  They are adding tracking features and allows developers to attempt to tamper proof their applications.  You will be able to instrument your applications to send data about how users are using your app.  The problem I have is privacy issues.

Dan Rigsby talked about Oslo.  Oslo is a way to write languages.  It allows DSLs to be created and they can be used to generate code and/or SQL.  I like Dan's speaking ability.  He gets excited and enthusiastic about his topics.  He had demo problems.  His VPC was really, really slow.  It's not completely his fault but he did say the usual excuse, "It worked for me last night..."  I definitely would go see Dan present again.  I believe that he will figure out the demo glitches and will make it only better.

Oslo is beyond bleeding edge technology.  It's more like hemoraging edge.  There are some interesting concepts that Microsoft is toying with.  I always take these ideas with a grain of salt.  I look at it as Microsoft presents a concept and see if it sticks in the dev community.