The control paradigm has been broken

The information age has brought many things to light, distance is no longer a factor when interfacing with connected entities.  We can control anything imaginable as far as a communication link can span.  Whether it is a Doctor performing remote surgery across the country or the Mars Rover collecting soil samples, we have proven that we as humans are capable of remote projection of our abilities. 

Remote Surgery, also known as Telesurgery uses a perfect combination of highly available communications and precise robotics to allow doctors to be hyper-available to conduct their specialty without either the patient or the doctor having to leave their local area.  This practice has the potential to rock the medical industry much like the music industry has been affected by the sudden shift of information and media sharing uncovered recently.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are now a core defense strategy because these weapons platforms allow for extremely flexible force projection.  UAVs provide a space-saving advantage because they do not require the life support, egress, and onboard instrument interfaces that conventional airframes need.  They just need the "ghost in the machine" to make critical decisions identifying whether or not a target can be engaged in combat. Other dangerous industries such as mining, chemical, manufacturing, and especially space exploration are benefiting from this concept.  One would say that we would'nt be making such leaps and bounds without robots, automation, and remote capabilities.

Burning Falcon

At about 11:00 tonight Nicholle and I finished piecing together our new patio.  I was engaging in a celebratory lighting of the new tiki torches. I took a step back and was in awe of the giant glow those kerosene torches were making.  I then realized the glow was not from my backyard, but from the intersection of woodmen and Meridian where a construction crew mistakenly ruptured a gas line.

I am a true gawker and I brought my camera with while I witnessed the glow of the gas line. You can see from the picture that the wires feeding the street lights were smoking and the lights were out. After an hour and a half of burning, the fire department and utility company has not been successful in putting this fire out.  You would think the fire department would have access to a gas shutoff valve or something. KKTV is reporting there are no injuries at this time.  I won't feel bad then about posting some awesome photos of fire!

sitemeter is causing problems

Something is funny here,  I pulled up my site with Internet Explorer and I got an error message saying "Internet Explorer cannot open the website http://www.dotnetr.com Operation Aborted"  and then the site goes blank.  Since I just released new code on my website to generate the xml necessary to populate the myspace pictures flash widget, I thought it was my fault.  I tinkered around with the code to no avail for about a half hour. 

...then a revelation happened - it even seems that my favorite productivity site lifehacker has been plagued with this problem too.  The only common link between my site and Lifehacker is that we both use Sitemeter as a traffic monitoring service.  Sitemeter is JavaScript code that tracks user visits and clickthrough events.   This is a major issue because this software is used by many sites because it's free. 

The solution to this problem is simple, either: 1) remove all instances of sitemeter from your website 2) use an internet browser other than Internet Explorer like firefox, safari, or opera.

This uncovers a good point.  You probably shouldn't rely on other people's services as a business model.  Right now as Lifehacker is down, they are probably losing a considerable amount of ad revenue just because they were too cheap to develop their own site statistics. 

Update:  it looks like Lifehacker and all gawker media sites realized that Sitemeter was bringing their site down.  Hopefully Site Meter will fix their bugs soon, otherwise, I might have to figure out a new solution for traffic monitoring. 

Syndicated random thought about camping

my daily visits

It's hard these days for me to be disconnected from the web.  These are the websites I visit daily and cannot live without.

Google - Being a programmer professional hack, I have to be as agile as possible.  Google is my other brain. enough said.
Woot - a deal a day at midnight (Eastern time) if you're lucky you'll get a bag of crap. 
Lifehacker - The ultra productivity blog that tells geeks how to do everything in this confusing world.
Digg - The "user" driven news site.  It is truly web 2.0.
Hack A Day - if MacGyver were a geek this would be his blog.   
Deals Plus - This is a user-driven deal site that has unbeatable deals - one of my money-traps!
I Can Has Cheezburger - cats and funny captions, good for a quick distraction while I'm working out subroutines.

of course a comprehensive list of my favorites can be viewed at my Google Notebook.
http://google.com/notebook/public/02140348234583657974/BDQOZSwoQo4nWgfEh
 

New portfolio entry

I have been working on a number of upcoming web projects when time allows.  One of those projects is the Booz Allen Idol.  This project allows employees in the Colorado Springs office to vote for their co-workers to sing in front of hundreds at the employee summer picnic.  It allows for simple registration and authentication in order to vote.  The top ten employees picked then have to sing a song picked by their highest bidder.  This adds a twist; imagine singing I Touch Myself by The Divinyls in front of all your co-workers and their families.  I think it takes a unique employee base to feel comfortable doing that.

Also, I have been spinning some hip hop thanks to Serato Scratch  Live and a pair of Technics SL1210 Mk5gs.  Check out my latest set called Hip Hop Hell on my media player in the left sidebar.  Today I'm working on a Progressive House track.  Maybe I'll stay with the theme and call it "House Purgatory." 

Avery is doing great, he has been growing at such a fast pace.  He is already in 9+ month old clothes and he is less than 2 months old.  Of course he is fed well and very healthy.  If you want access to his gallery and blog, please email me using the email link at the top of the left sidebar. 

no more artifacts

Today I fixed something that was bothering for quite some time.  The default thumbnail generation utility within asp.net has left many developers wanting more.  This utility produced image thumbnails that had obvious artifacts and quality degradation.  I used the quick solution to generate the thumbnail images until I get a couple hours of time where I could sit down and figure out how to manually generate an image.  Of course I could talk about image quality until my c code compiles, but words about imagery are empty without ... Yes! Imagery. 

Below is the thumbnail generated by the ASP.Net GetThumbnailImage method (1) side-by-side with the "new method" (2) notice the distinct lines in the snowcap and the clarity in the clouds in the second picture vs. the first.

(1)Low Quality  (2)High Quality

The only bad thing is image 2 uses a fairly complicated function and subroutine and image 1 takes only 1 line of code to generate:

thumbnailImage = originalImage.GetThumbnailImage(thumbWidth, thumbHeight, dummyCallBack, New IntPtr())

Of course this article would be pretty useless if I didn't show you how to do it.  Plus I'm sure I'd get threatening comments from my google clickthrough people telling me to quit my profession as a programmer.  Truth is that I used this article to guide me through the steps.  The only difference is that I use decision logic instead of relying on querystring to determine the scaled width or height of the image depending if the image is landscape or portrait oriented.

           If (originalImage.Height > originalImage.Width) Then 'portrait
                thumbHeight = 150
                intShrinkPercent = (thumbHeight / originalImage.Height) * 100
                thumbWidth = (intShrinkPercent / 100) * originalImage.Width

            ElseIf (originalImage.Height < originalImage.Width) Then 'landscape
                thumbHeight = 150
                intShrinkPercent = (thumbHeight / originalImage.Height) * 100
                thumbWidth = (intShrinkPercent / 100) * originalImage.Width

            ElseIf (originalImage.Height = originalImage.Width) Then 'square
                thumbHeight = 150
                intShrinkPercent = (thumbHeight / originalImage.Height) * 100
                thumbWidth = (intShrinkPercent / 100) * originalImage.Width
            End If

The other thing the code in the link above failed to do to my liking is it displays the image using the response object.  This means the user uploading would have to manually save and transfer the image file to the server.  I needed this to save the image automatically so I substituted the following code:

thumbnailImage.Save(Response.OutputStream, codecEncoder, encodeParams) 

for this

thumbnailImage.Save((Server.MapPath("./media/") + strThumbnailFileName), codecEncoder, encodeParams) 

Instead of Response.OutputStream I use a server path to save the thumbnail (make sure you give the aspnet user access to write to the image folder on your web server.)  One neat thing about this code is that it taught me how to use System.graphics to merge words into a .gif image.  (This is generated on error)  I'm thinking this is a good start on me making my own captcha control.

If you've stumbled upon this article and still need some help, shoot me an email by clicking the "email me" link at the top of the left sidebar or leave an article comment.  I can provide the code in it's entirety.