About a week ago I read on Channel 10 that Live Mesh was available to everyone on the U.S. Sarah Perez even gave me a tip: I could try it too! I just had to change my Windows Regional Settings, to tell Live Mesh servers that I was from the U.S. Shame on me, lying in order to access Live Mesh.
I wrote about Live Mesh some time ago. Now that I am using it I can say that is just as I was expecting. You can register your devices (just Windows-based computers, for now) in Live Mesh in order to sync files between devices and remotely control devices. The screenshot bellow shows the devices list page. It includes your registered devices, a special device called “Live Desktop” and an Add Device button.
That “special device” Live Desktop to which you can connect is a simple interface where you can access your shared folders, download stored files, create folders, upload files, etc. AJAX allows a kind of user experience that resembles to a real Windows desktop, so the name “Live Desktop” is appropriate. Since you can share files/folders with other people, in order to keep track on your Mesh you have access to a “News” panel where you can stay up to date with changes that have been made.
The client software that you download from Live Mesh and install in your computers has an interface that is identical to the panel that is available on Live Desktop. This application notifies you when any change happens, and takes charge of all the syncing-related tasks. Bellow you can see a “Programs” folder on my desktop. Folders that you have in Live Mesh are fully integrated with Windows Explorer, so you can browse them as any regular folder. You can even share a regular folder in Live Mesh just by right-clicking it and choose the context-menu option “Add folder to your Live Mesh…”.
I must confess that I haven’t used the folder sync functionalities. I just tried one time after I installed Live Mesh, but one great functionality that I have been using is Remote Desktop. Using Internet Explorer you can remotely control any of your Windows devices from anywhere in the world where you have an internet connections, without any particular software, just an ActiveX control that acts as an Internet Explorer plugin.
Remote Desktop works pretty well. I can even browse in the web, check e-mail, install software, etc, in the remote device using this functionality. You can only connect to a device that isn’t currently in use and has the Live Mesh application installed, so if you are like me, and what to control your home computer from work, don’t forget to leave if locked or logged off. I have been having some issues with connectivity. When I loose my connection to the web, I get a retry connection button from Live Mesh, but it almost never works… Another issue is related with copy/paste files between your local machine and your remote device. It is way too slow… And copying text from the local clipboard to the device doesn’t always work. Well… It is just a Tech Preview, not a final version.
The mobile version of Live Mesh has became available this week, it allows you to check the news on your Mesh and download files. It is available at the address https://m.mesh.com. A Mac version of Live Mesh is on development.
So far Live Mesh is a mashup and rebranding of several “old” Microsoft products like Folder Share for file sync, the Remote Desktop connections via web browser of Windows Server 2003, and since we have 5Gb of storage that can be used not only for sync but also for sharing with other people, has a little bit of Windows Live SkyDrive. But the kind of integration that Live Mesh brings is pretty great as an user experience improvement.
Weave is an experimental prototype from Mozilla Labs that integrates online services with Firefox.
“As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.”
Seems nice. But I’m pretty sure that I would not store all my passwords on the cloud in a service like this. But to store bookmarks, history, cookies (excluding the authentication ones) and tabs is pretty useful. I tried this service today, and it was toooo slow. I’ll way for a more efficient version of this experimental software.
I would prefer a browser independent solution, but that is too much to ask. Nevertheless it may be nice in the future. Meanwhile I’ll keep using Windows Live Favorites. If I used Internet Explorer as my main browser, it would be perfect, but it will have to do.
A equipa PizzaShoot continua o intrincado processo de desenvolvimento de um jogo de elevado nível!
Temos disponível mais um vídeo. Desta vez demonstramos com é possível ligar acessórios wireless da Xbox 360 ao PC através do Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows. Demonstramos também como utilizar o Input Reporter (disponível no XNA Creators Club) para testar o input não só do gamepad wireless, como também da guitarra que acompanha o Guitar Hero 3! Isto porque a guitarra não passa de um comando com uma disposição diferente dos botões (e com um acelerómetro mapeado nos triggers do comando normal).
Os developers de jogos em XNA ficam então com um leque de possibilidades ainda mais abrangente.
Although the video is in Portuguese, I want to leave the main message to all the potential worldwide readers of this blog. If you connect your Xbox 360 guitar to your PC (a wireless or wired guitar) you can use it as a X-Box 360 gamepad. Use Input Reporter to find out the correspondence between each device buttons. Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows it the accessory that you need to connect Xbox 360 wireless accessories to your PC.
I’ve been working in college assignment which goal is to integrate several information systems. One of those is a website where we can see the flight schedules from/to Portuguese airports.
The website URL is http://www.innovata-llc.com/ana/default.asp. Me and a colleague of mine had to write a web service that was used by BizTalk as a wrapper of this web site’s form. It was supposed to send an HTTP request passing some request parameters using POST parameters, and to parse the HTML response in order to extract the flight list for a given destination city and departure date.
First of all lets see the code we used to get the response. Uri address = newUri(requestURL); HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(address) as HttpWebRequest;
request.Method = “POST”;
request.ContentType = “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”; StringBuilder data = new StringBuilder();
data.Append(“DPT_Date=” + “17-05-2008″);
data.Append(“&RET_Date=” + “20-05-2008″);
data.Append(“&dpt_station=” + “LIS”);
data.Append(“&arv_station=” + “LHR”);
data.Append(“&non_stops=” + “on”); // Create a byte array of the data we want to send byte[] byteData = UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data.ToString()); // Set the content length in the request headers
request.ContentLength = byteData.Length; // Write data using (Stream postStream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
postStream.Write(byteData, 0, byteData.Length);
} // Get response String htmlResponse; using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
{ // Get the response stream StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
// Get the response string
htmlResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();
}
After getting the response content is time to use a nice HTML parser helper library. It is called HTML Agility Pack and it is open-source. You can find it at Codeplex.com/htmlagilitypack.
Now it is time to create an HtmlDocument (a class which ships with HTML Agility Pack) and load the response into this new instance. //Load HTML as XHTML HtmlDocument htmlDoc = new HtmlDocument();
htmlDoc.LoadHtml(htmlResponse);
After looking to the HTML source code, we got the right Xpath expressions to extract the flight list. //Get flight lines HtmlNodeCollection flights = htmlDoc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes( “//body/div/table[3]/tr[position()>=4 and position()<last()-1]“); foreach (HtmlNode flight in flights)
{
//Get attributes string departureTime = flight.ChildNodes[1].FirstChild.InnerText; string arrivalTime = flight.ChildNodes[3].FirstChild.InnerText;
//Do some stuff …
}
That’s almost it. The next step was adding the extracted information into some data structures, and returning that data. But these details are out of this post scope.
Posted on 6:47pm 4/30/2008 by Bruno Silva in Utilities, Web
Today, while reading an entry on Alcides’ blog I found out about Slide Share. It allows you to upload your slide show presentations and then get them embed in your website or blog in a flash movie.
I tried it out and it is pretty nice and useful, nevertheless there are at least 2 points which need some improvement. It does not support the pptx file extension yet, and when it comes to presentations that use animations it doesn’t work that well. This service seems that just takes a picture of each slide and turn that set of pictures into a movie with previous/next buttons. So, if you intend to use this service to share your slides, don’t forget to cut off the animations, or you won’t be pleased with the result.
This service usage is pretty similar to YouTube. You upload your file and wait until the processing is done on the servers. Than you can share the presentation in social networks and other websites. It allows you to attach the original presentation file for download, if you want so.
Some time ago a friend told me about QR-Codes. Before that I had already seen some of them in instant messaging avatars, without knowing the meaning of those images. QR-Codes look like this:
This is a kind of barcode like the ones that you see in the super market, but that can store a lot more information. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry about QR-Code.
An interesting thing about this format, is that there is a lot of software available for mobile phones and even windows mobile, that allows you to read these barcodes using your mobile phone’s camera. It is a nice way of sharing contacts (phone number, e-mail, URL’s) or a simple message (how about wearing a t-shirts, allowing your geek friends to read the message? )
A nice software for Windows Mobile is i-nigma barcode reader. Just point your camera at a QR barcode, and read the message!
A nice usage of this technology is present in the Windows Mobile free software directory freewarepocketpc.net. You can browse for software in your computer, and when you want to install an application in your device, instead of connecting it to the computer to transfer the cab file, or copying the download link by hand, just point your camera at the QR-Code in the download page, and download the software using the link encoded in the barcode image, reading it with i-nigma, or other similar software.
Believe me, it works pretty well. I wasn’t convinced until I tried it by myself.
Thanks for the introdution to QR-Codes, Nelson and thanks for showing me i-nigma, André!
