At home I have a multitude of sensors and devices - ~80 or so which are a combination of water sensors, motion sensors, door sensors, humidity, temperature, etc. A good bunch of these are controlled and integrated with Smartthings, and some I can interact with other apps (e.g. Amazon Echo or Philips Hue etc.). Most are Z-Wave based and some are WiFi. I wanted to know if there are any z-wave visualisers? Essentially software that uses a USB z-wave network device as a node and then can plot what the mesh looks like. Would be awesome to be able to debug the packet hops from the controller to the device. ...

Woah! Almost 7 GB of system error mem dumps! Seriously? I understand the value they provide but why do I need to manually go and clean them up. And 7 GB????? Does anyone even read them?

Just downloaded and installed and posting this via Open Live Writer . Remember the lovely (but dead) Windows Live Writer from Microsoft? Well this is a forked version of that which is open source, based on MIT license. The editor is offline and is very similar to word and can support a number of blogging platforms – including the common ones as you would expect. You can muck around the code (zip) or check it out on GIT . It is still work in progress of course (e.g. Plugin’s are not implemented yet). Irrespective, hugely grateful to Scott (Hanselman) to get this going.

I still stand by the rules of threading , but saw this on twitter and thought it was great. How a litter of puppies can explain the rules of thread? Awesome. 😄

Got this tip via Jay Doscher at work. Right-click on the desktop Select New ==> Folder. Rename the new folder to this: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} You should now have an icon labeled GodMode and the icon changes too. And as you can see there are many things in there: PS - this also works in Win 7 and 8.

It has been a while since I blogged, and is something I want to try and get slowly back into. I did find this site which has cool visualization tools if that is something you are interested in. As an example, here is what a interactive bubble chart looks like for the blog: Build bubbles for your page Dashboards

The legacy all parents should give to their children is an insurance policy in happiness; but the premiums must be paid today during their upbringing.

You think Life is the mystery; Life is but the rapture of flight - Allama Iqbal

I’m exhausted. I spent all day saying “no” to my children and “yes” to my wife." ( source twitter )

How inspirational is this! I get goose bumps just seeing it. Awesome. If you put your mind to it, anything is possible.

I am on the latest version of both WordPress and Firefox as of this writing - namely v4.1 and v34.0.5 respectively and running on a TechPreview of Windows 10 (Build 9879 to be precise). My main browser is Firefox, and whilst I also have Chrome and of course IE - I use them only on occasions of in some cases when I have to use them for one reason or another. ...

Perhaps I am pushing the boundary here, perhaps not but I am having lots of issues with Visual Studio 2014 CTP 4 (specifically Version 14.0.22129.01.DP) and Windows 10 Preview Build 9860. There have been a lot of errors, and finally, it has gotten to the point where even the basic thing like creating a new Console Project results in the following error. I did do a in-place upgrade of Windows from the previous build, but everything else seems to be working out OK - except just can’t write any code. 8-O ...

kaleidoscopic! not those here-and-now colours but in memory cloudy sky is filled full of black twiggy branches a large crow shoots past picket fence and trees standing tall like sentinels like sad sentinels comes-on quietly so benign the sensation so bloody empty! this revelation times at last you think you know shrug! alas you don’t fleeting memory self-flagellation head-shake another one lost again and again scene full of twiggy branches black crow descending ...

Blessing of Health Wearables

Continuing the Interesting Find series . Here are the things I was intrigued by: “ Honey Encryption ” - A new approach to encryption beats attackers by presenting them with fake data. Securing the Smart Home, from Toasters to Toilets - It is afterall the era of BigData and Internet of Things (IoT). Bizarre attack infects Linksys routers with self-replicating malware. Bing Code Search for C# - right from within Visual Studio - a boon for the lazy developers (yay!). Better beef up your Legal teams as well - how will one control IP violations at the code level - not quite sure. Visualisation of data is not only about ‘prettying up’ your BI reports, but it can actually also save lifes ! Oakland the city that told Google to bugger away ! Is this the start of a revolt? If you shop at Tesco.com and also have a Clubcard then you were aware that they were hacked ? What is hilarious, and, very poor the way they handled this and the lack of understanding. Want to see a glimpse of that? See this Twitter conversation . You like Pineapples? You can eat one; and you can also use one to break website security - very easily! Scary stuff. Microsoft MS-DOS/Word Source Code Gems - just awesome comments! Raspberry Pi car computer - enough said! Absolutely fascinating! Most Sophisticated #Android bootkit malware ever detected; Infected Millions #Security

Samsung SUR40 which recently got stuck at boot up (see the photo below). Once the Kernel lib loaded, for some reason was getting stuck at: StrongROM version 03.30 Build:_P MS PixelSense not booting up Powering it off or on, did not help. Neither did trying to get into the BIOS to try and change some things. I did get this back up and running, and in the end the solution was quite simple - I had to physically take out the power cable (just powering it down was not enough); wait a few seconds and then plug the power cord in, and boot it back up.

Don’t know how many folks know, but I got a google glass recently and only now have had some time to start playing with it. There were a few challenges but I finally got Glass ’talking’ to my Windows 8.1 machine and can now replicate the glass display (that is a post for another time, but it did take me some hit and try to figure out what I was doing wrong). This is pretty important, as without this I won’t be able to show much demo’s or make it very useful. ...

Smart Homes (Again)

I was cleaning up my documents, and found an old presentation where I talk about a lot of the new things coming out of Microsoft. Seeing this, did bring back memories. Some of it was very cool and head of its time. Not heard of DSL’s recently, wonder where the industry is heading.

Here are the interesting finds of this time around. IDA - A cool debugger which runs on most platforms and different from the MS variety. TypeScript - as the name suggests, it is strongly typed JS which compiles down to standard JS! This can only be good I think given all the crazy things one can so in JS. More details here . Can you hide anything from NSA? TV Tuners - did you know they can let you spy - who knew? grepWin - a powerful regex-based search and replace tool - and can work across multiple files. Twine - is a wireless sensor block tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. What all things one can do with Twine? Here are a few examples for inspiration . Visual.ly - tell your story visually; good resource for infographics and data visualisation Can an $11,111 coffee pot turn out a better cup of joe? What the Internet of Things (#IoT) needs to become a reality? Freescale has an interesting paper (pdf) on it. High expectations Asian Fathers - enough said! How to be a hacker ? 14 Kickstarter projects to watch out for in 2014 Alloy.UI - a really cool HTML and JavaScript library with lots of useful UI features . Builds on top of YUI3 and Bootstrap. DON’T PANIC - The Facts About Population . Very interesting, especially the visualisation. You can find more on that here . As sites and services become product aware, the age of pervasive commerce begins (remember Minority Reports ?).

Lessons from the Internet - If you never learn how to fail, you will never learn to scale!

Interesting read for any parent!