*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Just getting back from PDC 2008 I have to say the coolest non-developer thing your grandmother or mom can use that got an upgrade was Live Mesh.  I really like Live Mesh for a lot of reasons.  First and foremost it solves a real problem by syncing data, accessing devices and connecting devices together.  We are only starting to see the beginning that is the vision of the Live platform, trust me, there is a lot more to come.  Live Mesh in particular opens the door for a brand new world of cross platform peer to peer data syncing and more.  Secondly it provides a rich API through the Live Framework whereby developers can integrate their applications with it.  Let’s play around with Live Mesh, Live Tools and a few other things to see what kind of fun we can have.

What problems does Live Mesh solve?  Well for starters it solves the problem of syncing files.  Jeff Blankenburg wrote a post last week that gave five reasons you should give Live Mesh a try.  This week at PDC we can add two more reasons to Jeff’s list:

1. Mobile Client
2. Mac Client

If you want to play with the Windows Mobile client for Live Mesh, to get started read the post on the team’s blog here.  Note that Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 is required.  Once installed on your mobile phone you’ll get a “Mobile Pictures” folder in your mesh.  You can also sync other folders from your mesh with your mobile phone.  Here’s what the mobile client looks like on Windows Mobile.

Once I installed the mobile client I picked up my Blackjack II and took a quick picture of my dogs taking a nap in the floor of my office.

Within a few seconds the photo I took on my phone showed up on my desktop.  From phone to computer and computer to phone is now incredibly easy.  Once the photo was on my machine I could open it up and edit it and drop it into Live Writer, yet another great tool from the Live team.  Are you starting to get the picture?

The story starts to really unfold when you start combining Live Mesh and other Live tools such as Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Home Server! 

Here are the pieces of the puzzle:

• Live Mesh – storage and peer to peer syncing from the cloud from various clients such as Windows, Mobile and Mac
• Windows Live – a collection of various for free tools that are purposed for the cloud
• Windows Home Server – the home appliance that let’s you access your data internally and externally as well as provides a powerful backup mechanism

Think of it like this.  If I take a picture on my windows mobile phone sure I want it to sync that photo with my desktop but I also want to make sure I have that photo backed up and also persisted to permanent backup to the cloud in case something happens (home server drives fail etc).  I also want this to happen without me having to *think* about it.  You might ask , “Doesn’t Live Mesh hold all of my data though?”.  The answer to that is no. 

Currently we get only 5GB of storage with Live Mesh.  Really this isn’t bad but I would never expect Microsoft to hold the world’s data.  However, there is this product called “Groove” that does great peer to peer replication among other things.  See the dog fooding going on now? 

If you exceed the 5GB of data Live Mesh gives you, it immediately switches to peer to peer.  This means you can sync way more data than 5GB.

I mentioned Live Photo Gallery and Home Server so let me start with Home Server.  Integrating Live Mesh with Home Server is where the story starts to get even more interesting.  At PDC2008 we got to see some of that story and where it is headed.  Nothing has been released yet for Home Server but Brendan Grant, who we interviewed in Deep Fried Bytes Episode 12 on Home Server, showed part of the Live Mesh story with Home Server at PDC 2008.

In other words there will be a direct Live Mesh plug in for Home Server.  Right now I am cheating and installed Live Mesh on Home Server directly to sync my Mobile Pictures to see how this will play out once the real plug in is released.  Since I run KeepVault on Home Server, an unlimited backup cloud storage add on for Home Server,  I now have this kind of story.  It goes something like this:

Your next question may be “How do I view the pictures?”.  Answer:  Windows Live Photo Gallery (which is currently part of the http://download.live.com tools).  To make the Photo Gallery and Home Server story work I have set my import folder directly to the Home Server share.

Since all of my photos are imported directly to Home Server (which then gets backed up to the cloud) it means any photos that home server syncs with my mobile phone are immediately visible via Windows Live Photo Gallery.  This means I can tag, edit, fix, or delete all from one central place.  Here is the picture above with Simon and Max shown in Windows Live Photo Gallery:

Are you starting to see the picture (no pun intended)? We are only seeing a small portion of things that Live* can do for us.  This is why I am “super excited” because this technology is something my Mom, my sister’s, and certainly my wife will use.  Today we use Live Mesh to sync GBs of audio we record for http://deepfriedbytes.com with Live Mesh.  Woody and I never have to worry about keeping track of where things are at, it just works.

If you haven’t started to play around with this stuff, give it a try.

DISCLAIMER

Read RTA’s Techie Blog post before you decide to install Live Mesh directly onto your Home Server.  Again, this is going to be supported, we just don’t know when yet.

We had a blast recording live from PDC 2008!  We managed to get about nine podcasts recorded during PDC.  Now the hard part begins, the post production work! 

On the last day of PDC 2008 we rounded up all the podcasters we could find to do a round table discussion and recap PDC.  We recorded a show with Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow and Jon Galloway, Scott Koon and Kevin Dente of Herding Code.  We’ll be publishing this show first.  To cross pollinate our shows we’ll be posting the show at the same time but will break up the show into multiple parts so everyone can share.   

Our good friend Laurel Ruma from O’Reilly took this picture of us recording a show with Oliver Sturm of DevExpress.  As you can see, we were right in the middle of expo recording.  We’ll be doing a lot of post production work on the audio we recorded to make sure we remove as much background noise as possible but WOW did we record some great shows (and I’m not just saying that either). 

A big thanks go all of our guests and friends that stopped by to say hi. 

To see the line up of shows we’ve got coming out head over to our Up and Coming shows page here http://deepfriedbytes.com/up-and-coming/.

UPDATE

I found a picture Scott Koon took while we were recording the podcaster round table.

(left to right)

Jon Galloway (aka Mini-Jon), Jeff “Horror” Atwood, Chris “Woody” Woodruff, Me

 Listen To This Episode 

http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-16-discussions-about-gnome-linux-and-software-development-with-luis-villa/

Have you ever wondered how Gnome got started?  What about how to pronounce it? In this episode we sit down with Luis Villa, a well known open source community member, and get the scoop on how Gnome got started as well as discuss open source licenses and more.  Luis also gave us his take on Office and the impact it has had on Linux.  It was a great conversation, so great in fact we had to break it into two parts. 

Ways To Listen To The Show

There are several ways to listen to Deep Fried Bytes.

1. Directly From The Web Site (or click the link above)

When you visit the site look for this:

Clicking the triangle will launch the Yahoo! media player and automatically start playing the show for you. As long as you leave the browser window open the player will stay open. Clicking off the page WILL stop the player!

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If you have iTunes or Zune installed on your computer you can subscribe to our show. In iTunes open the Music Store and search for “Deep Fried Bytes”. In the Zune software, go to the MarketPlace select Podcast and search for “Deep Fried Bytes” to subscribe to the show. You can also click either of the two icons below to automatically subscribe to the show if you have iTunes or Zune installed.

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I’ll be presenting at the next meeting for Hub City NUG to be held on November 20th at 7:00 PM at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Location: College Hall, Room 100
Date: 11/20/2008
Time: 6:30 – 9:00PM  (refreshments served at 6:30, presentation 7:00, giveaways after presentation)
Presentation Topic: New Language Features in C# 3.0
Presenter:  Me

Map

(click map for full version)

Presentation Abstract
Are you tired of writing foreach loops or loops in general?  Did you know with the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net 3.5 framework new language features exist in C# 3.0 to help you write your code differently?  One of the many enhancements in this release were new language features to one of the core .Net languages, C#.  In this session we’ll take an in depth look at the various features of C# 3.0.  We will explore the old way developers wrote code (using foreach loops for example) in C# and then transpose the code to take advantage of new language features like Lambda Expressions, Extension Methods, Anonymous Types, LINQ and more. 

Since I upgraded my Blackjack II to Windows Mobile 6.1 I haven’t traveled anywhere where I needed Internet Connection Sharing to work.  Getting ready for a trip this week I decided to test ICS before I got to the airport.  I just assumed it would work but it wasn’t the case for me. 

First off props to Steve Harman for already posting how to get into the phone and unlock the connections on the phone.  Like Steve I figured the settings were not correct (I’ve gone down this road before with AT&T).   Here’s how to fix the Blackjack II with Windows Mobile 6.1 to tether to your computer using Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) that is built into the 6.1 upgrade.

Step 1:

Follow Steve’s outline on how to unlock the GPRS connections via the registry.

You’ll need to download a utility.  Here is the link for posterity sakes:

http://www.breaksoft.com/Blog/Utilities/2005/1/Mobile_Registry_Editor.aspx

Step 2:

Once the settings are unlocked try to connect and see if you can. I was unable to.  I kept getting:

The remote party has ended this connection.

I went back into the settings and added the following username and password to the AT&T ISP setting and then it connected.  Success!

Username:  WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password:  CINGULAR1

When connecting to wap.cingular as the access point, I’ve always had to enter the username and password to get things to work.  Maybe some don’t, I’m not sure what the rules are, maybe it is location based who knows.  Anyway, I hope this helps.  Cheers.

UPDATE 10/31/2008

When I was in Los Angeles, CA I had to change these settings.  The only thing I got to work was applying the same settings in step 2 to the AT&T MediaNet connection.

UPDATE 3/20/2009

The best way I’ve found to get ICS working on Mobile 6.1 is to install the previous fix.  You’ll find it on my other review of the Blackjack II here.