Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

I gave a presentation today in my Embedded Systems class titled: “Seeing Machines”. The presentation describes my project in which I created a security camera which leverages the skeletal recognition capabilities of the Kinect to detect when someone walks in view of the Kinect camera, upon which it takes pictures and uploads them to a private Picasa library. If 10 seconds passes without receiving authentication from the person who set the alarm off, an audible alarm will sound, and an SMS text message will be sent to notify the owner that an intrusion has been detected. The Kinect represents some amazing technology. I predict some really interesting technology coming out in the next 5 years which leverages the depth data and skeletal tracking capabilities of Kinect. My paper can be downloaded at this link: Seeing Machines, a paper by Joseph Fluckiger Note: view the speaker notes to see links to some of the amazing Kinect projects I found during my research.

  I am a Software Architect for a Fortune 500 company. My job is to take large amounts of information, filter through it and find the important facts, trends, techniques, subtleties, and truths. Let me take a moment to talk about a truth of the US Medical system. 1) The US Healthcare system over prescribes narcotic pain killers. I broke my collar bone on Friday while playing soccer and had surgery this morning to have a plate implanted over the two pieces of my collar bone. After the surgery the nurses insisted that I take narcotic pain killers to for the unbearable pain they described I would have once the local block wore off. They even convinced my wife who is a fan of natural foods and medicines that I absolutely had to have narcotic pain killers. All the way to the car the nurse pleaded to my wife to make sure that I took them. I didn’t because I value my brain cells. Guess what, I was fine. I was uncomfortable for 4 hours between 8pm and 12am, but I used ice which eased...

I’ve been using a utility class I wrote called “SmartStepsUtil” since 2007.  I’ve decided to share it with the world. It turns your WinForms app into a “Console” simply helping you to write colored text to a RichTextBox. I’ve used SmartStepsUtil on a few applications including SharePoint SUSHI . It makes it easy to quickly give feedback to the user about what is going on. It is thread safe, so you can call it from a background thread. Feel free to change it as needed. It just amazes me how many applications don’t give feedback to the user. Or they have complex UIs with textboxes all over the place. SmartSteps util brings the best of a Console application (simple UI, live feedback) into a Winforms app. To use SmartStepsUtil, copy into your application Methods: - AddtoRichTextBox() - ScrollToBottom() - ClearRichTextBox() Preset Styles to choose from to write to console: public enum StyleType {     bodyBlack,   ...

Revisiting Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts is always a good investment of time for any serious Visual Studio developer. Here is a nice list to hang on your wall: Most Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for .NET Developers . This list was created by Mahdi Taghizadeh .

In response to an article which states that bitcoin has no intrinsic value , here are my thoughts. Bitcoin does have characteristics which make it potentially more userful than than existing mediums of exchange. It is has near-zero transaction costs. Compare this with Visa/MasterCard. And try sending gold in the mail. Bitcoin also has real intrinsic value because it is more secure than Visa/MasterCard in that the recipient of payment cannot extract from your account more than you intended them to. When you give someone your credit card number, they can then use that number to take any amount of money they want from you. When you send money via bitcoin, they can’t because you aren’t sending your private key. With Visa/MasterCard we are giving our private key to a merchant. Bitcoin is not a crazy idea, Visa/MasterCard is! By reducing cost of money exchange world-wide, Bitcoin has huge potential economic benefits for the world economy. Who is a potential customer for Bitc...

This is a great extension for VS 2010 released last month: Productivity Power Tools . If you’ve used Resharper, this brings several of its great features right into VS 2010. - Quick Find - Remove and Sort Imports (they stole this one wholesale from Resharper) - Solution Navigator: very cool - Solution Explorer on steroids (legal ones of course) - Enhanced Scrollbar – red dots are breakpoints, dark blue dots is the carrot location. - Etc..  read more

  Many people find the photos in the window border to be a little distracting. It is easy to turn them off by adding a registry key.  Follow these simple steps: 1) Save the text below between the lines into a text file and rename the file “dontShowContactPicture.reg”. ------ Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Options\Mail] "ShowContactPicture"=dword:00000000 ------ 2) Double click the file and you will be prompted: 3) Restart Outlook. 4) See the result: Before: After: 5) To undo this change and turn pictures back on, simply edit the file and change “dword:00000000” to “dword:00000001”   More information can be found in this related article on stackoverflow.com

Here is a great PowerShell tips article: PowerShell A-B-Cs

Excellent presentation on User Experience: http://www.dallasasp.net/downloads/hfe_tobiask.pdf