It was so sad that I received news that one of our gym-training buddies in the late 90s and early 2000s, Choong Tsih Sing has passed away peacefully this morning (2343 London Time). A bunch of us havent seen him or been in communications with him since he has migrated to London with his wife and sons.

This is the 2nd friend I have (same age as me) who passed away due to cancer at a very early age. The other was a computer programmer buddy of mine who I learnt my basics of programming with. I had another friend of the same age who died in a boating accident a number of years ago.

I dont need any reminders to tell me that life is short and fragile but it is definitly hard not to reflect and be sad when tragedies like these happen to friends of the same age group around me. Many times, while we are chasing the technology or/and corporate ladders, these are reminders to tell us what are the important things in life and what are just immaterial. In fact, many many things are just immaterial. I am a huge subscriber of Buddhism' teachings: Dharma and its 4 Noble Truths in its core essence that "Nothing is permanent"

Rest in Peace, our friend, Sing and you will always have a special place in our hearts.

I have seen this in the labs in MSFT Corp Redmond at the Centre of Information Work for some time. I am so glad that it is finally out and will be available to the public.

What is even more cool is that the user interface of Surface is done in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). How about that ?

Postponed. Why ?

I had talked about Yahoo! Pipes here. It didnt take long (well, maybe longer than some of us would like ..) before MSFT Corp came up with something even better ... AND I mean real better with Silverlight and the works.

I have played around with it and I am IMPRESSED and HOOKED. Upsize my mashups, please.

While Microsoft Popfly is still in alpha, you can still check it out here. To find out what it actually is, there is a good demo-ONLY video here.

Welcome to the Social.

The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), the premier definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, returns in 2007 after a short 2 year break ...

... and its back in Los Angeles again !

I had such a great time back in PDC2005 in Los Angeles, presenting, networking and shooting the Visual Studio 2005 launch video, etc. That event in 2005 must rank tops in my book amongst many of the Microsoft technology events I have attended and/or presented over the years.

Microsoft tends to align PDC events with key product development milestones so we tend to hold the events every couple of years, sometimes even more. There isn’t a set schedule. Therefore, there shouldnt be that "Ah - I think I will skip this and go next year" mentality or something. The last 2 PDCs were some of the biggest Microsoft public events - with the announcements of Longhorn, WinFX, Office Server systems, Vista, etc

It is definitely NOT an event you want to miss. I encourage some of my friends, developers and IT-Pros from Asia-Pacific to save up and attend. The investment made will be well-worth it.

Registration will open in Q4. Do check it out and, more importantly, stay tuned to the registration site here for more details.

Hopefully, this early announcement will help in making sure this event gets into your (or your company's) budget planning for next year.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

So, while waiting for a new turn in my career to start, a couple of motivations spurred me to a 2-weekend-long project which I have completed, more or less.

It is no surprise I have always been interested in all kinds of distributed technologies and I have always wanted to hack out a interesting prototype based on GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and the likes.

One of the motivations I had is to log events based on the trail I have been or want to go on (on a mountain hike, on a cruise, rafting, sailing, etc). It would be nice to have a map associated with it and pinpoint the locations that we left a trail with an option to leave sticky notes on those markers. With our entire landscape rapidly changing by the day, it is good to capture some good snapshots of where we have been before that landscape changes. This would even be more invaluable with a growing kid in tow so as to strengthen (future) family ties of affinity through nostalgic memorabilia.

I have a PocketPC running on Windows Mobile 5, which I absolutely love. One of my favourite accessories is this Rikaline GPS 6033 Receiver that usually corrects when I feel (or am) lost. With the advent of greater usability, adoption and availability of some great virtual earth or maps technology such as Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth, I knew I could have more possibilities.

Lest you dont know, in Singapore, while GPS Receivers can be bought cheaply and easily, there is a law permitting against the sale of GPS Transmitters without a govt-issued license, for now anyways. This obviously ties back to privacy concerns, which is understandable. However, I dont see how we cannot control the misuse of that if we know the ins-and-outs of this specific technology.

This is where I decided to spend a few days cooking up this project. I used my favouite modelling tool for this one. No need to pay and install anything, learn a new domain language or any sort of technical or programming notations. In any case, it is only meant for me.

Basically, what I wanted to do is to write a small piece of PocketPC software that can read GPS data from a COM port that is already communicating with my GPS Receiver. Depending on what kind of network access you have, you can either stream the data to a host server over the Internet or have a mechanism to capture and log those GPS data in a meaningful way (which means not capturing GPS data in NMEA data format) so that we can send the data across when we get connected.

I always believe a good solution architect needs to have a good grasp of a wide-area of technology breadth. Having experiences with a different variety of technology, solutions and platforms helps to build that.

For example, while it is so much more cool to do real-time streaming, it is generally not feasible to open up that socket to do this for a period of time on a mobile device. Unless there is some significant breakthrough in mobile cell technology, your PDA will die on you before you even walk for 2 kilometres. And to do some effective real-time streaming, you will probably need 3G access (since you will be walking in wide-open spaces) and that usually sucks out the mojo of your PDA big-time. I think its better to log marker points and then transmit that data in a file when you find yourself a hotspot.

Having said that, the days of one big giant hotspot with WiMAX will happen very soon for us in Singapore. So, we may find ourselves in always-connected land soon. Then, I have to think about interested people who are paying bandwidth by the bits. The payload of the transmitted file MUST be small. Transmission must be quick and it must be WWW-Firewall friendly (since its likely you won't be doing this in the comfort of your own intranet environment, but most probably through a public security-tight hotspot). Only relevant data need go through Port 80 - That is a key design principle.

Many people here would think that I would use (W3C) SOAP as a web service to send that data across. I am ONLY looking for a point-to-point scenario, with no interoperability and security in mind for now, so using SOAP (with the extra overheads of the verbosity of its namespaces and angle-brackets) is not a preferred solution for me in this context.

I would stick with a time-tested architecture for this one - Just using Plain Old XML (POX) and Representation State Transfer (REST).

Using my-own partially modified version of JW Hedgehog's GPS Reader and a bespoked Window Mobile 5 Form application, I came up with this:

I had obviously blanked out my co-ordinates because I treasure my privacy as much as the next person. . You can save the data in 2 ways. One - via a single point marker so that you location will always be current as-is. There is no trail. Two - via an array of point markers. In the latter sense, you can choose to leave a trail.

Once I press the Send button, an XML Data file is transmitted to my host server POX-style. In this sense, it only transmits when you tell it to. It doesnt transmit on its own. Like I said, it doenst really make sense to do a full streaming transmission (like a transponder) because of mobile cell power capabilities (or lack thereof). Privacy concerns should be subdued here. Some processing would be done at the data host server upon receipt and using Google Maps (Documentation API here), the point markers would be rendered like this on your webpage (WhereWasI.html or something to that effect):

I termed this geoBlog (tm). I thought that is really cool. I can capture these snapshots and save them as part of my Glog and keep a memory trail of where I went and what I did. I intend to use this cool project on my cruises, hikes, holidays and vacations soon, especially the one to Alaska, which I hope to be doing soon.

F * * * * I N G    A W E S O M E ! - if I can say so myself.

Some of these images can be retrieved over the years over family dinners when the kids have all grown up and the landscape totally changed and I am sure it would bring up some great conversation.

To the geeks out there, I will make this application free-for-all-to-use. And because this is freeware - dont expect any support, service-level-agreements, warranty or any sorts of guarantee from me.

I have only tested it via my ETEN-M600 PocketPC. The data host is just a IIS6 Web Server on Windows Server 2003.

There are 3 parts to this entire solution (More details of the setup can be found here.):

1. The Windows Mobile 5 Application. You will need to install the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for this to work, if you havent done so. 
2. The Host page that receives and processes the data
3. The WhereAmI page that renders the map.

Of course, for [2] and [3], you would have to host the service yourself somewhere. I used Classic ASP technology for this. Why ? Because, I only needed to simple single host page to parse the XML coming over and saving it to a file and its easy to set up (no need for any complex IIS setups) if you want to transmit this to your own self-hosted server (for more privacy) if you have sufficient pipes. This is my own example here (anony) and here (auth) or here. (auth). If you would like to add more of your own features and port it to a ASP.NET version, you are more than welcomed to do so and share this with everyone else.

To the paranoid in us who suspects some kind of secret routing during data transmission, I am neither interested in knowing where you are/went nor do I care. But, for now, I will make the source bits available to you if you request for it. I intend to make the source bits public once I deem it ready. I am still doing some optimization and tweaking around it but it is generally very usable for now. I could think of different features and functionality to add into this but this is supposed to be a weekend long project for me. Nothing more than that. I will let the others decide what they want to do with it.

In the meantime, I have set up a simple forum here to collect any form of comments / criticisms / feedback / bugs / requests or whatever. Any enhancements, clarifications can be found here as well. Once I have the source bits ready, I will announce the host place for it. In the meantime, if you want the source bits for inspection now, just let me know.

Have fun geoBlogging (tm) ...

    ... Life is really about moving on. - Oprah Winfrey

Well, what else can I say ? After going through rounds of remote and local interviews conducted by the MSFT Corp product teams as well as the Microsoft subsidiaries and field offices in Asia Pacific for various opportunities and roles in the past year and going through my very own intensive decision-making process (Yes, I have my own methodologies with Spreadsheets and CheckBoxes), I have made a decision.

It wasnt at all easy as some of those packages looked really really good and attractive, especially those that require me to uproot me and my family and relocate. It seems the theme is - The further I relocate, the better the package. But I have to look past the bows and the ribbons and see what is at the bottom of the box.

In the end, I decided to stay home and be with the home team for now. One of the key motivations is that I really have to cut down on my travelling. (which also explains why I cannot be here) While the roles differ a fair bit, I sat down and looked at what I was doing and where I wanted to go. I have been near the front-line for some time (as evident by my post here) but I wasnt measured by front-line numbers. As I sat down comfortably in my seat for some time, I realized I wasnt being challenged enough. I need to learn new skills. I have achieved a lot with my technical ones and there is no doubt that I left a rich legacy behind. This is evident by the emails, requests and engagements I frequently get from Microsoft's customers as well as the Microsoft field offices in APAC (see the evidence of presentations, articles, engagements I have over the past years).

However, the desire to learn new skills is strong. So what if I can architect, design, code, build and configure ? - but Can I sell ? Can I pitch ? Can I talk to CXOs where and when it matters ? What good is a great software if you cannot convince people to buy and use it. I keep asking myself this all the time. Business issues and dynamics always interest me. New skills and new challenges in new environments always intrigued me. I always believe it is the mark of a great person to see how well he adapts to changes and not by the number of lines he can code in a single minute.

I decided it is time to put my money where my mouth is. I need hard numbers and I need to be measured by it. I need more technical breadth and I need to learn new business skills. I wanted more time to pursue and learn other technical interests such as Speech Recognition, Location-Based Services, GPS and other Mobile Technologies, Grid/Mesh/P2P Computing, etc and then learn how to pitch them to businesses. Sure, I will miss those technical and evangelistic activities I have been known for in my area of Web Services and related architectures, but I am sure I will build new foundations again and blaze out new trails. And I am also sure all the communities locally and regionally I was helping grow (as a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft MVP) has grown and more importantly, more than apt to carry on by itself. All the mechanisms have been put in place and the torches have been passed to very capable hands who can do a lot better job than how I did.

This blog stays and I will still be blogging about technicalities of software, products, etc. I will still carry on some of my previous activities - albeit of a different depth but more breadth, so look out for new blogging categories. I sure will miss what I have been doing for the past 5 years but isnt that what moving on is all about ?

I remember it was very late last year / early this year when I had a conversation with Martin Kulov, who is the Director .NET Development of the National Academy for Software Development in Bulgaria.

Basically, Martin pinged me and we talked about his idea and dream of bringing a PDC/TechED-style event to the Balkans, where he sees an increasing demand.

He then proceeded to invite me to present in this conference in Sofia, Bulgaria this year. I cannot tell you how honoured I was to receive this invitation. However, I had to put this on hold due to heavy work and family committments. Lest you dont know, while Sofia is generally only 2 spots below Singapore in the usual Country dropdownbox due to its alphabetical legacies, both countries are very spaced apart geographically. To compound this, airlines dont usually fly direct between these 2 countries and therefore, the end-2-end flight map (that routes you to so many different places) will be a lot more mileage than what it appears on a point-2-point straight line on a map. Ultimately, this trip for me alone will cost the National Academy for