Recently, Project54 was asked to create a demonstration of a Web Mapping Service (WMS) application for the Microsoft Surface. To maximize the usefulness of the demo, we were attempting to allow multiple WMS layers to be displayed at the same time. Doing this would allow the end user to find correlations between different sets of …
Category Archive: Software
Oct
20
Custom C# Image Button
Recently I was implementing an image button on a Windows Mobile 6.5 system. On the desktop you can simply extend the Button class and overload the OnPaint function to control the look and feel (for example adding custom image fields). However, in the Compact Framework version of .Net the Button control doesn’t actually draw itself …
Apr
05
Reading Serial Data from Virtual COM Ports
While most desktop developers do not have to deal with Serial COM ports (and I doubt many people miss it), here at Project54 we use COM ports to communicate with a variety of devices (GPS Antennas, Radars, Video Systems, etc.). For anyone that is familiar with programming COM port communication in the Win32 platform, they …
Mar
11
Project Natal for Xbox
This really looks like Wii on steroids! I have recently stumbled upon Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox. Their slogan is “You are the controller” which is really appropriate. The system uses full body motion, facial and speech recognition in order to improve the sensation while playing a video game. This means that no electro-mechanical controllers …
Feb
10
Irregular selections in Excel
Have you ever had a need to filter some tables of data in Excel using masks? If so, this post may be useful to you. The principle is simple: place your data in one sheet (Data), create a mask on another sheet (Mask) consisting of cells filled with ones (where you want to keep the …
Jul
16
Program discovers Newtonian Laws
I found this article about people from Cornell University creating a powerful computer program that was able, due to some major calculations, to figure some scientific laws of physics such as the Newtonian Laws. It’s pretty cool to know that a program could do that and that in the future it might be able to …
May
14
2009 IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security – HST 2009
On Monday, May 11, I was honored to present my work at a very prestigious IEEE conference on Homeland Security technologies, held in Waltham, MA. During the technical session on the interoperability and field deployable communications, I gave a presentation on the design and development of a software defined Project 25 data base station. Here …
Mar
19
Collaboration on documents
I was advised to use FolderShare application to share documents with my collaborators. But, in fact, we already have subversion for our code development. This automatically raised a question of why would we use FolderShare if we already have subversion installed on our server and in operation. It is not reasonable to compare subversion with …
Jan
16
Experiment Wizard
This is a follow up to my previous post about automation solution for our experiments. Taking the automation a step further I have designed Experiment Wizard. Experiment Wizard is a cross platform open source automation tool for scientific experiments. It defines the XML schema for experiment administration, and provides GUI application to execute created experiments. …