Harjeet’s Blog

Update: Scoble has released a recent video interview that is a lot better than the TED video… Here it is.. This is actually mindblowing!!

Scoble finally told us what made him cry. It’s a Microsoft Research project called the WWTelescope. I haven’t seen the demo for this, but it looks like its software that allows you to explore the universe, flying around wherever you want to go! Scoble also mentions that this uses the Photosynth technology, something I have personally used and seen the demo of and combining satellite imagery with Photosynth would be nothing short of Awesome! What photosynth allows you to do is take totally random images of any place say the big ben at different angles. It then takes these random images and intelligently creates a virtual tour patching these pictures together in a 3 dimensional space! I so want to get my hands on the WWTelescope now!

Update: Cool demo video below from TED

Many times in the past, I’ve struggled to copy and paste data accurately from the web to excel. I’ve needed to do my analysis in excel and so mostly ended up copying from the web, pasting it in notepad and then pasting it in excel. I used to lose all formatting and the results were not always the best.

So this nifty application from Microsoft Research has got to be one of the most useful for me. It allows you to select one or two instances of the data you want to capture from the web page and then just click on select similar data. The app looks through the page and selects all the data automatically populating the excel sheet. This is brilliant You can download this plugin here. Check out the demo video below:

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This is absolutely cool! I saw a brief demo of surface computing as a Microsoft Research Project, but now this is for real. Check it out on www.microsoft.com/surface or check out the demo video at http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/. A new way to interact with digital content, surface allows you to drag around images, grab data with our hands and move information around with simple touches and gestures. It also interacts with objects, recognizing them and reading data from them, for instance your account details off a loyalty card, or recognizing a phone as soon as it’s placed on a table top! It can have a whole wealth of applications, check out the video, as I don’t need to say much more!

I’m really excited about the release of the XNA Game Studio. Even though it’s been a while since I have written any code, the sheer fact that people can write games as easily as create applications in Visual Studio sounds cool. XNA allows you to create games that run on both windows and the Xbox 360 platform, so the possibilities are endless. There are many cool examples that have already cropped up, some good examples can be found on http://www.threesixbox.com/. You may have also heard that many of the leading educational institutions such as Georgia Tech, USC, Guildhall and RIT are adopting the XNA Curriculum, which doesn’t surprise me!