I guess I haven't blogged in a few months. Oops. I probably should have, just to write down what's been happening. Here's what's relevant to this post anyway: I got a Windows Phone 7 pre-production device a while ago, and right now I'm using a production LG Optimus 7 as my everyday phone (and loving it).
This blog post shall serve as my semi-official request to receive a Windows Phone 7 development device from Microsoft. So, why should I receive one of these devices? The reasons are quite simple.
Recently, the Diaspora project has been making waves on the Internet. Personally, I'm glad someone is taking privacy seriously for a change, but that's not what this post is about. One thing about the project that caught my attention is that their Kickstarter page says that they promise to release the source code under "aGPL", also known as Affero GPL.
I think I can safely say that, to date, I've not really released anything that I could consider popular. Things like The Vista Syn are useful tools for a very limited audience. That's exactly what I expected when I released ArkSwitch, a finger-friendly Windows Mobile 6.5.1+ task manager. After all - it's a task manager, which there are plenty of out there; for an unreleased version of WinMo; and it doesn't even have the coolest features of other task managers, like taking over the X button.
Well, that's not entirely how it happened.
Although I'm not 100% done with the lamp topic from Part II, I think it's in a good enough state that I can move on to something else for now. The next topic is controlling window blinds, also known as an exercise in masochism. Existing solutions are obscenely expensive, starting around the $130 mark and going way past $500. I refuse to pay that much for automated window coverings. Luckily, there is an alternative.
Since I have decided to go with Z-Wave at the end of part I, the next step is to determine what hardware I'll need for the features I laid out (again in part I). Some hardware is obvious, like the various Z-Wave modules I'll have to buy, while other hardware is more ambiguous, like what my Internet-accessible controller will run on. Let's get the more obvious stuff out of the way first.
I have wanted to do home automation for a number of years now (see my old post on my legacy blog here), but various things prevented me from experimenting with it, not the least of them being me not owning a house. Now that I actually do own a house, I've been looking at home automation technologies more and more, trying to decide what I can do, what I should do, what is feasible to do, and so forth.
Despite this post's title looking a bit like a spam subject line, this is a serious post about an issue we ran into today at work. We have a stored procedure that gathers some statistics for us, and a really strange thing was happening with it. When run from SSMS, it took less than one second to execute, but when run from code, it actually timed out while executing over two minutes. Why would it run so fast through SSMS and yet so slow through our code?
