• An updated view of the current state of the 3D Star Browser in Avalon

    Chris Sells referred to my early screenshots (post 1, post 2) and commented on the way the stars were lined up 🙂 There is a good reason the stars look like that in those screenshots. I was using the personal version of the SDSS DR1 data (MySkyServer) that only include few tens of thousands of stars from…

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  • Microsoft and distributed, high-performance computing

    This article mentions Microsoft‘s unannounced efforts for “grid” computing. This sounds extremely interesting. I can’t wait to see more information about this. One of the things I want to concentrate as part of my research, now that WS-GAF is almost finished (White Dwarfs, CHEERS info soon), is the use of the .NET platform and Indigo…

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  • HAPPY NEW YEAR…

    …to everyone. My thoughts are with all those affected by the Asia Quake disaster.

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  • Quake

    My thoughts are with all of those suffering from the quake devastation. Please consider making a donation to help with the relief efforts.

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  • GeoURL

    Register the location of your blog. Daniel just IMed about the effort he started (after an existing service was discontinued).

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  • A BackgroundWorker for Avalon

    I saw a post at the winfx.avalon newsgroup about the lack of support for a BackgroundWorker in Avalon (at least for v1.0). Since I need something like this for calling the Web Services asynchronously and then updating the Graphical User Interface, I just created a very simple one. public class BackgroundWorker {   private UIContext…

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  • 3D Star Browser in Avalon (continued)

    The experiments with Avalon and the Galaxy visualisation continue. Here’s a screenshot of ~78000 objects loaded into Avalon . The gold stars are the ~5000 of the personal version of SSA while the ~73000 are the stars from the personal version of the SDSS (MySkyServer). Waiting from Bob Mann (a great guy and the astronomer who…

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  • Moving behaviour from the endpoint to protocols

    In case you do not follow the comments on my blog posts, here’s another great one about moving the behaviour from the endpoint by Michi and my response (almost agreeing! 🙂 Of course I am not suggesting that we completely move to a world where all applications are built using the principles of service-orientation; only…

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  • Avalon and a 3D Star Browser

    As I previously mentioned, I’ve been experimenting with Avalon. As a toy application, I am developing a 3D star browser for our galaxy. The idea is to get the information for the stars from one of the scientific archives (SDSS or SSA) and display it in 3D. Last summer my student Rumesh Machap (the best…

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  • More on service-orientation

    Just pointing to a couple of great posts, compatible with and adding lots more to the views I expressed in the “Loose-coupling through the relaxation of endpoint assumptions” and “Comparing S-O and O-O as design principles and not as implementation technologies” posts: – Benjamin Mitchell‘s summary of a presentation he gave. – Steve Maine‘s “SOA…

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