Sitting in our all hands sales meeting discussing how to ‘not stuff up the proposal template’. Got to talking about using Paste Special->Unformatted in Word.

I didn’t know, but you can change the default paste settings in Word to ensure that cross document pasting is done nicely. The key is setting the default for ‘pasting from other programs’. This way when you cut and paste from PDFs and HTML and other stuf it doesn’t screw with your word document.

That’s Singapore and Sydney for those of you who don’t live in airport codes

I’ll be running a 2 day training course in Singapore and Sydney in a couple of weeks time. These are focused on showing you how to build out Line of Business applications using Dynamics CRM and a range of other Microsoft Platform Technologies. We’ll cover things like Silverlight, WPF, Unified Communications and Azure.

Intergen has put together all the content for this course and it’s a mix of presentations and deep dive hands on labs. It’s a 2 Day event and ideally you should have some previous CRM experience, or, have run through the CRM Developer Ramp Up Kit. You don’t need any prior experience in the other technologies but best you know your way around Visual Studio and you’ll need to be able to understand C# enough to work with it in the labs.

Metro Participants can register via www.discovermetro.net or can register directly on the Partner Learning Center. 

The link for Singapore for May 10th - 11th is
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=265620

The link for the Sydney event for May 14 – 15th is
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=265700

I’ll be running the same event in other APAC region cities in the future so keep tuned.

So my morning road ride ended prematurely this morning. Got half way around the Miramar Peninsula and blew out a spoke. Stupid cheap Shimano R500 wheels- methinks I might get Oli @ Roadworks to build me some nice training wheels.

I have got my speedo working properly again though.

Way cool. @RotoruaNZ Tweeted me the other day after I posted some photos of Mountain Biking up here.

Asked if they could use one of my photos on their Mountain Biking page. Check out Phil Ross on the dipper with the *loud* strobe action going on.

http://rotoruanz.com/ 

If you’re one of my overseas readers I can’t comment the City of Rotorua to you enough. I’ve dreamed of living there since I was at highschool and it’s still 100% on my 5 year roadmap. It’s close to the ski fields, has phenomenal mountain biking (the Redwoods), great kayaking (Kaituna and Wairoa) and great air links for frequent business travellers like me (Can go direct to AKL, WLG, CHC and ZQN).

The only query/quibble I have with the Destination Rotorua site is why on earth is it hosted on the other side of the world!?! See the trace-route below. Looks like it’s in Orlando!
Looks like their site uses PHP so they’ll probably be a good candidate for the Apache version of the Runtime Page Optimizer http://www.getrpo.com/Product/Apache. Running the RPO site tester it reckons it should knock a couple of seconds off the New Zealand load times.

C:\Users\Chris>tracert www.rotoruanz.com

Tracing route to rotoruanz.com [66.7.213.144]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    13 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  …
  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  …
  3     1 ms     2 ms     1 ms  wlgrtr1-65.intergen.org.nz [202.126.87.65]
  4     4 ms     1 ms     2 ms  ihwrtr1-129.intergen.net.nz [202.126.87.129]
  5     2 ms     5 ms     3 ms  32.114.216.13
  6   158 ms   150 ms   148 ms  165.87.71.190
  7   150 ms   148 ms   148 ms  12.127.33.6
  8   150 ms   152 ms   158 ms  cr2.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.74]
  9   148 ms   148 ms   156 ms  ggr3.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.17]
10   150 ms   149 ms   154 ms  att-gw.sanfran.level3.net [192.205.33.78]
11   157 ms   162 ms   161 ms  vlan89.csw3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.68.18.190]
12   176 ms   152 ms   160 ms  ae-83-83.ebr3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.69.134.233]

13   151 ms   155 ms   167 ms  ae-2.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.132.10]
14   148 ms   157 ms   148 ms  ae-63-63.csw1.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.3
4]
15   160 ms   163 ms   161 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.1
7]
16   183 ms   181 ms   192 ms  ae-3.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.132.78]
17   202 ms   181 ms   180 ms  ae-93-93.csw4.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.166]

18   190 ms   197 ms   181 ms  ae-91-91.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.133]

19   215 ms   214 ms   224 ms  ae-1-14.bar2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.137.153]

20   220 ms   218 ms   210 ms  ae-9-9.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.133.69]
21   212 ms   210 ms   211 ms  hostdime.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.79.118.38]

22   211 ms   211 ms   213 ms  dime151.dizinc.com [66.7.213.144]

Trace complete.

So just a great morning here in Wellington today. Rode into the office and dropped off my laptop then did 50km around the bays. Rode out around the peninsula to the round-about then back again. About 1hr 45min all up but the last bit from Kilbirnie home was pretty cruisy. Training effect on the Suunto T3c was 4.0. Speed on my Polar is broken due to a spoke that keeps coming loose.

So I spent last week Mountain Biking in Rotorua and generally recovering from my 3 months of travel.

Got out with the Canon 5D MkII and some strobes for a bit of run in the Redwoods.

Photos were taken by a variety of Myself, Phil Ross, James Ogle and Sarah Bolland.

Phil Ross on ‘The Dipper’.
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Chris Auld on ‘The Dipper’
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld on the Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

David Addison
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld and David Addison on The Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

Getting the strobes setup
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

So at almost all the Windows Azure events I’ve run around the world recently we’ve always gotten into a discussion about hooking Windows Azure applications up to on-premise systems. Indeed in a recent demo I wrote for a CRM + Windows Azure session I showed how to wire up Windows Azure applications to your on-premise CRM server. Often you’ll be using the cloud for what I call forward processing.

You should use caution here. Your Windows Azure application has the ability to scale almost infinitely. Your on-premise application does not. If you wire your Windows Azure web role directly to your on-premise system, say by making a direct Web Service call, and then your site gets slash dotted you’ve basically built your self a massive cloud hosted Distributed Denial of Service engine!

What you need to ensure that you do is buffer all of your requests from the cloud to your on-premise system via a queue of some sort. You may choose to use a Windows Azure Storage Queue for this or you may choose to use the new Queue and Router capabilities in the .NET Service bus. This means that if your Azure Web Role suddenly gets a huge amount of traffic the requests to your back end system will be queued and processed only as fast as the on premise application is able to handle them- the last thing you want is for a simple client self service application in the cloud to bring down a core business application on premise.

Obviously doing this is going to require that the call to the backend system is capable of being made asynchronously. If it’s a one way operation then it’s easy, if it’s a two way operation then getting data back to your user is generally going to be a case of having your worker role right back to to an Azure Table or indeed having a notification queue for each user that your worker role can enqueue the result onto.

In summary: If you wire your Windows Azure application directly to your on-premise application you are dicing with danger.

So it’s election time in India and just check out the BJP election add that popped up when I browsed Kiwiblog today

He’s like some 80 year old decisive determined Ninja!

Hope this place isn’t like Thailand.

So it appears that Paul Smith, the TwitchHiker has decided that:

“wherever you go in New Zealand, residents will complain how utterly frustrating the technology is, one born of a telecommunications monopoly and the country's remote placing on the planet”

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2307100/Twitchhike-stumbles-at-last-hurdle/

Is our telecommunications infrastructure really that obviously ‘one born out of a telecommunications monopoly’?

I’ve travelled the globe, hell, I’ve travelled the globe in just the past 3 months and our infrastructure in new Zealand is as accessible, as fast and as useful as any other country I’ve visited recently. If Paul Smith wants to fly over here on the generosity of New Zealanders (@flyairnz and others) and then spout his mouth off about out internet infrastructure then he can $%&^$^ off back to Newcastle as far as I’m concerned.

Clueless tool!

[Update]

In the comments someone asked me to back my statements up saying that Mr Smith backed his statements up. Well. Mr Smith just regurgitated the same old ‘Telecom is a monopolistic provider’ crap that seems to do the rounds. And I struggle to see how he could really lay claim to his experience unless he spent his entire time in a hermetically sealed Maui campervan.

So some facts to back it up then.

I travel the country and indeed the world. (9 Countries, 23 cities/airports, 130,000km and 59 days on the road just this year). My iPhone 3G and Tablet PC (with UMTS inbuilt) travel with me everywhere. In NZ this year I’ve been to TUO, HLZ, ROT, DUD, CHC, ZQN, AKL, MRO, NPE, NSN and a bunch of places in between when it’s been via vehicular rather than winged transport. From memory the only place I’ve been without Broadband when I’ve wanted it was at the Outdoor Pursuits Center in the middle of bloody nowhereville near National Park. Anywhere else I’ve had at a bare minimum sufficient GPRS signal to check my mail(I had GPRS at SEHOPC but I wanted broadband) , tweet my tweets and, should I have wanted to, cry poverty and try and sponge some more free travel. While not as ubiquitous as in the USA or Canada, the availability of good quality WiFi (back hauled no doubt by monopoly provided ADSL) is just fine here in NZ and as good as Australia or any other country that I’ve been to recently in South East Asia bar maybe Singapore.

So I’m staying on the Infosys Campus in Bangalore this week and hitting up their gym each morning.

The campus is a fantastic facility and the gym is top notch.

Did a cardio work this morning including a sprint on the Recumbent bike…. never thought I could peak my heart rate like i did on the recumbent! Always thought they were for grandmas! Definitely more of this for me going forward. Check out the chart

Tracking my workout using both my Polar S625x (as above) and my Suunto T3c at the moment.  Set out to achieve a 4.0 Training Effect on the Suunto which I nailed right at the peak of the recumbent interval- I think I was on level 18 (Constant wattage mode) doing about 100 RPM for that interval.

I need to grab some files over Live Sync to review on the plane….. look what I get

I’ve been meaning to write a Blog post praising your use of this technology…. but this stuff is just STUPID!!!!