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Welcome back

As the days get longer, and the air warmer, spring will bring a new version of my blog; the days of "rely on social media" have long passed, and it's come all the way back to "own your content". I'm revamping my blog to include various new and cool things,

24 Months

It's been 24 months since I've written a blog post -- in blog time that means nothing has happened for 2 years. That couldn't be further from the truth. Instead of a recap of the past 24 months, I'll share the amazing, exciting, awesome things that are happening now or

Fitness Fun

I've been running lately. I used to deny being a runner. I hated running. Running was boring. It also hurt to breathe. And my legs. Oi! Now that I've been running for a couple of months regularly, breathing is easier. My legs still hurt, but it might have more to

Hacking ESP8266's

I heard about ESP8266's from a friend at Google last year; I'd seen noise about them but hadn't paid any attention. Then what he said caught my attention -- using standard batteries we can make them run months, maybe more. I started trying to come up with a good reason

ThingsExpo 2015 -

Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking at ThingsExpo. I was asked by the great folks at The Linux Foundation and their AllJoyn Framework. Here's a link to my talk, Building IoT Devices with AllJoyn. The talk happened as the last talk of the day in the technical track, I

Summer to Fall: Turning the page...

Today I recieved the following email. This is from one of the best friends I've ever had, Mark Hereld. You should checkou this art, he's awesome -- then you should tell him to come visit me (Hi Mark!). howdy! below is "last light" image of the ActiveMural. thought you'd like

Serendipitous Geek Culture

The following advertisement just came through my inbox via a mailing list at work. This is one of those treasured moments when I realize how awesome it is to work at Microsoft. Want to build the world’s weirdest fort? I have 1000 empty Lemon-Lime Talking Rain cans in my

Build 2015: My first //Build

Over the course of time I've worked for and with a great many enterprises. Some public, some private, some "key players", some "boutique" -- almost every one of those collaborations was driven by a purpose: A project to complete, software to write, a device to build -- stories to be

Kiva: Why I only lend to women (outside the US).

I lend on Kiva. I lend to women (individually and in collectives). I lend in the poorest regions of the world. I used to believe, but I know: if we empower women we change the world I first started my journey towards sub-saharan african issues out of a deep personal

AllJoyn 101: Getting Started with AllJoyn

I just returned from giving a talk at the Linux Foundations Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose. It was an excellent event with very good information working in the embedded space, and it didn't just cover Linux, but also more general embedded tooling including tizin and AllJoyn. There was also

This is not your dads PowerPoint

This week at Mobile World Congress 2015 (in Barcelona), the AllSeen Alliance invited me to give a talk on Open Sourcing the User Experience for the Internet of Things. In order to drive the message home (that the software and supporting infrastructure for the Internet of Things is going to

Open Source User Experience for the IoT

Today, Felix Rieseberg, Ville Rantala, and I present this talk and demos in the AllSeen Alliance track at Mobile World Congress. Our talk, like much of our work, is focusing on advocating for the development of open source software. In particular, the AllSeen Alliance is a sponsor of the AllJoyn

Building IoT Products

This week I gave a talk about IoT, AllJoyn, and the complexity of building products at the Linux Foundations annual Collaboration Summit. I was a bit concerned, I haven't spoken to this particular community before but I'm worked with them in the past. This was my first time participating from

Connected Things 2015

I came to the MIT Enterprise Forums Connected Things 2015 conference to talk about AllJoyn and Interoperability; but through a series of humorous mishaps I ended up getting upgraded to sitting on a panel about IoT and Retail. My co-panelists were Mark Hill and the event keynote speaker Alan Messer.

Hackster.io Hardware Hackfest

I'm spending the weekend at the Hackster.io hackfest, focused on IoT hardware projects in Seattle. Here's a quick rundown of the first day so far: * Lots of good ideas are born quickly and easily * Everybody needs Hardware Hacking 101 * Not "How to use my board and sensor kit" * Software

B-24 Crew Remembers The Fear And The Closeness

I'm posting this on my blog. I have retrieved it from a strange online archive of old newspaper articles. This is important for me to save because Charles Kolar, identified below, was my great uncle. There's very little I can find out about my extended family on that side of

Moodcloud

This post is a retrospective on a project I was privileged to participate in during Microsofts Makefest in 2013. The team I joined decided to build a Moodcloud. What is a Moodcloud? Good question! The idea was to build a physical representation of the state of the twitterverse and to

Building Alljoyn-js

The AllSeen Alliance's AllJoyn protocol is designed to enable the "everything" in the Internet of Everything to find and talk with one another. We've been working with AllJoyn for a couple of reasons: 1. Microsoft is a member of the AllSeen Alliance 2. We have Startups in the Microsoft Ventures

IoT2014 Recap

This week I've been in Cambridge, MA to talk about Microsoft's IoT solutions: Intelligent Systems Services, Project Reykjavik, and Nitrogen. It was an excellent conference, wrapping up Wednesday with a demo event where everyone had a chance to show off their interesting projects and tools. Thursday I spent at the

Blogging at 30k': IoT 2014

I'm headed to the IoT 2014 conference where I'll be talking about Microsoft's portfolio of IoT solutions and demonstrating Nitrogen. The brief version of what I'm presenting is that Microsoft has been in the IoT space since before it was popular -- we have created and deployed technology that runs

Nitrogen HelloWorld

In my last blog post about Nitrogen, I showed how to get started developing with nitrogen with very little effort. To enable that blog post, I wrote a vagrant configuration that allows you to bring up a virtual machine running the Nitrogen Service and Admin web application. In this post,

CodaLab

CodaLab is a project to make Machine Learning simple, reproducable, and scalable. It focuses both on "bench" science in ML and supporting competitions to enable the community to work together to find the best solutions to hard problems. For almost a year I worked on CodaLab as part of the

Getting Started with Nitrogen

My teammate, Tim Park, wrote Nitrogen. I've been working with it for about a month, while hacking on lots of IoT related projects. I've got a few bits and pieces I've accumulated to make working with Nitrogen easier (for me) and its' time to share. So, here is a repository

IFTT

This is a test post to see if my IFTT recipes are working to repost my blog posts to facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. I don't like doing things by hand, automation rocks. I'm enamored with IFTT's UX too. Test #2 :)

Startup Weekend Win!

Back in May I won startup weekend as part of the People Analytics team. The experience was exhausting and energizing. Here's a short recap: Jay Beavers, Javiar Luraschi, John Rice and I decided to do Startup Weekend because we thought it would be fun -- and heck if we won

The Microsoft Strategic Engagements Team

Back in May I accepted a position on the Strategic Engagements team at Microsoft. It's a great group of people, with cool opportunities. We are still figuring out the lay of the land, but we're much closer to understanding what we do and how we do it than we were

HDInsight Emulator Tip #1

When developing map-reduce programs for Microsoft Azures Hadoop implementation, HDInsight, it's often useful to reference data stored in azure. Here is what I've found works easily but wasn't clear from the examples discovered online: * Add a configuration to your core-site.xml file: fs.azure.account.key..blob.core.windows.net

Ghost 0.4.2 on Azure

Getting Ghost 0.4.2 running on azure was quite straight forward. There were two gotcha's that I wanted to note in case they block anyone else. * Ghost 0.4.2 bower package update: 1.2.8 -> 1.3.5 in the package.json * If you have an error