I recently got accepted a paper at the REALWSN'08 workshop that is in conjunction with ACM EuroSys 2008 in Glasgow, Scotland. The paper deals with a project performed by Microsoft Research Cambridge using a wireless sensor network deployed on Skomer island in the UK, monitoring the Manx Shearwater seabird.

Last week I spend at Microsoft's TechFest presenting the work done at Microsoft Research Cambridge over the lat 12 months. Rob Knies gives a overall insight into our research at the community sites of Microsoft Research. I just surfed onto another article written by Briony Smith for itWorldCanada telling about what we showed there, well as the official press statement about our research.

Bill Gates recently mentioned the the ESI group [1] at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, talking to computing [2]. Very honorable.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/ero/
[2] http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2208895/revolution-beginning-3794902

One reason I recently don't blog too much is the fact that I am a bit restricted in what I can tell. Being involved in some exciting projects, the confidentiality of these projects does not allow much publicity.

Finally, one of the projects was revealed to public. Today I was pointed to a BBC news article on the web. Last season, Robin Freeman, post-doc in the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group at Microsoft Research Cambridge did a great project in monitoring vulnerable habitats of the manx shearwater species at Skomer Island, UK.

Being affiliated to the European Science Initiative at MSR Cambridge, I was part of the team developing several pieces of software deployed on the island together with an wireless sensor network. The project was in close collaboration with Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and Oxford University, UK. Some more information on the project can be found on its website.

Following the VSR group's main idea, I spend some time in updating my personal FOAF file. The best way to understand Semantic Web is practicing it. The resource you know the most about is your person. So, FOAF provides you some neat opportunities to get in touch with W3C's RDF technology.

Jim Nakashima gives some insight view how the Cider adorners work [1].

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2006/04/24/580393.aspx

Shawn Burke shows how to debug .NET source code in Visual Studio. all you need is to install the Visual Studio 2008 QFE [1] and then follow Shawn's instructions [2].

[1] https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/...
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/...

SPARQL has been finally published as W3C recommendation [1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

Today, Daniel helped my to solve a long standing miracle. For some unknown reason, Vista decided not to support hibernate on my Toshiba m400 anymore. So what to do:

Start the command prompt and type powercfg -H ON.

You won't see anything on the screen, but when going back to your advanced power potions you will see both, hibernate and hybrid sleep again.

That's all - and you can send your machine to hibernate again.

Andrew Matthews describes another interesting pattern in [1], which he called Ambient Content Pattern :

"Provide a place to store scope or context related information or functionality that automatically follows the flow of execution between execution scopes or domains."

[1] http://aabs.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/the-ambient-context-design-pattern-in-net/