Remember the EFF Blue Ribbon Campaign in the 90’s? Remember the Black World Wide Web protest? I recently stumbled upon the EFF Blue Ribbon Campaign again and found they are active in something very close to us, blogger rights. The EFF is working to bring awareness and I’d like to echo their message. As a blogger or blog reader, you have rights that you should know about and protect.

You can visit the EFF Blue Ribbon Web Sitefor detailed information. As a new blogger and long time blog reader it seems that a lot of the concerns are not yet material. And searching Google I’ve found no real blog rights violations in the US, definitely questionable things in other countries though. But, as with everything regarding civil rights we should be vigilant and pay attention. I think the spirit of the effort is worth supporting. As such this site is now displaying the blue ribbon campaign logo.

If you have any news articles or resources on the topic, please comment and share.

This code snippit will show you how to detect if there is a network link on one of the network adaptors on your system. The function is written in C# and uses the Windows Management Instrumentation to get the link status.

/// <summary>
/// Checks if a network is connected to the local machine.
/// </summary>
/// <returns>true if network connected, false if not</returns>
static public boolIsNetworkConnected()
{
    bool connected=false;
    if(SystemInformation.Network)
    {
        System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher searcher=
                      new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher(
                      "SELECT NetConnectionStatus FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter");  

        foreach(System.Management.ManagementObject networkAdapter in searcher.Get())
        {
            if(networkAdapter["NetConnectionStatus"]!=null)
            {
                if((int)networkAdapter["NetConnectionStatus"]==2)
                {
                    connected = true;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        searcher.Dispose();
    }
    return connected;
}

Interested in robotics? Brian Peek has published an article about using Microsoft Robotics Studio with the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. This is a great combination for an introduction to robotics for hobbyists or students. This is very similar to a system used by the Females In Science Club that I tutored in programming for the NASA robotics competition they competed in.

I’ve taught many technology classes from elementary kids to high schools students to senior citizens. I’ve taught Internet classes, programming, robotics, computer repair, and general use. Robotics is a great fusion of disciplines from software and hardware. It also provides an entertaining and interactive mechanism for education. If you want to teach or learn technology, for your, your kids, or your class, this is a great starting point.

Robotics Studio has an added benefit of supporting Microsoft Visual Programming Language which provides a graphical environment for creating procedural commands for the robotic control. This is an ideal way to lower the barrier of entry into technology, software, and robotics as it is much simpler than the terse text code that programmers write.

Software is very intangible and can be pretty uninteresting on it’s own. But combined with a physical medium, such as robotics, software can “come alive.” Microsoft and Lego have a great package for the introduction to robotics, and this kit can let you build some other pretty cool things!

When attempting to run Microsoft .Net based applications, like many of those available from http://www.lowesoftware.com, you may get the following error on startup:

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)

The cause of this error is that the Microsoft .Net framework is not installed or is damaged in some way. Therefore applications will fail to launch.

To fix this error you can run Windows Update and find the Microsoft .Net framework update to install. Alternatively, you can download the Microsoft .Net Framework directly from Microsoft.

• Microsoft .Net 1.1
• Microsoft .Net 2.0
• Microsoft .Net 3.0