I mean, Happy New Year!

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but there’s good reasons. Those who know me know that we had a new arrival just before Christmas, a beautiful baby girl, Isabella Maria Nagy. Click here for photos.

Chumby

So enough with the personal stuff, lets talk about what I got for my birthday (just before christmas). Recently, Chumby was released in Australia. I really liked the concept and since it was the only thing I put on my birthday wish list, it was no surprise that I got one for my 31st.

Chumby is a little touch screen device that shows widgets. What it shows is completely up to you. It connects to your wireless internet and downloads news, weather, time, games, music, video, and more. It can be used as an alarm clock (has a ‘night mode’) so you can wake up to your favourite internet music channel. You can use it to monitor your twitter updates, eBay auctions, mail inbox, basically anything that has a widget written for it, which is almost everything.

Under the hood each widget is a Flash application. You can write your own widgets and upload them to the Chumby site for everyone to share. I was thinking of creating a TFS Build Notification tool for it. Hardly something useful on an alarm clock right? Well Chumby doesn’t have to be just an alarm clock. Think of it as a feed of information available anywhere in your house or office. My Chumby sits on my work desk currently, but I am thinking of getting another one for the kitchen and maybe lounge room as well!

The management of your widgets is extremely easy. You don’t need to install anything on your local computer. Once you register your Chumby with the online servers, you can control it via their web interface. By default there is one channel with about 8 widgets pre-loaded, but you can then add/remove widgets as pleases you. If you want, add another channel and add widgets to that channel. For example, you might have one channel for monitoring weather and news widgets only, but in the evenings change to the channel that has all your music and videos, latest clips from YouTube, and Facebook status updates.

Checkout the website for more information about Chumby.

Azure Blog – Above The Cloud

Near the end of last year we saw the release of the Azure Services Platform, a Cloud offering from Microsoft. I’m very intrigued by this and it seems Microsoft have invested a lot of effort into their Cloud architecture.

Rather than spend any real time talking about it here, I’d like to take the opportunity to announce a new blog that I will run beside this one (both will continue). I am dedicating a whole blog to learning about Azure, since I believe it will honestly impact .Net development going into the future.

Check it out at its location here: http://azure.snagy.name/blog and subscribe damn you!