Update: It looks like this is a bust.  Only 3 people have responded with interest, so I’ll just get in touch with them and we can meet up.  I’ll leave the survey open in case people were holding out on me.  :)

At the very last minute, I was lucky enough to receive a free ticket to Mix09 (thanks Jay!) and have decided to attend.  After posting about it on Twitter, Matthias Shapiro suggested that since both Johnny Lee and I will be there (Johnny’s giving a session on the Wiimote), perhaps we should have a Wiimote “hacker” get-together.  I think it would be great to get all Wiimote fans, and even fans of the Coding4Fun website/book together to put names with faces and have some fun.

Sooooo….

I’ve put together a very quick, 3-question survey to gauge interest in having a meetup and what you’d like to do.  If you’ll be attending Mix and are interested, please take the 30 seconds to fill out the survey.  I’ll move forward with the plan based on how many people are interested.  There’s no sense in putting it all together for 2 people to show up.  :)

I’ve decided to setup a simple contest to give away a free copy of our book, Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More.  Entering is simple.  Post a reply to this forum post located at:

https://brianpeek.com/forums/p/1012/3258.aspx

And to make it a bit more interesting, here’s a topic for your post:  How have you coded for fun?  Write up a couple sentences on any fun project you’ve tackled at some point in your spare time.  I won’t disqualify you if you don’t, but I’d love to hear about your projects, and I’m sure others would too.

Make sure you are registered on this site with a valid email address and are logged into your account so I have a way to get in touch with you if you are the winner.  No, this isn’t some elaborate scheme to harvest email addresses…

This week, Dan Fernandez and I had the opportunity to be on the .NET Rocks! show with Richard and Carl.  We spent some time chatting about our Coding4Fun book (available at fine booksellers everywhere!) and several extremely interesting projects Richard and Carl have created in the past, including an anthromoporphic remote-controlled car, and a parrot who enjoys extremely right-wing politics.  I think you’ll just need to listen to the show to understand what those are about…

If you’ve followed any of my Virtual Earth 3D projects, you know that the managed API has been undocumented and unsupported for a while.  All the work that has been done so far has been possible due to a few VE3D team members posting information on their blogs and through reverse engineering using tools like Reflector.

Well, half of the problem has been solved:  The VE3D team has now released beta documentation for the VE3D GlobeControl !  As their blog post states, it’s still beta and not officially supported, but it’s definitely a great a start.

Now to see what assumptions I made in my projects that are incorrect…

I have just put up the latest version of WiimoteLib at CodePlex.  The changes for this release are:

v1.7.0.0

• Writing registers is now properly waiting for the Wiimote to reply before continuing...this removes all of the Thread.Sleep() calls and should *greatly* improve performance when setting LEDs and rumble (Serial Nightmare & wwibrew.org)
• Guitar Hero: World Tour Guitar and Drums now properly recognized and used (wiibrew.org, tested by Tyler Tolley and Mauro Milazzo)
• Guitar whammy bar is now a 5-bit value instead of 4 (wiibrew.org)
• Position of 4 IRs now properly reported in Basic reporting mode (Dan Carter)
• Found1/2 now properly reported in MSRS (reported by akka243)
• MSRS project updated to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

Please give this new version a try and let me know how it works for you, especially if you have one of the newly supported controllers.  And, as always, what features/bugs would you like to see added/fixed?  Please leave a comment here or contact me directly so I can add it to the list.  Enjoy!