If you’re a Silicon Valley geek, and you want to keep your “geek ID” what’s the best way to do it? That’s right, build your own Segway . Hmm … with the Summer approaching… just need to convince my lovely wife of this… can anyone help with a business case here?
Want to get more out of Firefox, then check out the Firefox tweak guide .
At work, recently I needed to simulate a GPS connection while sitting inside the building and while finding a solution for that I came across GPSGate , which is a cool piece of code. You can use this to share one GPS connected to a Pocket PC or laptop to other computers connected to the same LAN. On each computer running GpsGate you can in turn connect any number of GPS applications to GpsGate, everything running at the same time. Not only that you can also Simulate a GPS feed (what I was originally looking for) and also log a real feed from a device for later playback. ...
Jonathan Hardwick explores a few ideas on how to share your windows desktop on more than one machine… Now the question is that which ones are supported in Windows Media Center 2005, so I can control that using one of the laptops at home (there is always either mine or Meenakshi’s around). Has anyone tried this with MCE? ...
Fortune is running a story about the golden age of microchip graffiti is fading. But these images were never meant to be seen in the first place. “I saw something that looked different from most other things on the chip,” Davidson recalls. He cranked up the magnification and looked again. “I saw this Waldo thing,” recalls Davidson, referring to the character in the Where’s Waldo? cartoon books. At first Davidson thought the microscopic Waldo served as a kind of anti-copying feature, but a few months later, on the same chip, he found a teeny tiny Daffy Duck. Now the hunt was on. ...
Microsoft has released an early version of the CTP of Indigo and a newer version of Avalon (from the PDC) and is now available on MSDN to download. I would certainly be downloading this and checking it out in the very near future. There are some known issues, so make sure to read the release notes.
Microsoft Watch is reporting some details on what IE 7 features would look like. It has taken a page, err… tab I mean from Firefox and would be tabbed, improved support for CSS 2.0, IDN (international domain names), transparent PNG, etc. There are rumours about a built-in news aggregator. And of course, improved security which will include reduced privilege mode by default, no cross-domain scripting and/or scripting access, improved SSL user interface and possible integration between IE 7.0 and Microsoft’s new anti-spyware service (in beta currently). ...
I created a new area called Sandbox; for those who have worked with me previously can understand what this means. That is not a blog, just a place for me to start uploading some bits and seeing how they exist in the world or cyberspace. :) Right now there is nothing much there that is publicly going to be reached, but you can try hitting it at www.desigeek.com/sandbox . ...
Then waddle over here and check it out.
Chandu Thota has a pretty cool application called BogMap . What is a BlogMap you ask? It is a place where blogs meet maps and location. You can also Use BlogMap you can geo-code your blog, browse already geo-coded blogs and search for blogs. Once geo-coded, you can get your own BlogMap location using a simple url. This is me: ...
One of my colleagues, Jim Tallant, encountered a problem with Win2k Server, running in an Application Center environment, where very high CPU cycles threatened to bring down the server farm. All servers in the farm showed high CPU utilization (60 to 70%) whereas they normally run in the 15 to 20% range. We determined that this high CPU consumption was caused by excess time spent in the .Net memory garbage collection routine. The statistic “% Time in GC” on these servers was in the range of 40 to 60%. ...
Process Explorer 9.0 was released a few days ago. The new features in it are: System information dialog has per-CPU graph option with hyperthreaded and NUMA processor information A Users menu duplicates the functionality of Task Manager’s Users tab, showing Terminal Services session information and supporting logoff, disconnect, and sending messages On XP SP2 and higher the TCP/IP tab displays the thread stack at the time an endpoint was opened The tray icon context menu includes the shutdown menu Search engine option to use Google or MSN Search Object address column is available for the handle view Image signatures can be checked on-demand in the process properties dialog Process explorer is digitally signed with Sysinternals’ Verisign Class 3 signing certificate ...
Google competitor A9 has Company > Yellow Pages on A9.com a nifty new thing where you can see street-level photos along with the Yellow Pages on Amazon.com. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street. The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. The cities currently covered are: ...
If I had know of this a couple of days ago, life would have been much easier as I was trying to get TurboTax from the US from Kumud. Most e-mail providers impose limits on the size of message that you can send or receive. If you have trouble sending large files to certain people, or want to avoid clogged mail arteries or the risk of reaching an overstuffed mailbox that will bounce your message back, there is a free and easy alternative called YouSendIt that works every time - and you can send files up to 1GB in size. All you need to do is type in the destination address, select the file you want to send, and (optionally) type in your e-mail address and an accompanying message. It’s a Web-based service: the recipient gets an e-mail with a download link that’s good for seven days. Now, the only thing I want to try is, if the browser times-out when trying to upload huge attachments. ...
If you ever are in a situation where you need to identify production code issues or perf. issues, etc. (and who has not been there), then I would recommend checking out AppSight Black Box - a “kick-ass” product that I had an opportunity to play with sometime last year. They have solutions covering both .NET and J2EE and is very very impressive - I just want to know how the heck do they do it. You have to see it in person to believe it - and I have grilled these guys extensively using some real code, so if the demo looks to good to be true, well it is true! Here is the excerpt from their site which really does not do them justice: ...
Thanks to Noni for pointing this out to me. You can get the history of all (I think) languages all the way from the 50’s to today - quite interesting. [Listening to: BabyBaby - - (06:55)]
Karan ponders on the Mac Mini and all I got to say is, man, that machine looks good! I almost bought one at Frys… err that is before the common sense kicked in (for not atleast). What do you think?
Brad Adams had a recent post discussing best method names ever. It is quite hilarious and interesting to find some methods that are used such as the FDangerouslyCommitToDiskCacheButNotActuallyToDisk, SetMetafileBitsBetter, PrestoChangoSelector, (all Windows) etc. My personal favourite are ZombifyActivationContext (in XP+) and die_you_gravy_sucking_pigdog() (FreeBSD).
What do you fancy with a Cockpit running Windows ? Now I think that is cool! (And please enough with the PJ’s about Crashing and Windows)…. [Listening to: Tabba (Techno) - Musafir [Club Mix - CD1] - Musafir (05:49)]
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat had written a very interesting paper highlighting their research in Google for Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. Their implementation called MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. ...
Extremetech is reporting about Corsair Memory’s new XPERT Memory has one seriously distinguishing feature: It has a 10 character alphabetical LED display that snaps in place over your DIMMS. Install the RAM in your system and it automatically offers up your your memory speed, voltage, and DIMM temperature in bright red characters. Remember calculators in the Seventies? It’s that kind of LED display, and it really stands out through a case window. ...
I am sure you also have played with VSTS, but not sure if you are having problems with VSTS Dec 2004 Refresh bits up on MSDN. I am installing this natively (not on VMWare/VirtualPC, etc.) running Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition with VS.NET 2003, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 (Beta 2), and usual suspects like Office 2003, etc. During the installation process when I get to installing Visual Studio (see screen shots below), aftre going about 60-70% of the way I get an error - “Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Edition Beta 2-English – Error 1304.Error writing to file: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Windows.Forms.dll. Verify that you have access to that directory.” Now everything seems to be ok to me, I am logged as God (Domain Admin) on the box and there is enough disk space as well, so not sure what is causing this. ...
I have my own favorite extensions, but Luke discusses more on his post here . Interestingly with Firefox being safer and all that (compared to IE) Spoofstick is missing from most lists. [Listening to: Chapter 2 - Unknown - (01:52:32)]
A century after Einstein’s miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did; Economist.com attempt to elucidate . [Listening to: Tabba (Techno) - Musafir [Club Mix - CD1] - Musafir (05:49)]
The beta 5 version of VMWare adds some interesting features, especially where you create multiple snapshots by allowing the user to take an unlimited number of point-in-time, saved-to-disk snapshots of running virtual machines. This makes it easier to capture and switch between multiple configurations and accelerates testing and debugging. The Snapshot Manager displays thumbnails of all the snapshots on a single screen and makes it easy for users to track all their snapshots and revert to a previously saved snapshot. Also, when reverting to a previously saved snapshot, a new branch is automatically created so other snapshots continue to be available. You can check out the screenshots here and download the beta . ...