misc

Live Writer’s new 2009 Release Candidate is available for download . I continue to be impressed by this editor and I cannot recommend it enough. 😄

I am going to be at PDC – anyone else I know going to be there? If you are reading this, and are going to be there then it is quite likely you know how to ping me and let me know you going. It also might be a good idea to check out the Devil’s field guide to the PDC . I will be blogging from there – but not during the sessions – need to ensure I am not distracted – especially as the Avalanche is coming !...

Not since the days of NT 4.0 (which stood for New Technology btw) has this happened that Microsoft is calling a Windows version what is really is – so Windows 7 will be called Windows 7 ! I say Yay! It is about time the stop all the malarkey about funky code names and boring “release names”.

Interesting to see how Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded; in addition to SimpleDB now they support Oracle and mySQL – this certainly ups the ante and will make it more enticing for Enterprises to hop onto this. I have been using S3 for a some time now where my WHS is backing up and have been quite pleased. It will be interesting to see how Zurich responds with SQL Server....

Testing, testing, can anyone see this?

Guardian has an interesting story on how Bluetooth is being used to track people’s movement in Bath. The concern is that the 10 or so scanners not only pick up your mobile’s ID (which you have set) but can also pick up your Identity via your name. email and phone numbers. So think carefully before switching on your Bluetooth on the mobile!

I think Snap Previews were a good idea earlier but now for me it has just started getting irritating and for my blog I have switched it off.

Do these seem to be the first Window 7 Screenshots or is it Photoshop magic?

VMware Fusion is not new and I have been meaning to blog about it for a while but just not got around to it until now. If you only have used VPC (Virtual PC) or it’s bigger cousin (Virtual Server) and never used one of the VMware products, wake up and smell the coffee and get ready to get blown away. VMware Workstation for example is so much better than VPC and is not even in the same league....

I came across this undercover report on Hotel Glasses from a colleague or mine and it sure is very disturbing! A must watch if you stay in hotels.

Ink Generated with Ink Blog Plugin - http://www.edholloway.com

Megha send me this one; I had never heard of these guys but I do recognize the music from the new iPod Nano advertisement.

Seems like many others are following the MS route in releasing Betas - which might not be the best thing in the world. Telligent has now released the CS 2007 Service Pack 3 (Pre-Release) with a long list of fixes and “new features”.

LOL! iPhone advertisements run XP .

Despite my skepticism about not much happening on the WLW front, I do like it and use it for blogging and want to find out which plugins would you recommend. For example, which one to use for code? There is Insert Code for WLW , Paste from VS , Insert Formatted Clipboard , etc.

Both Microsoft and IBM are dueling it out in the cyberspace over SOA - reminds me of the hay days just before the .com boom started back in the bay area. 😄

If you are an avid reader of this blog (who am I kidding) 😉, you would have noticed that for the last couple of days it has been impossible to hit this site. The main reason for that being for the last 2-3 days discountAsp.net (where I host this site) have been under a massive DDOS attack . They setup another site outside of their data centers just to provide us (their customers) an update....

Hot on the heels of SP1 , Telligent has released CS 2007 SP2 . You can read up on what has been fixed and you can download it from here . I have upgraded the blog to SP2 and everything seems to be running fine, but if something is amiss then let me know .

A few people have released an interesting set of wallpapers which although they say is for Aero, you can use it with any OS. You can see a screenshot here and download it from here (~16 mb).

SP1 for CS 2007 has been available for about 3 weeks, and I finally got around to upgrading to that. Everything seems to be working fine, but if you find something amiss please drop me a note and let me know.

Now that CS 2007 has shipped, CS (a.k.a Community Server - the thing that this blog runs on), has announced their plans for the rest of this year and will have two releases in July and October codenamed Maui and Hawaii respectively. Seem to be interesting changes, enhancements, refactoring, etc that is going on. I have not had the time to dig too much under the covers of CS (not since it morphed from ....

First things first - no I am still alive just have been awfully busy and not had a chance to blog. A couple of guys have implemented two Captcha controls (I had first implemented this as part of upgrading to CS 2.1 Beta 2) for CS 2007. Brenda Tompkins’s Captcha control (which I am using here) - this in addition to the blog comments also supports contact, photos, file comments and registration - cool....

Zeddy has released a plugin for VS 2005 (with a screen-shot on his blog) which allows you to copy and paste the code from VS.NET directly into a CS blog. It only supports C#, so if you are using VB.NET you are stuck with another method (such as copy’ing into Word and then using that - though as Zeddy also points out that has issues). See

Well I bit the bullet and upgraded the blog to run on CS 2007 RTM - yes contrary to what I had said earlier. Initial indications look good so far and I only had to make a couple of changes. There are still a few things which I have not tried like the Google CS plugin, and I suppose the CAPTCHA control will stop working. I would need to look at those over the next few days....