If you are a Tea person (and I am not), then you would like Cup of Brown joy from Professor Elemental – who is basically a guy from Colonial India who does hip hop.

Debugger Canvas is a new user experience for the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture. Check out the quick demo below to see what it is capable of and read up on the guide on how to use it . ...

Pedro has build one of the best apps for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) that I have ever come across - TFS on the Road . As the application navigation map shows below it covers most aspects of TFS that you would be interested in – all packaged up in a very nice GUI. :) ...

If you are having constant issues with a specific hardware, then one of the culprits could be a corrupt device driver for that hardware. In simple terms, a device driver is nothing but another computer program which allows Windows and other applications to interact with the specific hardware. Since this is very hardware specific, generally one need to install the specific drivers for that device. ...

Recently the wife installed the latest iOS update for her iPhone 4 (all 600+ MB of it! And people have the misconception that Microsoft software is bloated?). After the update, the Sync on the phone was failing with the following error: “The iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13019)” as shown in the screenshot below. She did have the latest version of iTunes – not that made any difference. Also, restarting iTunes or rebooting the phone and the machine did not help and the error remained the same. After a quick search online , it seems quite a few others have the same problem. ...

One word - WOW!

I am getting bored with the current WordPress theme on the blog and was interested in getting another theme (preferably free), got any recommendations? And nothing from the 10 ugliest WordPress themes please. :-)

If you are ever in a situation where you want to find out if you logged into using cached domain credentials (AD) or authenticated against the domain controller then the easiest way is to open Event Viewer and look for the entry where the source is NETLOGON and Event ID 5719. The description would be something like: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Log Name: System Source: NETLOGON Date: 27/05/2011 08:53:17 Event ID: 5719 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: YOUR-Full-Qualified-Computer-Name Description: This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME due to the following: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator. ADDITIONAL INFO If this computer is a domain controller for the specified domain, it sets up the secure session to the primary domain controller emulator in the specified domain. Otherwise, this computer sets up the secure session to any domain controller in the specified domain. Here is a screenshot (on Win 7) showing a (filtered) view of the same event. ...

If you ever want to get a Mini Dump of a process (of course for debugging purposes) the easiest way to do so is to use Task Manager (or use Sys Explorer ). Just find the process you are interested in, right click and select “Create Dump File” and voila. One thing to be careful – make sure you are using the same version of the Task Manager (or Sys Explorer) as the process. For example if your process is x32 (and you are running on a x64 system), then make sure you are using x32 version of Task Manager and not the x64 as that will cause issues. ...

More related details on Dustin’s post - WCF scales up slowly with bursts of work .

There are times when you need to kill a number of processes in one-go like today when Chrome crashed a few times hanging all the running instances – next time Google says, one tab cannot bring down all of them – send them my way :). For such times, a PowerShell script is all you need. I wrote up a simple one which takes the process name as input and then kills all the processes which match that name. ...

My dear friend Mario has finally got around to blogging and one of his latest posts shows , it is possible to run Hadoop (which if you are not familiar with, can be thought of as an open source version of Google’s MapReduce ) in Azure. You need to setup a typical configuration of nodes (Name Nodes, Tracker and Slaves). ...

After moving to Bangalore, it turns out that I would need to get one or more UPS’s for the machines at home. The place we will be moving to in a few weeks does have power backup, but if/when there is a power cut it takes a few minutes for the generators to kick in and is not instantaneous as I was thinking. I have never bought a UPS until now and don’t have any experience with it - what are the things that I need to consider? I will have the following equipment running which will need to be powered up for about 15 minutes: ...

Read this story in the Guardian about a guy called Matt , who blogged about bringing up his daughter all alone, as his wife died soon after giving birth. This was such a heart stopping story, which is highly recommended. Interesting shift on the tone of the blog which first helped Matt with the bereavement and later gave him strength to cope with this to finally the blog providing support for others in a similar boat and looking for help. ...

In other news of the day … we are going to be moving in the next few weeks to Bangalore. Avanade , is sending me on a posting / secondment to Bangalore for 18 months to help out with a few things. Of course, the family will be moving as well. After my tenure, the plan is to come back to London. ...

Update 2: Car already sold - thanks for all the interest. Update: Dropping the price we we need to sell the car soon! I am wanting to sell my car and thought I would put it up on my blog first before trying other places. It is a Left Hand Drive BMW 330i Automatic (2001 model) with 89K miles in Excellent condition and has both the Sports and Premium packages factory installed. ...

New Parenting blog up and running (finally) – by popular demand. The intention is to keep that completely different from this one. I and the wife will be starting to post there so watch that space. Happy to get other new (geeky) parents (or soon to be parents) contributing if they want to.

Guardian story Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US where a number of academics have done studies which conclude that Twitter and Facebook don’t connect people, but on the contrary they isolate them from reality got me thinking about this and wonder if Technology is making us less human! MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s new book Alone Together (which seems interesting and is something I have not had the bandwidth to check out), is leading an attack on the information age. It does seem to agree with the recent articles like Is Google making us Stupid? I don’t quite understand Facebook (even though I have been more on it recently); my views on Facebook are quite well known, especially in the context of privacy and security . If I talk to a friend who could be in Delhi or San Francisco, I don’t feel as connected having a dialogue with him or her over Facebook as I do when talking on the phone, IM or even email. Often people thing just because they have posted something on Facebook, that is the end of it - it almost seems at times, I am too lazy and can’t be bothered, so will post a message and get it over with - or as they say in Punjabi - “syapa mukao”. :) ...

I was excited to find that Twitter had a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) endpoint for the current trending topics and decided to write a simple consumer which can read this and then spit it out in a simple console. And JSON being so simple and more or less “universal” meant that there are multiple implementations for .NET. Of course if you got lots of bandwidth you can roll out your own parser. ...

Upgrading through *all* versions of Windows from v1 thru to Win7.

Krodh k samay mukh se nikle ashleel shabd athwa shabdo ka samuh, jinke uchaaran k pashchaat vyakti k hriday ko shanti ka anubhav hota hai :) (Sorry too complicated to translate from Hindi to English)

So I am not the biggest fan of MS maps and prefer google maps. Any ideas if this is available instead of the default maps on Win 7 phone, and I don’t mean the web version :).