This is scary! It seems like your printer is spying on you using tiny tracking dots which are automatically printed whenever you take a print out. Of course these dots are unique and can be tracked to your individual printer and are not visible to the naked eye (otherwise you won’t have noticed them, innit?) The US govt. has convinced most of the printer manufacturers to add this to every page. EFF highlighted the issue first and had issued a press release . Since then they have released a decoding guide that you can use to figure out how to find this. They also released a list of printers which either have or don’t have the dots; and also point the fact that just a “No” does not mean there is no forensic watermarking present, it just means there could be some other kind of marking. Make sure you are consulting this list whenever you next buy your printer. ...

Someone recently asked about how to load test WCF - apart from the usual things like LoadRunner , VSTS Test Load Agent , etc a couple of other interesting options came up. One is WCF Load Test and the other JMeter. WCF Load Test generates a unit test taking in data from a a trace file along with the relevant WCF proxy or interface. ...

My article on P2P programming with WCF and .NET v3.5 was finally published on MSDN . This was written a few months ago and has been going through the internal process at MS to get published- finally it is up there - better late than never I guess. 😄 ...

This is probably old news now, but something which has me concerned as it can cause lots of unseen issues. In .NET 3.5 the default ThreadPool count has been increased ten-fold from 25 to 250 per processor per process! ThreadPools as we know are quite handy - not only do they help when an application comes under load instead of adding more pressure in a stressful situation. They also allow us to readily “reach into” a pool of threads and “pick one” to use - saving the costly overhead of creating and destroying threads (in case you did not know creating and destroying threads is an expensive process). ...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

Squeaky Geek to Silicon Saint ; number 5 is my favourite. Bar da Boa - wait for the flash to finish loading (be patient); enter your First and Last names and click on “Visualizer” - lol. MSR’s InkSeine - which allows you to find stuff with ink, seems quite handy if you use a tablet; some videos here ; you can get it here . TSA is blogging - now you can vent your frustrations! In case you ever wondered, how ASP.NET uses memory ? Especially handy when one started running out of memory. Xperf - a new tool in Windows SDK. Feeling nostalgic? Check out ScummVM . Sony Ericsson’s new Windows Mobile based phone - quite cool. Apparently, multi-functional printers are the latest security threat . Apparently quite a handful of people have had Vista wifi issues whereby a laptop resuming from Sleep/Hibernate cannot connect to the wifi; resetting the wireless card does not help and only a reboot fixes it. It might not be baloney and there is some truth to the matter. Reading these real world examples of online data loss (HA! it was online so you thought you won’t lose it), makes me feel quite smug about my WHS . ...

Of course the assert does not work.

Synergy - one mouse and keyboard to control them all. 50 Tips, Tweaks and Hacks to make the most of Google Calendar . Wayback Machine - Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. e.g. how Microsoft.com looked 12 years ago. Awww … I had forgotten the IE logo. Hamachi remote Wake-on-LAN tutorial . Virtual Wifi - connect to multiple wireless networks at the same time using one wireless card! Cilk is a language for multithreaded parallel programming based on C and is especially effective for exploiting dynamic, highly asynchronous parallelism, which can be difficult to write in data-parallel or message-passing style MSDN Code Gallery - need I say more? Reverse IP Check - see what sites are running on the same web server as your domain. E.g. at the time of writing this there were 305 domains hosted on the same web server as this blog - wow! Airbus A380 Cockpit in 360. London Food Hygiene ratings - don’t concentrate only on how many Michelin Stars the restaurant has, but focus on how clean is it. ...

I did not know until this week that there was something called “Livelock”; Eh? I heard of Deadlock what the heck is Livelock? Well it is kind of the opposite of Deadlock (in some respects). A Deadlock as we know is when say Process A is waiting for Process B to finish or release some resource or something before continuing and Process B in turn is waiting for Process A before it continues - end result neither continues. ...

Wise words from Jim (when teaching CDS ): “Keep it Sequential Stupid”

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

Here is how fellow Avanut Wayne describes the “conversation” between Vista and you (the user) when an app. decides to kick the bucket. I particularly like the last one. User: “This thing’s frozen.” [Tries to close program using various keyboard and mouse actions.] U: “Yep, totally wasted.” [Task Manager displays] U: “Kill this program.” Computer: “Hey, uh, did you know that this program isn’t really responding? I think it might be frozen.” ...

I had not heard of this until Karan told me about Erlang which was originally developed by Ericsson and stands for Ericsson Language.

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. ...

It has been a while since I posted some of the interesting find (been busy for a change). Slashtop - no more waiting for the OS to boot up; if you want to get online or make a call using skype then this is up and running in an instant; more details here . Exploits of a Mom - need I say more? 5 ways to share big files between co-workers or friends - quite handy when you are in those pesky situations when you need to get something across to someone else. Cellprofile Switcher - you can use the information about the mobile cell your phone uses to do some work for you. For example, your phone can automatically silent itself when you get to work. Of course not too much help when on the tube. Kudocities - I came across this when trying to find out what happened to there was a decent buritto joint (sadly not in the same league as Chipotle ) close to the office which suddenly closed and that was a big deal! Why? Well for all the culture, people, excitement, smoke, crime, tube, etc. that is London there is not a decent Mexican joint. 👎 Crazy about Alarms? Then check out phoneAlarm for your mobile. Vidabox Lux - is this the most advanced Media Centre? It supports HD-DVD, HDTV, BluRay, etc. My Mobiler - interact with your Windows Mobile screen from your desktop (including copy/past, drag/drop, capture, etc.). Or maybe it is this one ? Desktop Wallpapers - quite amazing and hundreds and free. Z Wave Products - of course if you need to “shutdown” then won’t work. Err … what the heck is Z Wave ? ...

Think Before You Blog

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.

MS has announced the details of what is new on WHS Power Pack 1 and it seems a collection of things which one would want to add to WHS. It is good to see the amount of testing gone into this and the fact they have upgrades coming out so soon after RTM.

Until recently I was running the RC of WHS (being part of the Beta program); but as that was expiring I coughed up for the OEM version. After installing it when I tried to configure the domain name to mychoice.homeserver.com I got an unknown error. I tried both homeserver.com and livenode.com options but neither of them worked. It seemed to get these working you need to open IE on your WHS and go to Tools => Security => Trusted Sites => Sites and add the following two sites and try adding it again and all should be OK then. ...

When you install SP1 for .NET 3.0 by default that changes the throttling settings you might be use to. You could get into a situation where a number of calls are processed and then they stop with the client eventually timing out. To get around this you either explicitly close your connection (which is a good practice in most cases) or change the serviceThrottling setting in your WCF config. ...

I was reading on something else and came across this and was quite bemused. Simple Nomad is a hacker who loves Tea. For those who did not know, Tea is called “Chai” in Hindi so when you see “Chai Tea” somewhere (like Starsucks ) then that means “Tea Tea” which just sounds silly. ...

You remember me talking about holding off that Dell ? Well the very cool Crystal LCD's are here (and boy are they pricey)! For $1200 you get a 22" 1680 x 1050 display. I only see these on Dell’s US site and don’t see them on the UK site yet. Not sure how long before they show up here. I am surprised Dell did not get this out in time for Christmas. ...

Fellow Avanut David send the link to Point UI ; it essentially is a small skin application for your Windows Mobile 5/6 and somewhat emulates the iPhone interface. Before you roll your eyes and think “here is another iPhone-knockoff-wanna-be”, I’d suggest you take it for a spin. It is just bloody good! The interface is just simple and you can use fingers (my fat fingers also worked!); to me it seems a less of the iPhone and more of a combination of the HTC Touch and the new upcoming Windows Mobile 6.1 and 7 (screenshots of v6.1 can be found here ). Maybe Microsoft should hire these guys in the team. ...

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