Fastest residential uplink in the world - 40 GB/sec! Updated programmer stereotypes - updated for “today’s” world. Hotmap shows where people have looked at when using Virtual Earth . Advanced Vista Codec Package (note: I have not used these yet) Vista’s (little known) recovery strategies . My Picture 3D allows you to see your pictures in a 3D environment - probably a bit useless and only for those with a high speed Internet access. Outlook Extra allows to change the default path so you can easily find and delete attachments send in emails among other tweaks. Moo - they print things from your stuff. PHP121 - a php based IM - perfect for internal corporate chat where you don’t (or can’t) access one of the IM’s. Five Tech mistakes to avoid . Visual Studio Robotics tutorial (with Mindstorms NXT of course). Free legal icons for you to leech (they are under GPL). Parking Perfection game - learn how to park! 😄 Warthog anyone? Toshiba’s wireless docking station - though I have had such terrible experiences with my Tecra M3 over the last 3-odd years I cannot recommend a Toshiba to anyone!

Google (of all the people) have released Manzana a .NET API for interacting with the iPhone. Below is what they had to say and you can see a screenshot here . I of course don’t have a iPhone to try it out. “Simple and powerful .NET library that lets you read/write files from/to the iPhone, list directory contents and other file and directory related functions.” ...

Office Live Basics - get it for free. Google Talk Emoticons Speaking of google, they now have hot trends Jing , what is it and how do I use it ? Estetiikka - Free web gallery using PHP (v5) and MySQL. Interested in making Ubuntu look just like OS X ? Zen Computing - some guys are raving about this Linux distro as better than Fedora and Ubuntu. Live Earth Videos now available . Vista Wallpapers , including the one running on the blog here. Domain Keys Identified Mail ( DKIM ) - tool to battle spam ...

An article is discussing what possibly could be part of Vista SP1 whenever it ships, either later this year or early next year. And on the topic of Vista SP1, another rumor is that Vista SP 1 Beta will be out sometime next week .

Even though I have been part of the Windows Home Server (a.k.a WHM) beta for a while, those bits I was mostly running in a VM and did not get to installing it on a dedicated box until RC1 came out. It certainly is quite interesting and opens up various possibilities especially in a non-techy family. Also the fact that it is “designed” to be run headless certainly makes it easy and able to hide in a corner/room/garage/cupboard/shed(?)/whatever. ...

I guess the title says it all (via Lap )

As part of “Secure Tuesday” (or whatever MS calls it), there are a number of important and recommended pushes out today from MS. Better hit that Windows Update to get these. Here is what I see on Vista and Office 2007 on one of my laptops:

Continuing the interesting find series, here are the next set of finds. Grasshopper 2.0 - is a free VS.NET plugin that allows you to code in .NET 2.0, build for Java and run on Linux, without rewriting any code! Sweet! IKVM.NET - is a implementation of Java for both Mono and .NET and includes a Java VM, .NET implementation of the Java class libraries and some other tools which enable interoperability between both .NET and Java. This is more of less compliant with JDK 1.4, though there are some gaps and AWT and Swing are not implemented yet. EasyVMX.com - lets you create virtual machine of the free and awesome VMware Player . I know many others share the same opinion that VMware Workstation is many generations ahead than Microsoft’s VPC. If you are too cheap to pony up the $189 license fee then EasyVMX might just be what the doctored ordered. Solid freeform Fabrication - DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar! This is a project to construct a home-built three dimensional fabricator which allows for a low cost design leveraging recycled components, large printable volume emphasized over high resolution, and ability to use low-cost printing media including granulated sugar. SavaSocket - Allows you to power off standby appliances and as a result save money, energy and the environment! It is like any other power socket, with the exception it has a infrared receiver and can learn a specific button from any infra red remote control allowing the user to control power to the socket and as a result all devices plugged into that. Windows Splash Screens - a trip down memory lane showing all of Windows splash screens thus far from Windows 1.01 released back in 1985. ...

Microsoft has released eScrum v1.0 which is an add-on for TFS and if you use Scrum then should be of interest to you.

If you ever wanted to reassign what Ctrl+Enter does in IE from the default of adding http://www. before and “.com” after what you entered in the address bar. Say you wanted to change this to go to “.net” or “.co.uk” then it is a simple registry change as shown by Ramesh . Of course any registry change for the inexperienced is a daunting task and I suggest backing it up just incase you mess it up. ...

You might have noticed this via your Windows Update that Microsoft has released a cumulative update for Vista MCE! It is supposed to fix a number of issues, though I have not seen any changes (but then I was not having any issues in the first place). You can get details on what this update contains.

Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division released the results of a benchmark study that showed that applications based on WCF Web services outperformed J2EE applications running on WebSphere (ver 6.1.07) by as much as whopping 285 percent! Woah! From a cost point of view, the .NET solution is supposed to be one-fifth of the IBM Java solution. For the study four core tests were benchmarked, namely: Web Services: Remote activation of back-end services from the front-end Web application. Durable Messaging: Orders placed via transacted/durable queue in loosely-coupled architecture. Non-Durable Messaging: Orders placed via a non-durable/non-transacted queue. Monolithic: All elements of application run in a single JVM or CLR instance, no Web Services or messaging. In this mode, orders were set to be placed synchronously. Of course, given this is released by Microsoft there will be some bit of skepticism, but feel free to check out the details (PDF) - 10.3 mb and 92 pages of both the study and the results. ...

You can download the first chapter for free from Addison-Wesley’s intro book on DSL . If you are new to DSL’s (Domain Specific Language) this this is a good read. Here is a abstract from the publisher: Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)–languages geared to specific vertical or horizontal areas of interest–are generating growing excitement from software engineers and architects. DSLs bring new agility to the creation and evolution of software, allowing selected design aspects to be expressed in terms much closer to the system requirements than standard program code, significantly reducing development costs in large-scale projects and product lines. In this breakthrough book, four leading experts reveal exactly how DSLs work, and how you can make the most of them in your environment. ...

This is a true story and happened on one of my projects (which shall remain nameless). Below is the feedback from one of the client as they were doing our code reviews. Line 66: there seem to be a few too many words starting with “f” in the salutations comment. [This is really picky – the commenting standard in this file has otherwise been really good so far.] And incase you were wondering what was the code in question, here it is: ...

I keep stumbling along many interesting finds online (well interesting to me) which I keep storing in OneNote and finally decided to start posting them here under the .link category. These mostly would be for me when I want to get them to a later stage. Without further adieu, here is the first of many finds: The Phrase Finder - if you ever wanted to know about Phrases, Idioms and their meanings, origins and popular fallacies then check out the phrase finder. e.g. Vis-à-vis eSnips.com - wanted to share files with others? Check out esnips.com which allows you to share any time of information with who and what you share. Read up more here and don’t forget to check out the fine print . JFGI (Just f***ing google it) - need one say any more? 😄 Urban Dictionary - a slang dictionary with your definitions e.g. I recently heard there is something (or someone) called a Neek . ...

Step 1: Vowing Wedding Favors Step 2: Skyping Baby Names

Microsoft is giving away free ringtones (4 packs) for your Windows Mobile; don’t forget to read up on how to install these .

It has been so long that I can’t remember when I last spoke with my dear old friend Govind . We use to work together back in Seattle. He is one guy who I have a lot of respect for and when he talks, you shutup and listen (yes I know that is very difficult for me to do). It is interesting the twists life throws at one and how everyone adapts and changes. It is difficult to imagine him now and how his priorities and what he is passionate about has shifted - one won’t even fathom the idea in your wildest dream. ...

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. Of course there is nothing they can do about such attacks and given the circumstances I think they did an excellent job in dealing with it and trying to keep their customers up to date - kudos guys! ...

Want some British Humor? Then check out NewsBiscuit .

Microsoft’s Photosynth - you need to see it to believe it ! Absolutely jaw dropping! {via Lap’s Moment’s of Distraction }

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 . ...

If you recall I talked about lifeStation last year and Simon from Passive Technologies posted a comment letting me know that they have upgraded all their machines to MCE Vista from MCE XP. There is also a new lifeServer which boasts 6TB of storage and RAID 5 (though I cannot find out anywhere if this is 6TB of total storage or usable storage). On a separate note, this might be a good candidate to run Windows Home Server . ...

Microsoft has the beta version of their update catalog which is a one-stop-shop to get updates, drivers, hotfixes, etc. Although it is aimed for corporate users anyone can use it and it would help those running more than one machine at home to get all the updates once instead of downloading them again and again.

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). ...