Windows Live Writer, after a lot of talk , finally has an update in the shape of Beta 2 and in addition to the obvious ones (such as support of Sharepoint 2007 and Windows Live Spaces) there are more features. Some of the new features are table editing, better category support, new API’s (which I cannot attribute having never programmed against the API), etc. However, the plugin section does seem to finally be integrated better since I last saw it which was a while ago. ...

I must say after getting used to viewing TV (and Movies) via a MCE - not having one is sorely missed. Recently the machine was randomly hanging and a few blue-screens and as it turns out one of my memory sticks went bad which was causing the issues. Although I had bought the memory from Crucial , over two years ago - they have a lifetime warranty. I called them and they immediately volunteered to change both the sticks (as I was running them in dual-channel). I was running the machine fine on one stick albeit a little slow, but I decided to send in both sticks and get things back to “normal”. Now I have been waiting for just over a week to get back the replacement memory. Which means for just over a week and we don’t have a MCE running at home and boy I was surprised that we miss it! ...

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.

I have seen this question being asked a number of times in the forums and thought I’d post about it. What is a Google Sitemap, who better to answer but Google: A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never penalized for using this service. We cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index. Over time, we expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as we refine our processes and better understand webmasters’ needs. ...

Then check out IP Spotting , I am not so sure what the intent of this site is, but nevertheless it is sure geeky (and cool) . Here are the results when I am connected via HSDPA . Score: your IP address has scored: 8. Of the 291663 IP’s spotted so far, this is ranked: 178179. ...

If you were in the market for a new laptop especially a Tablet then Dell is coming ! Not only that - they have some awesome ultra-thin Monitors which are only 0.5 inch thick and will support HD resolutions and allow you to daisychain multiple monitors. These were originally showcased the concept at the CES earlier in January. Better start saving up! ...

After running Vista x64 (since RTM back in November) on my laptop I have finally rolled back to Vista x32. I did not have any driver issues for the most part it was more of incompatibility of some x64 bit app’s. Does remind me of this: Using Wndows Vista is Torture

More details here and screen shots here .

After a few initial hiccups , I got Orcas installed and up and running but trying to do something simple with it has been challenging. For example if you create a new simple WinForm (I only tried this with c#) and open the default Form in the solution you get the following error: The service Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.ISelectionContainer already exists in the service container. ...

I was trying to install Orcas VSTS Beta 1 on a Vista x32 machine and the setup failed as shown in the screen shot below and the logs were not very helpful either. [05/16/07,06:13:16] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Error code 87 for this component means “The parameter is incorrect.” [05/16/07,06:13:16] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Setup Failed on component Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5 [05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5 is not installed. ...

In addition to 3G speed results I had posted earlier, below are the HSDPA and 3.5G speed results from home. Click on the image below to see them in full size. Summary: Upload: Download: ...

Over the weekend I got a HSDPA / 3.5G USB modem and here are the 3G speed results of that from home. Click on the images to see them in full size. I’ll post the 3.5G results soon as well. Summary: Download Results: Upload Results: ...

Don’t believe me? Then check this out.

What? Is that even English? I’ll get to answering it in a second. Not sure how many of you know, but for a very long time I have been wanting to do a Masters and also dabble in the world of Academia Research. I have done some commercial research in the past which I thoroughly enjoyed but never done any Academia research - well not yet anyway’s. ...

Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPhone

Vertigo has a very cool WPF application called Family.Show which exploits many of the new WPF features (data binding, sexy visualization, styles, templates, animation, etc.) and is a good example of the new “Web + Desktop” app hybrids combining the advantages of both paradigms. Family.Show is a genealogy application that you can use to build your family tree. The timeline implementation is very cool and you can “speed or slow down” time and see how your family tree (or forest) ...

Seems like Microsoft and Yahoo discussed a merger where Microsoft would have bought Yahoo; although the deal is off, if it had gone thru the deal would have been worth $50 billion!

Keeping up with their cool AJAX implementation (part of Yahoo Mail), Yahoo has now implemented a Web version of their Yahoo Messenger. I like the interface - fairly simple which makes it good. Now just waiting for the Vista version of Yahoo Messenger .

I love Outlook but in 2007 there are some irritating things. For example if I shutdown Windows with Outlook running, next time it will complain that Outlook was not closed properly and does a file check - so I close Outlook wait for the process to finish before starting to shutdown Windows. Also every now and then I get the reminders with no reminders as you can see below. ...

I stumbled across this BBC story quite by accident - a driver taking a disused Boeing 737 seemed to get lost at night when transporting the plane when he reached a road with not enough road clearance and abandoned the plane in the middle of the road! This is quite funny though the poor guys who are inconvenienced by this would beg to differ. ...

Google has a new service called Voice Local Search where you call a toll-free number (in the US) 800-GOOG-411 (for those not from America, 411 is the Information line, similar to 911 is the emergency line). You can use this by category or name of the business and other than the cost of your call it is free. It is handy if you don’t have access to a computer and has the same data as that is found on Google Maps. While you can use this with a mobile, Google is recommending to use Google SMS instead from a Mobile. ...

Right, quick update on my previous post on Joost - I do have at the moment of writing this 998 Joost invitations; though still only 26 channels. And I don’t know what you guys are seeing, but the channels are not quite smooth and get quite jerky.

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 .Text) so I cannot articulate some of the under-the-cover fixes. Read up all the details here . ...

“…I’ll design software that’ll run on an OS we’re not using, built on components that aren’t installed, and that require networking components that aren’t installed.” (c) Marc Jennings

One of my colleague, Brian, pointed out the Software Engineering Proverbs - which are quite priceless. It sure does remind me of the Top 10 replies from a developer (when code breaks).