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). ...

The Computer Languages timeline was posted in one of the internal Avanade communities by a colleague and is pretty cool. Seems like Fortran was the “father” (or “mother” depending on your perspective) of all languages. 😄

Microsoft has released a update (KB933493 for those interested) for Outlook 2007 which helps improve some perf issues when your PST files get very large. I have not seen this myself but then my PST files are approx 1.5gb. More details can be found at Neowin .

The WPF wiki on Channel 9 has a WPF Application Portfolio - some are cool and some are surprisingly useful. Many of these can be deployed with ClickOnce making it convenient. If you are not on Vista you will need the .NET 3.0 bits.

This surely can not do any good? Jamie who created TestDriven.NET is involved in a legal dispute with Microsoft. This is not he Microsoft I know and work with on almost a daily basis! Hopefully common sense will kick in. On a separate note, Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates - who is the saint and who is cut-throat villain of Geekdom? Cult of Mac at Wired has an interesting read on the subject. ...

HTC just released a new phone here in the UK called HTC Touch . Not only is this very cool but is something you can touch, feel (and buy) today in the UK unlike the over-hyped iPhone . 😛 ...

If you wanna kill some time and get amused at the same time, check out ExtremeTech’s Wacky Mouse Showdown .

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: ...