What is a collation? Before I get into the exception details, a collation is something that defines what the bit pattern looks like for each character and is used sorting, ordering and comparisons. You can read more details here . When I had originally upgraded from CS 2.0 to 2.1 Beta 1, I had started to get a collation error in SQL – but only when I clicked on any specific tag to see posts listed by that tag. I had posted this to the CS forums with no luck . Now, I had selected the default SQL collation when I was installing it on one of my dev boxes at home. After profiling SQL Server, the culprit was the stored procedure called “cs\Tags\Get”. ...

Community Server 2.1 went RTM yesterday and I am not quite happy. Didn’t they just release the RC1 just a few days ago (on August 4th to be precise) What is the point of pushing a RC1 for 5 days! After I spend a considerable amount of time testing and upgrading to RC1, the RTM was released. Yes, I am irritated by the fact I have to do some more testing, but I am more irritated about the fact, why bother releasing a RC if you are not going to be really testing with it? Isn’t the point that let people use it for a while and fix issues found and then go from there? Seems like just releasing it to tick a box on some process. Grr…. ...

I came across ieaddons.com via the IE team’s official blog and till then had not heard of it. I have been using IE 7 Beta 3, and despite my original issues with it, I do seem to like it – Firefox is still my primary browser though. Speaking of IE, there are a few things that I do like which I wish is going to be in Firefox. One of them, when opening a new tab it open right next to the active one, instead of opening all the way in the end – which helps a lot when doing the research. Also I like the clean and smaller look of the toolbar – giving me more real estate for the web pages. One of the things I don’t like though is the Find functionality in a page. I don’t like the window which shows up, I personally prefer the way Firefox does it at the bottom of the page and finding as I type and also the option to highlight all the words on the page. ...

Being the good citizen that you are, you have Automatic Updates switched on and you find that Windows downloaded the updates and installed them. BTW, if you have not run Windows update recently I would recommend to do it now as there were a bunch of critical updates that were released yesterday. Also you should run Microsoft Updates instead of Windows update as that will pull down all the updates to all MS products installed and not just Windows. but now it bugs you every few minutes asking you to reboot. ...

Thanks to Karan for pointing this one to me. But instead of blocking everyone out of your wireless, if you got bandwidth to spare then why no have fun? Which is exactly what Pete Stevens did with this upside-down-ternet and secured his wireless in an alternate fashion. I think of these these days I’ll try this out – although I would have to scale down the speed as I need the a significant chunk because of VPN and VOIP. ...

MSNBC might not like it , but as Long Zheng shows, Vista’s speech recognition actually works .

NeoSmart highlights about the fact that there is a possibility that .NET 3.0 might RTM in a couple of months. What would this mean? Well a couple of things. One, hopefully MS has gotten their act together and stop making huge breaking changes in every public drop. While I understand that every CTP is still early in beta and with the nature of these things there will be changes, but you should see the number of breaking changes that are being made so late in the game. And the changes are not small, but classes, methods, parameters, etc. being changed, moved, renamed, etc. Which makes all this quite irritating – and it seems quite similar to experiences shared with a few other colleagues of mine had with VSTS and Team Foundation Server. And two, hopefully there would be documentation! Currently, one of the chapters for the WCF book I am writing is on Peer-2–Peer networking and there is almost no information publicly available! Which as you can imagine makes life a bit interesting, though reflector is your friend in such situations. ...

Meenakshi (don’t bother checking the link, she has not started blogging), also got her new phone – a Qtek 8500 yesterday. And after a few hours of grumbling as she had to manually update her Outlook contacts with the phone numbers before she could sync. it up she seems to be happy with it and I think she really likes it. 😄 ...

I had been testing the CS 2.1 RC1 over the weekend at home and after it seems everything seems to be working, I upgraded the production blog to the latest bits as well. If you see anything missing or any broken links then please let me know.

I have finally taken the plunge and am going to switch over to a phone running Windows from my existing Symbian based Sony Ericsson P910i . The fact I cannot get emails on the phone is the deal breaker and also since I upgraded to Office 2007, I cannot sync the phone with Outlook. I just ordered the HTC TyTn and I should be getting it in a week or so. ...

It might not seem like a big deal, and actually if you were not keeping an eye out then quite easy to miss. But now you can save locations with Google Maps. If you are like me and are a heavy user, then this feature has been in the waiting for a while. Check out the link for Saving location on the top right corner when you are in google maps . You will need a google account where your locations are saved. ...

Well, if you have ever wondered, Tess has a great post listing out the various reasons why. Well worth a read.

There is an excellent selection of google mash ups in the Part 1 and Part 2 at google map mania. Below is an excerpt for some of those are listed (but make sure to check those links for the complete list). Nearby - Nearby.org.uk is a site with heaps of UK (and Ireland) location based information. They have taken this information and created a customisable mashup application with a huge list of on-demand information layers you can overlay from various UK sites. Example site-feeds include info from wetroads.co.uk, cavedatabase.co.uk and Ports.org.uk to name a few. BlueGhost features Weather, traffic and rail info - BlueGhost UK Info was born out of the BBC Backstage Project and features real-time various information overlays for the UK on Google Maps. Toggle national weather, traffic and rail alerts on the Google Map. Interestingly, this is the first mashup code I’ve seen making use of the new zooming feature recently added by the Google Maps team. Green Brighton - vegetarian and vegan restaurants, organic veg boxes, recycling centres, permaculture gardens and meditation classes. London Hotels Mapped by Tube Station - TubeHotels.com plots the locations of hotels close to all tube stations in London. Search by station or specific hotel name and results get plotted on a Google Map. Each hotel in the list shows how far it is from the closest tube station. UK Handbag Theft Map - (Only works on IE) Crawl Planner Petrol Prices – Be careful, as you might end up spending more money driving to the petrol pump rather than saving any. Tourist Maps – quite handy if you get oodles of people visiting like we have been. 😄 UK Speed Cams Tap Water Quality for fish tanks (if you think something is fishy) 😄 Monopoly Pub Crawl UK Classifieds + Google Maps EventSites - UK Web 2.0 site employing Google Maps Old London Town - Crime/History Map Make sure you don’t open too many of these in various tabs of your browser (especially if you are using IE 7 Beta 3), it will slow down your system significantly. If you are using IE 7 Beta, opening them at the same time might even cause IE to crash (as I experienced). ...

You probably know that I am co-authoring a book along with a few other fellow Avanader’s and ex-Avanader’s who I call the Indigo Amigos. Who are these crazy people you ask? Brave enough to hang out with me. In addition to reading their names on APress or Amazon , but here are the links to their blogs/sites in ascending order: ...

I recently came across Microsoft Codename Max (cross-posted via Shawn ), which seems very promising however I have not had a chance to install it as it requires Jan CTP of WinFX and I currently have June CTP running on one of my primary machines. I could install a VM with that but honestly cannot be bothered. If you have had a chance to play with it I would love to hear your feedback? ...

I wanted to find out if anyone out there has read The Connection Machine - which essentially is a PhD thesis of the author’s (W. Danny Hillis) and seems to be something I would be interested in. The question I have is, has anyone read it and if so what do they think of it? And if you have it, can I borrow it to read it? ...

I have been looking at a few offline blogging tools and I am trying out BlogJet based on Adam’s recommendation who has been using it for a while. It seems to be OK thus far, but I have not had a chance to play with it except for a few hours and it seems to be promising. The only issue I have is it does not seem to support Unicode characters – at least not in the title – I do not know of the posts themselves. See the image below where my blog’s title is a bit messed up. ...

As you might have already heard that Microsoft will be pushing out IE 7 to every Windows desktop out there later this year using Windows Update. This will be pushed as a high priority update, which means for most users who automatically download and install this, they will get IE 7 - irrespective if they want to upgrade to IE 7 or not. If you are using IE then it is recommended to upgrade to IE 7 - or even better (IHMO), you should switch to Firefox. In any case, Microsoft also (thankfully) has delivered a toolkit that will disable the auto download and installer of IE 7. If you are sitting on a slow internet link (or close to you usage), then this might be a good thing to install as well. That way you can download IE 7 once and then locally install it on your network. ...

Continuing the Living dangerous theme I upgraded this blog to CS 2.1 Beta 2 . It’s a painful process (including smoke testing). Anyways it all seems to be working. I also added a couple of new things which are not very evident upfront. One being the completely automatic public turing test to tell humans and computer apart control (or better known as captcha control) - to get a better handle on spam and the other is a Google Sitemap generator that you can check out here . Both of these are addons to CS that are available from their download section . ...

It seems I cannot get enough of the adrenaline rush and like to live on the edge. I have further upgraded this blog to run on CS 2.1 (Beta 1) and is now using .NET 2.0 instead of v1.1. and also on the backend is using SQL 2005 instead of SQL 2000. Now all I need to do is sit and pray that nothing breaks. 🙈

If you use a RSS feed then you might not have seen this, but if you browse to the blog you would see that I upgraded to Community Server 2.0. I was running a modified version of .Text 95 and the upgrade to CS was a bit painful, mostly due to the fact that I did not want to lose all this data and there was not upgrade path from .Text. ...

I have been asked this everytime we get around to talking about Avanade (my current employer), now what does it mean. I did not know till now and had always wondered till now. But I came across this old archive (in another context) and now I know what it means: ...

The HDD on my work laptop crashed over the weekend - started with CRC errors and then went kaboom (not literally). While our IT folks are trying to recover the data off it as I type this, I wanted to know if you can recommend a cheap or free tool for backing up? I of course did not have the latest backups of my files - I use to till about a year ago and got lazy. This of course is a lesson learned the hard way ☹️. ...

Love thy neighbor (Click on the image to see it in full size)

I have used Vonage’s Click2Call functionality while I was in the US and loved it; they have finally released the same thing for the UK (finally)! If you don’t know what this is then read up on it here ; you can download it form here (3.0 mb).