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). ...

Thanks to Dee to pass this on - but this is cool in my opinion :) - as long as of course they continue to me made of foam! So, who is going to get me one of these?

Since my previous post , I have made some improvements to this - mostly around the installer and also the fact that there might be machines out there in the world who do not have Microsoft Ink installed. (duh!). If you have a Tablet PC or one of the SDK’s installed which give you the Ink bits then continue using ClickOnce - I would recommend to upgrade to the newest bits. ...

If you are a Sudoku fan, then check out my slightly modified version of the one published by Microsoft . I have it up using ClickOnce , so unfortunately you would need to use IE for the best experience. It might work with Firefox (I have not tried it yet). Also you will need .NET Framework 2.0 - if you don’t have it - the installer will point you in the right direction on how to get it. If you do need to get .NET 2.0 - make sure you are on a broadband connection as it might take time. ...

When the new IE 7 bits were originally released - I forget if it was late last year or early this year - I had installed them to have a play, but that was such a shoddy release that I quickly uninstalled and happily continued to use Firefox. A while after that Beta 1 was released which I did not touch and although some of my brave colleagues installed it and used it - I kept at a arms length. When Beta 2 was released, again I was quite vary, but after hearing a number of positive reviews (mostly on the stability) I tried to give it a spin again and installed it. I was using it only for about a week or so without too many complains till Beta 3 was released. Based on my positive experience with Beta 2, I assumed Beta 3 can only be the same if not worse! Oh how wrong I was - as someone said “Assumption is the mother of all screw ups”. :) Beta 3 in my experience is quite unstable and it does lock up the whole machine atlease once on a daily basis - required me to do a cool boot. In the process I of course loose any unsaved changes. Even when Microsoft eventually gets this right, at the end of the day, IE 7 is still just a catch up with Firefox and I have no plans to switch to that as my primary browser. ...

The minute I clicked “post” regarding my previous post, I knew it was a mistake - talking about the book I am co-authoring with a few other people (who most definitely are brighter than I am). Anyways, thanks to my dear friend Kumud for pointing me in the right direction and providing the inspiration by sending me the cartoon below. :) ...

Well I suppose I can talk a little about it now - after all it seems like happening. For the last few months I and a few other colleagues of mine are writing a book on Indigo, now called WCF (Windows Communication Framework). I personally am quite fascinated by communication and all the challenges that brings to the table. The book is titled “Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation” and will be released later this year. You can get more details on it here . As and when I get more time, look out for more details on Indigo from me here including details of the other authors - who I have nicknames as the Indigo Amigos. Feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions on Indigo and I’ll try my best to get back to you, however between fighting fires at work and trying to finish the chapters, I don’t have too much bandwidth left. :) ...

Bill Gates is handing over the reins of the role of Chief Architect to Ray Ozzie by July 2008 - two years is a long time, but nevertheless Bill would be missed by most of us.

Interesting new worm based on the likes of the movies such as the ring or feardotcom spreading via MSN. It is quite dangerous as it disables many security and antivirus software running such as antivirus, firewalls and even Windows programs like the Task Manager and RegEdit. It is easy to recognize, as you will get the following instant message - which downloads a avi (only that is an exe), when you run that your system is infected and all your contacts on MSN will be send the same instant message. ...