I was trying to setup Sharepoint “v3” which is part of Office 2007; the Beta 1 Technical Refresh installs without a problem, but when I try and configure Sharepoint it fails in Step 2 and I get the error shown below. You can click on the image to see the full size. However, when I trawl through the log file, I did find a few exceptions, a couple of which are listed below. The only reason the font is small on those is so it would fit and render fine in here. You can copy and paste that in notepad or something and see if in a bigger font; alternatively you can download the log file (see the end of this posting). ...

Engadget has a comparison of the HTC Wizard and the new HTC Hermes which should be coming out soon.

cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! ...

I have finally bitten the bullet and plan to transition over to a Windows Mobile phone from my current Sony Ericsson (I have a P910i). The HTC Hermes is the phone I would be moving to, the ability to get email on the fly (blackberry style) is the main motivation. HTC Hermes (also know as i-mate JASJAM) is going to be released in a about 2-3 months and is ideal for my needs. You can read a review of this phone here . ...

I had very seriously considered getting a Mac Mini - the new ones with the Intel CPU’s. But now that Microsoft has announced that there won’t be any EFI support in Vista , I am not so sure of getting a one now. I am a Wintel guy, and the reason for getting a Mac was from a pure geek-value in the short term, but in the longer term was to install Windows and use it as another machine. Since I have never done any development on the Mac and don’t plan to do anytime soon, if I cannot run Vista on it, then this is just a very expensive toy - and I don’t make that kind of money. :) ...

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity. - Albert Einstein

Got this amazing call center movie from Kumud :), its about 12 mins long and you of course need to have the sound on or have headphone. Also when I was looking at it, their servers might be overloaded or something and it was very slow, so in case thats not eased off then you just need to be patient. ...

Thanks to Abhijit for pointing this one, and its awesome, if you ever wondered how would Microsoft redesign the iPod packaging, then fear not, your prayers have been answered - check it out . :)

In case you were wondering why your Indigo / WCF Jan CTP code does not work with the Feb CTP, then you can find a list of all the breaking changes published by MS. It is interesting to note that Microsoft is changing the namespace so late in the game, but I would rather they get it right now and make breaking changes as opposed to when Indigo ships. ...

The first time I heard of Microsoft’s Origami Project, was this morning in the papers ; the official site does not say much; but I was pointed to this leaked video , by a good friend who shall remain name less (don’t want to get him in trouble, now do I?). :) I have been told it runs some version of XP, but not sure on what exactly (embedded vs. regular), also with Vista round the corner, not sure if thats a good idea or not. In any case check out the video it does seem pretty interesting. ...

The software that one uses for blogging is interesting - if you are a “serious blogger“ (now there is an oxymoron), then you are tied to one platform or “engine“. What if you want to move from that, what do you do then? Either you give up your existing blog and move to the new one (in the process losing all your old posts, etc), or you somehow convert the data from one to the other. For example. right now I am running a modified version of .Text on my blog. Never really bothered to upgrade to Community Server 1.0 (CS), now that CS 2.0 is out , I am thinking of moving to that, but there is no official path to move my data from .Text to CS 2.0. I could try and move it to CS 1.0 and then from CS 2.0 - a process which seems quite clunky. Alternatively, I could write a took myself which does that, but then do I have the time? Another interesting option seems to be Logahead , which boasts of the first AJAX blogging and does seem to have a few cool features , has anyone taken it out for a spin? (You can play with the demo here .) The problem though remains the same, how do I move my existing data to that new “platform”. ...

You have have heard of Google Pages by now; if not check it out . I got a test page published just to see how it looks, it seems simple enough and seems to be a good answer to those who cannot afford some of the fancier solutions like Frontpage, etc. Now if only I could publish pages to somewhere else like my own domain. ...

Yes, I have been alive! Check out the Bugs being reported these days (thanks to Karan for the link) :)

You can get your own word spelled using flickr. Below is how “amit” is spelled: ...

I have gotten so much spam using the comments that the only way for me to manage them is to turn them off. Yes I know there is an easy way to fix it where I ask for confirmation before a comment is posted but I have not had the time to change the code, test it and then upload it to the server. I might just upgrade to CS 2.o when it RTM’s. Till then continue using the the Contact page and mention the post in there as well. ...

Check out the soon-to-be-released Origen AE S210 which among many other features has bays for 12 HDD’s, and a 12" touchscreen LCD! Not sure on the damage it will cause (£££), but if its reasonable, then I would need to find a business case when Vista ships to get my hands on one of these :).

Got this via one of the Avanade communities (thanks Wes), and is just funny - does not matter if you are a geek or not - you need to see the Crash Difference video detailing out some experiences of using and owning and loving a Mac! :)

I have been eyeing the CLR via C#, Second Edition , I don’t have the first edition, can anyone comment on how good/bad would it be? Of course it will be published next month, and I suppose I can get more reviews then.

We have just started to look for a house - why build someone else’s equity when you can build your own. I got to admit its a drag! And the fact we just started and people go on for months doing this, I don’t know how. It is just a big pain in the butt. My sympathies to all those going through the same thing. If you do know good areas in London where we can live please let me know? I need it to be close to Tube and preferably within Zone 2. ...

Stephen Toub at Microsoft warns about a scam where people have been getting mailings (not emails) offering them MSJ - this a scam as MSJ is not published anymore! Don’t send them your hard earned money. 

If you go to the Computer Management tool in Longhorn (Dec CTP), then you will something called the System Stability Chart, which shows you how stable the system has been including Software Installs/UnInstalls, Failures (including Apps, Drivers, Hardware, Windows), etc. Its pretty cool and should help narrow down cause of failures - quite helpful in a corporate environment. Here is a screen shot from one of my VMs. ...

Contract inheritance (via CLR interface inheritance) is pretty cool allowing you to support versioning and contract aggregation in WCF, the catch though is if you have a Duplex interface then the callback interface must follow the same hierarchy. So if your primary interface say is IMyInterface which inheritances from ISomeInterfaceOne and ISomeInterfaceTwo, then the callback interface also needs to have the same chain or you will get an InvalidContractException. Here is an example from MSDN: ...

Charles talks about how installing WAIK on a functioning VS 05 or TFS system will fail and screwing up the .NET 2.0 runtime bits; best to avoid doing that for now.

If you are writing high-perf. managed applications, all the old-world advice from the days of good old COM is still valid. But you do need to think of a few other things such as how the CLR JIT would change things, or the Exception Handling, or Threading and syncing up, or possibly the GC and Allocation Profiles? While this MSDN article is old (now), it still is excellent Food for Thought when it comes to writing high-perf. apps. ...

If you wanted to use the ThreadState property (which should only be used for debugging and not sync.), to find out if a thread is running. Since the Running state has a value of 0, you cannot do a bit test to discover this state. But you could do something like this to get the same result: if ((state & (Unstarted | Stopped)) == 0) //yea, its Running!