Karan pointed me this one, you need to read through the letter - its hilarious! And my dad has encountered a similar thing in real life, except from Australia.

I am quite happy with the case I have for my MCE, but I came across the following to new cases, which if I had to buy now I would seriously consider - they are on opposite end of the spectrum and depending on what you need and your budget one might be a better fit than the other. DIGN X15e Aluminium Enclosure Enlight 7473 Home Media Chassis Drool on! :) ...

A fellow Avanader is on the way to Seattle and I was helping him find deals for Fry’s and that that is probably the only thing I miss about the US! There is nothing close to that in the UK! The trip down memory lane has been quite nostalgic for me. :)

Picked this up on one of the communities at work, and is possibly a true case of Geeks Gone Wild ! Make sure you have your volume turned on to appreciate the effort gone into it. I want to know where does this chap live and the cost of electricity, especially on this cold, foggy, mysterious night here in London :) ...

So, if I want to do something like this , and install Mac OS X on an old machine (with an Intel x86 CPU) then where do I get a version of Mac OS X (10.4.1 I think will work), so I can play around with this? I have never had a Mac so not sure where to start. Thoughts? ...

If you read my earlier post you would know you could not get WinFX running with the RTM version of VS 05, but now that MS publicly just released the Nov CTP of the WinFX that is compatible with VS 05 RTM, so you can breathe in peace. :) As always there are three pieces you need to get to, one is the WinFX Runtime itself (2.68 mb), two is the VS 05 WinFX Extensions (2.32 mb), and lastly the SDK (929 mb - yep its big) if you desire. The SDK is just documentation and does not include the runtime. ...

Office 12 Beta 1 was release today, unfortunately due to various NDA clauses, I cannot get into too much detail at this time. But slashdot has the story and there are screen shots of it by pcmag here . All I can say is that this is probably the only time I am more excited about this than when I moved from Lotus Notes to Outlook 98. :) ...

Microsoft announces that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server “Longhorn” Small Business Server and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses will only be released as 64-bit. More on the story here .

From PCMag, Sony’s incredible gaffe - creating a DRM applet that loads prior to the operating system - has caused an incredible furor. Sony agreed to suspend the program , but that’s not all. Now the rest of the world is piling on. Microsoft now says it will delete the rootkit directly with its anti-spyware program, and it’ll be included in the December version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool. And it looks like the Macintosh, which is also affected by the rootkit , might still be at risk. ...

Well you can’t. As you might be aware that the .NET runtime are different between Visual Studio 2005 RTM and WinFX Sept CTP build, and the only way you can get this to work together is fall back on Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 - which is the only supported version as of now. On the other hand in about a week or so from now, a new WinFX build is supposed to be publicly released, which can coexist and keeps each other happy. If you can wait for a week I could recommend the latter. ...

Both Meenakshi’s and my parents and everyone else in the family is OK in Delhi after the blasts. Also been calling around and asking and of all the people I can get in touch with from the extended family to friends, as far as I know everyone is fine.

At long last VS.NET 2005 (code named Whidbey) and .NET 2.0 are shipped! You can download them from MSDN, and don’t really need to wait till Nov 7th (the official launch date). w00t! :o)

I guess it was eventually meant to happen, Google has a database coming out soon called Google Base (which will be available at http://base.google.com ), and their intent is if it can be posted online in any fashion then use their database. And all that information will be available through searches and can be integrated with google maps. Seems more revenue for them, and also they seem to be targeting the likey of eBay and Craigslist. You can read up an interesting post at arstechnica on the subject.

Meenakshi forwarded me the post from C Enrique Ortiz, who has a very funny and true, a Developer’s Top 10 replies when code doesn’t work . :) My personal favorites are number 6 and 2.

Thanks to Rohit for pointing this out, but the Curry and Rice girl is a riot ! If you are not Indian (or of Indian background) or don’t have any Indian friends or spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends, you might not get the context. Make sure the volume on your speakers are turned on high! :)

Seems like Microsoft has said , the XP SP3 bits going around are fake as it is not sp3; not sure who to believe, in any case you should not be updating any “real” machine you use and depend on.

Avi pointed out this one to me. Google has a rss reader called Google Reader which to me seems quite similar to Bloglines , why I would use one over the other is not clear to me. ...

HotFix has a list of some of the things that are going to be included in XP SP3; PC World also talks about it .

I think this is the new way to go , drink on!

I stumbled upon this via a colleague of mine who was answering a different question on our internal newsgroups at work. Paul Wilson shows how you can have multiple forms in ASP.NET

Check out the new features which are part of the next Sharepoint release .

WSJ has a very interesting story on how Microsoft had to restart a lot of Vista features from a clean code base and throw away a lot of work done on existing windows code base over the years; and from my point of view, the fact that it took this long is surprising, but as they say better late than never. ...

Zilla Smash has some excellent hi-res screen shots of the new Beta Yahoo Mail and as someone else said, boy does gmail look clunky in comparison!

Seems like there have been many cases where the iPod Nano gets scratched very easily, making it useless for viewing pictures and song names, etc that is playing. The Register has an article covering it including and the thread on apple’s newsgroup is already up to 240 posts on the issue. ...

Hats off to the mono guys who got this running on Nokia 770 (their new internet appliance running Linux); screen shot here .