I created a new area called Sandbox; for those who have worked with me previously can understand what this means. That is not a blog, just a place for me to start uploading some bits and seeing how they exist in the world or cyberspace. :) Right now there is nothing much there that is publicly going to be reached, but you can try hitting it at www.desigeek.com/sandbox . ...

Microsoft is readying more than just 64-bit Windows releases. It’s also developing 64-bit versions of a handful of its key desktop and server apps. You an get all the updates here . Now, I only need to know when they ship MCE in 64 bit so I can really use the AMD64 I am planning on buying. :)

Then waddle over here and check it out.

You might have seen this already, if not, MSDN has a six-part article extensively examining the data structures in .NET 2.0 covering the usual suspects and then some not-so-usual unless you have written some compilers such as BST’s, graphs, red-back trees, etc. Quite an interesting read when you have some time.

How many times have you wished you had someone to talk to when the order you placed online is botched? I know I had this recently, when Amazon screwed up and I was waiting to talk to someone and in the end had to email a general customer service account and go back and forth on that many times before it was fixed - something that would take only a couple of minutes on the phone. So, if you can relate to me, here are two sites that might be of help. The first one is specially for Amazon and eBay and the second one has a few companies such as Dell, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, United, American Airlines, T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, Sprint, etc. If you have any more information (numbers/links/etc) that you would like me to add here please let me know. ...

Chandu Thota has a pretty cool application called BogMap . What is a BlogMap you ask? It is a place where blogs meet maps and location. You can also Use BlogMap you can geo-code your blog, browse already geo-coded blogs and search for blogs. Once geo-coded, you can get your own BlogMap location using a simple url. This is me: ...

Interesting article in USA Today about by the year 2020, China and India will be vying with the United States for global economic supremacy, the nation’s top intelligence analysts predict, and al-Qaeda will have withered away - only to be replaced by smaller, more splintered but equally deadly groups of terrorists. The National Intelligence Council issued its once-every-five-year look at the future of the globe Thursday, contrasting optimism about dramatic global economic growth with concern that the same cyberpathways fueling economic development are also hastening the spread of violent, radical Islam. ...

Got money to burn? PC Magazine is here to help, and they are not talking Champaign kisses and caviar dreams; they are talking about the hottest entertainment technology money can buy. Their roundup covers everything from 61-inch plasma displays to media hubs for piping tunes throughout your house. Go ahead and ogle . Your $150 million lottery haul snuggles safely in the mattress. Another $100 million, left you by the cat lady for rescuing Hieronymus, rests pleasantly under the petunias. You own both Park Place and Boardwalk. Life is good, but then Ed McMahon saddles you with a check for a million - annoying pocket change hardly worth hiding in the sock drawer. What to do? ...

Thanks to Murty for pointing out this tale of a buffalo that simply refuses to be milked without its daily dose of BBC! And it’s not quite the British broadcaster that the animal is addicted to but khaini - a form of chewing tobacco that is popularly called " buddhi bardhak choorn “, or BBC, in Jharkhand. For its owner Mangra Munda, a resident of Lohardagga district, the addiction has turned into a headache. For along with fodder, he has to shell out plenty of tobacco. His buffalo demands the chewing tobacco six times a day and makes life difficult if it doesn’t get adequate amounts. ...

 Dell has done it again. The company has just released a 24" LCD monitor for your computer at an amazing price. While most other comparable monitors cross $2k - their’s costs only $1200! The monitor also includes 4 usb ports and a 6-in-1 card reader supporting CompactFlash (type I and II), SD/mini-SD card, Sony Memory Stick / MS Pro, Smart Media and Hitachi Microdrive. The display also offers a load of connectivity options, including VGA, DVI, composite, component, and S-video connections. It also has integrated picture-in-picture (PiP) that works with any pair of inputs. The PiP lets you display a small window in one corner (user-selectable) or side-by-side windows. The addition of component inputs is welcome and makes the unit suitable as a small HDTV monitor. But the DVI input does not support HDCP content protection, so you can’t use it with HDTV sources that require HDCP. Since this is primarily a desktop PC monitor, it also lacks HDMI connections. The on-screen display (OSD), is in color (the first time I have seen one). You can read up the full review (including pictures) here . ...

Watch this space as I add my drool factors here - things that mostly I probably don’t need - but would love to get my hands on. Meenakshi, if you are reading, think of this as the wish-list for the presents. :o). As they say boys with toys after all!! This is not to be confused with the .food category.

One of my colleagues, Jim Tallant, encountered a problem with Win2k Server, running in an Application Center environment, where very high CPU cycles threatened to bring down the server farm. All servers in the farm showed high CPU utilization (60 to 70%) whereas they normally run in the 15 to 20% range. We determined that this high CPU consumption was caused by excess time spent in the .Net memory garbage collection routine. The statistic “% Time in GC” on these servers was in the range of 40 to 60%. ...

Process Explorer 9.0 was released a few days ago. The new features in it are: System information dialog has per-CPU graph option with hyperthreaded and NUMA processor information A Users menu duplicates the functionality of Task Manager’s Users tab, showing Terminal Services session information and supporting logoff, disconnect, and sending messages On XP SP2 and higher the TCP/IP tab displays the thread stack at the time an endpoint was opened The tray icon context menu includes the shutdown menu Search engine option to use Google or MSN Search Object address column is available for the handle view Image signatures can be checked on-demand in the process properties dialog Process explorer is digitally signed with Sysinternals’ Verisign Class 3 signing certificate ...

Seattle Times has a story from the RSA Conference , where surprisingly they find Windows is more secure than Linux. No, this is not a study done by Microsoft. They compared Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3 running databases, scripting engines and Web servers (Microsoft’s on one, the open source Apache on the other). Their criteria included the number of reported vulnerabilities and their severity, as well as the number of patches issued and days of risk — the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued. On average, the Windows setup had just over 30 days of risk versus 71 days for the Red Hat setup, their study found. “That’s a very surprising statistic, and I must say the first time I saw this statistic I thought you messed with my database,” Ford said to Thompson. Their presentation started jokingly, with Ford reeling off Windows jabs and praising the virtues of freely shared software that’s developed collaboratively over the Internet. But they concluded with statistics showing that the Windows setup had a clear advantage over the Linux alternative. ...

Google competitor A9 has Company > Yellow Pages on A9.com a nifty new thing where you can see street-level photos along with the Yellow Pages on Amazon.com. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street. The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. The cities currently covered are: ...

And about time I guess too. MS has finally announced that they are going to learn from Firefox and start working on v7.0 of IE with a beta shipping this summer. With the recent Longhorn announcement also shipping around then, lots of stuff happening.

Ah, some excellent gems…

If I had know of this a couple of days ago, life would have been much easier as I was trying to get TurboTax from the US from Kumud. Most e-mail providers impose limits on the size of message that you can send or receive. If you have trouble sending large files to certain people, or want to avoid clogged mail arteries or the risk of reaching an overstuffed mailbox that will bounce your message back, there is a free and easy alternative called YouSendIt that works every time - and you can send files up to 1GB in size. All you need to do is type in the destination address, select the file you want to send, and (optionally) type in your e-mail address and an accompanying message. It’s a Web-based service: the recipient gets an e-mail with a download link that’s good for seven days. Now, the only thing I want to try is, if the browser times-out when trying to upload huge attachments. ...

If you ever are in a situation where you need to identify production code issues or perf. issues, etc. (and who has not been there), then I would recommend checking out AppSight Black Box - a “kick-ass” product that I had an opportunity to play with sometime last year. They have solutions covering both .NET and J2EE and is very very impressive - I just want to know how the heck do they do it. You have to see it in person to believe it - and I have grilled these guys extensively using some real code, so if the demo looks to good to be true, well it is true! Here is the excerpt from their site which really does not do them justice: ...

I think I just found my business case for a Bike! :). Meenakshi (my wife remember), is dead against me getting one, but if I think I bought this helmet first, then I have to get a bike to match the helmet…. :). Now lets just hope she is not reading this…

If you recall I had recently posted about the release of Enterprise Lib. My colleague, Hisham Baz has a post on how to get started with the Ent. Lib . If you are new to it and want to know more about it, that is a good place to start. ...

Indigo is now out in the open and you should see a lot of flurry about it soon. This is cool. I have had a chance to look at bits and pieces of it in the past and could not talk much about it due to NDA, but that hopefully can change soon. [Listening to: Track 03 - New Artist (38) - New Title (38) (05:05)] ...

Got this via Megha. This actually is not new, I remember many years ago in India some inventor-dude doing the same thing and driving around to Nirulas (slurp, smack, drool).

Thanks to Noni for pointing this out to me. You can get the history of all (I think) languages all the way from the 50’s to today - quite interesting. [Listening to: BabyBaby - - (06:55)]