MIT Technology Review is running an article that states that U.S. President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using GPS technology. Bush also instructed the Defence Department to develop plans to disable, in certain areas, an enemy’s access to the U.S. navigational satellites and to similar systems operated by others. The European Union is developing a $4.8 billion (euro3.59 billion) program, called Galileo. ...

Finally I got the high-speed up and running at home last night - yippee - its good to be back in civilization! This is only 2 mb dsl line - a little slower than the 3.0 megs I had back in the US, but certainly much better than the dial up we were on for the last 2-3 days (and no internet connectivity before that from home)! Well, now you will have the pleasure of more of my meaningless babble - ah the festive season - rejoice *grin*. ...

Lapdeep pointed this one my way. BBC has a very funny report on the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and how they are coping with the fighting! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Before you start reading this story , if you have a serious laughter problem, then please stop! ...

Well, you probably have heard of the new MSN Toolbar Suite that is their answer to Google’s desktop search. To install it you need to have IE 5.01 (if you want the popup blocker then IE 5.5+), XP or Win 2000 (with SP4) and Outlook 2000 (or higher) or Outlook Express 6.0 (or higher) if you need to search in emails and half-gig of recommended disk space. Feel free to check out a list of all the features . If you fancy checking it out, then you can download it for free too (its about 4.8 mb). I still have not tried it yet, will give it a spin and upload my findings over the holidays sometime (no time in the short term and no broadband at home). Has anyone else tried it? What have your experiences been? ...

If you ever thought that PInvoke was a pain in .NET, don’t fret, Adam Nathan has a VS.NET addin that you can get from here after using which you wondered, how the heck did I live without this! He also has a PInvoke.NET wiki for you to use and of course contribute to. ...

At work, recently I attended an excellent presentation given by a colleague where we talked about Debugging in general (across both Managed and Unmanaged code), and what the various categories are, and various tools at ones disposal, etc. I thought this post from Rico on how to find GC leaks was quite timely for that topic. [Listening to: City of Blinding Lights - U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb [Bonus Track] (05:48)] ...

This probably is no surprise to you (it sure was to me), but there is an excellent collection of extensions (@ the time of this post 228) for Firefox (you can also get to Mozilla and Thunderbird ). There are various categories and seem quite cool. I have not tried them yet, but am going to install some soon. Also not sure, if these are cross platform or do they depend on a platform basis. Anyways, if you have not heard of Firefox , then which planet have you been living on? If you are back from Saturn, then I would recommend to install it right away and have fun browsing. ...

.netcpu Corp , a small startup in Microsoft’s backyard is beginning to ship a tiny, 32-pin chip-like computer module that runs “.NET Embedded”, the same platform developed for use in the SPOT watches. The embedded software stack, called .NET Embedded, (shaded in blue in the architecture diagram below) contains the bootstrap code (to initialise the system on powerup), a Tiny HAL plus device drivers ( to control the underlying system hardware) and a Tiny CLR through which the device is programmed. ...

Tapestry has a bunch of comics they provide as RSS which contain some of my all time favourites ( B.C , Dilbert and Wizard of ID ) and wishing they add some more! Irrespective, it is pretty cool and if you want a good laugh in a day, then worth checking out. ...

To some of my friends who recently joined the hen pecked husbands association!

This is pretty idiotic (and funny). Since I recently moved from US to UK, I wanted to buy a adaptor for the 240v (and funny plugs) that are there in the UK for my Linksys router. So I find out their sales number here in the UK and give them a call and say I just want the power adaptor as mine is “broken”. Guess what they tell me? Sorry, can’t have one mate. Huh? What? Seems, like they don’t sell power adaptors, I would either have to buy a new router, or if mine is covered in warranty (which it is), then that would need to be replaced under that. Grrr…. ...

And ain’t it true. :) PS - click on the image to see the full size.

Thanks to Rohit for pointing this out, but if you are a Punjabi (and unlike me you are the literate lot and can read it), then you can google in Punjabi. To check it out browse over to http://www.google.com/intl/pa/ and have fun!

Robert Hensing writes a very interesting and controversial article where he recommends not to use any kind of passwords on a Windows network? Why you ask? Well because passwords are very easily cracked and worms such as Agobot / Phatbot / Polybot / SDBot / RBot / etc. ship with boat-loads of dictionaries of passwords. Not to mention that either automated or human attackers don’t even need to guess the password as there are many hacking tools that will let a miscreant sniff your network traffic to get the authentication material for the LM, NTLM and Kerberos protocols and then brute-force that material back into a working password. You can try and protect the network with segmentation, encryption (IPSec etc.) and even 802.1x , etc. but really they just workaround with the inherent vulnerability in your network which is - the password. ...

It seems that a routine software upgrade knocked out 80% of the UK govt. PC’s at the Dept. for Work and Pensions. Though the article mentions Microsoft and EDS, it does not mention the real reason for the issue, just says that “Staff at the DWP found that they were unable to use their desktop computer after a number of technical glitches knocked out 80,000 of the department’s 100,000 terminals.” ...

Does anyone know if Xbox games are protected by region just as DVD’s are? E.g. I bought my XBox in USA, and if I buy a game here in London, would that work in the XBOX or it won’t? I forget, but someone was mentioning to me the other day that it wont. Any ideas?

Since, I am new to London, I would like to get your perspective on which are the good restaurants in the London area? What gems do you hold dear to your heart and wish to share so some poppers like me can also enjoy them? Sure, I have checked out the usual suspects , in addition to the ones I know from USA. ...

I am not a big gamer - I hardly ever play a game, the only one I have finished (without any cheat codes) is Halo and I loved it! After, reading the CNN review on Halo2, I cannot wait for all my stuff to reach here from California and then go and buy this. Have any of you played this? What do you think? Is there someone in London who I can come and meet and see what this looks like? ...

As I start working on some stuff, I have been thinking of this. Essentially when you are dealing with mobile devices, by their very nature they are disconnected in nature, and not always on a network (such as desktop or laptop). In multi-user environments, the challenge is how to you keep the data concurrent between the “online” and “offline” version? Typically there are two scenarios either you do optimistic concurrency or pessimistic concurrency. The earlier being a device (rather a client/user), submits both the currents and previous state and then the data is updated only if there have not been any changes since the device last synched. Pessimistic locking is when the application locks all the records the device intents to update - this of course is not a good idea. ...

Addison-Wesley and Developmentor have provided TheServerSide.NET with the entire book of Essential XML Quick Reference for free download. Essential XML Quick Reference is for anyone working with today’s mainstream XML technologies. It was specifically designed to serve as a handy but thorough quick reference that answers the most common XML-related technical questions.It goes beyond the traditional pocket reference design by providing complete coverage of each topic along with plenty of meaningful examples. Each chapter provides a brief introduction, which is followed by the detailed reference information. You can get it from here . ...

Well this is probably old news, but now GMail allows pop access , not sure if many people will use it or not including me since I like to be able to access my emails anywhere (especially at work) and the searching emails as usual is damn good. If you however do download it to Outlook then I would suggest installing Lookout , atleast your searches in Oulook would be as good as Google (I had an earlier post on it here and here ). ...

Is the new MSN Search (Beta) any better than Google? I still use google as my primary search engine, but have played around a little with this, though not quite seriously to pass any judgement on it (yet), though it certainly seems much better than their previous release . I will try and use it more and post my findings here, till then what do you guys think? ...

Adam Nathan writes , about a “special” version of the .NET Framework 2.0 (Beta 1) , which if you use to run your managed code, then gives Microsoft feedback on what portions of the .NET Framework and Win32 api you use and are dependent on. The idea is to help MS maintain backward compatibility as newer versions of the framework ship and also help them prioritise their things to do. ...

Well as you can tell, I thought of trying out the new skin called Luxinterior Light , earlier I had Luxinterior Dark running. It seems with the days quite dark (and grey) here in London and with darkness coming around 4:30ish in the afternoon, it was perfect time to add some “cheer”. This one though now seems too cheerful to me *grin*. Do you prefer anyone or even care? Does anyone even come here and sit and read all my gibberish…. ? ...

Extremetech has an article evaluating the US release of Bow-Lingual which aims to translate “dog” to “English”, i.e. converting simple dog barks to phrases. There is a wireless mic that hooks up to the dog’s collar and a unit that you hold to see the result. When the dog barks or whines, the recording device is triggered which then records raw, unfiltered sound for the next three seconds. After recording, the sample is segmented into four equal length audio components, each coming in around .75 seconds in length, each of which is broken down into voice prints and matched again a “database of voice prints”. ...