Ah, the political heat is in the air here in the US and the mudslinging is in full swing. Here are the Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals: 10. No estate tax for families with at least two U.S. presidents. 9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form. 8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton. 7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair. ...

NY Post reports that Google is working on a new browser (as reported on /. if you check www.gbrowser.com among other domains, they are taken by google). Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft. Google hired Joshua Bloch, one of the main developers for Java, from Sun. They also hired four people who worked on Internet Explorer. One of them, Adam Bosworth, is credited with being a driving force not only behind IE, Access too. Most recently, Google grabbed Joe Beda, the lead developer on Avalon . ...

Shawn Van ness has an excellent article, that spells out how event listeners can cause memory leaks, yep even when running in managed code. Steve Main sums it up pretty well: The main issue is the “lapsed listener” problem. This occurs when objects subscribe to events and subsequently get out of scope. The problem is that the event subscriber doesn’t get garbage collected because the event is still holding a reference to it inside of the event’s invocation list. The event subscriber is still considered reachable from the GC’s point of view. As such, it doesn’t get collected until the event goes out of scope (which is usually at application shutdown) which means that the event subscriber is effectively “leaked”. ...

Well after an interesting post on Forbes view on Linux and Microsoft and Karan’s lash back on the same I am back with more. Do I think is there an alternative to Windows? Absolutely! Is it for everyone? Well, if you believe the article in MIT’s Technology Review then probably yes. ...

Microsoft employee Raymond Chen (who seems to have loads of time on his hand) has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he’s saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he’s received at work since 1997. Not willing to stop there, Chen graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man’s malicious traffic. Cazh1 on the other hand has another take on the whole History of Spam thing - the impact of spammers changing message formats to get past the spam filters. ...

As Forbes writes (which I verbatim here), Is Linus Torvalds secretly working for Microsoft? That sounds crazy until you consider that lately, the free operating system he created, Linux, has been helping Microsoft close deals. Consider the deal that Microsoft snagged with the London borough of Newham, announced in early August. Looking to overhaul their computer systems, the Brits originally planned to dump Microsoft’s Windows and switch to open-source programs, including Linux. But when they commissioned a study to evaluate costs, they found it would be cheaper to stick with Windows. So they signed on for a 10-year deal. “We think the savings following the Linux route would have been about half what they were when following the Microsoft route,” says Richard Steel, Newham’s director of information and communications technology. ...

Microsoft released today another critical security update - Buffer Overrun in JPEG Processing (GDI+) Could Allow Code Execution (833987). A buffer overrun vulnerability exists in the processing of JPEG image formats that could allow remote code execution on an affected system. Any program that processes JPEG images on the affected systems could be vulnerable to this attack, and any system that uses the affected programs or components could be vulnerable to this attack. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. ...

Techdirt writes on how University of Texas is having WiFi Blues. Can’t they run this on a different frequency and allow their students to run it on a different one? Why does Bush country want to do everything the difficult way and different? ;) Slashdot is running a story about The University of Texas at Dallas banning independent WiFi networks to avoid interference with the university-run WiFi network. There’s just one (big) problem. The FCC has made it clear that only they have the right to regulate unlicensed spectrum . That was the point of the ruling they made just a few months ago telling airports they can’t stop anyone from setting up WiFi networks within the airport. At the same time, though, this does demonstrate some of the issues with unlicensed spectrum. As great as it’s been for generating massive growth for things like WiFi, interference is still a problem - and one that not enough people have paid attention to. ...

This is really funny and I am probably getting someone in trouble. I get pretty good logs for this blog, who gets on it from where, how long, etc. you know the drill. If your hold time with Dell Support (most of which is outsourced to India) is longer than normal then it is probably because of me *grin*. As you can see in the image below, seems like those guys are just too busy reading my blog and at last count had spend close an hour and a half here! You can click on the image to see the full size. ...

Karan has a very interesting post on the Paris Catacombs which was inspired by a story in the Guardian which stated the French police finding a real underground full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous” the police said. The whole thing was running off professionally installed electric and phone systems. Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor saying : “Do not try to find us.” ...

If you were looking for the car advertisement then please either scroll down or you can click here . Since there are a bunch of guys interested in the car, I was to keep this at the top of the blog.

This is an interesting factoid that Microsoft added as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 that lets users prevent data from being written to USB devices (via a registry key). But this is just the start, Longhorn is supposed to add more comprehensive “features”. Much has been made of the security risks posed by portable storage devices such as USB keys, or flash drives, music players like the iPod, and other small gadgets that can store vast amounts of data. Some fear that such tiny devices can be used to quickly copy sensitive data off business PC hard drives, or to introduce malicious software onto corporate networks. In the next version of Windows, Microsoft will give big companies an easy way to block use of such devices, while making it easier for consumers to connect their home systems to them. ...

I want to put up my 1998 Honda Accord EX on the market and if any of you are interested in buying an excellent vehicle then please leave me a comment here. I have brand new tires and brakes on the car. I also have all service records (Major, Minor and Oil Changes) and have kept the car in brand new condition both from the outside and inside with regular and timely servicing. The car looks great and is in excellent mechanical condition and needs no reconditioning. The engine is good with no leaks, etc. and the paint is glossy with the interior in a excellent condition too. This car has a clean title. ...

If you installed .NET Service Pack 1 you might notice that certain RSS feeds are broken and might return an HTTP Protocol Error. As Dare suggests , this is due to the fact that the HttpWebRequest class has been modified to make it more compliant to the HTTP spec. E.g. on the MS research feeds, this errors because the server returns the Content-Location header as “Content Location” (notice the space as opposed to the hyphen). You can check out the list of fixes in .NET SP1. ...

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility! ...

I first heard of KeyHole during one of Microsoft’s presentation of Avalon (which is Longhorn’s presentation subsystem). Keyhole is the 3D digital earth pioneer—the only company to deliver a 3D digital model of the entire earth via the Internet. Keyhole’s groundbreaking EarthStream™ technology combines advanced 3D graphics and network streaming innovations to produce a high performance system that runs on standard PC’s and commodity servers. Both high performance and intuitive to use, Keyhole’s solutions enable anyone to manipulate a rich map of the earth composed of imagery and feature information. Check them out at http://www.keyhole.com/ . ...

Well I have been out of the country travelling for the last three weeks and hence have not had the opportunity to blog - partly due to the fact that I was quite busy and partly due to the fact that could not find decent connectivity. Well I am headed back home tonight and should be back up and blogging sometime next week, though I would have a lot of catching up on work including loads of emails. ...

I did download the latest service pack for Windows XP, SP2 yesterday. First of all its pretty big, the ISO image was 475 mb so this is something you don’t want to download at a slow connection. Microsoft has said that you should be able to order the CD and get it shipped to you (its free). I was able to install the service pack on one of my test machines without any problems and am now in the process of installing it on a few other XP machines I have running. ...

Microsoft is Beta testing the Web version of MSN Messenger and about time I think since Yahoo has had the web version of their messenger service for a while now. This is of course useful if you are one a shared computer or not on your own computer and cannot (or do not) want to install the MSN Messenger. ...

This is my second part of the SQL Server 2005 posts; you can read the first part on Hosting the .NET runtime in SQL Server. In the CLR certain conditions such as out of memory, stack overflow, etc can bring down an app domain (or process), this cannot be allowed in SQL Server 2005 when latter is acting has a host (for the CLR) as it will affect reliability and performance - couple of the key goals for SQL Server. Similarly unconditionally stopping a thread (e.g. via Thread.Abort) can potentially leave some resources in a “hung” state. ...

Those who are unfortunate enough to know me, know I keep saying Common Sense is not very Common (and how true it is). VS Mag has an article that list out some best practises for ASP.NET though they do it from a performance perspective, I feel everyone should do these irrespective what their perf. requirements are: Use Page.IsPostback - There is a lot of stuff one does when the page loads the first-time, no need to keep doing it again and again. ...

My dear friend Mario pointed me to this and it is hilarious! Make sure your speakers are on and enjoy!

If you live (or ever lived) in the San Francisco Bay Area (also know as the Silicon Valley), you would know that boosterism has a long part of the valley’s culture as much as Technology and Money is. This Sunday in the paper there was an excellent perspective on with the upcoming Google’s IPO, Silicon Valley’s hype machine is in overdrive, raising sales for potential investors. Below is the article written by Jonathan Weber for Mercury News, hopefully you would also enjoy the read and let me know what you think on the issue. ...

I finally got around to trying out SQL Server 2005 (a.k.a. Yukon) and reading up a little on how it operates under the covers. I had earlier discussed SQL Server Express. This is my first of series of posts where I will be highlighting some of the new things a developer can do in SQL Server 2005 from a .NET perspective, since there are many DBA’s who live and breathe SQL Server I will leave all the database and T-SQL specific stuff to them. ...

MSDN Mag has an interesting article on tools that convert code from c# to vb.net and vice-versa. I have come across a number of clients and developers both in the company I work for and also at clients who are interested in this. I find this whole topic quite intriguing, especially since in .NET there are minimal differences between c# and vb.net, at least if you stick to only managed code. Also it is quite easy to reuse functionality between the various objects (especially in these days of SOA - more on that some other day). This of course is easier if your are not trying to reuse WinForm apps. Irrespective, there is a lot of demand and some of the options listed here allows you to download the code and play with that too. ...