There has been a very interesting (imho) multi-part interview with the author of Beyond Software Architecture where he discussing various aspects like the relationship between Architecture, Culture and Goodness. Also goes on to discuss the social role of an architect, conceptual integrity and the importance of domain knowledge. I particularly like the quote … “ An architecture is like a dirt road. The first time a car drives over it, the road looks about the same. By the time the 10,000th car drives over it, though, there will be grooves in the road. As an architecture mature, it gets grooves.”. Some other interesting responses that I personally have learned from over the years and I can relate to are below. ...

From the last time, when DARPA issued the grand challenge, the cameras were there, the million bucks were there (drool), the people were there, the hype were there and the robots were there. So what was missing? Well the Robots followed my example and forgot their “brains” and were half blind and stone dumb! So instead of learning from that and letting the existing teams push on they want to try LAGR. As I say, common sense is not very common! ...

Recently google has been all over the news - online, print and television, atleast here in the US; and why not, with their IPO and everything, lot of people are hoping this would kickstart the recovery of the economy. I have been toying with a few other search engines for a few months now. These have also been highlighted in the media recently alongwith the google hype as a potential threat to google. The engines I have been toying with apart from google are: ...

This reminds me of a few weeks ago when during one of my IM sessions with my buddy Karan I was bashing up Linux (which from those who know is not really me). This lead to (atleast that is what I think) a frantic call from him - all the way across the pond - and we yapped like a pair of teenage girls for close to an hour +. The crux of that debate… err.. discussion we had was Windows vs. Linux. If memory servers correctly (which ain’t a lot *grin*), then this article pretty much sums it up. Here are some of the common OS myths that typically float around in cyberspace: ...

Bill Venners has an interesting article on Abstraction and Efficient. He says that Abstraction is a mechanism to understand things. A good analogy he lays out is in Mathematics. Where expressing a solution means we really did understand the problem and not write up some code to try a “special case“. Also states that it is important to generalise and see one particular problem as a example of the class of problems. You can read the article here , Part I (c++ style sweet spot) can be found here and Part II (modern c++ style) here . ...

This utility that can be used to quickly switch the .NET Framework version that the aspx pages are compiled against.I am not sure why you would want to run both the versions of ASP.NET on the same box at the same time as 1.1 is backward compatible to 1.0, but I am sure there are many reasons which make total sense - I just cannot fanthom any at this time. Internally, it uses the command line tool called ASPNET_REGIIS that is included in the Microsoft.NET Framework. ...

If you did not hear, then google recently launched its Personalised Web Search feature which is still not Beta (its on their lab page). Here you can go and setup you interests (essentially your scope) and then you can narrow down your results to only within the context of that scope. Quite interesting when you are looking for something which is also very generic or a completely different topic. ...

Some of you out there have emailed me and expressed interest in knowing a little more on what I do and what is the purpose of this blog and what the heck does it run on? Now I am absolutely amazed that there are people out there reading this. My question to you is, what the heck are you doing reading this, don’t you have work or something to do? Anyways, what can I say, I am a Geek! W00T! Computers is something (probably the only things) I know a little about and have been playing with them ever since I can remember. Computers even today is first a passion, then a hobby and then a career, I am just very happy I am doing something I love doing and getting paid for it. :) ...

I never knew this but if you want to force a debugger to launch (especially useful when writing a Windows Service for example) you can use System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); Now I have not tried this myself (yet), but have others? If so, whats the feedback?

Yipeee! I you are a MSDN Universal subscriber - you can download the version they handed out at WinHEC!

In Longhorn MS is looking to add some laptop-specific features designed to make portable machines easy to use as consumer devices such as portable DVD players. They are also looking to add a separate UI that could be “instantly booted up“ to play movies, music, etc. - hence getting you the the experience more comparable to using consumer electronics devices. For someone like me who is mostly on the road, this would be good, if I can cut down to one “device” (i.e. the laptop) along with the chargers, wires, etc that I carry - my shoulders would certainly thank me. ...

Longhorn Milestone 7.2 (M7.2) bits were handed out at WinHEC. Per Chris sells , the MSDN subscribes should be seeing this soon. You can check out some of the reviews from the WinHEC participants here . I am now rubbing my hands gleefully and eager to get my hands on it - have to wait for it to show up on the subscriber download at MSDN - will need a new HDD then :). Lets see if my small demos for Tiles survives or not - the PDC build, I run out of memory and finally have to reboot. ...

Quite funny check it out if you got the time. :) If you rate the movie, you can get a FREE copy of Visual Basic.NET

In a loosely coupled system (e.g. Service Oriented Architecture i.e. SOA), the dependencies can be either a Real Dependency or an Artificial Dependency. Real dependencies are the services that you need to fulfil your need, this is something that cannot be eliminated or reduced. Artificial dependency on the other hand are the features you need to adhere to in order to consume the services you need. Typically these fall in the categories of platform dependencies, API dependencies, language, etc. Although artificial dependencies cannot be eliminated it can be reduced. ...

A friend’s (Phil Kerkel) laptop recently got infected with HackerDefender which cost him about a day’s worth of work. Now this seems to be harmless, but something like this invading the system is scary, especially when you have all your data and not to mention in most cases a lot of our client’s data! Basically, these guys use the FTP services installed on Windows machines running on high speed networks (such as DSL/Cable, or University campuses) to they can use that fat pipe to distribute copyrighted material such as films, games and software etc. Sometimes these ftp servers are protected by a piece of software called HackerDefender, this software is used to hide files, processes and even ports from the user and investigating parties and is particularly difficult to infiltrate. ...

If you have had enough of Clippy, check this out. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity!

Karan found this and you can read about all of it in his blog. But I checked and he is right! Gmail does not show me the time of the “origin” of the email only when gmail got it. So taking Karan’s scenario: Retrieve from external pop3 mailbox 250 new messages Import 250 Messages look at inbox, and you have 250 messages received at the same time (1 min ago) Oh wow! this is just what I need. This begs the question, is this by design? If so, would it be to thwart the spammers? Personally I would like to see both when was the mail sent, and when did I get it. ...

Now this probably has to fall in the News of the Weird category, I would probably have fallen asleep, drooling on the computer, which would have caused something to short circuit and then blow up the machine, and eventually get the house on fire. Hence, not work losing your house over this.

You probably already heard this, but Chris Sells has a new column on MSDN called Longhorn Foghorn , that describes each of the “ Pillars of Longhorn ” - this is something which IMHO developers would understand and appreicate. In the first article he explains the “Pillars” and then in the next two goes onto build Solitaire. You can download the sample and play with it too. ...

Shadowfax is an interesting set of “Reference Solution” that is being worked on by the PAG group at Microsoft. I think this would be a very important piece in the whole SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) space, with getting bits out the door in a quick and reusable fashion. Basically this is a similar implementation of Indigo in todays technologies (i.e. those that are currently shipping such as .NET). This “unifies” the four messaging options you have today: ...

I suddenly started getting an error during boot up on one of my machine and could not figure out what it was, after spending a fair amount of time on google, I found this listing of error codes that I feel was very helpful. You can bookmark this post and use it as your reference. Code Description 01x Undetermined problem errors 02x Power supply errors 1xx System Board Errors 101 System board error - Interrupt failure 102 System board error - Timer failure 103 System board error - Timer interrupt failure 104 System board error - Protected mode failure 105 System board error - Last 8042 command not accepted 106 System board error - Converting logic test 107 System board error - Hot NMI test 108 System board error - Timer bus test 109 Direct memory access test error 110 System board memory 111 Adapter memory 112 (any adapter in system unit) 113 (any adapter in system unit) 121 Unexpected hardware interrupts occurred 131 Cassette wrap test failed 151 System Board Error; Defective battery 152 System Board Error; Real time clock failure 161 System Options Error - (Run SETUP) Battery failure 162 System options not set correctly-(Run SETUP) 163 Time and date not set - (Run SETUP) 164 Memory size error - (Run SETUP) 165 System options not set - (Run SETUP) 166 (any adapter in system unit) 199 User-indicated configuration not correct ...

So, somehow I was one of the “dudes” to get a gmail account. Since I have been travelling a lot (on work), I don’t get the time to be online as much - if you have me on one of the IM’s, you know that - since I am online only about 50% of the day. But the point I am getting to, is that I have not had a chance to play with gmail all that much. Karan, got in and was fooling around with it and gave me his feedback. Today is the first day I think I did something meaningful with it. What better way to set it up that to forward all my spam mails from my “honeypot” account to gmail. So that is done! Now we will see how good the spam filter is. As of now about 50% if the spam is not getting caught! Also would be an interesting test on what advertisments am I shown based on all the spam I get? ...

I am not sure if I should buy this t-shirt or not? What do you think? :)

OSnews and Aspire were running a competition for writing a Development Article where I had submitted an entry on Exception Management in .NET. To my surprise I won that (even though there were not too many entries). You can read the article here . I will be posting here also probably this weekend. ...

Microsoft is planning on releasing a Longhorn Refresh to geeks like me at WinHEC next month. I am looking forward to that as there are just too many leaks right now. On an average on a machine with a 1gb of mem, I have to reboot on an average every two hours otherwise the memory workingset get way to huge with all the disk thrashing!