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!

After my recent post on spyware, there is an interesting story being run by BBC where 90% of technology managers say that there is some kind of “spyware” running on their employees PC to track their browsing habits with 29% of those being installed surreptitiously. The interesting number to me was that about 6% of users believed that the machine they use had been infected by such software. So I guess you should stop reading this now and get back to work. :) ...

ICP DAS USA has a new PLC coming out that is running on Windows CE.NET 4.2 on a Intel Strong ARM CPU. It can run PC based control software developed with higher languages such as c#, vb.net and embeded c++. This offers the best of both the worlds - PC and PLC. If you like ladder logic you can use ISaGRAF and TraceMode. It also has a builtin VGA, Ethernet, CompactFlash, USB, Keyb and mouse ports (phew) and can use a regular monitor (or touchscreen) to view its HMI. You can check it out here . ...

Karan pointed this one out to me, but seems like google is into Mirrors now. Check out what “eerhab tima” returns. :)

I posted an article (click here or on the title) on what the Zachman Framework is all about. I find it so surprising that in today’s world, I came across a whole bunch of people who call themselves as “Architects” who have no idea or clue as to what the Zachman Framework is. I am not trying to be critical towards those people, they are probably very smart and know their stuff, but I figured maybe its a time for a crash course. ...

Today, on one of the computers at home, Meenakshi accidentally installed one of the spy-wares (via a popup - which interestingly was not blocked). This changed the search engine used by IE, installed some toolsbars and opened a whole bunch of popup windows. Also disabled some of the other legit toolbars that were running (MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc.) Anyways, it took me a good 3+ hours to track the bugger down and clean up the whole machine. What a pain and waste of time. But it got me the opportunity to document what I did and hopefully you can benefit from it. ...

Ladies reading this (are there any btw), I am just the messenger, so don’t shoot me. Per my dear friend Karan “…the thing about women is that they wont let u die they will keep u alive, in pain and agony, screaming and shouting, but wont let u fall over the edge…. “. He can be flamed here . ;)

Here is a very old post I found lying around on my disk by Brian Harry, he was the Product Manager of the CLR team at Microsoft (he might still be, I just don’t know). This is a long and very interesting read on the issue of resource management and the deterministic finalization of .NET. Brian provides the backgorund so most people (who were flaming MS at that time), understand that this is really a hard problem to solve. Happy Reading…. ...

Here are some excerpts from my slide deck on XAML. If you need to see the complete powerpoint, let me know and I can either mail it to you or upload it here. If you don’t know, XAML is the new Extensible Application markup language that is part of Longhorn. If you have the PDC bits you should be able to run these. I am skipping on most of the details of the controls, probably will post that some other day. ...

This is probably stupid (and old news now), but if you saw the xaml demo during the PDC of Avalon (presented by Don Box I think), here is the code to reproduce that sample. Please note that you would need to change the source tag in the Video class to a path that makes more sense for you. Also, as always, please use common sense when running this. Don’t flame me if something blows up. :) ...

First of all here are the sys. requirements: Macromedia Flash Player 6 r79 IE 6 compatible browser with Javascript enabled The IT manager - overworked and underappreciated. You know the story. Back in school, always the last to be picked for football, but the first one they ran to when they accidentally deleted a homework assignment. Not much has changed since then. But the fact is it takes a special skill set to manage an IT department. As IT manager you need to monitor industry trends and administer mission-critical resources for an entire company. At the same time, you have to manage increasingly tighter budgets - finding ways to do more with less - and possess the people skills to oversee staff and run interference with top decision makers. ...

The year is just getting started, and that can mean only one thing: It’s time to reflect on the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid tech moments of 2003.

I forget where I read this recently, but it stuck to me. Humans are failure machines, we are not success machines. We fail all the time and almost all the things. And it is only through this “weeding” process we get the feedback for the failures and learn how to correct them and then do better. Well … at least the smart ones learn to how to correct them.

Yes it is true and it is very cool! Mainsoft has a product called Visual MainWin for both J2EE and Unix and Linux platforms. You can have your ASP.NET applications (using ADO.NET) deployed on a single J2EE platform. Please note, this is not really “calling” any web services that are running on Java. How does it work? Well for one you can check out this flash movie (and it surely is amazing!). But basically they wrote an IL compiler that takes the IL generated by .NET app (i.e. ASP.NET in this case) and converts it to Java bytecode which then is run “natively” on a J2EE platform. ...

Unfortunately, I am not one of the lucky guys with a smartphone, but for those who do have one, Lutz Roeder, released the code and the binaries for Digger (a copy of Dig-dug from the good ol Dos days) for the Smartphone. It needs the Smartphone 2003 and .NET CF.

Incase you did not know, but this blog runs on .Text with minor tweaks to the code. When I run this in the W3C Validator , I get 61 (wow!) errors back. If you examine the results of the validator some interesting things emerge. Here is a listing of the issues I found: ...

If you use VS.NET then you must read the fun facts to get the most out of the IDE. This is not new, but had forgotten about it, till I stumbled upon it again recently.

Though, this has been possible by google for a bit, most people did not know all the power of google. Here are some of the things you can do: Area Code Maps Package Tracking ( FedEx , UPS, USPS) Flight Tracking Info Vehicle Info Patent Search FAA Plane Registration UPC Codes [FCC Equipment IDs]( http://www.google.com/search?q=fcc B4Z-34009-PIR) There is also a calculator which in addition to the simple things (such as addition, multiplications, etc) can also calculate the sqrt, trigonometric functions (sin, cos, etc.), ln (logarithm base e), log (logarithm base 10), factorial, etc. Want to see some binary multiplication ? ...

Ergodex has made what it dubs as the “ The World’s First Totally Personalizable Input System ”. They have a pad with a sticky surface that connects via usb to a computer. You can then stick the keys to the surface as you like. You can “record” macros and assign them to keys and can be executed at one touch. ...

The first computer designed and produced in India is now for sale in the country. The Simputer has been developed by scientists and engineers at the Institute of Science in Bangalore. The handheld device was built to help people to afford to have their own computer and access the internet. It comes in three versions and can be used to surf the web and send e-mails. The basic model has a 206Mhz processor, 64MB of memory and uses the Linux operating system. The price will be around €190. ...

Mercury News is running a story on how India’s second-largest software company, Infosys Technologies, announced Thursday that it is expanding operations in Fremont with a new management-consulting subsidiary to advise technology companies on shipping software-development work offshore. My question is, do they need to promote offshoring? Isn’t there enough action on the offshoring front?

Waaah… so Microsoft is clipping Longhorn and pushing out the release. There have also been rumours of pushing WinFS to Blackcomb (which would be the server version of Longhorn). Also. some rumours of a new version XP which would have a newer version of Media Player with a built-in online shopping piece akin to iTunes. When Longhorn does ship (as of now in 2006), it would be the biggest gap in Microsoft’s history between OS releases - almost half a decade, that in the IT world is an era. ...