Perhaps I am pushing the boundary here, perhaps not but I am having lots of issues with Visual Studio 2014 CTP 4 (specifically Version 14.0.22129.01.DP) and Windows 10 Preview Build 9860. There have been a lot of errors, and finally, it has gotten to the point where even the basic thing like creating a new Console Project results in the following error. I did do a in-place upgrade of Windows from the previous build, but everything else seems to be working out OK - except just can’t write any code. 8-O ...

kaleidoscopic! not those here-and-now colours but in memory cloudy sky is filled full of black twiggy branches a large crow shoots past picket fence and trees standing tall like sentinels like sad sentinels comes-on quietly so benign the sensation so bloody empty! this revelation times at last you think you know shrug! alas you don’t fleeting memory self-flagellation head-shake another one lost again and again scene full of twiggy branches black crow descending ...

Blessing of Health Wearables

Continuing the Interesting Find series . Here are the things I was intrigued by: “ Honey Encryption ” - A new approach to encryption beats attackers by presenting them with fake data. Securing the Smart Home, from Toasters to Toilets - It is afterall the era of BigData and Internet of Things (IoT). Bizarre attack infects Linksys routers with self-replicating malware. Bing Code Search for C# - right from within Visual Studio - a boon for the lazy developers (yay!). Better beef up your Legal teams as well - how will one control IP violations at the code level - not quite sure. Visualisation of data is not only about ‘prettying up’ your BI reports, but it can actually also save lifes ! Oakland the city that told Google to bugger away ! Is this the start of a revolt? If you shop at Tesco.com and also have a Clubcard then you were aware that they were hacked ? What is hilarious, and, very poor the way they handled this and the lack of understanding. Want to see a glimpse of that? See this Twitter conversation . You like Pineapples? You can eat one; and you can also use one to break website security - very easily! Scary stuff. Microsoft MS-DOS/Word Source Code Gems - just awesome comments! Raspberry Pi car computer - enough said! Absolutely fascinating! Most Sophisticated #Android bootkit malware ever detected; Infected Millions #Security

Samsung SUR40 which recently got stuck at boot up (see the photo below). Once the Kernel lib loaded, for some reason was getting stuck at: StrongROM version 03.30 Build:_P MS PixelSense not booting up Powering it off or on, did not help. Neither did trying to get into the BIOS to try and change some things. I did get this back up and running, and in the end the solution was quite simple - I had to physically take out the power cable (just powering it down was not enough); wait a few seconds and then plug the power cord in, and boot it back up. ...

Don’t know how many folks know, but I got a google glass recently and only now have had some time to start playing with it. There were a few challenges but I finally got Glass ’talking’ to my Windows 8.1 machine and can now replicate the glass display (that is a post for another time, but it did take me some hit and try to figure out what I was doing wrong). This is pretty important, as without this I won’t be able to show much demo’s or make it very useful. ...

Smart Homes (Again)

I was cleaning up my documents, and found an old presentation where I talk about a lot of the new things coming out of Microsoft. Seeing this, did bring back memories. Some of it was very cool and head of its time. Not heard of DSL’s recently, wonder where the industry is heading.

Here are the interesting finds of this time around. IDA - A cool debugger which runs on most platforms and different from the MS variety. TypeScript - as the name suggests, it is strongly typed JS which compiles down to standard JS! This can only be good I think given all the crazy things one can so in JS. More details here . Can you hide anything from NSA? TV Tuners - did you know they can let you spy - who knew? grepWin - a powerful regex-based search and replace tool - and can work across multiple files. Twine - is a wireless sensor block tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. What all things one can do with Twine? Here are a few examples for inspiration . Visual.ly - tell your story visually; good resource for infographics and data visualisation Can an $11,111 coffee pot turn out a better cup of joe? What the Internet of Things (#IoT) needs to become a reality? Freescale has an interesting paper (pdf) on it. High expectations Asian Fathers - enough said! How to be a hacker ? 14 Kickstarter projects to watch out for in 2014 Alloy.UI - a really cool HTML and JavaScript library with lots of useful UI features . Builds on top of YUI3 and Bootstrap. DON’T PANIC - The Facts About Population . Very interesting, especially the visualisation. You can find more on that here . As sites and services become product aware, the age of pervasive commerce begins (remember Minority Reports ?).

Lessons from the Internet - If you never learn how to fail, you will never learn to scale!

Interesting read for any parent!

​I saw this awesome presentation on why rand() is considered harmful. When you need a random number, don’t call rand() and especially don’t say rand() % 100! This presentation will explain why that’s so terrible, and how C++11’s header can make your life so much easier. ...

I don’t know how many people have heard of that NoReplyAll Outlook Add-In from MSR - which is a must have IHMO for everyone. With this enabled, you get the following new buttons in the Toolbar and when composing emails, it will restrict the others from replying-all and help in dealing with some of the email-storms you get internally! You can NoReplyAll add-in this from here . ...

Been a while since I posted on this series. But starting it again. Here are the latest few interesting finds I have stumbled across. Of course these are in no particular order. UTF 8 Everywhere - Argues the cause on why UTF-16 and Unicode is a default poor choice except for specialized libraries, which deal with text. Data discrimination for the poor - Means that if you are poor (i.e. not rich), then the internet you see and know might be different from the others. Big Data discrimination. Customer feedback to a Tour Operator - It’s enough to make you cancel your reservation. Gartner IT Symposium Factoids - Very cool to see the data on mobility and where we seem to be heading. OpenRemote - open source for IoT (Internet of Things) - think of it the glue stitching everything together . Generation Game - Businesses are worrying about how to manage different age groups with widely different expectations. Overtaxed and over there - Loopy tax rules spur expats to renounce their American citizenship. Greenhouse (alpha) - a creative coding toolkit for spatial interfaces. Dipping your hands in a data pool - with a LeapMotion Tesla Model S Rest API - enough said. :) Cozy Cloud - private cloud for your apps, data, which you control and this is open source.

Why did the cat meow? Because it’s a cat. Cats meow. (PS - I am not a cat guy, more of a dog guy)

(and also valid for the US Govt) *Ring* Hello, IT. *Sigh* Have you tried turning it Off and on again?

Don’t start an argument with a girl because they all have 4,30,50,194 GB memories and will bring up something you did at 14:27PM on 23/04/2008 (via ExtraGrumpyCat )

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 int MyFunction() { // There once was a man named Dave int Result = 0; // Whose code just wouldn't behave MyObject \*Ptr = new MyObject(); // He left to go to a meetin' Result = Ptr->DoSomething(); // And left his memory a leakin' return Result; }

two words never heard in polite conversation Microsoft Vista

You scramble me and unscramble me I’m putty in your hands ~ Only you

Sigh, why do I get to see all the ‘interesting’ errors. Not sure what do I get to make of this. :)

The wife recently bought a Nike FuelBand which she was loving. However in about 4-5 weeks of regular usage, the strap on it broke and the links which hold it together fell apart. The device itself is working, but it cannot be worn now as it won’t lock making it quite useless. 😢 I was quite surprised as this is supposed to last more than this given both what it is meant to do and the cost of the device as well. Now this is an expensive paperweight. ...

No, there is no typo in the Subject, this advice is from NSA and should be good if you want to secure your data from NSA. The Register had this excellent write up on Guardian could have protected Snowden. I also like what The Register say: Use an old-fashioned air gap. Be paranoid You also could Steganography , using something like SteganPEG , but that is more obscurity, rather than security. The advice from The Register is sound and essentially is good if you are interested in protecting sensitive data. There are essentially four steps parts to this. ...

After my WHS died and I moved to a Synology DS413 and using that as a ‘home server’ and have been extremely happy with it! The only thing I miss is backing up the Windows machines automatically (as WHS did), but overall I think this is better, flexible and more powerful compared to WHS. I needed to look for a new wiki software. I recently moved from ScrewTurn Wiki (which was great BTW, but then is a dead project now) to DokuWiki which is perfect for my needs. I run two wiki’s at home and has much of our day-to-day things we as a family need. There are some sections of the Wiki, which are sensitive and I don’t want anyone one the network getting to it. I wanted to authenticate the user and once they login only then get to that. ...

I have been thinking of doing some code ‘smelliness’ test, and am keen to automate code reviews (as much as possible). I am interested to know what tools have you guys used? I want to use the tools to find the low hanging fruits and know off the 80% of things and then we manually look at the more interesting aspects, which the tools don’t (or can’t) pick up. Ideally, I would like this as an add-in to Visual Studio, which can run as part of a build and depending on how one configures it, can get to a gated check-in and/or work-items being created in TFS which then can be assigned and tracked. What I am thinking is to complement the likes of FxCop, the built-in Visual Studio tools. There was TeamReview which I had looked at some point in the past, but we never got it running successfully. I have not had a chance to see it since then. Someone has also attempted some of this via this , but it does not seem to go anywhere. Surely, there someone has already build this which we can look into? ...