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Do these seem to be the first Window 7 Screenshots or is it Photoshop magic?

Here is how fellow Avanut Wayne describes the “conversation” between Vista and you (the user) when an app. decides to kick the bucket. I particularly like the last one. User: “This thing’s frozen.” [Tries to close program using various keyboard and mouse actions.] U: “Yep, totally wasted.” [Task Manager displays] U: “Kill this program.” Computer: “Hey, uh, did you know that this program isn’t really responding? I think it might be frozen.” ...

I had not heard of this until Karan told me about Erlang which was originally developed by Ericsson and stands for Ericsson Language.

VMware Fusion is not new and I have been meaning to blog about it for a while but just not got around to it until now. If you only have used VPC (Virtual PC) or it’s bigger cousin (Virtual Server) and never used one of the VMware products, wake up and smell the coffee and get ready to get blown away. ...

It has been a while since I posted some of the interesting find (been busy for a change). Slashtop - no more waiting for the OS to boot up; if you want to get online or make a call using skype then this is up and running in an instant; more details here . Exploits of a Mom - need I say more? 5 ways to share big files between co-workers or friends - quite handy when you are in those pesky situations when you need to get something across to someone else. Cellprofile Switcher - you can use the information about the mobile cell your phone uses to do some work for you. For example, your phone can automatically silent itself when you get to work. Of course not too much help when on the tube. Kudocities - I came across this when trying to find out what happened to there was a decent buritto joint (sadly not in the same league as Chipotle ) close to the office which suddenly closed and that was a big deal! Why? Well for all the culture, people, excitement, smoke, crime, tube, etc. that is London there is not a decent Mexican joint. 👎 Crazy about Alarms? Then check out phoneAlarm for your mobile. Vidabox Lux - is this the most advanced Media Centre? It supports HD-DVD, HDTV, BluRay, etc. My Mobiler - interact with your Windows Mobile screen from your desktop (including copy/past, drag/drop, capture, etc.). Or maybe it is this one ? Desktop Wallpapers - quite amazing and hundreds and free. Z Wave Products - of course if you need to “shutdown” then won’t work. Err … what the heck is Z Wave ? ...

Think Before You Blog

I came across this undercover report on Hotel Glasses from a colleague or mine and it sure is very disturbing! A must watch if you stay in hotels.

MS has announced the details of what is new on WHS Power Pack 1 and it seems a collection of things which one would want to add to WHS. It is good to see the amount of testing gone into this and the fact they have upgrades coming out so soon after RTM.

Until recently I was running the RC of WHS (being part of the Beta program); but as that was expiring I coughed up for the OEM version. After installing it when I tried to configure the domain name to mychoice.homeserver.com I got an unknown error. I tried both homeserver.com and livenode.com options but neither of them worked. It seemed to get these working you need to open IE on your WHS and go to Tools => Security => Trusted Sites => Sites and add the following two sites and try adding it again and all should be OK then. ...

When you install SP1 for .NET 3.0 by default that changes the throttling settings you might be use to. You could get into a situation where a number of calls are processed and then they stop with the client eventually timing out. To get around this you either explicitly close your connection (which is a good practice in most cases) or change the serviceThrottling setting in your WCF config. ...

I was reading on something else and came across this and was quite bemused. Simple Nomad is a hacker who loves Tea. For those who did not know, Tea is called “Chai” in Hindi so when you see “Chai Tea” somewhere (like Starsucks ) then that means “Tea Tea” which just sounds silly. ...

You remember me talking about holding off that Dell ? Well the very cool Crystal LCD's are here (and boy are they pricey)! For $1200 you get a 22" 1680 x 1050 display. I only see these on Dell’s US site and don’t see them on the UK site yet. Not sure how long before they show up here. I am surprised Dell did not get this out in time for Christmas. ...

Fellow Avanut David send the link to Point UI ; it essentially is a small skin application for your Windows Mobile 5/6 and somewhat emulates the iPhone interface. Before you roll your eyes and think “here is another iPhone-knockoff-wanna-be”, I’d suggest you take it for a spin. It is just bloody good! The interface is just simple and you can use fingers (my fat fingers also worked!); to me it seems a less of the iPhone and more of a combination of the HTC Touch and the new upcoming Windows Mobile 6.1 and 7 (screenshots of v6.1 can be found here ). Maybe Microsoft should hire these guys in the team. ...

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I was signing up for Google apps just to see what the fuss is all about and could not think of a domain and thought to give geek.com a try. Of course I knew it is not available, but I am quite offended by what Google thinks of Geeks - especially the whole damn company was formed and staffed by geeks.

I got this via the Ava communities - John Lee created a Wii Whiteboard Marker - very cool. Now the only thing to figure out how the heck to get a projector. 😄

If you want to get Windows Vista using Windows Update then copy the following in a bat (or cmd) file and run it in an admin console (if you have UAC switched on); then run Windows Update. Also the SP1 is a Release Candidate and not the “final” version so use at your own risk! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 @echo off reg delete HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSp1 /f > NUL 2>&1 reg delete HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Wow6432Node\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSP1 /f > NUL 2>&1 reg add HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSp1 /v Beta1 /t REG\_SZ /d da2ba4db-dedb-437e-8e7e-104643454bb6 /f IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR) :SUCCESS @echo. echo =========================================================== echo Windows Vista SP1 registry key has been set successfully. echo Please check for updates in Windows Update. echo =========================================================== @echo. goto END :ERROR @echo. echo =========================================================== echo FAILED to set Windows Vista SP1 registry keys. echo Please run this script by right clicking and selecting echo "Run as Administrator". echo =========================================================== @echo. goto END :END pause

Love it or hate it UML is important for anyone involved (Architect/Developer/Whoever) - either you need to create designs based on UML and you need to understand that someone else has. Sure it has its challenges and for some specific things there are better solutions (DSL’s - more on that some other day). I am “old school” and over the years have used Rational Rose (or whatever IBM has renamed it to since buying Rational out). ...

With all the modern systems using multi-core and multi-processor systems, tapping this new power is an interesting challenge for developers. It also fundamentally starts the shift on how your “average Joe” interacts with a computer and things that he/she expects to be able to. First, check out the “ Manycore Shift ” paper from Microsoft. Second checkout the Parallel Extensions to .NET 3.5 which is a programing model for data and task parallelism. It also helps with coordination on parallel hardware (such as multi-core CPU’s) via a common work schedules. There is also a new Parallel Computing Dev Center on MSDN. Before you download the December 2007 CTP, make sure you have the RTM bits of the .NET 3.5 runtime. There are also a number of bugs fixed in this new CTP. If you want a quick introduction then check out a few videos available . ...

At work we had an issue where our sql performance (SQL Server 2005) was very slow - much slower than we needed and everything looked OK but in the production environment (to which we don’t have access - rightfully) things were not ticking as they should be. We had a requirement to be able to process ~200K / hour and we were barely managing ~ 44K / day! Ouch! As it turns out, the solution in the end after a lot of digging and flapping around was changing the type of one of the columns which was defined as a nvarchar(MAX) to a nvarchar(400). The data we were storing in this column can easily fit within 400 characters and we don’t need the MAX. The reason this helped is because a MAX is not indexable. The database was flagging this as warning but this was missed. Changing this increased our perf. from the measly 44K records being processed in 24 hours to processing 410.0K records in 16 minutes! Sweet! ...

Fellow Avanut, Barry , created the most evil pumpkin in Linuxland.

I think we need something like Rotten Neighbors for the UK ! 😃 What is it? If you have a rotten neighbor then you can tell the world about them. You can browse to your neighborhood and plot your own marker with a complete description Here is an example from in the neighborhood where I use to live in California.

Avanade in Netherlands went on a campus recruitment drive and seem like they are having too much fun ! In case you are like me and do not understand Dutch, then what it says is “Food for IT guys” and essentially was a marketing drive on various campuses where prospective interns for Avanade were offered some food (looks like chips) in exchange for their emails. I think the whole idea is just brilliant! We should do something similar in other regions. ...

Megha send me this one; I had never heard of these guys but I do recognize the music from the new iPod Nano advertisement.