Find editing host files a pain? Then check out HostsMan (v 3.0.45 is just released) which allows you to automatically update, enable/disable, backup, exclusion, etc. host files. Some old fun programs that we all enjoyed in our time. Fujitsu announces 1 TB 2.5" HDD’s (i.e. for notebooks) - though it might be a little while before they hit the stores and a little longer after that before they are affordable I would guess....
Microsoft has released a couple of hotfixes based on the feedback it has got from various people using the “Error Reporting Service” and sending in dumps. As far as I am aware, as of now these are not pushed via Windows update. The first one is supposed to improve compatibility and reliability of Vista; here are the things it resolves: The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver....
I have not been very happy with WHS lately - and the backups have been failing as you can see in the two screen shots below. 🤭 <p> <img src="images/image_thumb.png" alt="image"/> </p> <p> <img src="images/image_thumb_3.png" alt="image"/> </p> Looking at the event log there have been many errors. I have not had the time to research these and see what is wrong. Here is a sampling on what is going on:...
Today India celebrates its 60th independence from the British Raj - Happy Birthday! So 5 more years to retirement? . Over the last 6 decades has had quite a ride. There has been a lot of talk about it lately here in the local media in UK along with many celebrations in London (mostly to woo Indian business, Bollywood, etc). The BBC showed a very interesting documentary called “ Partition: The Day India Burned ” on the partition of India from the British colonial days in two states - India and Pakistan....
This is probably old news, but is new to me. I logged into MSDN to check something else out and saw that SoftGrid is now available on MSDN. I have had the bits internally for some time, but now anyone with MSDN login can get it. If you have never heard or seen SoftGrid you would be quite amazed how powerful it is. Unlike most virtualization software which virtualizes OS’s (VMware, Virtual PC, etc....
LOL! iPhone advertisements run XP .
… apparently I am after being featured in Avanade Advisor’s [somewhat] cheesy video . 😏
Despite my skepticism about not much happening on the WLW front, I do like it and use it for blogging and want to find out which plugins would you recommend. For example, which one to use for code? There is Insert Code for WLW , Paste from VS , Insert Formatted Clipboard , etc.
Got time to kill (maybe you have a 4 hour commute like I recently started) and want to tickle that brain of yours? Still reading, then check out Google Papers . Of course some of the papers have been quite publicized such as the failure trends for HDDs. But there are many more interesting ones such as the High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers or MapReduce, an abstraction for large-scale computation which essentially is a programming model for generating and processing large data sets with many terabytes of data and thousands of machines....
Both Microsoft and IBM are dueling it out in the cyberspace over SOA - reminds me of the hay days just before the .com boom started back in the bay area. 😄
SOA in the Real World - Microsoft’s eBook for free; alternatively go and buy my book . 😜 Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. Microsoft SkyDrive now open to public beta, giving 500 mb of space; but not sure why you would use that when Mozy gives you unlimited online backup for $5/month (which is about £2.50 / month - cheaper than a cup of Flat White coffee )....
Here is a flavor or some more WHS errors that I have been getting in the eventlog and not really had the time to do the research to figure out what they are. Looking at these (and there are man more), does not inspire too much confidence and I am varied to start using this in “production” mode. Hopefully they have been fixed in the RTM version but as I am running RC1, not sure....
I have been meaning to post this for a few days but not had the change. In the meantime it seems this has was picked up by /. (among others) and since then it has become fairly well publicized. MSR (Microsoft Research) has a research project about “file swarming with network coding” or in simple terms peer-to-peer called Avalanche . This is different from the “normal” P2P networks that you might have used in the past....
At first I thought the Network Health notification of Windows Home Server (WHS) was pretty cool, but now after using it for about a month it actually gets very annoying. Below is a screen shot showing me some of the options. On two machines the backup was not successful and I have ignored these, but the list keeps growing. I cannot find a way (via the GUI - have not mucked around to see if there is a registry setting or a command tool, etc....
Fastest residential uplink in the world - 40 GB/sec! Updated programmer stereotypes - updated for “today’s” world. Hotmap shows where people have looked at when using Virtual Earth . Advanced Vista Codec Package (note: I have not used these yet) Vista’s (little known) recovery strategies . My Picture 3D allows you to see your pictures in a 3D environment - probably a bit useless and only for those with a high speed Internet access....
Google (of all the people) have released Manzana a .NET API for interacting with the iPhone. Below is what they had to say and you can see a screenshot here . I of course don’t have a iPhone to try it out. “Simple and powerful .NET library that lets you read/write files from/to the iPhone, list directory contents and other file and directory related functions.”
Office Live Basics - get it for free. Google Talk Emoticons Speaking of google, they now have hot trends Jing , what is it and how do I use it ? Estetiikka - Free web gallery using PHP (v5) and MySQL. Interested in making Ubuntu look just like OS X ? Zen Computing - some guys are raving about this Linux distro as better than Fedora and Ubuntu. Live Earth Videos now available ....
An article is discussing what possibly could be part of Vista SP1 whenever it ships, either later this year or early next year. And on the topic of Vista SP1, another rumor is that Vista SP 1 Beta will be out sometime next week .
Even though I have been part of the Windows Home Server (a.k.a WHM) beta for a while, those bits I was mostly running in a VM and did not get to installing it on a dedicated box until RC1 came out. It certainly is quite interesting and opens up various possibilities especially in a non-techy family. Also the fact that it is “designed” to be run headless certainly makes it easy and able to hide in a corner/room/garage/cupboard/shed(?...
I guess the title says it all (via Lap )
As part of “Secure Tuesday” (or whatever MS calls it), there are a number of important and recommended pushes out today from MS. Better hit that Windows Update to get these. Here is what I see on Vista and Office 2007 on one of my laptops: <p> <img src="images/image_thumb.png" alt="image"/> </p>
Continuing the interesting find series, here are the next set of finds. Grasshopper 2.0 - is a free VS.NET plugin that allows you to code in .NET 2.0, build for Java and run on Linux, without rewriting any code! Sweet! IKVM.NET - is a implementation of Java for both Mono and .NET and includes a Java VM, .NET implementation of the Java class libraries and some other tools which enable interoperability between both ....
Microsoft has released eScrum v1.0 which is an add-on for TFS and if you use Scrum then should be of interest to you.
If you ever wanted to reassign what Ctrl+Enter does in IE from the default of adding http://www. before and “.com” after what you entered in the address bar. Say you wanted to change this to go to “.net” or “.co.uk” then it is a simple registry change as shown by Ramesh . Of course any registry change for the inexperienced is a daunting task and I suggest backing it up just incase you mess it up....
You might have noticed this via your Windows Update that Microsoft has released a cumulative update for Vista MCE! It is supposed to fix a number of issues, though I have not seen any changes (but then I was not having any issues in the first place). You can get details on what this update contains.