Posts

To laugh or to cry … that is the question.

Seems like many others are following the MS route in releasing Betas - which might not be the best thing in the world. Telligent has now released the CS 2007 Service Pack 3 (Pre-Release) with a long list of fixes and “new features”.

If for some reason you wanted to know what version (and possibly license) of TFS were you running (as a fellow Avanut did in the communities), then check out this tool by Jeff . Speaking of TFS, Brian has published the “final” feature list of what to expect in TFS 2008 including compatibility with VSTS 2005. ...

I have been experimenting with Windows Home Server at home and running the RC1. I was low on disk space (having only one internal 80 gb HDD which was also running the OS). It started with one of the annoying Network Health alerts telling me I am low on disk space. Since there was no room in the old machine I am running this one to add another internal HDD I decided to plug in an external USB HDD. ...

Google Mapplets are “mini applications” you write which can be embedded within Google Maps. Google has a special “preview” version of the maps where you can test this out. To help you write mapplets (e.g. a random weather map ) google also has the Mashup Editor ( reviewed by Lachlan ) which is similar to Yahoo Pipes . ...

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. Best in Emerging Technology - very cool! Did you know there was a hard drive shredder out there, wanna buy one ? Collaboration between people in teams is a “hot” topic these days and to try and solve it there are many solutions out there - one of those being huddle (which I have not used). But the one that I have used and is quite good is Zoho , and does seem quite promising. I have specifically used the Notebook and Planner . The planner is interesting as well as you can email your page and it will store those emails as content. Tafiti (which means “to research” in Swahili) is a very cool search experience and essentially showcases Silverlight with Live search behind it - now if only we could switch the search provider to google it would be even sweeter. 😄 fsutil - this is new to me although around for a while. It is a command line utility which can perform many FAT and NTFS related tasks such as managing reparse points, managing sparse files, dismounting a volume, or extending a volume, etc.

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: ...

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. 🤭 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). ...

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.) SoftGrid virtualizes applications - so you have have multiple versions of the same application installed and running at the same time without conflicting with each other! Now I have not had a chance to play with this to see how it handles various dev related software like the debugger, various windows services, IIS, SQL Server, etc. but it sure works like a charm for “client app’s”. If you want to see more then check out Getting Started with SoftGrid and the Lazy Admin’s What is SoftGrid . ...

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. Happy Reading! ...

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. Those networks distribute blocks of files via swarming to all the nodes on the mesh network and as the the number of nodes increases, the harder it becomes to schedule these chunks of file in an optimal manner. So, how is Avalanche different you ask? Well here is what they have to say about it: ...

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.) to “delete” the warnings that I am OK with and choose to ignore. Also the warnings occur on every machine which is setup in WHS - like a very wanting spoilt brat 😄. ...

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. Outlook Extra allows to change the default path so you can easily find and delete attachments send in emails among other tweaks. Moo - they print things from your stuff. PHP121 - a php based IM - perfect for internal corporate chat where you don’t (or can’t) access one of the IM’s. Five Tech mistakes to avoid . Visual Studio Robotics tutorial (with Mindstorms NXT of course). Free legal icons for you to leech (they are under GPL). Parking Perfection game - learn how to park! 😄 Warthog anyone? Toshiba’s wireless docking station - though I have had such terrible experiences with my Tecra M3 over the last 3-odd years I cannot recommend a Toshiba to anyone!

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 . Vista Wallpapers , including the one running on the blog here. Domain Keys Identified Mail ( DKIM ) - tool to battle spam ...

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(?)/whatever. ...

I guess the title says it all (via Lap )