I am quite surprised on how ignorant many people (like I was) are about understanding how the day-to-day activities contribute to Global Warming and the issues we face on this planet. As much as we wishes, unfortunately there is no backup or Undo feature 👎. To understand how our daily lives contribute towards global warming check out the Carbon Calculator and then read up on how you can offset those emissions and be Carbon Neutral ....
I had been thinking of writing a program which will allow be to dial a number using Vonage especially being the fat-butter-fingered-lazy-ass that I am. . Although I wanted to do this for a while, I could only get around to writing it over the holidays. The program is fairly simple to use as shown below. <p> <img src="images/vonagedialer_thumb2.jpg" alt=""/> </p> Enter your User Name and Password Click on Connect This will connect to Vonage and authenticate your user name and password....
Thanks to my colleague, Ian, for pointing this one. After some initial rumors , Bill Gates has announced a new product called Windows Home Server which will automatically back up all the data on Vista and XP providing centralized storage and make it available on the Internet. Bill also promised that the Home Server will be easy to setup and the user won’t have to even worry about formatting, partitioning,installing, etc as the OS would do all that automatically....
I have a weird problem which does not make sense at all and I am hoping it is something stupid on my end. One of my folders called “Gadgets” which resides in Community \ Social folder structure has somehow become invisible. I know the folder is present because I can still see my un-read emails (via the Unread Email Search Folders). Also if I search for emails in that folder I can find the emails, but I cannot see the folder in my list and as a result any of the emails in that....
I just upgraded to CS 2.1 SP2 (I was on SP1) and from my quick smoke test all seems to be well; if you find something not working then please let me know.
Given my book is up on Amazon this might not be the best time to write this . There is an interesting article by one of the LA Times reporter on his experiences with how the price changes for books “left” in the shopping basket and not actually bought. This is something I have noticed first hand and I can tell for a fact it is not just books but other items as well....
This is an old but still an excellent list of free goodies and tools from Microsoft for Windows. You can also find a link there for Office goodies.
I am now running the new Beta of VMWare Workstation 6 , and it seems to be working fine in Vista x64 (RTM incase you are curious). The installation of Ubuntu which I am also running natively at home is supported as one of the OS’s in this new version of VMWare and installs without a hitch. However to install VMWare tools after VMWare automatically mounted that was a little more of an issue (especially for a newbie)....
It might seem like a surprise to some of you, but then many others who are reading this probably won’t be surprised to read that I am now running a native instance of Linux on one of my machines are home. I had an old machine (dual-proc PIII 1 GHz procs with 512 mb RAM) which was running Windows 2003 Server - and it had not been switched on for a while....
The new version of VMWare 6.0 is out in Beta and it has some exciting new things. In addition to the new features listed below (from their email), it also supports x64 and up to 8 gb of RAM! Support for Windows Vista - Use Windows Vista as host operating system Multiple monitor display - You can configure a VM to span multiple monitors, or multiple VMs to each display on separate monitors....
There are a couple of new Vista based remotes coming out in the next few months, which incorporate SideShow - sure looks sweet. <p> <img src="images/3383_large_ricavision1_thumb2.jpg" alt=""/> </p>
The release of Visual Studio Service Pack 1, seems to have created a lot of interest - rightfully so - about time all those annoying bugs with VS05 are fixed. If you have not seen it then go and get the Service Pack 1 - it is a hefty install coming in at approx. 431 mb. Running on XP/2003: Although I did not have to do this myself I know some colleagues who had a problem installing the SP1 where the installation was interrupted with an error saying “Error 1718....
I think the WCF Book that I recently finished is out earlier than a week and should be available on Jan 15th instead of the 22nd, however Amazon still shows the availability of Jan 22nd.
I don’t know if this is a Vista x64 issue, but when I am watching a DVD on the laptop the movie playback is quite jerky and as a result very irritating. I have tried both Media Player and Media Center and unfortunately get the same result. Interestingly though, a few weeks ago, between the two (Media Player and Media Center), one of them was jerky but the other was smooth (I forget which was which), but now both are the same....
<p> <img src="images/lifeStation_thumb7.jpg" alt=""/> </p> I recently came across this advertisement in one of the magazines. There is a company called Passive Technologies who have released a pretty cool looking MCE machine called lifeStation . It looks like an appliance and still runs MCE 2005; I would recommend to wait when they upgrade to Vista. I don’t own one, so I don’t have any first hand experience. I also don’t know how much it costs, but it is bound to be pricey....
If you are running Vista x32 or x64 and want to play the usual set of audio and video files (such as mp4) you might need additional codecs . The one which has worked with me on Vista x64 is called the K-Lite Mega Code Pack v1.61; however as I said in my previous post , it might have caused an issue in DVD playback though I am not 100% sure of that....
This is quite cool; I got this via one of the Avanade communities. The .NET CF team is working to port WCF to the compact framework and as you can see below it will support a subset of the WCF. You can get more details on this post by Roman, though there are more WCF details on that and not as much as the WCF “Compact Edition”, it is still quite exciting....
A number of you have pinged me asking the Table of Contents (TOC) for the Book that I recently finished . I don’t know why it does not show up on Amazon or even on the publishers site , but here are a high level TOC. If you want the detailed TOC’s then let me know and I can dig those out as well. PART 1 Introducing Windows Communication Foundation...
A conversation with Pardesi who is on dialup, (can I say “Loser”) reminded me of this. <p> <figure> <img src="images/061127_dial-up_torture.gif" alt="Torture 2.0"/> <figcaption>Torture 2.0</figcaption> </figure> </p>
Microsoft has released the Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007 bits . These are also know as VSTO 2005 SE (Visual Studio Tools for Office Second Edition). In addition to all the new Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, InfoPath, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Visio), these also support Office 2003 applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visio). You can get more information on MSDN.
I guess it is moments like these which give us a break from the realities of the world and allow us to see the lighter moments of life. BBC has a story , of a mother in the US, who got her son arrested because he opened his Christmas gifts early. I guess, he can counter-sue her for “distress”, and she can counter-counter-sue (is there such a word?) for pain and anguish!...
<p> <figure> <img src="images/061206_expedia_roach_motel.gif" alt="Roach Motel"/> <figcaption>Roach Motel</figcaption> </figure> </p>
As you can see the links on this blog now show a preview, this is using Snap Preview and it can give you a preview of the link before you click on it and is quite cool. You can signup for free with nothing to sign up or anything, just add the script tag and away you go. If you want to add this to your CS implementation, the easiest way is to follow the following steps:...
I finally upgraded the blog to Community Server 2.1 SP1 today - its been out for a little while but did not get the time to upgrade till now. Everything seems to be running fine, but if you find something broken then let me know. The next version of CS , does have lots of code-names, but I don’t know what to make of it. It is supposed to be out sometime in Q1 07....
Update: Meenakshi has been bossing me around (as usual) to update this post. It might help if she actually started blogging herself instead. (If you don’t see another post here, that might be because I have had a few broken bones) Meenakshi got this video attached to one of the spam emails. William is very cute, and though the sounds his dad makes aren’t quite that funny, William of course disagrees....