Posts

If you are a Sudoku fan, then check out my slightly modified version of the one published by Microsoft . I have it up using ClickOnce , so unfortunately you would need to use IE for the best experience. It might work with Firefox (I have not tried it yet). Also you will need .NET Framework 2.0 - if you don’t have it - the installer will point you in the right direction on how to get it. If you do need to get .NET 2.0 - make sure you are on a broadband connection as it might take time. ...

When the new IE 7 bits were originally released - I forget if it was late last year or early this year - I had installed them to have a play, but that was such a shoddy release that I quickly uninstalled and happily continued to use Firefox. A while after that Beta 1 was released which I did not touch and although some of my brave colleagues installed it and used it - I kept at a arms length. When Beta 2 was released, again I was quite vary, but after hearing a number of positive reviews (mostly on the stability) I tried to give it a spin again and installed it. I was using it only for about a week or so without too many complains till Beta 3 was released. Based on my positive experience with Beta 2, I assumed Beta 3 can only be the same if not worse! Oh how wrong I was - as someone said “Assumption is the mother of all screw ups”. :) Beta 3 in my experience is quite unstable and it does lock up the whole machine atlease once on a daily basis - required me to do a cool boot. In the process I of course loose any unsaved changes. Even when Microsoft eventually gets this right, at the end of the day, IE 7 is still just a catch up with Firefox and I have no plans to switch to that as my primary browser. ...

The minute I clicked “post” regarding my previous post, I knew it was a mistake - talking about the book I am co-authoring with a few other people (who most definitely are brighter than I am). Anyways, thanks to my dear friend Kumud for pointing me in the right direction and providing the inspiration by sending me the cartoon below. :) ...

Well I suppose I can talk a little about it now - after all it seems like happening. For the last few months I and a few other colleagues of mine are writing a book on Indigo, now called WCF (Windows Communication Framework). I personally am quite fascinated by communication and all the challenges that brings to the table. The book is titled “Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation” and will be released later this year. You can get more details on it here . As and when I get more time, look out for more details on Indigo from me here including details of the other authors - who I have nicknames as the Indigo Amigos. Feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions on Indigo and I’ll try my best to get back to you, however between fighting fires at work and trying to finish the chapters, I don’t have too much bandwidth left. :) ...

Bill Gates is handing over the reins of the role of Chief Architect to Ray Ozzie by July 2008 - two years is a long time, but nevertheless Bill would be missed by most of us.

Interesting new worm based on the likes of the movies such as the ring or feardotcom spreading via MSN. It is quite dangerous as it disables many security and antivirus software running such as antivirus, firewalls and even Windows programs like the Task Manager and RegEdit. It is easy to recognize, as you will get the following instant message - which downloads a avi (only that is an exe), when you run that your system is infected and all your contacts on MSN will be send the same instant message. ...

Idiots are wonderful, no wonder every village want one. :)

Shipping with Vista Beta 2, there is a new security feature called Address Space Layout Randomization (a.k.a ASLR); other than being a mouthful, this helps defend against buffer overrun exploits. It does this by moving the entry points into the system dll’s around randomly in memory. Its all about odd, and there are 256 locations it can be loaded in, or in other words there is a 1/256 chance of getting the address correct. This will help make the attacks such as return-to-libc (which start with a buffer overflow) harder. This of course is not a replacement for writing poor code or fixing the actual overruns found, but it would certainly go a long way in reducing automated attacks that use this exploit. ...

telnet to “ascii-wm.net 2006” (without the quotes of course), 10 minutes before kick off and you should find a live “video” stream. (from the inquirer ).

You might have heard that Microsoft has “renamed” WinFX to .NET 3.0 and all the hoopla that created. So, effectively .NET 3.0 will be .NET 2.0 + WinFX. Hmm, given that WinFX is part of Vista (albeit some bits ported back for XP), what happens if I want to install it on Windows 2000, is that still supported? And so when the “real” new version of the CLR ships, would that be called .NET 4.0? Hmm… ...

If you have send an email to my work email address within the last week and you have not heard from me, chances are I did not get that email. I am one of the lucky guinea pigs, whose mailbox has been moved to Exchange 12 (officially now called Exchange 2007) where we are using it in production. There seems to be an issue (which we are investigating), where Exchange is kicking back emails saying something along the lines of: ...

If you are part of the Office 12, you might have already received the email detailing that Office 12 is out at http://beta.microsoft.com . On the other hand, it is also available on MSDN if you have Universal Subscription. If you don’t have either, seems like Microsoft has opened the beta to more people, and you can get the beta 2 (which will run till Jan 07) from here . ...

If you use American Express, then beware there is a Trojan going around that asks for secure information when when logged into Amex’s secure site. Amex has provided a screen shot of what it looks like, check it out so you know in case you see it. You can read more on this at eweek here . ...

Well lots of stuff happening in life and as a result this is on the back burner. Firstly we bought a place and moved last weekend, so last few weeks have been just awfully busy with that. Also started a new project in the last few weeks and that has kept me busy as well. Some more stuff happening, which hopefully I can talk about some day. But all in all, next few weeks, I am going to be snowed under again, and you should hear from me eventually. 😄 ...

Thanks to Rohit for sending me this - I have been just too busy (as you can probably tell), to even blog about this. There is an awesome letter to the Pakistani people (from Indian bloggers) , which is worth a read! If you have not been involved or know some of the Indian culture, you might not get the full context, but still worth a shot. :) ...

I was looking at something else, and stumbled across the wall of Ribbons , pretty interesting. :)

Yes at least one of them can, called Jet Airways . I have flown them recently and was pleasantly surprised with the excellent quality of service and food - even in Cattle class. Guardian also seems to agree with me. :) On the other than, their website , well thats another matter. ...

An Oregon man who went to a hospital complaining of a headache was found to have 12 nails embedded in his skull from a suicide attempt with a nail gun, doctors say. You can read the story here ; I think its the Bush effect ;)

Are you sure you want to get a Dell machine for £385K? That is more expensive than most houses! And it only has one gig of memory. Oh it had two, I could think about it ;). You can click on the images below to see them in full size. ...

Believe it or not, approximately 5 months are SQL 05 went RTM, Microsoft has released the first service pack for that which includes the database mirroring functionality. You can get a list here of all the things fixed and the press release here . I have not tried this myself yet, so cannot comment, but I wonder if it would cause any issues to BizTalk and SharePoint among other things. I’ll post any issues I find over the next few days here. ...

So, if you rejoiced with the release of Boot Camp and were now going to head out and buy a Mac, then hold on a minute. Many users have reported a serious issue with the beta version of Boot Camp, where they have not been able to switch back to OS X and are stuck running Windows. Now, if you are anything like me, you won’t see anything wrong with that, but if you are not like me, then you would need to do a complete reinstall of OS X to get around this. Quite a few number of people are pissed out there because of this. ...

I have had an issue for a while - how to share calendars with Meenakshi and the rest of the family in an easy way. Right now my primary calendar is in Exchange at work, and that is fine for work related items, but tracking and sharing personal items was not possible. Right now, I mark them as Private in Exchange so my colleagues can see that I am busy then, but cannot see the details. And the personal events when added, Meenakshi gets an invite, but if she wants to send me an invite (or look at when I am busy or free), then that is not possible. We exchange a number of emails or IM’s before finding out what a suitable time is. This gets more interesting, when other friends and family want to know when are we free or busy for say a theater show or dinner. ...

I currently have two small NAS’s - Ximeta’s NetDisk (120 GB) which have been running well without any issues (except a little slowly when there is a lot of traffic), but I am getting close to exhausting that space and was looking for something beefier. A couple of options that do seem very promising. One is the Buffalo Tera Station , which while I know a few people have used this and are happy with it, my issue being I cannot upgrade the drives as easily. This is where Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV comes in the picture. Not only can this support 2 TB of data, but the drives are hot-swappable, how sweet is that. PC Mag also has a good review of the product. The built-in OS which controls this is called RAIDiator and if you read the features , it does seem quite capable. ...

Not sure which Linux distro to use, well, then check this out - if my calculations are correct there are 234 different distros available - wow! If you still cannot make up your mind then just run Windows! :)

I first read about the Spam Cube , in the paper a few days ago , and was intrigued by what it offers. But at the same time I am skeptical, it seems to be promising a lot – and like many similar attempts before this have failed. There is a limitation of four computers , but then they mention you can use up to six , so not sure that the limitation is and why - though I can possibly speculate its probably how fast it can process stuff. ...