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Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity. - Albert Einstein

Got this amazing call center movie from Kumud :), its about 12 mins long and you of course need to have the sound on or have headphone. Also when I was looking at it, their servers might be overloaded or something and it was very slow, so in case thats not eased off then you just need to be patient.

Thanks to Abhijit for pointing this one, and its awesome, if you ever wondered how would Microsoft redesign the iPod packaging, then fear not, your prayers have been answered - check it out . :)

In case you were wondering why your Indigo / WCF Jan CTP code does not work with the Feb CTP, then you can find a list of all the breaking changes published by MS. It is interesting to note that Microsoft is changing the namespace so late in the game, but I would rather they get it right now and make breaking changes as opposed to when Indigo ships.

The first time I heard of Microsoft’s Origami Project, was this morning in the papers ; the official site does not say much; but I was pointed to this leaked video , by a good friend who shall remain name less (don’t want to get him in trouble, now do I?). :) I have been told it runs some version of XP, but not sure on what exactly (embedded vs. regular), also with Vista round the corner, not sure if thats a good idea or not....

The software that one uses for blogging is interesting - if you are a “serious blogger“ (now there is an oxymoron), then you are tied to one platform or “engine“. What if you want to move from that, what do you do then? Either you give up your existing blog and move to the new one (in the process losing all your old posts, etc), or you somehow convert the data from one to the other....

You have have heard of Google Pages by now; if not check it out . I got a test page published just to see how it looks, it seems simple enough and seems to be a good answer to those who cannot afford some of the fancier solutions like Frontpage, etc. Now if only I could publish pages to somewhere else like my own domain.

Yes, I have been alive! Check out the Bugs being reported these days (thanks to Karan for the link) :)

You can get your own word spelled using flickr. Below is how “amit” is spelled: <p> <img src="http://photos33.flickr.com/35859438_b7312902e4_t.jpg" alt="Stairwell A"/> </p> <p> <img src="http://photos30.flickr.com/55640946_84e4ecf9a9_t.jpg" alt="M"/> </p> <p> <img src="http://photos7.flickr.com/6338027_84787dca81_t.jpg" alt="neon sign I"/> </p> <p> <img src="http://photos25.flickr.com/46836718_1b3ea8a07d_t.jpg" alt="T"/> </p>

I have gotten so much spam using the comments that the only way for me to manage them is to turn them off. Yes I know there is an easy way to fix it where I ask for confirmation before a comment is posted but I have not had the time to change the code, test it and then upload it to the server. I might just upgrade to CS 2....

Check out the soon-to-be-released Origen AE S210 which among many other features has bays for 12 HDD’s, and a 12" touchscreen LCD! Not sure on the damage it will cause (£££), but if its reasonable, then I would need to find a business case when Vista ships to get my hands on one of these :).

Got this via one of the Avanade communities (thanks Wes), and is just funny - does not matter if you are a geek or not - you need to see the Crash Difference video detailing out some experiences of using and owning and loving a Mac! :)

I have been eyeing the CLR via C#, Second Edition , I don’t have the first edition, can anyone comment on how good/bad would it be? Of course it will be published next month, and I suppose I can get more reviews then.

We have just started to look for a house - why build someone else’s equity when you can build your own. I got to admit its a drag! And the fact we just started and people go on for months doing this, I don’t know how. It is just a big pain in the butt. My sympathies to all those going through the same thing. If you do know good areas in London where we can live please let me know?...

Stephen Toub at Microsoft warns about a scam where people have been getting mailings (not emails) offering them MSJ - this a scam as MSJ is not published anymore! Don’t send them your hard earned money. 

If you go to the Computer Management tool in Longhorn (Dec CTP), then you will something called the System Stability Chart, which shows you how stable the system has been including Software Installs/UnInstalls, Failures (including Apps, Drivers, Hardware, Windows), etc. Its pretty cool and should help narrow down cause of failures - quite helpful in a corporate environment. Here is a screen shot from one of my VMs.

Contract inheritance (via CLR interface inheritance) is pretty cool allowing you to support versioning and contract aggregation in WCF, the catch though is if you have a Duplex interface then the callback interface must follow the same hierarchy. So if your primary interface say is IMyInterface which inheritances from ISomeInterfaceOne and ISomeInterfaceTwo, then the callback interface also needs to have the same chain or you will get an InvalidContractException. Here is an example from MSDN:...

Charles talks about how installing WAIK on a functioning VS 05 or TFS system will fail and screwing up the .NET 2.0 runtime bits; best to avoid doing that for now.

If you are writing high-perf. managed applications, all the old-world advice from the days of good old COM is still valid. But you do need to think of a few other things such as how the CLR JIT would change things, or the Exception Handling, or Threading and syncing up, or possibly the GC and Allocation Profiles? While this MSDN article is old (now), it still is excellent Food for Thought when it comes to writing high-perf....

If you wanted to use the ThreadState property (which should only be used for debugging and not sync.), to find out if a thread is running. Since the Running state has a value of 0, you cannot do a bit test to discover this state. But you could do something like this to get the same result: if ((state & (Unstarted | Stopped)) == 0) //yea, its Running!

I stumbled across this article talking about how to keep your computer spyware-free, all good advice. Now one less thing I need to be tech-support for the friends and family. :)

Not sure if I agree with the assessment that its Coldplay that is bad, rather I think its EMI. Seems like the whole Sony Saga again.

Exception Management is a topic near and dear to me personally, primarily because of the lack of understanding of most developers (that I have come across). There is an interesting change in the .NET 2.0 CLR on how it manages unhandled exceptions in a thread. If you write multi-threaded apps then this is important for you to understand. If you don’t write multi-threaded apps today, but I presume you would soon, then this is a good learning exercises....

Thanks to Wai for pointing this out, this is a rock song (I think) dedicated to Developers, you can download the songs in both mp3 and wma in various bit rates and they also have the lyrics; not bad I would say. :)

I got this via one of our communities internally at Avanade, and I have to admit it is pretty darn good, not sure why MS is now allowed to air it.