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I had this very irritating issue with the remote control of Media Center, where mostly whatever key I pressed, got pressed more than once (even though I pressed it once); it it would cause things like as you move around - very irritating as you would skip over channels you wanted to change or navigate to music or pictures, etc. But it seems like this issue of Stickiness is because there are two buffer overruns in the eHome infrared receiver ( read Q331913 ), and although Microsoft has this patch to fix it, I would recommend installing the new Update Rollup1 for the eHome receiver as the earlier patch was released in 2002 and even though I have MCE 2005 it was a suspect of not fixing the issue (mind you I did not do extensive testing). ...

Mike Calligaro talks about the Mobile team’s decision on using Persistent Storage in Windows Mobile 5.0 - first time ever for a Pocket PC (Smart phones already have this since 2002); and how this will affect you as a end user - as it talks about RAM vs. Battery life - both things which are very dear to our hearts. ...

If you want to find out more from a class diagram perspective on what the new API’s are especially for the new managed messaging, state and notification API’s in Windows Mobile 5, then check out the class diagram. Click on the thumbnail to see the full one.

Well, we have a very nagging problem on the MCE, Live TV, Recorded TV, Music, Radio - all was fine, the only issue was whenever we saw a DVD, even with the MCE and Windows volume all the way to maximum, the sound was not loud enough to hear and quite often we had to switch on the sub-titles just to follow what is going on. Finally, though it seems I have found a fix - and it seems to be working. I was using the AC3 filter and the DTS/5.1 encoding. In the AC3 Config, you need to change the preset default to an aptly one names Loud, which fixes the issue. ...

I came across two Desktop management programs - Konfabulator and SmartBar XP and want to know what your review on them are? Some of the reviews I read talked about SmartBar being slow and others raving about how Konfabulator is pretty neat. What do you think? ...

My colleague, Chris Periris has an article where he talks about how to host an indigo servince in various forms. In case you did not know Indigo can be hosted in various surrogate processes (in addition to itself) such as IIS, EXE, NT Service, COM+, etc.

Even if you are not interested in this phone, you should go over and read this listing on eBay. And yes, my lovely wife Meenakshi (and not she has not started blogging yet) has this phone …. ahem …. which I gave her … hopefully she is not reading this…. :o) ...

Now that I am not sleeping and read my earlier post (*grin*) about MSMQ (ver. 3.5) and Indigo, I would like to clarify a couple of things. One, you don’t have to have MSMQ 3.5 installed, only if you want to use MSMQ (i.e a queue channel). If you are using tcp, udp, http, etc, then you don’t need this. And two, if you do install MSMQ, then on Windows 2003 Server you need to install the SP1 first. Also, you might want to get the checked build on a dev box as that has debug info. ...

I am quite new to the UK having moved from the US a few months ago and seems like I need a new battery for my car. Any ideas which sites I can look at to get an idea for cost, etc? I would prefer an OEM (same brand that originally came with the car). Any ideas?

Google calculator now supports currency calculations. Want to know what $3.5 are in £’s ? Or how about the currency of UK in Indian money ? Or how about 5 British pounds in South Korean money ? How cool is that? ...

As I found the hard way, if you require queued channels to work in Indigo, then you need to install MSMQ Ver. 3.5 which is specially required for Indigo. Interestingly, the installer does not install this (for check that even MSMQ is installed), but then by design Indigo can use any kind of channel. This version of MSMQ provides functionalities like per-application dead letter queue and remote transactional read that are used by the “Indigo” queued channel on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. You can get the downloads from here . Below are the direct links: ...

Here is the new file copy dialog box in Longhorn (via Karan): Sorry, was just too good to pass up. *grin*

What better way to learn these new technologies other than going through Microsoft’s e-learning courses including the hands on labs from TechEd, etc. for free. But you need to hurry, as this offer is valid only till launch (i.e. first week of November). If you already have the Virtual PC (VPC) image, then you can go here for SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 . If you don’t have the image then you can still do the same on a hosted environment by Microsoft - you will just need to be on a high-speed internet connection then. Click for the hosted environment for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 . ...

Thanks for all those who emailed, IM’d and SMS’d me. Both I and Meenakshi are ok, we were in Amsterdam this week and not in London. Everyone we know are ok too, but there is still lots of confusion in London. What a sad world we live in. :(

This blog will be offline tomorrow as the server this is hosted on has SP1 being installed. Date: Friday Evening, July 8th, 2005 Time Window: 9:00PM - 2:00am PST During this time window, the server will be offline for approximately 60 minutes.

Believe it or not, but at TechEd Europe 2005, Microsoft is giving away an XBOX 360 as a lucky draw. All the attendees who submit feedback for each session are entered in the lucky draw and one winner from every session is being given a XBOX 360 - a full, what is it, 4 months before public launch? No, I have not seen it yet, if I do, keep watching this space. ...

If you want to get to the .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 msdn documentation, the best url for that is msdn2 - check it out.

Not sure if you know, but I am in Amsterdam this week for TechEd Europe as a result, it would be a bit tricky posting here my useless mindless good-4-nothing blabber! I guess, you would need to just survive on caffeine till then. ;)

I don’t know if you knew or not, but as a kid Physics was my favorite subject (yep more than Computers), and I almost went into that line of things, but the idea of controlling a machine at my will (machine being a computer here) was more fun, so here I am many moons later. But, every now and then my old physics roots still pull me to something interesting I read about (its only reading now, no more experiments). One consequence of Einstein’s theory (E=mc²) is that a clock in motion will always appear to run slowly compared with one at rest (and since all motion is relative, the clock at rest will appear to go slowly from the vantage of the one moving). ...

If you think gadgets for the hip-hop world are a good idea, then check out some “samples” … lol …

Although I keep to my geeky side of things, every now and then I do come across a political story that I find intriguing for various reasons which I post here. This is one of them, reported by BBC about Nixon’s dislike of ‘witch’ Indira as he called Indira Gandhi , India’s Prime Minister from 1966 - 77 and then 1980 - 84.

This is very cool! Google now has officially released their API’s for Google Maps; till now there were a few hacks in place such as my where I work , but now its all supported. You would need to get a key, which is associated with a specific url, you can get that here and also read up on all the fun details here . ...

Give it a spin , it sure is intriguing … and now it makes perfect sense too …. :)

Jon has released a crack for google’s video viewer which allows you to view movies from anywhere (as opposed to those hosted only by google.com). Here is the crux of the code which prevents that: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 // Google mods const char\* allowed\_host = \\"video.google.com\\"; char \* host\_found = strstr(p\_sys->url.psz\_host, allowed\_host); if ((host\_found == NULL) || ((host\_found + strlen(allowed\_host)) != (p\_sys->url.psz\_host + strlen(p\_sys->url.psz\_host)))) { msg\_Warn( p\_access, \\"invalid host, only video.google.com is allowed\\" ); goto error; }

TheServerSide.NET has done a performance benchmark specifically around benchmarks comparing the following four configurations against each other: Sun JWSDP 1.5 / Sun HTTP Server 6.1 IBM WebSphere 6.0 / IBM HTTP Server 6.0 .NET 1.1 / IIS 6.0 .NET 2.0 / IIS 6.0 They said, extensive time was taken to tune all the above following each vendor’s best practices and iterative testing to get the best result. For all configurations, tracing, logging, authentication and session state was switched off. Also the Java heap sizes and thread settings were tuned for max. performance. And, all tests were run on the same hardware (in this case a AMD Opteron 1.8 ghz). ...