Posts

Well after an interesting post on Forbes view on Linux and Microsoft and Karan’s <strong>lash back</strong> on the same I am back with more. Do I think is there an alternative to Windows? Absolutely! Is it for everyone? Well, if you believe the <strong>article</strong> in MIT’s Technology Review then probably yes. Microsoft still commands 94 percent of the market for PC operating systems. But Linux is gaining fast. In Toronto, customers can walk into the world’s first retail Linux store, Sub500....

Microsoft employee Raymond Chen (who seems to have loads of time on his hand) has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he’s saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he’s received at work since 1997. Not willing to stop there, Chen graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man’s malicious traffic. Cazh1 on the other hand has another take on the whole History of Spam thing - the impact of spammers changing message formats to get past the spam filters....

As Forbes writes (which I verbatim here), Is Linus Torvalds secretly working for Microsoft? That sounds crazy until you consider that lately, the free operating system he created, Linux, has been helping Microsoft close deals. Consider the deal that Microsoft snagged with the London borough of Newham, announced in early August. Looking to overhaul their computer systems, the Brits originally planned to dump Microsoft’s Windows and switch to open-source programs, including Linux....

Microsoft released today another critical security update - Buffer Overrun in JPEG Processing (GDI+) Could Allow Code Execution (833987). A buffer overrun vulnerability exists in the processing of JPEG image formats that could allow remote code execution on an affected system. Any program that processes JPEG images on the affected systems could be vulnerable to this attack, and any system that uses the affected programs or components could be vulnerable to this attack....

Techdirt writes on how University of Texas is having WiFi Blues. Can’t they run this on a different frequency and allow their students to run it on a different one? Why does Bush country want to do everything the difficult way and different? ;) Slashdot is running a story about The University of Texas at Dallas banning independent WiFi networks to avoid interference with the university-run WiFi network. There’s just one (big) problem....

This is really funny and I am probably getting someone in trouble. I get pretty good logs for this blog, who gets on it from where, how long, etc. you know the drill. If your hold time with Dell Support (most of which is outsourced to India) is longer than normal then it is probably because of me *grin*. As you can see in the image below, seems like those guys are just too busy reading my blog and at last count had spend close an hour and a half here!...

<strong>Karan</strong> has a very <strong>interesting post</strong> on the Paris Catacombs which was inspired by a <strong>story</strong> in the Guardian which stated the French police finding a real underground full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous” the police said....

If you were looking for the car advertisement then please either scroll down or you can <strong>click here</strong> . Since there are a bunch of guys interested in the car, I was to keep this at the top of the blog.

This is an interesting factoid that Microsoft added as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 that lets users prevent data from being written to USB devices (via a registry key). But this is just the start, Longhorn is supposed to add more comprehensive “features”. Much has been made of the security risks posed by portable storage devices such as USB keys, or flash drives, music players like the iPod, and other small gadgets that can store vast amounts of data....

I want to put up my 1998 Honda Accord EX on the market and if any of you are interested in buying an excellent vehicle then please leave me a comment here. I have brand new tires and brakes on the car. I also have all service records (Major, Minor and Oil Changes) and have kept the car in brand new condition both from the outside and inside with regular and timely servicing....

If you installed .NET Service Pack 1 you might notice that certain RSS feeds are broken and might return an HTTP Protocol Error. As Dare suggests , this is due to the fact that the HttpWebRequest class has been modified to make it more compliant to the HTTP spec. E.g. on the MS research feeds, this errors because the server returns the Content-Location header as “Content Location” (notice the space as opposed to the hyphen)....

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!...

I first heard of KeyHole during one of Microsoft’s presentation of Avalon (which is Longhorn’s presentation subsystem). Keyhole is the 3D digital earth pioneer—the only company to deliver a 3D digital model of the entire earth via the Internet. Keyhole’s groundbreaking EarthStream™ technology combines advanced 3D graphics and network streaming innovations to produce a high performance system that runs on standard PC’s and commodity servers. Both high performance and intuitive to use, Keyhole’s solutions enable anyone to manipulate a rich map of the earth composed of imagery and feature information....

Well I have been out of the country travelling for the last three weeks and hence have not had the opportunity to blog - partly due to the fact that I was quite busy and partly due to the fact that could not find decent connectivity. Well I am headed back home tonight and should be back up and blogging sometime next week, though I would have a lot of catching up on work including loads of emails....

I did download the latest service pack for Windows XP, SP2 yesterday. First of all its pretty big, the ISO image was 475 mb so this is something you don’t want to download at a slow connection. Microsoft has said that you should be able to order the CD and get it shipped to you (its free). I was able to install the service pack on one of my test machines without any problems and am now in the process of installing it on a few other XP machines I have running....

Microsoft is Beta testing the <strong>Web version of MSN Messenger</strong> and about time I think since Yahoo has had the web version of their messenger service for a while now. This is of course useful if you are one a shared computer or not on your own computer and cannot (or do not) want to install the MSN Messenger. This is supposed to also work in Netscape 7.0 or later, or Mozilla 1....

This is my second part of the SQL Server 2005 posts; you can read the <strong>first part</strong> on Hosting the .NET runtime in SQL Server. In the CLR certain conditions such as out of memory, stack overflow, etc can bring down an app domain (or process), this cannot be allowed in SQL Server 2005 when latter is acting has a host (for the CLR) as it will affect reliability and performance - couple of the key goals for SQL Server....

Those who are unfortunate enough to know me, know I keep saying Common Sense is not very Common (and how true it is). VS Mag has an <strong>article</strong> that list out some best practises for ASP.NET though they do it from a performance perspective, I feel everyone should do these irrespective what their perf. requirements are: Use Page.IsPostback - There is a lot of stuff one does when the page loads the first-time, no need to keep doing it again and again....

My dear friend Mario pointed <strong>me to this</strong> and it is hilarious! Make sure your speakers are on and enjoy!

If you live (or ever lived) in the San Francisco Bay Area (also know as the Silicon Valley), you would know that boosterism has a long part of the valley’s culture as much as Technology and Money is. This Sunday in the paper there was an excellent perspective on with the upcoming Google’s IPO, Silicon Valley’s hype machine is in overdrive, raising sales for potential investors. Below is the article written by Jonathan Weber for Mercury News, hopefully you would also enjoy the read and let me know what you think on the issue....

I finally got around to trying out SQL Server 2005 (a.k.a. Yukon) and <strong>reading</strong> up a little on how it operates under the covers. I had earlier <strong>discussed</strong> SQL Server Express. This is my first of series of posts where I will be highlighting some of the new things a developer can do in SQL Server 2005 from a .NET perspective, since there are many DBA’s who live and breathe SQL Server I will leave all the database and T-SQL specific stuff to them....

MSDN Mag has an interesting article on tools that convert code from c# to vb.net and vice-versa. I have come across a number of clients and developers both in the company I work for and also at clients who are interested in this. I find this whole topic quite intriguing, especially since in .NET there are minimal differences between c# and vb.net, at least if you stick to only managed code....

Well as you might have heard that Office 2003 SP1 is out. You can <strong>read here</strong> all the juicy details on what is fixed. As with all Service Packs it is highly recommended to install this, more-so if you use OneNote. I am surprised that Microsoft is actually calling this a OneNote 2003 SP1 - it is worth being a whole new version of the product! Those who have met me in person (unfortunately *grin*), know I cannot stop singing praises of OneNote and this service packs adds so many more features which makes is even better....

Well, this was long overdue. I had <strong>promised</strong> to upload my article that won a contest by osnews.com. I finally found a little time to upload it here, though the formatting is still a bit screwed especially on the code snippets. You can <strong>read the article</strong> . If you would like a pdf version of the same let me know and I can either put it up here or email it to you....

Thanks to Chris who accidentally pointed me to this. This is an update to my earlier <strong>post</strong> on Lookout. Seems like <strong>Lookout</strong> is now part of the <strong>MSN Sandbox</strong> and you can <strong>download</strong> it from there which is pretty cool of Microsoft to offer it soon after acquiring that company. If you use Outlook 2000 or later (not Outlook Express) then this is a highly recommended add-on.