As the Large Hadron Collider is switched on today, the Guardian has a story saying that there are many people calling the CERN to find out if the world ends today? Apparently is completely safe and will not be doing anything that has not happened ‘100,000 times over’ in nature since the earth has existed. If you see another post here after today, I guess the mini-black holes did not suck in everything!...
You might have heard of Photosynth - it was announced last year; but if you ever wondered what the big deal was about Photosynth (or have not heard of it), then check out this video . Also this is open to all now for free.
You might have heard of the new “Cloud” service from Microsoft called Live Mesh . You can get more details on the team’s blog and a few videos . While I have the Mesh bits installed for a few weeks I only recently started using it and was very handy when I wanted to get to some information on one of the Wiki’s running at home. I have some of the machines on my home network connected on the mesh now (see screen shot below) - they all are running Vista....
Wow! What a week - so much talk of the next version of Windows code-named “7”. Of course the multi-touch (see video below) is what everyone is talking about. Now, this is cool because it is the evolution of the Surface which is scaled down to a screen. If you have not seen a Surface - it is quite big and works with five infrared cameras which picks up the gestures and then knows what to do with it (more on Surface at another time)....
This stumped me for a while and I was not sure what I was doing wrong. Apparently it seems if you don’t have the <configSections> element in your app config file as the first thing then you get a weird error saying "Only one <configSections> element allowed ...." (see example below). The description is misleading - you will see this error even though you only have one <configSections> element in your config file....
This is scary! It seems like your printer is spying on you using tiny tracking dots which are automatically printed whenever you take a print out. Of course these dots are unique and can be tracked to your individual printer and are not visible to the naked eye (otherwise you won’t have noticed them, innit?) The US govt. has convinced most of the printer manufacturers to add this to every page....
I did not know until this week that there was something called “Livelock”; Eh? I heard of Deadlock what the heck is Livelock? Well it is kind of the opposite of Deadlock (in some respects). A Deadlock as we know is when say Process A is waiting for Process B to finish or release some resource or something before continuing and Process B in turn is waiting for Process A before it continues - end result neither continues....
I had not heard of this until Karan told me about Erlang which was originally developed by Ericsson and stands for Ericsson Language.
I got this via the Ava communities - John Lee created a Wii Whiteboard Marker - very cool. Now the only thing to figure out how the heck to get a projector. 😄
If you want to get Windows Vista using Windows Update then copy the following in a bat (or cmd) file and run it in an admin console (if you have UAC switched on); then run Windows Update. Also the SP1 is a Release Candidate and not the “final” version so use at your own risk! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 @echo off reg delete HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSp1 /f > NUL 2>&1 reg delete HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Wow6432Node\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSP1 /f > NUL 2>&1 reg add HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSp1 /v Beta1 /t REG\_SZ /d da2ba4db-dedb-437e-8e7e-104643454bb6 /f IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR) :SUCCESS @echo....
No, there is no typo in the title of this post - there is a .NET “Micro” Framework (which is a Microsoft stack in case you were wondering). I had not heard of such a thing until today (but then I have not done any embedded stuff for a while). It is designed to use only a few hundred kilobytes of RAM (512K) and an inexpensive processor (ARM7 and ARM9 based)....
This is probably old news, but is new to me. I logged into MSDN to check something else out and saw that SoftGrid is now available on MSDN. I have had the bits internally for some time, but now anyone with MSDN login can get it. If you have never heard or seen SoftGrid you would be quite amazed how powerful it is. Unlike most virtualization software which virtualizes OS’s (VMware, Virtual PC, etc....
I have been meaning to post this for a few days but not had the change. In the meantime it seems this has was picked up by /. (among others) and since then it has become fairly well publicized. MSR (Microsoft Research) has a research project about “file swarming with network coding” or in simple terms peer-to-peer called Avalanche . This is different from the “normal” P2P networks that you might have used in the past....
Even though I have been part of the Windows Home Server (a.k.a WHM) beta for a while, those bits I was mostly running in a VM and did not get to installing it on a dedicated box until RC1 came out. It certainly is quite interesting and opens up various possibilities especially in a non-techy family. Also the fact that it is “designed” to be run headless certainly makes it easy and able to hide in a corner/room/garage/cupboard/shed(?...
If you ever wanted to reassign what Ctrl+Enter does in IE from the default of adding http://www. before and “.com” after what you entered in the address bar. Say you wanted to change this to go to “.net” or “.co.uk” then it is a simple registry change as shown by Ramesh . Of course any registry change for the inexperienced is a daunting task and I suggest backing it up just incase you mess it up....
The Computer Languages timeline was posted in one of the internal Avanade communities by a colleague and is pretty cool. Seems like Fortran was the “father” (or “mother” depending on your perspective) of all languages. 😄
Windows Live Writer, after a lot of talk , finally has an update in the shape of Beta 2 and in addition to the obvious ones (such as support of Sharepoint 2007 and Windows Live Spaces) there are more features. Some of the new features are table editing, better category support, new API’s (which I cannot attribute having never programmed against the API), etc. However, the plugin section does seem to finally be integrated better since I last saw it which was a while ago....
Then check out IP Spotting , I am not so sure what the intent of this site is, but nevertheless it is sure geeky (and cool) . Here are the results when I am connected via HSDPA . Score: your IP address has scored: 8. Of the 291663 IP’s spotted so far, this is ranked: 178179. IP as a bitmap (which does not look much like anything) X . X X X X X X ....
In addition to 3G speed results I had posted earlier, below are the HSDPA and 3.5G speed results from home. Click on the image below to see them in full size. Summary: <p> <img src="images/HSDPA_3.5_Summary.png" alt=""/> </p> Upload: <p> <img src="images/HSDPA_3.5G_Upload.jpg" alt=""/> </p> Download: <p> <img src="images/HSDPA_3.5G_Download.jpg" alt=""/> </p>
Over the weekend I got a HSDPA / 3.5G USB modem and here are the 3G speed results of that from home. Click on the images to see them in full size. I’ll post the 3.5G results soon as well. Summary: <p> <img src="images/12616841523.png" alt=""/> </p> Download Results: <p> <img src="images/3.5G_Download_Speed.jpg" alt=""/> </p> Upload Results: <p> <img src="images/3.5G_Upload_Speed.jpg" alt=""/> </p>
Vertigo has a very cool WPF application called Family.Show which exploits many of the new WPF features (data binding, sexy visualization, styles, templates, animation, etc.) and is a good example of the new “Web + Desktop” app hybrids combining the advantages of both paradigms. Family.Show is a genealogy application that you can use to build your family tree. The timeline implementation is very cool and you can “speed or slow down” time and see how your family tree (or forest) grows....
Keeping up with their cool AJAX implementation (part of Yahoo Mail), Yahoo has now implemented a Web version of their Yahoo Messenger. I like the interface - fairly simple which makes it good. Now just waiting for the Vista version of Yahoo Messenger .
Right, quick update on my previous post on Joost - I do have at the moment of writing this 998 Joost invitations; though still only 26 channels. And I don’t know what you guys are seeing, but the channels are not quite smooth and get quite jerky.
Contrary to some reports that Joost has gone live with unlimited invites and 150 channels - at least that is not what I am seeing. I don’t know if I need to do anything “special”, but here is what I have when I login to Joost. Number of Invites: Zero, yes that is a 0 as in nada, zip, zilch, etc. <p> <img src="images/image0_thumb4.png" alt=""/> </p> Number of Channels (so far): 26 - not 150, but 124 less....
In case you have not been following the news lately, NASA and Stanford University’s joint effort - Gravity Probe B after 17-odd months of launch and collecting data has proved one of the two not-as-yet-proven aspect’s of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Simply put (and it will be simple as I only have a fairly basic grasp on Physics - it was one of my favorite subjects in School, but that was many moons ago 😄, Isaac Newton believed (as shown by NASA’s image below) that both time and space were fixed entities and gravity was the force which acted between the object....