Geek

After a flurry of activity on Live Writer last year there has not been any movement on Windows Live Writer and seems like it is dead? Anyone got any updates on when (or if) when this will move forward?

Well this is quite old news but it is new to me - running IE on Linux - how cool is that. Click on the screenshot to see IE running on Ubuntu at one of the machines at home. If you would like to run IE 7 on Linux, then check out this link . ...

I had been thinking of writing a program which will allow be to dial a number using Vonage especially being the fat-butter-fingered-lazy-ass that I am. . Although I wanted to do this for a while, I could only get around to writing it over the holidays. The program is fairly simple to use as shown below. Enter your User Name and Password Click on Connect This will connect to Vonage and authenticate your user name and password. If successful I retrieve a list of the Phone Numbers associated with your account. These could be more than one lines or soft phones you have. Select the Vonage line you want to use. Enter the Phone Number you want to dial. Click on Dial. Your Vonage phone should start ringing, when you pick up that line it will automatically start dialing the phone number you entered in Step 4 - how cool is that. There are two ways you can install this, but before you do that you need to have the .NET 2.0 runtime installed on your machine. If you don’t have this you can download the v32 bit or the v64 bit . ...

The new version of VMWare 6.0 is out in Beta and it has some exciting new things. In addition to the new features listed below (from their email), it also supports x64 and up to 8 gb of RAM! Support for Windows Vista - Use Windows Vista as host operating system Multiple monitor display - You can configure a VM to span multiple monitors, or multiple VMs to each display on separate monitors. Integrated Virtual Debugger - Workstation integrates with Visual Studio and Eclipse so you can deploy, run, and debug programs in a VM directly from your preferred IDE Automation APIs (VIX API 2.0) - You can write scripts and programs to automate VM testing. Headless mode - You can run VMs in the background without the Workstation UI. Easy Upgrade or Downgrade of VMWare Virtual Machines — A new Convert Hardware Version wizard steps you through the process of upgrading or downgrading virtual machines between Workstation versions 4, 5, and 6. You can get the Beta from here and get more details in the release notes here . And of course check out the known issues before you do anything. I have not tried this myself - yet. Maybe if I can take some time out over the holidays. I personally prefer VMWare to Virtual PC anyday and am quite excited about this new release. ...

There are a couple of new Vista based remotes coming out in the next few months, which incorporate SideShow - sure looks sweet.

If you are running Vista x32 or x64 and want to play the usual set of audio and video files (such as mp4) you might need additional codecs . The one which has worked with me on Vista x64 is called the K-Lite Mega Code Pack v1.61; however as I said in my previous post , it might have caused an issue in DVD playback though I am not 100% sure of that. ...

As you can see the links on this blog now show a preview, this is using Snap Preview and it can give you a preview of the link before you click on it and is quite cool. You can signup for free with nothing to sign up or anything, just add the script tag and away you go. ...

If you are like me and are running Vista x64 and are having some driver issues and would like to use the XP x64 drivers in Vista, but cannot because Vista expects the drivers to be signed, well then you can disable that. Disclaimer: please use common sense and back up your data and don’t blame me if this breaks stuff. Note 2: Using signed drivers is the recommended practice! I would resort to this only as a desperate measure (till all the drivers are released) or if you want to use it in a development scenario. ...

This certainly has to excite your geek molecules - digg in 3D (use your mouse to navigate around) ( Thanks to Chris for the link)

I guess, Dheera did not like the faculty entering his dorm room at MIT, so he had to fix the situation I suppose . . If I ever get to own a house with a basement (which would be my “hang out” area), I am sure to get one of these. Writing the PS/2 keyb driver seems simple enough and the code unlock door code is straightforward as well (however, you might want to format it to make it readable). Sweet, I do need to make one of these. ...

[Update: Once published the maps were askew, so fixed that] Now that I have had a chance to use Live Write for a bit, I thought I’d post my feedback so far. What do I like? Overall, I like it - its so far been the best tool I have used of its kind. I tried using Word 2007, but for me that never worked and it gets stuck in a loop - and keeps asking me for a credentials, which even after entering the correct one does not go work. I do not get any error or exception (though I have not had time to attach the debugger and see - maybe this weekend). ...

BBC is reporting that a new file sharing darknet (what is that?) service called Relakks has launched in Sweden. I think they have been a bit overwhelmed lately, if you check their website , you get the following message. 😉 ...

Troltech will be releasing a open linux based mobile phone next month which has a user-modifiable linux OS and is a working mobile supporting GSM and GPRS. The phone will be available as part of a SDK and will be available in a candy-bar form. Troltech are hoping the “spirit of innovation” will help it be a success and will be marketed as the “first open Linux mobile device for application developers”. The phone is based on a dual-core XScale processor at 312 MHz with 64 mb ROM and 128 mb flash. The idea sounds very promising (especially to geeks), and it would certainly be interesting if it does take off. ...

Thanks to Karan for pointing this one to me. But instead of blocking everyone out of your wireless, if you got bandwidth to spare then why no have fun? Which is exactly what Pete Stevens did with this upside-down-ternet and secured his wireless in an alternate fashion. I think of these these days I’ll try this out – although I would have to scale down the speed as I need the a significant chunk because of VPN and VOIP. ...

There is an excellent selection of google mash ups in the Part 1 and Part 2 at google map mania. Below is an excerpt for some of those are listed (but make sure to check those links for the complete list). Nearby - Nearby.org.uk is a site with heaps of UK (and Ireland) location based information. They have taken this information and created a customisable mashup application with a huge list of on-demand information layers you can overlay from various UK sites. Example site-feeds include info from wetroads.co.uk, cavedatabase.co.uk and Ports.org.uk to name a few. BlueGhost features Weather, traffic and rail info - BlueGhost UK Info was born out of the BBC Backstage Project and features real-time various information overlays for the UK on Google Maps. Toggle national weather, traffic and rail alerts on the Google Map. Interestingly, this is the first mashup code I’ve seen making use of the new zooming feature recently added by the Google Maps team. Green Brighton - vegetarian and vegan restaurants, organic veg boxes, recycling centres, permaculture gardens and meditation classes. London Hotels Mapped by Tube Station - TubeHotels.com plots the locations of hotels close to all tube stations in London. Search by station or specific hotel name and results get plotted on a Google Map. Each hotel in the list shows how far it is from the closest tube station. UK Handbag Theft Map - (Only works on IE) Crawl Planner Petrol Prices – Be careful, as you might end up spending more money driving to the petrol pump rather than saving any. Tourist Maps – quite handy if you get oodles of people visiting like we have been. 😄 UK Speed Cams Tap Water Quality for fish tanks (if you think something is fishy) 😄 Monopoly Pub Crawl UK Classifieds + Google Maps EventSites - UK Web 2.0 site employing Google Maps Old London Town - Crime/History Map Make sure you don’t open too many of these in various tabs of your browser (especially if you are using IE 7 Beta 3), it will slow down your system significantly. If you are using IE 7 Beta, opening them at the same time might even cause IE to crash (as I experienced). ...

If you use a RSS feed then you might not have seen this, but if you browse to the blog you would see that I upgraded to Community Server 2.0. I was running a modified version of .Text 95 and the upgrade to CS was a bit painful, mostly due to the fact that I did not want to lose all this data and there was not upgrade path from .Text. ...

Since my previous post , I have made some improvements to this - mostly around the installer and also the fact that there might be machines out there in the world who do not have Microsoft Ink installed. (duh!). If you have a Tablet PC or one of the SDK’s installed which give you the Ink bits then continue using ClickOnce - I would recommend to upgrade to the newest bits. ...

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. ...

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 ).

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

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 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. ...

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. ...

I have finally bitten the bullet and plan to transition over to a Windows Mobile phone from my current Sony Ericsson (I have a P910i). The HTC Hermes is the phone I would be moving to, the ability to get email on the fly (blackberry style) is the main motivation. HTC Hermes (also know as i-mate JASJAM) is going to be released in a about 2-3 months and is ideal for my needs. You can read a review of this phone here . ...

I had very seriously considered getting a Mac Mini - the new ones with the Intel CPU’s. But now that Microsoft has announced that there won’t be any EFI support in Vista , I am not so sure of getting a one now. I am a Wintel guy, and the reason for getting a Mac was from a pure geek-value in the short term, but in the longer term was to install Windows and use it as another machine. Since I have never done any development on the Mac and don’t plan to do anytime soon, if I cannot run Vista on it, then this is just a very expensive toy - and I don’t make that kind of money. :) ...