At work, recently I needed to simulate a GPS connection while sitting inside the building and while finding a solution for that I came across GPSGate , which is a cool piece of code. You can use this to share one GPS connected to a Pocket PC or laptop to other computers connected to the same LAN. On each computer running GpsGate you can in turn connect any number of GPS applications to GpsGate, everything running at the same time....
Jonathan Hardwick explores a few ideas on how to share your windows desktop on more than one machine… Now the question is that which ones are supported in Windows Media Center 2005, so I can control that using one of the laptops at home (there is always either mine or Meenakshi’s around). Has anyone tried this with MCE?
Fortune is running a story about the golden age of microchip graffiti is fading. But these images were never meant to be seen in the first place. “I saw something that looked different from most other things on the chip,” Davidson recalls. He cranked up the magnification and looked again. “I saw this Waldo thing,” recalls Davidson, referring to the character in the Where’s Waldo? cartoon books. At first Davidson thought the microscopic Waldo served as a kind of anti-copying feature, but a few months later, on the same chip, he found a teeny tiny Daffy Duck....
Microsoft has released an early version of the CTP of Indigo and a newer version of Avalon (from the PDC) and is now available on MSDN to download. I would certainly be downloading this and checking it out in the very near future. There are some known issues, so make sure to read the release notes.
Microsoft Watch is reporting some details on what IE 7 features would look like. It has taken a page, err… tab I mean from Firefox and would be tabbed, improved support for CSS 2.0, IDN (international domain names), transparent PNG, etc. There are rumours about a built-in news aggregator. And of course, improved security which will include reduced privilege mode by default, no cross-domain scripting and/or scripting access, improved SSL user interface and possible integration between IE 7....
I created a new area called Sandbox; for those who have worked with me previously can understand what this means. That is not a blog, just a place for me to start uploading some bits and seeing how they exist in the world or cyberspace. :) Right now there is nothing much there that is publicly going to be reached, but you can try hitting it at www.desigeek.com/sandbox . The first entry in there is going to be a World Clock - for which you can download the setup at www....
Then waddle over here and check it out.
Chandu Thota has a pretty cool application called BogMap . What is a BlogMap you ask? It is a place where blogs meet maps and location. You can also Use BlogMap you can geo-code your blog, browse already geo-coded blogs and search for blogs. Once geo-coded, you can get your own BlogMap location using a simple url. This is me: You can geo-code your blog feed using the submit page. Browse blogs feed using the browse page....
One of my colleagues, Jim Tallant, encountered a problem with Win2k Server, running in an Application Center environment, where very high CPU cycles threatened to bring down the server farm. All servers in the farm showed high CPU utilization (60 to 70%) whereas they normally run in the 15 to 20% range. We determined that this high CPU consumption was caused by excess time spent in the .Net memory garbage collection routine....
Process Explorer 9.0 was released a few days ago. The new features in it are: System information dialog has per-CPU graph option with hyperthreaded and NUMA processor information A Users menu duplicates the functionality of Task Manager’s Users tab, showing Terminal Services session information and supporting logoff, disconnect, and sending messages On XP SP2 and higher the TCP/IP tab displays the thread stack at the time an endpoint was opened The tray icon context menu includes the shutdown menu Search engine option to use Google or MSN Search Object address column is available for the handle view Image signatures can be checked on-demand in the process properties dialog Process explorer is digitally signed with Sysinternals’ Verisign Class 3 signing certificate
Google competitor A9 has Company > Yellow Pages on A9.com a nifty new thing where you can see street-level photos along with the Yellow Pages on Amazon.com. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street. The whole process (except for the driving!...
If I had know of this a couple of days ago, life would have been much easier as I was trying to get TurboTax from the US from Kumud. Most e-mail providers impose limits on the size of message that you can send or receive. If you have trouble sending large files to certain people, or want to avoid clogged mail arteries or the risk of reaching an overstuffed mailbox that will bounce your message back, there is a free and easy alternative called YouSendIt that works every time - and you can send files up to 1GB in size....
If you ever are in a situation where you need to identify production code issues or perf. issues, etc. (and who has not been there), then I would recommend checking out AppSight Black Box - a “kick-ass” product that I had an opportunity to play with sometime last year. They have solutions covering both .NET and J2EE and is very very impressive - I just want to know how the heck do they do it....
Thanks to Noni for pointing this out to me. You can get the history of all (I think) languages all the way from the 50’s to today - quite interesting. [Listening to: BabyBaby - - (06:55)]
Karan ponders on the Mac Mini and all I got to say is, man, that machine looks good! I almost bought one at Frys… err that is before the common sense kicked in (for not atleast). What do you think?
Brad Adams had a recent post discussing best method names ever. It is quite hilarious and interesting to find some methods that are used such as the FDangerouslyCommitToDiskCacheButNotActuallyToDisk, SetMetafileBitsBetter, PrestoChangoSelector, (all Windows) etc. My personal favourite are ZombifyActivationContext (in XP+) and die_you_gravy_sucking_pigdog() (FreeBSD).
What do you fancy with a Cockpit running Windows ? Now I think that is cool! (And please enough with the PJ’s about Crashing and Windows)…. <p> <img src="images/6pack.jpg" alt=""/> </p> [Listening to: Tabba (Techno) - Musafir [Club Mix - CD1] - Musafir (05:49)]
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat had written a very interesting paper highlighting their research in Google for Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. Their implementation called MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key....
Extremetech is reporting about Corsair Memory’s new XPERT Memory has one seriously distinguishing feature: It has a 10 character alphabetical LED display that snaps in place over your DIMMS. Install the RAM in your system and it automatically offers up your your memory speed, voltage, and DIMM temperature in bright red characters. Remember calculators in the Seventies? It’s that kind of LED display, and it really stands out through a case window....
I am sure you also have played with VSTS, but not sure if you are having problems with VSTS Dec 2004 Refresh bits up on MSDN. I am installing this natively (not on VMWare/VirtualPC, etc.) running Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition with VS.NET 2003, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 (Beta 2), and usual suspects like Office 2003, etc. During the installation process when I get to installing Visual Studio (see screen shots below), aftre going about 60-70% of the way I get an error - “Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Edition Beta 2-English – Error 1304....
I have my own favorite extensions, but Luke discusses more on his post here . Interestingly with Firefox being safer and all that (compared to IE) Spoofstick is missing from most lists. [Listening to: Chapter 2 - Unknown - (01:52:32)]
A century after Einstein’s miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did; Economist.com attempt to elucidate . [Listening to: Tabba (Techno) - Musafir [Club Mix - CD1] - Musafir (05:49)]
The beta 5 version of VMWare adds some interesting features, especially where you create multiple snapshots by allowing the user to take an unlimited number of point-in-time, saved-to-disk snapshots of running virtual machines. This makes it easier to capture and switch between multiple configurations and accelerates testing and debugging. The Snapshot Manager displays thumbnails of all the snapshots on a single screen and makes it easy for users to track all their snapshots and revert to a previously saved snapshot....
Well, I have been thinking for a long time (for those who know me, know that is quite unusual, mostly my poor brain just gives up and packs up due to overload - but that’s a story for another day) of getting a Media Centre at home of some sorts. Being a Microsoft geek it was obvious of the choice of going with the Media Centre 2005, but being a geek, and not to mention the consistent and persistent push of my dear friend Karan , who is a huge proponent of OpenSource (and no he is not the sort of a guy who bashes MS just because of them being MS), I realised, I could not just take it at face value and decided to read up a little more - after all at the end of the day this would be sitting next to the TV and is something that needs to look half-decent and not something that would live in the study so who cares what it looks like....
I think, this is the ultimate geek story about two guys who got fired from their jobs at Apple but still kept working (to finish the Graphic Calculator ) - oh how I wish I was there!! BTW, you can download the free versions even today (and no they are not from 1993).