geek

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....

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....

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.

I guess it had to happen one day, but as of this morning Google’s search engine is not working - atleast not here in Bay Area, USA which is also where Google is Headquatered. CNN has also picked up on <strong>this story</strong> and mention that in addition to the US, France and UK are also having issues. When I try and search on something I get the error an Error -27 as shown below....

Wired is running a <strong>story</strong> that interview’s a former senior manager who shares his firsthand knowledge of the device’s development, the glitches that almost killed it, and the extraordinary steps Apple took to keep the iPod a secret. You can check it out <strong>here</strong> .

Found this <strong>interesting link</strong> which has all kinds of DVD Hacks for most DVD Players (including my cheap-no-brand-one). You can also enter codes to make your DVD Players region free - neat! Update: This link was broken its been fixed now. Thanks to my lovely wife - Meenakshi for finding that. She does need to read my blog every now and then especially when I am quizzing her. *grin*

As Jim Fawcette who had had this interesting entry writes, we’re starting to see Microsoft’s strategy for serving different market sectors with the preview of <strong>Visual Studio Team System</strong> (VSTS), the enterprise version of VS 2005 and the various <strong>Visual Studio Express</strong> (VSE) Editions. What hasn’t been discussed widely yet is that Microsoft’s approach is fundamentally different from what we’ve seen for development tools. Historically, design focuses on the high-end tool, then all other versions are essentially crippled versions of the “real” release, with levels of features simply turned off with little or no attention being paid to the unique needs of each market sector....

Now, not sure if this <strong>error</strong> is supposed to be smart or cheesy, or did a programmer at Google just have too much sugar, but I got this error a few times tonight and the first time I have seen it.

As Techdirt points out It’s funny how all the lawsuits against Google just so happen to appear right before their IPO. The website Googles.com just shot up their traffic numbers by a ridiculous amount for their stories and games for young children about an alien named Googles, by <strong>suing Google for trademark infringement</strong> . It turns out that Googles (the alien/children folks) got a trademark for the name related to children’s books and toys in 1997, pre-dating Google by about a year....

IMHO, it was bound to happen and about time it did. The BBC is <strong>reporting</strong> that Google bans Gmail sales. Google updated the program policy for Gmail on Monday adding clauses that ban the sale, trading, reselling or exploiting of Gmail accounts for commercial purposes. Despite the policy change Google still seems happy for invitations for accounts to be swapped and traded.

Subramanian pointed me to this article. Researchers at Microsoft have devised a technique to assimilate the human body as a conduit for consumer electronics. Electrodes attached to body use the skin as a system bus to transmit data and as a conductive medium to distribute power between devices. The human body is used as a conductive medium, e.g., a bus, over which power and/or data is distributed. Power is distributed by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes....

Found this off /. so if you have seen it there, you can stop reading. Interesting project where one can submit a md5 hash and in a few days (I presume) you get the plain text value of them. Currently the character set a-z;0-9 [8] is supported which means that hashes created from lowercase plain text with letters and/or digits upto a maximum length of 8 characters are supported. They user RainbowCrack for cracking which essentially is a hash cracker....

I found an interesting behaviour in the Page rank feature of the google toolbar in IE. For example when I view this blog with the fully qualified URL i.e. http://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit my page rank shows up as 7/10 and when I view it using the abbreviated URL http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit (no www.) then it shows up as 3/7. You can see both the screen shots <strong>here</strong> and <strong>here</strong> showing this behaviour. My question is, has anyone else also noticed this?...

Microsoft today released a <strong>patch</strong> for Download.Jet (32 bit edition) which I would highly recommend everyone to install - make sure you select your OS’s language before downloading it. If you don’t want to install the patch and prefer doing it manually then keep reading. I had another <strong>post</strong> a few days ago which talked a little more on this virus, if you care to read. The issue at heart really is the ADO stream in IE....

There has been a number of interesting things I have started noticing lately. With the whole recent <strong>virus fiasco</strong> I changed my IE security setting to High - which lead to almost every site I visited on any regular basis to crap out (which sucks and is a big failure on people like me who help design and implement some of these systems, but that is another story for another day)....

Hopefully you have heard of the new Download.Ject virus that is also known as JS.Scob.Trojan, Scob, JS.Toofeer and have taken the corrective steps to fix it. Like most other users, I primarily use IE ( about 85% of the time and FireFox the rest of the time) and need to be careful of this threat - especially on what it does. If you have not done anything to prevent this I seriously recommend that you do ASAP....

Found this on Scott’s <strong>blog</strong> , but Borland is now <strong>blogging</strong> (W00T) and using the same open source code as me. You can get their feed <strong>here</strong> . I quickly eyeballed it and seems like lotsa interesting stuff.

Scott (the author of dotText - the open source bits running this blog), has an interesting <strong>question</strong> to ask, is Unit Testing important for all to include it in all the edition of Whidbey of only Visual Studio Team Systems. I think this should be a moot point. In my opinion no developer can say he/she is feature complete if they have not done a “unit test”. How can one know if their code does what it is supposed to do?...

BBC is <strong>reporting</strong> that the first ever computer virus spread by mobile phones has been sent to anti-virus firms. No infections have been reported and the worm is harmless but it is proof that mobiles are at risk from virus writers. The worm, known as Cabir, infects phones and devices running the Symbian operating system. Anti-virus firms are divided on whether it will open the floodgate to similar viruses. Because the worm requires Bluetooth technology to travel, it is geographically constrained to a radius of about 30 metres....

Nearly three years ago TechDirt wrote about <strong>breakthroughs in atomic entanglement</strong> that could lead to advancements in quantum computing and teleportation. It seems that much of that research has continued as two separate groups of researchers have now used entanglement to <strong>successfully teleport the quantum state of an atom</strong> . As the article points out, the fact that two separate research groups came up with similar results (using slightly different methods) is particularly promising....

If you want to see how heave your site is then <strong>browse over</strong> and plug in your url and check it out. Here is how the numbers for this blog came up to: Load Time by Connection SpeedConnection SpeedDownload Time14.4Kbps85.93 seconds28.8Kbps44.96 seconds56Kbps24.84 secondsISDN (128Kbps)13.22 secondsCable (512 Kbps)6.30 secondsT1 (1.44 Mbps)4.82 secondsSDSL (1.544 Mbps)4.76 secondsADSL (2.0 Mbps)4.59 seconds Page ObjectsSizeObject TypeURL137443HTMLhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit/4672CSShttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/skins/bahree/style.css2990IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Images/login_icon.jpg1052IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Images/atom.gif953IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/images/Comments.gif138IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/images/link.gif130IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Skins/bahree/images/xml.gif88IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Skins/bahree/images/arrow_on.gif4CSShttp://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/customcss.aspx It also told me what was broken - which means I should take out the time to fix it....

I was in meetings today with Microsoft and going over some client stuff that I cannot really talk about here. But at this client the “hot backup” is done on a remote NAS over a OC192 line and I was like what the heck is that? Turns out that has a bandwidth of almost 10 gigabytes/sec (9.6 gb/s to be exact) - wow! Imagine all the things one can do with that pipe....

I don’t get it. <strong>Anatoly</strong> discusses how he (along with other people he quotes) don’t use the debugger in C# or any other managed code and letting the runtime find the exception and let it “deal” with it. Now I don’t know these people and they could probably be correct in the context of the applications they write, but I don’t agree with their viewpoint. Sure there are applications that would not warrant the use of a debugger (like HelloWolrd *grin*), but most of the applications I design and work on are fairly complex and the debugger is a very invaluable tool!...

Pocket C# is port of C# compiler from DotGNU project to Windows CE. DotGNU contains open-source runtime, compiler, tools and many other things to make free cross-platform .NET environment. I took only compiler and several required tools and ported them with some modifications to WinCE platform. This would allow you to develop and build applications using standard .NET CF and C# right on your pocket device. It’s quite easy, you almost don’t need to do anything manually - just write your code and project file and then build it with one tap....

Karan (see the Blogs I read section for his weblog) pointed me to this and I think it is pretty cool. <strong>IronPython</strong> is a new implementation of the Python language targeting the CLR. It compiles python programs into IL that can run on either .NET or Mono (now that is cool). This produces a standard assembly that other code can reference. It would be an interesting exercises to see the IL it produces and see if we can infer anything from that....