misc

Megha send me this one; I had never heard of these guys but I do recognize the music from the new iPod Nano advertisement.

Seems like many others are following the MS route in releasing Betas - which might not be the best thing in the world. Telligent has now released the CS 2007 Service Pack 3 (Pre-Release) with a long list of fixes and “new features”.

LOL! iPhone advertisements run XP .

Despite my skepticism about not much happening on the WLW front, I do like it and use it for blogging and want to find out which plugins would you recommend. For example, which one to use for code? There is Insert Code for WLW , Paste from VS , Insert Formatted Clipboard , etc.

Both Microsoft and IBM are dueling it out in the cyberspace over SOA - reminds me of the hay days just before the .com boom started back in the bay area. 😄

If you are an avid reader of this blog (who am I kidding) 😉, you would have noticed that for the last couple of days it has been impossible to hit this site. The main reason for that being for the last 2-3 days discountAsp.net (where I host this site) have been under a massive DDOS attack . They setup another site outside of their data centers just to provide us (their customers) an update....

Hot on the heels of SP1 , Telligent has released CS 2007 SP2 . You can read up on what has been fixed and you can download it from here . I have upgraded the blog to SP2 and everything seems to be running fine, but if something is amiss then let me know .

A few people have released an interesting set of wallpapers which although they say is for Aero, you can use it with any OS. You can see a screenshot here and download it from here (~16 mb).

SP1 for CS 2007 has been available for about 3 weeks, and I finally got around to upgrading to that. Everything seems to be working fine, but if you find something amiss please drop me a note and let me know.

Now that CS 2007 has shipped, CS (a.k.a Community Server - the thing that this blog runs on), has announced their plans for the rest of this year and will have two releases in July and October codenamed Maui and Hawaii respectively. Seem to be interesting changes, enhancements, refactoring, etc that is going on. I have not had the time to dig too much under the covers of CS (not since it morphed from ....

First things first - no I am still alive just have been awfully busy and not had a chance to blog. A couple of guys have implemented two Captcha controls (I had first implemented this as part of upgrading to CS 2.1 Beta 2) for CS 2007. Brenda Tompkins’s Captcha control (which I am using here) - this in addition to the blog comments also supports contact, photos, file comments and registration - cool....

Zeddy has released a plugin for VS 2005 (with a screen-shot on his blog) which allows you to copy and paste the code from VS.NET directly into a CS blog. It only supports C#, so if you are using VB.NET you are stuck with another method (such as copy’ing into Word and then using that - though as Zeddy also points out that has issues). See

Well I bit the bullet and upgraded the blog to run on CS 2007 RTM - yes contrary to what I had said earlier. Initial indications look good so far and I only had to make a couple of changes. There are still a few things which I have not tried like the Google CS plugin, and I suppose the CAPTCHA control will stop working. I would need to look at those over the next few days....

RC1 for Community Server 2007 (the thing that runs this blog) is available now and you can get it from here . If all goes well then the RTM version is supposed to come out on the 16th of this month - in other words in four days. I will wait for the RTM before I try and update the blog to the new bits.

Interesting way to do advertising - something (which incase you did not know), is something Avanade does not do - it is mostly word of mouth or very targeted marketing to the CxO. Video: Avanade - Where Microsoft Innovation Meets Unrivaled Insight

Telligent have released the Beta 1 for Community Server 2007 and you can find more details here . I have the beta running locally on my machine and on the surface I don’t see many changes, but I have not had too much time to dig into it. The only notable change is how the themes are handled - making it very easy. E.g. changing the image on the paperclip theme is a piece of cake....

I just upgraded to CS 2.1 SP2 (I was on SP1) and from my quick smoke test all seems to be well; if you find something not working then please let me know.

Given my book is up on Amazon this might not be the best time to write this . There is an interesting article by one of the LA Times reporter on his experiences with how the price changes for books “left” in the shopping basket and not actually bought. This is something I have noticed first hand and I can tell for a fact it is not just books but other items as well....

I finally upgraded the blog to Community Server 2.1 SP1 today - its been out for a little while but did not get the time to upgrade till now. Everything seems to be running fine, but if you find something broken then let me know. The next version of CS , does have lots of code-names, but I don’t know what to make of it. It is supposed to be out sometime in Q1 07....

I recently bought a new Multi-function printer at home - a Dell 1815dn and it works great. I am quite impressed with the speed and quality - both of which are fine for home use. This can also scan documents and send it to a machine on the network and that was one of the features that was very useful at home, but the Windows Firewall did not like it and would block the incoming request....

I am finding all kinds of interesting bits and bobs now that the primary OS I am running is x64 bit. For example did you know that Flash Player does not have a x64 bit implementation? Believe me, less Ads for me to see on pages and you don’t see me shedding any tears! Here is what I get when I tried to install Flash on IE 7 x64: Flash Player is not supported for playback in a 64-bit browser....

Vista x32 is available on MSDN - go get it! 😄 Update: Here is a screen shot: <p> <img src="images/VistaonMSDN_thumb.png" alt=""/> </p>

Still trickling down …. just another few hours to go. <p> <img src="images/VistaRTM_thumb2.png" alt=""/> </p>

If you are running Community Server (CS) like this blog and you would like to get Google or YouTube videos in your posts ( like this ), then you need to add the following setting in your section of the communityserver.config file. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 <embed style="true" type="true" src="true" quality="true" bgcolor="true" scale="true" wmode="true" salign="true" FlashVars="true" width="true" height="true" /> <object width="true" height="true" /> <param name="true" value="true" /> (via Chris Hammond&rsquo;s post )