Misc

If you buy a en eligible Dell on or after October 26th you can upgrade to Vista. Check out Upgrade Express Site and http://www.dellvistaupgrade.com/ and for more details.

Yes, they are like Military Intelligence - an oxymoron. And HSBC is not too off as well by locking out accounts of users running on NetSurf (which incase you did not know is an opensource browser for RISC OS platform). See I keep saying, common Sense ain’t very common. ...

If you got more time to waste while searching than doing anything then check out Ms. Dewey . While it seems cool at first, it very quickly gets very irritating. And the fact, she does not shut up does not quite help. (via fellow Avanut, Christopher T Clark)

This is the screen shot from Windows Media Player in Vista Build 5728 - I guess there is still work to be done by Microsoft.

Well, Gartner is saying that Vista will be the last of its kind, as for any future versions using a modular architecture as the current integrated architecture is unsustainable. I don’t think this in itself is anything new (most other companies have been doing it for a while). But in practice this is more difficult than it sounds. It will be quite difficult to break the Windows team and the way they do builds, code branches, etc. Also, what will happen to Longhorn then? However, I do hope Microsoft moves to this model as the existing ones will just keep getting more painful. (go this via osnews.com ) ...

Observer has a list of the top 15 websites that change the world. I am not sure I personally agree with all of them, but interesting nevertheless.

Continuing my quest for better offline blogging , this is a test post using Windows Live Writer - first impressions are good despite some people having “interesting” behaviors with this online. I’ll keep you guys posted on how this goes for me.

I upgraded the blog to CS 2.1 RTM, after a few days of testing and everything seems to be working fine. If you find something thats broken, please do let me know .

What is a collation? Before I get into the exception details, a collation is something that defines what the bit pattern looks like for each character and is used sorting, ordering and comparisons. You can read more details here . When I had originally upgraded from CS 2.0 to 2.1 Beta 1, I had started to get a collation error in SQL – but only when I clicked on any specific tag to see posts listed by that tag. I had posted this to the CS forums with no luck . Now, I had selected the default SQL collation when I was installing it on one of my dev boxes at home. After profiling SQL Server, the culprit was the stored procedure called “cs\Tags\Get”. ...

Community Server 2.1 went RTM yesterday and I am not quite happy. Didn’t they just release the RC1 just a few days ago (on August 4th to be precise) What is the point of pushing a RC1 for 5 days! After I spend a considerable amount of time testing and upgrading to RC1, the RTM was released. Yes, I am irritated by the fact I have to do some more testing, but I am more irritated about the fact, why bother releasing a RC if you are not going to be really testing with it? Isn’t the point that let people use it for a while and fix issues found and then go from there? Seems like just releasing it to tick a box on some process. Grr…. ...

Meenakshi (don’t bother checking the link, she has not started blogging), also got her new phone – a Qtek 8500 yesterday. And after a few hours of grumbling as she had to manually update her Outlook contacts with the phone numbers before she could sync. it up she seems to be happy with it and I think she really likes it. 😄 ...

I had been testing the CS 2.1 RC1 over the weekend at home and after it seems everything seems to be working, I upgraded the production blog to the latest bits as well. If you see anything missing or any broken links then please let me know.

I have been looking at a few offline blogging tools and I am trying out BlogJet based on Adam’s recommendation who has been using it for a while. It seems to be OK thus far, but I have not had a chance to play with it except for a few hours and it seems to be promising. The only issue I have is it does not seem to support Unicode characters – at least not in the title – I do not know of the posts themselves. See the image below where my blog’s title is a bit messed up. ...

I have been asked this everytime we get around to talking about Avanade (my current employer), now what does it mean. I did not know till now and had always wondered till now. But I came across this old archive (in another context) and now I know what it means: ...

I have used Vonage’s Click2Call functionality while I was in the US and loved it; they have finally released the same thing for the UK (finally)! If you don’t know what this is then read up on it here ; you can download it form here (3.0 mb). ...

Bill Gates is handing over the reins of the role of Chief Architect to Ray Ozzie by July 2008 - two years is a long time, but nevertheless Bill would be missed by most of us.

Not sure if I agree with the assessment that its Coldplay that is bad, rather I think its EMI. Seems like the whole Sony Saga again.

This is the not the first time this has happened, but in case you were seeing a few of my previous posts, no I am not listening to the same song by Bon Jovi (in a loop), but the media player blogging plug has bugs! It for some reason is stuck on that - does not matter even if I have Media Player even open or not. So its turned off for now, don’t have the time to find a fix. If someone out there knows a solution let me know. (BTW, I am running Media Player 10). ...

Seems like there have been many cases where the iPod Nano gets scratched very easily, making it useless for viewing pictures and song names, etc that is playing. The Register has an article covering it including and the thread on apple’s newsgroup is already up to 240 posts on the issue. ...

I came across two Desktop management programs - Konfabulator and SmartBar XP and want to know what your review on them are? Some of the reviews I read talked about SmartBar being slow and others raving about how Konfabulator is pretty neat. What do you think? ...

This blog will be offline tomorrow as the server this is hosted on has SP1 being installed. Date: Friday Evening, July 8th, 2005 Time Window: 9:00PM - 2:00am PST During this time window, the server will be offline for approximately 60 minutes.

Yep, you read it right, Dell’s new laser printer 1100 sells for $100 in the US or £84 in the UK (including tax and delivery) and does feature some impressive specs (for its price) - such as 600 dpi and 15 ppm. Maybe its time I did not worry about getting a transformer for my HP LaserJet 2100 (which runs on 110v and the wall here in UK has 220v) and just bought this. ...

Back in March I was looking to get a new chair for my home office, but now how about a whole new desk and chair ? I don’t know if that is Chinese or Japanese or some other language, but can anyone find out how much does it cost? ...

In case you have not heard there is a new beta of Yahoo Messenger that adds a load of features. I have been using it for about a month or so and it works well for the most part - remember it is still in Beta. Now you can even make phone calls, read the related story . ...

Off the top of my head I cannot think of any true value for this (also I am not a System Engineer, so maybe its just that). Cisco is ready to release a new device that hands XML traffic and is supposed to bring “advanced XML security and management capabilities”. Cisco has a new new AON (Application-Oriented Networking) group (*groan*, talk about overusing a terminology) and has partnered with leading middle ware vendors such as SAP and IBM. The device is suppose to add new functions such as XML message parsing, schema validation and digital signature validation. ...