Jan 27 2009
I am having issues with Win 7 – keeps hanging (will post that another time); but I like the irony of things causing this (see screen show below).
BTW, if you can get to the Performance Information and Tools via Control Panel => All Control Panel Items =>Performance Information and Tools => Advanced Tools.
Jan 27 2009
I was looking for something else and stumbled upon this post from Joe where he lists the qualities that makes up a “good architect” (despite the feelings that have been expressed to me in the past). I have to agree with him and am quite pleased to see that a “typical” Avanade architect would fit the bill. 
Oct 26 2008
Amazon’s EC2 is now available for Windows – squeaking in just before PDC was to kick off. This is quite exciting as it allows you to scale out and try something at a very low cost on Windows.
If you want to manage your EC2 environment, you can use the Firefox add-in called Elasticfox; there is also a C# library which wraps EC2’s web service API making them easier to consume from .NET.
Amazon is also going to release more features (fairly soon) across the board – load balancing, auto scaling, monitoring, etc.
It will be interesting to see the competitor offerings from Microsoft – should get public details at PDC.
Sep 08 2008
As the Large Hadron Collider is switched on today, the Guardian has a story saying that there are many people calling the CERN to find out if the world ends today? Apparently is completely safe and will not be doing anything that has not happened '100,000 times over' in nature since the earth has existed.
If you see another post here after today, I guess the mini-black holes did not suck in everything! 
Sep 01 2008
You might have heard of Photosynth – it was announced last year; but if you ever wondered what the big deal was about Photosynth (or have not heard of it), then check out this video. Also this is open to all now for free.
Jun 17 2008
You might have heard of the new "Cloud" service from Microsoft called Live Mesh. You can get more details on the team's blog and a few videos.
While I have the Mesh bits installed for a few weeks I only recently started using it and was very handy when I wanted to get to some information on one of the Wiki's running at home.
I have some of the machines on my home network connected on the mesh now (see screen shot below) – they all are running Vista. It is quite useful and much easier to use than trying to RDP into various machines (assuming you can fwd the ports for various machines on the router). Another cool feature is I don't need to have any bits installed to access them (say from a corporate environment). You only need a browser to login to the mesh and get to the machines (I only tried this is IE 7 btw).
I have used a little bit of this so far and do find it quite useful; there are various elements of this that I have not really used yet (such as the sync. features).
I wonder if there will be an interesting convergence between this and WHS at some point in the future?
May 31 2008
Wow! What a week – so much talk of the next version of Windows code-named "7". Of course the multi-touch (see video below) is what everyone is talking about. Now, this is cool because it is the evolution of the Surface which is scaled down to a screen.
If you have not seen a Surface – it is quite big and works with five infrared cameras which picks up the gestures and then knows what to do with it (more on Surface at another time).
But in addition to multi-touch we also know there is no new kernel for Windows 7, instead Microsoft is refining the existing kernel. So if you were betting on WinMin (which BTW is only 25 mb!) being there then forget it. Windows 7, will ship around three years after Vista shipped – in other words we should see it sometime next year.
Of course you have got to have screen shots – there has been a lot of speculation if they are genuine or fake, but they sure do look cool. Check out the top left and right corners of the screen shot above and the way the task bar is layed out – nice! I can't wait to get the first drop of this and see how it pans out! Given this is build on top of Vista hopefully we won't have too many issues with drivers making early adoption of this more painless compared to Vista.
Windows 7 first demo shown at D6:
Mar 07 2008
This is scary! It seems like your printer is spying on you using tiny tracking dots which are automatically printed whenever you take a print out. Of course these dots are unique and can be tracked to your individual printer and are not visible to the naked eye (otherwise you won't have noticed them, innit?)
The US govt. has convinced most of the printer manufacturers to add this to every page. EFF highlighted the issue first and had issued a press release. Since then they have released a decoding guide that you can use to figure out how to find this. They also released a list of printers which either have or don't have the dots; and also point the fact that just a "No" does not mean there is no forensic watermarking present, it just means there could be some other kind of marking. Make sure you are consulting this list whenever you next buy your printer.
Mar 07 2008
This stumped me for a while and I was not sure what I was doing wrong. Apparently it seems if you don't have the <configSections> element in your app config file as the first thing then you get a weird error saying "Only one <configSections> element allowed …." (see example below). The description is misleading – you will see this error even though you only have one <configSections> element in your config file. To fix this, move the <configSections> as the first element in your app config file and all will be well.
Example error:
{"Only one <configSections> element allowed per config file and if present must be the first child of the root <configuration> element. (C:\\src\\MyCallApp\\VOIPCall\\bin\\Debug\\VOIPCall.vshost.exe.config line 10)"}
Jan 26 2008
I did not know until this week that there was something called "Livelock"; Eh? I heard of Deadlock what the heck is Livelock? Well it is kind of the opposite of Deadlock (in some respects).
A Deadlock as we know is when say Process A is waiting for Process B to finish or release some resource or something before continuing and Process B in turn is waiting for Process A before it continues – end result neither continues.
Livelock is when Process A is running and is constantly changing e.g. stuck in a very long running or infinite loop and quite often causes resources to run out (a.k.a Resource Starvation).
My classic example of this was when I was using Turbo C 2.0, many moons ago and after a point I could not compile anymore because the compiler was running out of stack space – as the program had grown than big in size. I had to move to Turbo C++ compiler as that could address more than 512 KB or memory which the Turbo C compiler could not. All these years and I did not know I was experiencing a Livelock!
Jan 20 2008
I had not heard of this until Karan told me about Erlang which was originally developed by Ericsson and stands for Ericsson Language.
Dec 12 2007
I got this via the Ava communities – John Lee created a Wii Whiteboard Marker – very cool. Now the only thing to figure out how the heck to get a projector.
