I found myself agreeing with this article. I am a windows developer pure and simple but at times windows suck
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars
Ever wondered how Windows Vista source code looks? Here it is!
http://www.drunkenfairies.com/windows-vista-source-code/
I have reached the point where I am totally disenchanted with the NSW government. Can they do nothing right? First is the disaster that the transport system in Sydney, then the hospital system in shambles, corruption in the councils and now this. We need to be connected everywhere and our backward government doesn't see that. Well I know who I will be voting for next time elections roll around.
Over the last week or so, I been spending some quality time with Graffiti. I found that there were absolutely things that I love, even to the point of trying to convert this blog over to it. (more about this later). The layout and site design, is relatively easy..you can use the result of my playing here. The content posting is great and works sort of with Live writer.
What I find is that not all themes or skins that are publish support a default set of features of Graffiti, so you need to customise it. So I started by pointing the web address to a new install of graffiti. Version 1.1 supposedly has a cs2.1 migrator, but i couldn't get it going at all. I tried taking a local backup and tried it but to no avail.
One of my requirements is that it should work seamlessly with live writer like cs2.1 does. In the skin I chose, i couldn't figure out how to post on the home page. In graffiti, there is an option tab, where you can say post to home page. I asked on the Graffiti forums and currently live writer doesn't support all the features of Graffiti.
Back to cs2.1 trusty old blog
Taken in Queenstown
I been hearing good things about Graffiti so I took advantage of the $99 offer from Telligent. Will be implementing it on this site this weekend. This site was built on CS2.1 and to be honest CS2.1 is too clunky for a blog. Now with the licensing costs for CS2008 being more expensive, I decided to look elsewhere.
I love DNN but it suited more for a different purpose. Stay tuned and I will see what we come up with.
I was using Beetztreams rss reader for a while but it doesn't quite seem to work properly so i decided to look around for something that will work on my mobile device. After some searching, I found News Break by IIium software. I don't know why I never looked at it before but i am hooked! Partnered with Jetbrains Omea reader on the desktop, it does everything I want it to do...
I havd issues my Atom and Active sync
It
is not possible to use the Internet connection via ActiveSync to
certain desktop computers - connection to desktop seems working
correctly but Pocket Internet Explorer is showing error message
0x80072f78 each time trying to go to any web page.
Here is the solution:
Open Registry Editor on your desktop (Start/Run and type "
regedit") and locate the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services. Right-click on the value list and choose
New/DWORD value. Type the name "
AllowLSP" and leave the value zero.
Disconnect and connect your device and Pocket Internet Explorer (and all other applications) will start working.
At work, one of the logs was taking up too much space as the transaction mode was set to full and we deleted the log and had difficulty reattaching the database.
There is a gem of a command that allows you to do that.
exec sp_attach_single_file_db @dbname = 'TEST'
@physname="D:\backup\customer files\MICRO Metadata_Data.MDF'
My trusty O2 Atom is a bit long in the tooth, and since I moved to Vodafone from Optus is being acting strangely. Vodafone swears back and blue that it isn't them but i am a bit sus about it. The phone can be on, and shows full network coverage but until you try dialling out, it disconnects every call. And others can't dial in as well, going to message bank straightaway. Only way to fix it is to reboot. Sigh...
So I was wistfully thinking of a replacement, and i really need a smartphone, the closest one that i like is the HTC Touch A friend has one and only thing it is a 2.5 g and it is a bit slow. I been reading the iphone hacks for Australia and it looks like something to investigate, with the recent price drop. Wonder if v2 of the iphone would be coming soon?
If you worked at multiple places like I have, you would know what a chore it is to keep in touch with people and where they are working now. Invariably you will lose touch and if you are a bad communicator like me, relationships that you build up, tends to get diluted. A colleague at work showed me this really cool concept called LinkedIn and I wished I thought of it earlier.
Basically it is the same as any other social networking site. (think facebook, myspace etc) but for professionals and mainly geared towards IT professionals. Basically it allows you to
- Create an online resume of where you worked in the past and the roles you have undertaken
- Get your colleagues to recommend your work. How often do recruiters ask for referrals? See my point?
- Keep in touch with other colleagues who have moved on, so you can have a sticky beak at what they are doing now
- See if there is any common friends and colleagues between you guys.
- Get new jobs (Not sold on this yet but have to wait and see)
Do check it out..this is my linked in details
Another one of my interests is Digital Photography. Besides a Nikon D70, which I absolutely love, the fam and I were planning a trip to the land of the long white cloud..aka New Zealand. So I thought I would go look on Ebay to see if there was a video camera that could complement my camera. I been to the shops and had my mind set on a Sony HDR-SR1 but they were a bit beyond my budget.
What is an Sony HDR-SR1? it is a true 1080i HDV camcorder..for those not in the know, it is the same resolution as some of the lcds and plasmas around. It also has a built in hard disc of 30GB which means it doesnt need any tapes at all. It also touts a new digital format called AVCHD which is a highly compressed form of mpeg 4. More about this later.
Went to Ebay to see if i could pick up one.
Yes...HDR-SR1 were available and one caught my eye..HDR-SR1 model with extras..mmm ok. it was an NTSC model, ok I could live with that..I mean most tvs now can support both NTSC and PAL so i thought not an issue. Let the buyer beware, there is actually two types of electronic devices sold in Japan. One for the local market and the other for the export market. And guess which sucker bought which model? Yep...I got the the local version. Got conned by the buyer who said you could change the menus. Actually there was a recourse to this, you should be able to put at least a negative feedback against the sellers name for false advertising. But alas i gave feedback before i found out that there was no english menus!!!!! what a dingbat! So I am stuck with a high performance camera in Japanese! lol
That aside we recently had a conference and i had to get a new external hard disk to store the raw footage for the meetings. Works about about 3 hours of taping is about 20GB in size!
I evaluated a few editiing packages..Sony Vegas, Ulead DVD Studio and i found that the best and easiest one to use was the Pinnacle Studio Plus 11. It will do AVCHD format and comes with a number of templates. You can upgrade to the Ultimate version but you have to pay Pinancle for every extra feature you want to use or unlock..can turn out to be an expensive option.
I blogged before about Coderush...however I think I am about to change camps to Jetbrains Resharper. Resharper code analysis and coverage tools are so much better than coderush. Only gripe about it is that it takes over the intellisense functionality of vsstudio. grrrr