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I’ve just downloaded Qumana LE, a WYSIWYG editor that allows posting to blogs that support certain API’s. This is my first test post.
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Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 155 user reviews.

Intel has announced it’s next gen PC platform for entertainment. It’s called ViiV. Nobody seems to have a concrete answer as to what it actually means or where it came from. Anybody care to shed a light?

Average Rating: 5 out of 5 based on 154 user reviews.

Woo hoo !!! I finally jumped in an got myself a laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 700m, at an unbelievable price of CAD (yes, Canadian dollars) $760, taxes and S&H included.

I’ve been looking at laptops since that US $750 deal came up a few weeks ago, and although Dell still has them here and there (Slickdeals.net , NotebookReview.com , NotebookForums.com etc), nothing actually came close to that deal I got off Ebay yesterday.

The 3 laptops that I was considering to buy were:
- Dell Inspiron 9300
- Dell Inspiron 700m
- ASUS Z71V

I was strongly leaning towards the ASUS, mainly due to performance and great reviews off the internet, but had the 700m considered in the back of my mind for travelling about. I needed this notebook to do some personal work on the train trips to and from work, so the 700m would have seemed like a perfect fit. And yet, deep down inside, I still wanted that bleeding edge specs for a PC like I could’ve configured with either the 9300 or A71v.

My original hesitance towards the 700m comes up from these thoughts:
- It doesn’t have DDR2 memory like the other 2;
- It doesn’t have dedicated graphics memory like the other 2 (hence, it will be crappy for newer games… Reviews everywhere do not recommend the 700m for gaming at all); and
- The keyboard is smaller and will take some time gettings used to.

And yet, after thinking about those points for the last week or so, I convinced myself that:
a. I don’t need DDR2 memory since I’m not doing anything bleeding edge;
b. I don’t need dedicated graphics memory since I don’t have any time at all to play games, and all the games I’ll play are old stuff or non 3-D;
c. I can get used to the keyboard; and
d. This laptop looks nice and is easy to carry around and
e. With the budget I have, it seemed like the most logical and cost-effective choice.

So with those thoughts in mind, I was just browsing around for deals the last few days, and yesterday on Ebay I couldn’t believe what I saw. This guy was selling about 50 of these laptops with a starting price of 99 cents. Of course when I looked at them, they all were hovering around the CAD $250 price range. I looked at the descriptions, and found out that it included 512Mb RAM and the 8x DVD +/- burner, plus he shipped the items for free. The final bonus? This guy was in Canada, so no duties to pay for border crossing :)

I talked to my wife about this yesterday evening, and decided if I could get it for under $1, 000 CAD then I’d go for it. Surprise surprise, when I bid with 4 seconds left, I got it for $760 !!!. During the outburst of joy after I got this, I didn’t realize that I could’ve bought 2 more of these (these 50 auctions were spread out to end within 3 minutes of each other) to sell afterwards and try recover some of the cost :(. Oh well, I got a pretty good deal and it’s all fine and dandy.

Made the payment last night, and I’m hoping to get the laptop in my hands within the next week or so. I’ll post some initial thoughts and reviews when I get it.

Go Ebay !!! :)

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Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 181 user reviews.

Within the last few months, I’ve gone to various free educational seminars from Microsoft, received tons of educational material online (including their MCSD.NET certification books through the Last Developer Standing competition), free books and software. It looks like Microsoft is really pushing to get the knowledge of its .NET framework based products around.

I’m a Microsoft product kinda guy, so it’s great for me. The picture here shows the free products that I’ve received recently:
- Microsoft VS.NET backpack
- Introducing ASP.NET 2.0 book
- VS 2005 Beta 2, Team Studio, as well as SQL Server 2005 Beta
- Visual C# 2003 Standard edition (just got this in the mail today actually)

Add to this, the various free IDE’s around, the Express products all over the place, and the open source project Mono gaining grounds within the Linux community, and I think the .NET solution is really going to gain quite a bit of followers in the development world.

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Average Rating: 5 out of 5 based on 275 user reviews.

Today I went to attend my first ever Microsoft Event. It was a free session on ASP.NET 2.0. Got to the venue (a large movie theatre) about 8.45 and had a lineup quite long. Fortunately the lineup moved quickly since we only needed to get our invitations scanned. Grabbed a croissant (wow.. really good food…) and went straight into the main theatre. The room was almost full already, so I got up to the very last row up top and sat near the aisle.

The topic was very interesting, as it relates quite well to my work. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces some interesting concepts such as Master Pages, a web based administration system, advanced profiling/membership/roles that could use LDAP’s, Active Directory or databases as a backend, web parts and tons more controls being introduced. You could see some of the slides here. The speaker was Adam Gallant, a Developer/Platform Evangelist for .NET. I found him to be very knowledgeable about what he was talking about and really enjoyed this session. A lot of these features really take out some of the grunt work from developing web applications, and will reduce the amount of coding by quite a bit. I even joked with some of my colleagues at work that maybe soon there will be no need for programmers / developers :)

At the end of the session, everybody was given out free backpacks and an Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 book by Dino Esposito. Overall, I found the session refreshing, as it showed me what could be done with ASP.NET 2.0, and my mind was racing with the thoughts of trying this out at work. I was told that Visual Studio 2005 (they’re dropping the ‘.NET’ from VS) will definitely ship this year, and that Beta 2 will be released in ‘Microsoft’ March (not sure how long that is :) ). I’ve seen really neat features and can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Two thumbs up to Microsoft for continuing to provide great developer tools and listening to public input.

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Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 227 user reviews.

If you need to manage SQL Server / MSDE databases, and don’t have enterprise manager, try this web based tool that pretty much allows you to do most common things: Web Data Administrator.

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 274 user reviews.

Phew, my computer is finally back up after being out of commission since last Tuesday. I never imagined the problems that came up relating to getting my machine back up and running. Normally, on other computers, getting a PC up and running takes me about 2 to 3 hours plus minus for applications. This install actually took me 2 days to get running properly.

The problem started with the W2K image that was built for my specific PC. It was an old image, no patches etc, and so I was told by my support officer that I should expect it to get hit by viruses, trojans, etc within a few minutes of connecting to the network. We then proceeded to install all the required patches, updated the antiviruses, scanned for malware, adware and whatever ‘ware’ there is. (This paragraph I just described took almost a day by itself)

Next problem, I’m supposed to be ‘Admin’ on my machine, and yet I don’t have permission to access the registry or admin tools from Control Panel. I also couldn’t right click on my taskbar, hence no quick launch buttons. (Argh.. how could one live without the quick launch toolbar? :) ). I was thinking some Global Policy or script that runs when I login. So I check the policy object, look at the script on the domain, and nothing really stood out. I ask my support officer, and she doesn’t know either. We’re both stumped (This after running virus scan with the latest .dat file and all those spyware removal programs mentioned above). Of course, the next course of action had to be a google search. Found out that I could just rename ‘regedit.exe’ to something else .exe and it ran fine. I then found some keys that had to be turned off so that I could get my Quick Launch toolbar running.

The funny thing here is that after some patch installs, and installation of Visual Studio .NET, somehow my registry gets reset back to prevention of right click and regedit. This doesn’t happen all the time, so I’m quite lost on what’s going on. If anybody could give me a clue on what’s going on, I’d be grateful. FYI, Microsoft’s AntiSpyware, Spybot, Winpatrol, and the latest McAfee antivirus doesn’t return anything even in Safe Mode without networking.

While trying to download Spybot, I also found this nifty util called RegAlyzer, which pretty much is a custom build ‘regedit’. This allowed me to bypass using regedit when it was disabled.

So that’s how my last few days have been going, I managed to install Cognos Impromptu andamp; Powerplay, Visual Studio.NET, SQL Server Client Tools and IIS to round up the last day. Just hope my HD never crashes again, it’s really a PITA to get things back running.

Average Rating: 4.9 out of 5 based on 189 user reviews.

Google has released a beta of their mapping technology. I’ve just tried it out, and it looks pretty cool. You can drag around the map, zoom in up to street level, and when it does find directions to and from a place, each line of direction can be clicked on, and the map will highlight and zoom into the corner/street you have to travel.

It finds some places, but some places still don’t show up yet. I guess that’s why it’s still in Beta. But it’s really a nice tool that Google came up with, keep up the good work guys.

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 152 user reviews.

I downloaded Firefox at work a couple of days ago, and guess what? Good bye IE ! Seriously, it loads pages faster, has lots of cool features like the Live bookmarks for RSS feeds, tabbed browsing (no more clutter on my taskbar from too many open browsers, yay!!!), and lots more extensions. Don’t know why it took that long for me to give it a try, but great thing I did.

There’s just a couple of sites that won’t open because of ActiveX components, and I still have IE installed for those kinds of situations, but other than that surfing with Firefox has truly been fun.

Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 202 user reviews.

Well, I’ve got my internet phone service running now. For the week or so I’ve been using it, it seems to be of good quality. Just as good as a normal phone service. The only drawback to this is that I have to connect my phone at the location of my gateway, which of course is connected to wherever my broadband connection comes from. Luckily for us, we have a cordless phone and live in a condo, so not much trouble; but I can imagine how this would be a bit of a problem for people who live in a house. You would need to get many cordless phones to cover a house of 3 floors.

VoIP will really change the way the world communicates. I remember when I was young, people who could travel around the world (fortunately, my dad was one at the time), would be able to make a lot of money by bringing goods from one country to another. Right now, everybody’s on the internet and it is truly a global market, there’s not much barriers to communication anymore. When VoIP takes over in a decade or so, it will make this world look so different.

Average Rating: 4.9 out of 5 based on 150 user reviews.

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