December 2004 - Posts
Adi Oltean talks about one of my favorite Windows technologies: VSS in Shadow copies - a peek under the hood.
Amazingly powerful stuff.
He also talks about the command line interface for VSS and bunches of other really good Windows internals stuff on his blog. Such good stuff that I've added him to my blog roll.
Channel9 has posted a wicked-cool video of Alex Kipman demoning using Visual Studio to write slick SmartPhone app that talks to both the GPS and MapPoint via a web-service.
Who says Microsoft can't innovate? What other platform provides anywhere near the richness and integration across devices?!?!
I purchased my Pharos GPS reciever as part of buying Microsoft Streets & Trips 2005. I bought it at the Microsoft Company Store for a silly low price (you can get it for ~$100).
However it does not come with the Bluetooth Dock; heck, until I watched this video I did not even know there was a Bluetooth Dock for it.
For that, I just (litterly 5 minutes ago) went to www.buy.com and ordered one for $84.26.
I'm going to have fun playing with this on my Audiovox SmartPhone and DELL Insipron 8600 notebook (which I should also get this week) after the lifts close at Copper Mountain where the condo I'll be staying at has wifi.
Today we (Microsoft) released the release candidate 1 (RC1) of Windows Server 2003 SP1, which you can download here.
Being in the Windows Server group I've been runing interim builds of W2K3 SP1 for a looong time. I even have it running on all of my servers at home. In addition my main workstation at work is an AMD Athlon 64 machine running Windows XP Pro x64 Edition which is derived from the same code tree.
I have to say I was skeptical about how good a job we'd be able to do of ensuring application compatibility while still moving forward to a full 64 bit OS (on the client).
I have been dogfooding XP Pro x64 since July and have been completely impressed by the lack of incompatibilities. Most of the things I've had to deal with were driver issues. For example, it took a while for Intel to get a x64 version of my SATA RAID controller driver out. The only problem I still have is I have CrystalFontz LCD display that uses USB and there are still no drivers for it.
The only two apps I have that do not currently work are Ultramon and Maxivista. The Ultramon people are working on it (I have a beta x64 version) and the Maxivista people think I'm nuts for even suggesting they do a x64 version.
All games I've tried, including Half Life 2, have worked flawlessly.
http://carismata.com/snowreports
A great summary of Crystal, Stevens, Mt Baker, Whistler, and Alpental. Works very well from Windows Powered Smartphones and Pocket PCs.
I've been using this since early last season and it's just great.
Below is a live pic of Steven's Pass. When I posted this it was snowing...what's it doing now?
Mike Hall posted probably the best optical illusion I've ever seen. Wow.
In the same spirit of ridiculous humor he says I used to be one of his heros (although I think he was being serious).
I'm a car nut. For the last 7 years my passion has been about my '88 Porsche 911 Carrera coupe and my '95 BMW 540 M-Sport 6-Speed. It's high time I started posting the occasional blog entires about my cars. You'll find these posts under the Car category...
While reading posts on the M-Sport mailing list I noticed that Ren Finley, another M-Sport fanantic (Ren's a bit more of a purist than me so he refuses to add the "M-" to Sport) has a blog now. He talks about getting a new clutch built for his car. I'm due in 5-10K miles so I am looking forward to hearing how this SPEC Stage III clutch works out.
I recently had to replace the "thrust bushings" on my M-Sport and choose to go with polyurethane bushings. Bad move. They are way too harsh on the roads I drive daily. Feels like the EDC suspension is always in Sport mode. I'm going to rip them out and replace them with '95 M5 bushings instead.
MSN Spaces looks really cool. They have implemented some very, very cool features that make using it for moblogging (mobile blogging) very easy.
All you have to do is send an email to your blog and if the email includes attached photos they are uploaded to your photo album and placed inline in the blog entires.
I only wish it gave me more control over the layout and look and feel.
I'm going to play with having a moblog (aka cek.moblog) up there: http://spaces.msn.com/members/cek.
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