Loud Thoughts

Interesting bot comments on my blog

2010-06-01T18:50:05Z

After a long gap, I logged in to my blog server and found many interesting comments created by bots. Some are funny, here are a few examples..

detox body says .... So pleased to enjoy such a interesting post that does not fall back on base posturing to get the idea covered. Thanks for an enjoyable read.
Austin Naillon says ...Awesome write-up! This will aid a lot of people find out more about this particular topic. Are you keen to incorporate video tutorials together with these? It could definitely help. Your description was spot on and thanks to you.
Max53 says .."well im excited " :-)
Social Bookmarks says ..Dude... good post! I might actually even listen to what you are saying. Overall your whole blog is great... I am digging it. Peace!

A few comments which are totally unrelated to the topic of the blog post. For example,

In response to my blog on the trip to Grodno, Erin says "Thank you for the time you spent on this post. Know that your work is much appreciated. Keep it up! "
On my post about planning the Europe trip, Oscar Henningsen says "Pretty wonderful post, very useful stuff. Never imagined I would find the information I would like right here. I have been scouring throughout the internet for some time now and had been starting to get frustrated. Thankfully, I stumbled across your site and got precisely what I was looking for. "

But all said and done, I must admit that some of these comments have motivated me enough to write a blog after a long long time :-)

Installing Windows7 RC on my tablet PC

2009-05-17T07:33:36Z

Today I installed Windows 7 on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC and here is how it went:

First of all, this PC didn't have a CD drive and my external CD drive was not working. So I decided to create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 7, thanks to the innumerable and affordable 8GB USB pen drives available now:-). I created the bootable drive as per the instructions listed in http://www.bwana.org/2009/01/11/how-to-install-windows-7-beta-from-a-usb-drive-to-an-hp-mini-1000-without-vista/. But whenever I booted my Thinkpad with the new USB drive, it said "Missing Operating System". After some hunting around, I found that the problem was due to a missing switch "/mbr" switch in invoking bootsect.exe. So I ran the following command:
bootsect.exe /nt60 G: /mbr

With this command, the USB was made bootable and the installation started. And guess what, the installation completed in just 20 minutes on my 40 GB 4200 RPM hard disk. Wow!! Too good, huh?

After the installation, I ran the Windows Update to update the drivers for network card, audio card etc. The display driver was still not installed, so I installed the XP-compatible driver from Intel support site. Now the system is up and running.

Yes, it was a pleasant experience.

Attending BarCamp Bangalore

2009-03-01T18:06:08Z

I have registered for Bar Camp Bangalore, to be held on 7th and 8th of March 2009. Bar Camp is a network of user-generated conferences held around the globe. It is an open workshop event where the contents are provided by the participants themselves. Anybody can register a session and other members can join the session. The presenter creates a topic page on the Bar Camp website and participants can discuss the topic prior to the event. During the event, on hour time will be dedicated to discuss the topic.
To know more about Bar Camp, read their FAQ page or this Wikipedia link..
I am really looking forward for this event.

Security Vulnerability on Windows 7

2009-02-06T04:28:57Z

Amid criticism about the annoyingly frequent UAC (User Account Control) notifications on Windows Vista, Microsoft decided to prompt users less frequently in Windows 7. But this decision has generated sharp criticism from all circles. Security experts have criticized that this exposes a vulnerability that will put users at high risk. Basically, with Windows 7, users can choose how often they want to be notified - the default setting is to notify only when a third-party application is making a change. The catch here is that any changes to the UAC setting itself are being made within the OS and not by a third party. Hence malicious code could turn off such alerts entirely without notifying the user that such a change had been made. MS is literally getting beaten up for this decision. Finally, Microsoft announced that they have decided to adjust the feature such that it notifies users when the UAC itself is modified. These changes will be available in the Windows 7 RC due later this year.
As I write this, I am reminded of the Malayalam proverb "Velukkan thechathu paandaayi" (translation: the face cream that was applied to become fair has created a patch)

Startup error in Visual Studio Debug session

2008-06-24T03:18:50Z

Today when I hit F5 in my Visual Studio project (a sample Win32 console application), I got this weird error "msdia80.dll cannot be loaded". I did a quick search in the Internet and found a few solutions:

Reinstall Visual Studio SP1: Unfortunately, this is not a viable option because we know how much time it takes to install SP1
Register the msdia80.dll: This is a very easy fix. But where do we find this DLL? Here is the answer: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC

I tried the second solution and it worked fine. So this is what we need to do:

Open command prompt.
Navigate to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC
Run this command "regsvr32 msdia80.dll"

That's it. Enjoy debugging your application.

Xobni, a good Outlook plugin

2008-05-07T03:07:42Z

Today I read about Xobni , a pretty good Outlook plugin that extends Microsoft Outlook's functionality in many ways. Xobni maintains a profile for the user's contacts and keeps track of his/her email usage, statistics etc.
When you click on an email conversation in Outlook, Xobni displays the following information about the sender in the sidebar in Outlook:

The sender's profile
Profile of the sender's contacts
All threads of the conversation with the sender
All attachments sent by the sender

In addition to this, this plugin provides a nice and fast search feature with search-term highlighting in results pane. And what's more, Xobni does all this without degrading Outlook's performance and more important, without crashing it.

Another interesting news is that Microsoft had tried to buy Xobni sometime back, but it didn't work out (yeah, not all MS deals work out these days). Xobni CEO just walked away from the deal. Wonder why? Apparently, Xobni is more of a platform than a simple email helper application. The Xobni platform has hooks deep into Outlook which enables them to even integrate with Outlook's default search. The platform is their trump-card and they know that they can make more money if they make the platform available to third-party vendors. This means that other vendors can use Xobni toolkit to seamlessly integrate their applications with Outlook.

By the way, Xobni claims that it can even extract phone numbers from the email; but I am not sure how effective this would be. The demo video shows that it extracts a phone number from an email message which contains the simple text 'my cell number is 99999'. But how intelligent their content extraction and pattern-matching algorithm would be if the text is grammatically or contextually different? Let's wait and watch.

Published the article on DotSVN

2007-09-23T16:45:08Z

At last, published the DotSVN article that explains the basic philosophy of DotSVN and gives step-by-step instructions on how to use DotSVN to access Subversion repository from .NET applications. The article is titled Accessing Subversion repository from .NET using DotSVN. I have published it in DotSVN, CodeProject and Programmer's Heaven.

Following are the links:

At Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/subversion_using_dotsvn.asp
At DotSVN: http://www.dotsvn.net/articles/accessing-subversion-repository-from-net-using-dotsvn.html

First iteration of DotSVN is released.

2007-08-28T09:30:05Z

Last Sunday, we published the first iteration of DotSVN, a pure .NET repository access library for Subversion. In this iteration, the DotSVN library can read the repository and list the directory contents. This implementation is the best of breed of original SVN and SVNKit, the JAVA port of SVN.

We built a Repository browser to browse the repository. See the screenshot below:

Compare with the original SVN Repository Browser. Can you see any difference? Kudos to George's UI skills.

This was an important milestone for this project. Though not big, this was a dip for us.

We also got many unit tests running:
It was thrilling to code, test, code test, code test.......

Joined DotSVN project

2007-08-28T09:11:10Z

Last month, I joined the DotSVN project, which is a .NET implementation of SVN (Subversion). The idea behind this project is to create an SVN implementation that is well-suited for a Windows platform. The original SVN targets all platforms; whereas DotSVN is focused on Windows based deployment. The project owner George Chiramattel says that the origin of this project is yet another project called nTrac, a .NET port of Trac. When he started working on nTrac, he realized that a true Windows implementation of SVN is not available. He wanted a .NET implementation that can access SVN at the repository level, instead of at the client layer. So he decided to create one; that is DotSVN.

I am very excited to be part of this project. Work is progressing well.
Shall post the progress here...

XmlLite: Light-weight fast XML parser for native C++

2007-04-01T14:49:00Z

Microsoft has released XmlLite, a light-weight fast XML parser exclusively for native C++. XmlLite is supposed to be a near-equivalent of System.Xml namespace of the managed world. I said "near-equivalent" because XmlLite is just a forward-only reader. It does not provide schema/DTD validation or DOM implementation. Neither does it support XPath or style sheets. So perhaps it is far from near-equivalent.

But what I like about this parser is that it focuses on performance and low overhead. More importantly, it is meant for native C++ apps. After all, MS hasn't fogotten the C++ community.

Kenny Kerr gives a good overview of XmlLite in this MSDN article

technorati tags:XmlLite, XML parser, native C++

Trac

2007-03-10T11:48:01Z

I recently came across Trac, a minimalistic web-based project-management and bug-tracking system. Normally, these kind of products come with a plethora of features; but turn out be seldom used. It is better to have a light-weight product with just-enough features, but easy to use. This is the idea behind Trac. It is the best fit for developers to organize their work without disturbing the development process which is deployed in the team/organization. Trac is Wiki-based and interfaces with Subversion.

The only problem is that it is not trivial to install it on a desktop due to the intricate requirements for particular version of Python and other software. But we managed to get it running along with its WebAdmin plugin. There are quite a few Trac Hosting sites like CvsDude, WebFaction.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 released

2006-12-21T11:02:39Z

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2005 SP1. This includes some 70 improvements like Core Duo support, performance improvements in TFS, integration of TFS with Excel 2007 etc.
VS2005 SP1 Release Notes say

Service pack installation takes longer than the original product installation:
Installing Visual Studio 2005 SP1 takes longer than installing the original release version because the SP1 installation is much like a product installation, but with additional installation tasks. Installation time depends on which product is installed and the computer’s configuration.
Installation requires significant disk space:
Disk space equal to that taken by the original product installation may be needed to install a service pack .
If you have more than one Visual Studio product installed, you will need disk space for each service pack installation. You can find an estimate of the required disk space on the download page for the service pack.

Here is what Fabrice says about the SP1 installation..

Update: You should make sure you have some time available for the installation. Here, it took more than one hour and a half with 99% of the CPU occupied all the time!

I was waiting for a Service Pack of VS2005 which would fix some of the common VC++ development issues like Updating intellisense forever, precompiled header problems etc. I wonder whether these are fixed in SP1.

SysInternals suite of products

2006-11-24T12:06:10Z

Today I read that Microsoft has published SysInternals suite of products in which the entire collection of SysInternals tools are rolled into a single ZIP file. This is something which was much awaited for. When I downloaded and extracted it to my hard disk, the Virus scan software gave the following interesting error:

SysInternal's bluescreen emulator is the culprit :-)

Zoho adds Single Sign-on

2006-10-09T04:58:54Z

Recently, I heard about the Office Suite and Productivity tools from Zoho and I started using Zoho projects to manage my official & personal tasks. It has a decent UI, very rich functionality and good usability. Unlike Tada list, Zoho task management is rich in UI and functionality .
Zoho has a vast suite of products like Zoho projects, Zoho writer, Zoho sheet, Zoho Show etc. Till now, each of these applications needed separate credentials. But yesterday, Zoho Blogs declared that they have modified the site such that a single sign-on will authenticate the user to all their products. This is wonderful. They have described steps for exisitng users to consolidate their various user accounts to a single one.

What's more... I am happy to see many Indian names in it :-)

Trip to Europe

2006-06-25T12:11:05Z

George and myself have been planning fo a Europe trip this year. Finally, we decided to make it during the month of August for 3 weeks. Yesterday we booked tickets Bangalore-Amsterdam-Bangalore by Air France. Now we need to plan the trip. We finalized the countries to visit - London, France (Paris), Germany, Amsterdam, Rome, Venice and Belgium. We made the first draft of itinerary. We have to start the visa processing tomorrow and decide on how to travel within the countries. Ooooo.. the very thought of the trip thrills me.