August 2006 Archives

I should admit that I was not able to spend adequate time on FolkMind. Now that I am back from my vacation, I am committing myself again to this. And this time I am hoping that I can maintain the momentum.

Google started an initiative called 'Google Apps for Domains'. According to Google, this service will..

..offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization's website, too. It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

One of the first steps that I did is to migrate the domain folk-mind.org to the above Google service. I should say that my migration experience was quite painless and was able to finish the whole activity in less than 2 hours (including adding the default home page).

My only crib is that, currently there is no option to change the 'A record' in the DNS. We can only modify the CNAME record. This results in folk-mind.org and www.folk-mind.org (this time with the www) returning two different pages. My brother helped me resolve this by using a web forward to folk-mind.org.

I am writing this post using Windows Live Writer (Beta). Currently the beta is available for download here.

I am pleasantly surprised with its capabilities. To start with, it can connect to blog services other than Windows Live Spaces. And once it is configured, it downloads even the visual theme from the blog site. So while you are editing the blog, the visual theme is presented.

the tool also exposes a plugin API (currently available here).

Quite a few plugins are already available. One of which (flickr4Writer) allows you to insert images from Flicker (and this is the plugin I used to insert the above picture).

In the article titled 'The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software', Herb Sutter explains the importance of improving our skills on writing concurrent programs - ie if we need to gain performance gains form all the multi-core CPUs that are coming out lately.

In this light, I have collected a series of articles that discuss this matter in detail.

• An Introduction to Programming with C# Threads
• Threading in C#
• CLR Inside out: Using concurrency for scalability [MSDM Mag Sep 2006]
• What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps [MSDN Mag Aug 2005]
• Advanced Techniques To Avoid And Detect Deadlocks In .NET Apps [MSDN Mag April 2006]
• WinForms UI Thread Invokes: An In-Depth Review of Invoke/BeginInvoke/InvokeRequred
  

Hope this helps.

technorati tags:Threading, Concurrency, CSharp

We reached home after our long vacation. Apart from this small incident, we enjoyed the trip throughly. I wanted to blog about our experience during the travel itself - but this did not happen as it was difficult to get connected to the Internet as often as I wanted :-(

I have started to upload the snaps that I had taken. You can find them here.

technorati tags:EuropeTravel, Vacation

We reached Rome by train (thanks to Eurail pass) and within moments of getting off the train someone stole my valet! This is despite the fact that, I had kept the valet in my front pocket (which also had a zipper). The speed with which this happened took me off-guard.

I understand that such thieves act in coordination - one person would be responsible for distracting the victim and the second would do the actual act of stealing.

This is how (I presume) it happened in my case. I took the metro pass from the vending machine and started waking towards the train. Just then I saw a lady (who was walking past me), 'accidentally' drop a book. It was quite a heavy book and the sound of it hitting the floor was hard to miss. I was surprised that the lady did not realize this and prompted her about the same.

It was probably during this that I got robbed. Having successfully distracted my attention, her accomplice would have easily taken my valet. The accomplice would have noticed where I had kept my valet after taking the metro ticket.

In Belgium we visited some pubs with more than 200 varieties of Beer!

With some guidance from my brother Sherry, we had a chance to taste a few.

Note the amount of foam in the beer!
Each beer is served in specific glass with the name of the beer on it.

Pictures of a few more beer....

And some sparkling wine too..

technorati tags:EuropeTravel, BeerHunting, Belgium