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August 2005 - Posts

Iain McDonald talks about R2

R2 is a server technnology. It is essentially a specialized Windows OS for server management in file serving, printing and directory utilization workloads. I hope that IT administrators will love it. R2 was designed top-down starting from practical scenarios Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2005 10:47 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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VSS writers and inconsistent shadow copies

A few days ago, a customer told me that he encountered a weird error while using NTBackup to backup the system. The error text looked like this in backup log: Media name: "System State.bkf created 8/29/2005 at 5:38 PM" Volume shadow copy creation: Attempt Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2005 9:19 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Virtual Earth hacks

http://viavirtualearth.com/vve/Gallery/Default.ashx I personally like Flash Earth . Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2005 7:05 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Nature, the beautiful nature, can be bad

Reuven told me about what happened in New Orleans. I browse the dramatic news and I feel an unexplained sense of guilt. Guilt because I am not one of the hundreds of thousands of people affected. That I will never understand how will this affect their Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 30, 2005 11:33 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Nostalgia: Cray Y-MP EL - available for online access

rchrd pointed that a Cray Y-MP EL is freeely available for online access. This was one of the first mini-supercomputers - an idea that Cray Research played with fifteen years ago. The computer was a computing monster in those times (four processors, 1 Read More...
Posted Monday, August 29, 2005 12:53 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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We Want Posts in Brett's Blog!

In my regular visit to Brett's blog (I don't want to miss any new posts!) I noticed the following disclaimer: News This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. A full disclaimer here . Huh? Brett, what post are you reffering Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 28, 2005 10:03 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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What's your favorite bug story?

... SteveJS asks . I saw many curious bugs in my developer life, but here is one that I remember: Back in Windows 2000 shipping days, one of the coolest features there was PnP and power management. This also caused us to ship later than expected because Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 27, 2005 3:08 AM by AdiOltean | 9 Comments
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The simplest search portal. Ever.

What? MSN with no ads? :-) http://www.start.com/developer [source: Scott's "SiteExperts" place ] Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 27, 2005 12:47 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

What is the size of a GMail inbox now, and in the near future?

I just heard that Gmail is now finally open for subscriptions, so I headed to gmail.com . While looking at their web page, one weird thing caught my attention: an ever increasing counter of "megabytes" that was contiuously updated. Being a curious guy, Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 25, 2005 3:12 PM by AdiOltean | 11 Comments

The fun days of app-compat testing

Raymond Chen describes his past experience on testing a randomly chosen third-party app with Windows 95. Back then we did not have an app-compat team, and for non-critical applications things were just checked out manually on a voluntary basis. I remember Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 24, 2005 3:17 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

New goodies in Virtual Server

[source: CNet ] Several new exciting features in Virtual Server got publicly announced at Intel Developer Forum: • An individual virtual machine will be able to run powerful multiprocessor work loads--likely as many as eight processors for a single machine. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 24, 2005 3:07 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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RAID 6 comes back

There is a growing level of interest in exotic RAID technologies, like RAID 6. The main improvement over RAID 5 is the fact that in a RAID 6 configuration you have double-parity, allowing two separate parity stripe units to be stored on two separate spindles. Read More...
Posted Friday, August 19, 2005 9:29 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Creating life from scratch?

There is always "one more link" for today... This time - news about an old subject - how to create "life" by assembling genetic components. Here is the link . They're mixing, matching and stacking DNA's chemical components like microscopic Lego blocks Read More...
Posted Friday, August 19, 2005 4:46 PM by AdiOltean | 9 Comments
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Remote controlled humans

Scary stuff ... so when I will see a headline saying "Debugging humans"? Smiling nervously, the young woman walks forward in a straight line. Suddenly, she veers to the right. She stumbles and stops, attempting to regain her balance, and continues to Read More...
Posted Friday, August 19, 2005 4:44 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Hitting the search relevance wall

There is a curious fenomenon going on in the search arena today - something I call the "hitting the search relevance wall". The thing is that most search companies are getting so much better that it is hard to distinguish between them in terms of quality. Read More...
Posted Friday, August 19, 2005 1:11 PM by AdiOltean | 19 Comments

Puzzle Solution: a geometry problem

The geometry problem from my previous math puzzle has a nice solution. I particularly like it because it is one of these problems that are pretty hard to solve traditionally - unless you perform the right geometric construction - and at that point, the Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 18, 2005 8:35 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Bloggers, and the maximum coolness threshold

Statistics are fun to watch, as long as you don't take them seriously. For example, while reading some blogs, I was just realized something funny about blogging quality: a blogger can only blog a fixed quantity of interesting things in a given period Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 18, 2005 7:32 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Interview: Bill Hilf on Open Source

Bill Hilf, Microsoft's Linux Lab Manager responds to various questions on Microsoft's relation with the Open Source community. http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/08/1247220&tid=109&tid=11&tid=106 Read More...
Posted Monday, August 08, 2005 12:52 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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Here comes the Spyware patrol!

I just read in eWeek about yet another technique to find suspicious sites. The principle is surprisingly simple: 1) Take N virtual machines, running Windows XP with various degrees of un-patched security holes. These machines will serve as a honeypots Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 07, 2005 3:25 AM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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Puzzle: a little geometry problem, and a sequence question

This is not really a puzzle, but a real geometry problem. Let's take a random triangle (ABC), and let's assume that the angle bisector from A intersects BC in the point D. Proof that: AD ^ 2 = AB * AC - BD * CD Here is the figure, drawn in MSPAINT.EXE Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 06, 2005 12:44 AM by AdiOltean | 15 Comments
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IE7... feels different

I like IE7. A few days ago, being too brave maybe as usual, I decided to instal it on my dev box and in a few days I succeeded to develop dangerous addictions for several things. First, on tabbed browsing (pretty fast given that each IE window is a separate Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 06, 2005 12:36 AM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments

ECMA standards now aligned with the new Whidbey, C# 2.0

Few days ago, ECMA approved the third edition of the C# and CLI standards. This aligns the language and runtime to the latest enhancements in Whidbey, like generics, nullable types, etc. The effects of this standard approval are almost immediate - Miguel Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:12 PM by AdiOltean | 4 Comments
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