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September 2005 - Posts

Are there any COM programmers out there?

Even with all this new wave of .NET stuff, I still find myself in the XXI century doing good old COM programming - and I enjoy doing it... So is anyone still interested in blog posts around COM programming? (especially around COM servers, COM security, Read More...
Posted Friday, September 30, 2005 11:56 AM by AdiOltean | 10 Comments

Start.com has now Hotmail integration

It looks like Hotmail is slowly getting integrated with start.com. Go to http://mail.start.com for a quick test... Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 27, 2005 7:33 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Day of Defeat: Source - released!

A few hours ago (one hour later than expected, at 4.00 PM PDT), Day of Defeat: Source was released in the wild. This is the first product from Valve that benefits from the HDR technology. The Valve engineers went to interesting challenges to make HDR Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 27, 2005 1:49 AM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

An internet-enabled sewing machine... but does it run Windows?

Yes it does . This is Bernina Artista 200e and it runs Windows CE! The 200/200e models have some interesting features: among other thigns, an incorporated CD-ROM reader and a USB port. Also, it is able to connect to the internet. I saw it briefly at the Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 24, 2005 6:00 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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CMD programming - elements of style

Everyone knows how to write CMD scripts. And this is the reason why we have so many messy CMD scripts around. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anywhere some guidelines on how to write clear, maintenable batch files. So here is my take: 1) Think about discovery Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 22, 2005 11:51 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

How big is Hotmail?

Huge. Here is some data from a PDC Hotmail presentation : ~200 million active users 3.3 billion inbound emails a day 1.5 billion blocked at the router 1.0 billion deleted as spam (never hits the user's mailbox) 0.5 billion sent to the junk folder Over Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 22, 2005 10:41 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments

Virtual disease affecting World of Warcraft characters

We are living in interesting times. First, WoW created the possibility of virtual economies. Now we have virtual diseases... Players of Blizzard's incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading across Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 21, 2005 7:20 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

WS-Management specification submitted to DMTF

WS-Management was just submitted to DMTF! WS-Management is a web-service based spec for system management tasks like resource discovery, events, executing of certain operations, etc: [...] this specification identifies a core set of Web service specifications Read More...
Posted Monday, September 19, 2005 4:41 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Age of Empires III

I can't wait to get it. In the meantime, interesting things on http://ageofempires3.com . AOE3 will use Havok physics engine, the same middleware component that powers Half-Life 2 (there is a link mentioning Havoc in this page , however, the link points Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 18, 2005 10:57 PM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments

The death of the A-list?

There are two important events that happened recently in the blogosphere: 1) The launch of http://www.memeorandum.com/ - a web site to automatically generate a summary of "what's hot" in the blogosphere, and 2) The widely expected launch of the first Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 15, 2005 2:42 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments

A new Hotmail interface

The new Hotmail interface was presented at PDC - and here is already an ArsTechnica review . The UI seems clean and nice, and BTW it uses the Atlas framework under the cover. Speaking of e-mail, I just noticed that Yahoo also has its new Y! Mail interface Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:54 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Gates on Vista, Office 12, LINQ, and other stuff

Interesting - three more interviews with Bill Gates: 1) with CNet. 2) with Jon Udell. 3) and with Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Of course, his previous interview with Robert Scoble is old news... Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:09 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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LINQ: a post-modern revolution in software development

Arguably, LINQ (Language Integrated Query) will be the next major revolution in programming languages. LINQ is a language-independent, platform-independent technology that solves an old problem - data queries in your code- in a very elegant way. First, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 13, 2005 11:09 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
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Puzzle: all horses have the same color

Several answers to my previous puzzle reminded me about an old result: Theorem: All horses have the same color. Proof : We demonstrate this by induction over N for all the sets of horses size of size N: - N=1: The proof is true for N = 1 (any horse has Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 13, 2005 5:55 PM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments
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Start.com Developer Center is launched! (or at least the web site is up)

It looks like it is possible to create your own start.com site, develop "gadgets" for it, etc. Go directly here: http://start.com/developer/ Here is also some documentation on the new Atlas runtime: http://start.com/developer/atlasruntime.aspx While you Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 13, 2005 2:11 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

100 GB in your cell phone?

Using nanotechnology, Rusell Cowburn and other researchers developed a new 3D architecture for memory chips. This latest research, however, has the potential to develop a chip that combines the storage capability of a hard drive with the low cost of memory Read More...
Posted Monday, September 12, 2005 7:41 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Two math puzzles

What is the value of this expression? If that was too easy, how about this one? Read More...
Posted Monday, September 12, 2005 3:10 PM by AdiOltean | 21 Comments
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GetVolumeInformationW warnings in VSS - what do they mean?

I mentioned a while back a weird-looking event log entry: Event Type: Warning Event Source: VSS Event Category: None Event ID: 12290 Date: 8/30/2004 Time: 12:37:19 PM User: N/A Computer: SomeMachineName Description: Volume Shadow Copy Service warning: Read More...
Posted Monday, September 12, 2005 10:34 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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eBay and Skype?

When I saw Fred's entry on eBay and Skype was "What? Skype is on sale on eBay?". Then, I quickly figured out that this is about eBay buying Skype... Intriguing move. Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 08, 2005 3:45 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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The Bill Gates interview

Robert Scoble did it again! The latest interview on channel9.com we have Bill Gates in person answering to various interesting questions (for example, his opinion on blogging at Microsoft). http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=111598 Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 08, 2005 3:26 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Samsung will launch DVD player with HD DVD + Blu-Ray support

Samsung came with a brute-force solution to the HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate: it will launch a player that will support both formats! http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/07/content_3454461.htm Samsung said Tuesday it will introduce a DVD player capable Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 07, 2005 6:01 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Hurricane Katrina: Plea for help revealed by satellite imagery

I hope that the right people already know about this particular message for help: This message was noticed three days ago by Scott Stanfield, on the latest NOAA imagery released on the web on September 1, and posted by Jeff Atwood in his blog. And the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:46 AM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments
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start.com - what I like, and what I want

In reply to my "Start.com rocks" post , Dragos asked me the other day: >>> what is it that rocks if we compare it to google/ig for example? Or if we compare it to a web-based rss reader for that instance, since it plays a strong substitution Read More...
Posted Monday, September 05, 2005 11:42 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Thoughts on chirality

In a recent post that I've missed until now, Eric Lippert describes a simple mental experiment: why a mirror reverses left and right, but not top and bottom. This weird property (called chirality ) has a fascinating history, and deep implications everywhere: Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 04, 2005 12:51 AM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
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Vendors try out VDS 1.1

The VDS plugfest is almost done now... The most interesting part is the new VDS 1.1 feature set, which extends storage management capabilities to iSCSI and MPIO deployments. http://www.infostor.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=235991&p=23 Read More...
Posted Friday, September 02, 2005 1:44 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Tricks with Mark of the Web: Behaviors, XML files

A new feature of Internet Explorer is the Local Machine lockdown that blocks by default the execution of scripting in HTML pages. It is implemented in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 (and future versions of Windows/IE). If you just load in IE a Read More...
Posted Friday, September 02, 2005 10:53 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Start.com rocks!

Less is more - and now it's even more less than what you saw last time. I hope that http://start.com will set a new bar for a clutter-free search portal :-) Start.com it's now my home page. Good bye, search.msn.com... Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 01, 2005 12:47 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments
 
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