December 2005 - Posts

• My S1 TiVo has finally been retired.

  Replaced with an S2 140h TiVo I got for free from TiVo (through their rewards program). Now I have two S2s in my network. Can transfer shows between them etc. Very nice indeed. The S1 was showing its age - it was still kind'a functioning, but the MfsFtp Read More... Posted Friday, December 23, 2005 12:01 AM by Shahar | 0 Comments Filed under: Touchy Feely

• What's the bloody point? American Express Gift Card...

  So I'm standing in a safeway, at the register. There's an American Express $100 gift card. You pay $105 for it ($5 fee), and get a $100 gift card that can be used anywhere.. Maybe it's a culture gap thing. I have only been in the US for 4 years.. But Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 11:52 PM by Shahar | 13 Comments Filed under: General

• How to remotely access the Win64 registry from a Win32 machine in managed code (Part II)

  This is a continuation of a previous post . As you recall (or not), we had some test code that would open a remote registry on a server machine and read values. These values would then be used on the client machine to run tests against that server. We Read More... Posted Monday, December 19, 2005 12:23 PM by Shahar | 3 Comments Filed under: Development

• Another DRM legistlation. Wonder where it will stop.

  As reported in Slashdot (and other places): http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/19/088241&from=rss Basically, making legistlation to close the loophole that will currently allows analog copying of digital copyrighted matirial (I am oversimplifying, Read More... Posted Monday, December 19, 2005 12:11 PM by Shahar | 4 Comments Filed under: General

• Minor heart attacks with x64 and Multithreading

  There are very few things that I am afraid of. It’s not that I am brave or heroic – I am just lazy. Being afraid takes energy and can potentially require me to take action (even if the action is running away). I am just too damn lazy for that. The things Read More... Posted Friday, December 16, 2005 12:01 PM by Shahar | 2 Comments Filed under: Development

• I never knew how protected I was from spam.. Until somebody changed the winisp filters...

  In the past 24 hours I have been getting spam emails at a rate of one per minute on my non-ms email (if you just woke up, that's about 720 emails in 12 hours). Outlook junk filter was able to filter about 30% of them but the rest landed in my inbox. In Read More... Posted Thursday, December 15, 2005 10:49 AM by Shahar | 0 Comments Filed under: General

• Copy (Ctrl-C) works in Message Boxes

  This feature has been working since windows 2k or early versions of XP, and still many people do not know about it. If you have a Message Box showing, and you want to copy its contents, you can just Ctrl-C when the window is focused - you will hear a Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 14, 2005 3:37 PM by Shahar | 1 Comments Filed under: Development Related, General

• Defensive Programming - small introduction and one not-so-tall tale

  Recently, I helped one of the devs (lets call him dev1) figure out a bug. The bug was introduced into the code by a different dev (lets call him dev2). The person who was ultimately responsible for the bug creeping into the code in the first place however Read More... Posted Monday, December 12, 2005 1:02 PM by Shahar | 4 Comments Filed under: Development

• New version of MaxiVista - Multimonitor just became better

  Maxivista allows you to install virtual display drivers on your computer. It then uses other computers to act as your extended monitors. This means, if you have 3 computers and 3 monitors at your disposal, you can install MaxiVista and have one of your Read More... Posted Monday, December 12, 2005 10:51 AM by Shahar | 3 Comments

• Mailbox too big? MSN Desktop search to the rescue.

  In our internal exchange system, MS has various limits on email size, depending on what server you happen to reside on (true beta servers tend to not have any limit. More stable servers tend to have an upper limit in the vicinity of 500mb). If you are Read More... Posted Sunday, December 11, 2005 12:04 AM by Shahar | 6 Comments Filed under: General

• How to access the “real” x64 registry from a Win32 .NET Application – Part I

  Jerome, one of our testers, ran into a problem when trying to access the real x64 Windows 2003 server registry from a Win32 managed binary (over the network, no less). The observed behavior of the problem is that, even though a known value is located Read More... Posted Friday, December 09, 2005 11:08 AM by Shahar | 3 Comments Filed under: Development

• Why does this spelling mistake bother me so much?

  Spelling your instead of you're. Read More... Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 8:59 AM by Shahar | 7 Comments Filed under: General