Hardware and Software to look forward to in 2010
Hardware:
1. Google phone
2. Apple Tablet
3. Microsoft Tablet
4. Google Tablet
5. New iPhone
6. Microsoft phone?
Software:
1. Microsoft Windows Mobile 7
2. Apple Maps – They bought a mapping company mid last year (to replace Google Maps on iPhone?)
3. Google Chrome OS
4. Google Voice with VOIP (Google phone with data plan only?)
5. Exchange 2010
6. Office 2010 with Web Apps
7. Visual Studio 2010
8. Limited news on Windows 8
The battle between Apple, Google and Microsoft is just heating up.
Happy New Year!
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The image attached in this post is from flickr.com and is not my work. You may need to obtain authorization from the owner on flickr.com before using it.
Icon Finder
Very cool website that allows you to find icons
The site uses AJAX and has icons of varying shapes and sizes. Check it out.
Access a share by it’s DNS alias name
On the DNS server
1. Open DNS
2. Create an A record with the name you want and the IP address of the server that you want to alias
3. Close out and make sure you can ping this new alias from another machine
4. If you cannot ping, refresh the DNS changes manually by using ipconfig /flushdns
On the Windows Server
1. Open regedit from Run or Command Prompt
2. Navigate to HKEY_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
3. Add or Edit DWORD "DisableStrictNameChecking"
4. Change the value to 1
Restart the server. You should now be able to access the server using it’s DNS alias.
Return of the Blog
It has been over a year and a half since I last blogged. Most of my interaction during this time has been through Twitter, Friendfeed and to a much lesser extent Facebook. About a year back I started experimenting with Microsoft Azure (then in early beta). That experiment never came to fruition taking a toll on my blogging endeavors. My original plan was to migrate this website from running on my local computer to Azure, but technical issues and lack of focus left the blogging code in a limbo because of which I never finished migrating the entire code. Being online on Twitter and Friendfeed also lowered the urgency. This may now make sense to some of you who have seen a blank home page. I will write more about the Azure experience in a future post.
Fast forward to two days back, I decided this website needs a major overhaul given that Microsoft Azure didn’t work for me. It is for small businesses that do not want to spend time, money and IT resources into building their own server rack. My goal was to spend as little money as possible and yet have the ability to play with the latest web technologies with little to no underlying complexity. After doing some basic research, I decided to go with Go Daddy's hosting service. It’s cheap, it has IIS7 with ASP.NET 3.5 and it gave me the ability to create a SQL Server database (2GB maximum size). My past experience with Go Daddy’s SQL Server wasn't very good so I dumped the idea, you can read more about it in my previous post “Migrating to Godaddy.com”.
As of now my blog is running happily on Go Daddy servers and I don't have to keep my machine running all the time. I spent the last weekend rewriting the blog engine in ASP.NET MVC and cleaning up the interface. It was one of the most productive weekends ever. I got my feet wet in ASP.NET MVC, I put on a designer hat and changed the blog theme, and I got my website up and running. Go Daddy had the option to connect to their SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio. I didn’t have to use their web based interface any more. The entire backend migration was very easy.
There is still work to be done. One of the ideas I have is to import around 700+ tweets from my twitter account and display it on my blog. I am not sure of this yet. The other idea is to display a Flickr stream of my recent favorites using the Flickr API, an idea I got from Friendfeed. That may be a project for next weekend.
Something that makes me say Wow!
No it's not another Vista ad. It's about my home country. Check it out here. Click Watch Video to your right.
Bill Gates fires back at Mac ads!
I am quoting MSNBC news article by Steven Levy:
Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I've never seen it. I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.
How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we've done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it.
In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?
Read the complete Q and A with Bill Gates here.
Wow! I didn't know that the File Edit ... menu bar was first created by Windows. I do know that Microsoft first showed the search features back in 2002 - 2003 and it hurt them real bad. Everyone from Google to Apple copied the idea and came out with real products way before Microsoft could come out with it's own. They surely learnt a valuable lesson from the Vista debacle. I think moving forward for Windows releases we are not going to see any cool new features until the Beta release, which kinda sucks!.