Touch UI laptops in CSI NY: You Only Die Once

Just finish watching CSI New York tonight. Tonight’s episode (titled You one die once) featured a team of robbers with high tech James Bond gears like a self healing + laser cutter sport cars and tuxedoes wired with wireless connection to steal data from nearby digital devices. But the CSI NY squad themselves are also armed with some high tech stuff (I think CSI NY is the most geeky one among 3 with showcase of gadgets suited for si-fi) like a touch UI based laptop that works like iPhone of the recently showcased Windows 7. It is pretty cool seeing Mac Taylor carry one around his office and information is just at the touch of his finger tips.

Mac Taylor holding a Touch UI laptop

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqDQ0wUcSPQ]
YouTube – Windows 7 seven First Official Video

Website to visit: 2advanced studios

The art work of this website is just too damn cool to ignore. The loading page (because it is running on Flash) looks like a Command & Conquer game loading screen. And not to mention the theme music of the website rocks (yea… they got theme music some more)

Speaking of Command & Conquer, 2advanced Studios actually did the mini/ teaser site for Tiberium Sun game and also Star War’s The Force Unleashed.

Currently they put version 5.0 for this website, so I guess it went thru a few make over. Go here and pay a visit. Enjoy your weekend. 🙂 http://www.2advanced.com/

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RTM!!

After months of testing, Hyper-V reached RTM status today. What is Hyper-V? Below is the explanation from Microsoft’s website.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.

You can download it here. I will do the same and test it out over the weekend. 🙂

IssueTracker 3.5 started on Codeplex

Base on the idea behind the Issue Tracker project in www.asp.net, I am developing a new version with the intention of

1. To help people to sump start .NET 3.5 development
2. To help people to jump start an application based on the S+S vision
3. To serve as a base of the future Start.NET course I plan to write

I got the help of Poh Sze and Ervin to help me on part of the project and I hope to showcase it in Tech.Ed SEA 2008.

Beware of msg/ sites requesting your Hotmail/Messenger password

Please be aware of a malicious email circulating around the web that claims to be able to see who has blocked or deleted you from Windows Live Messenger. This is a hoax email which redirects you to a site when you click on the link in the email. The site then requests your Hotmail/Messenger password or Windows Live ID and starts spamming everyone on your contact list with this hoax.

Some of these sites even automatically infect your computer with a Trojan/Virus that steals all passwords on your computer. Below is an example of how the email looks like, these change over time so please be aware of suspicious emails such as this.

Paparazzi @Microsoft

Found out about this microspoting blog by someone at MSFT campus who

creep around campus talking to my favorite kinds of people: geeks who are passionate about what they do.

Interesting gig she has there, it looks like a Web 2.0 journalist or something like that. But the site has some cool stuffs about life at MST Corp with blogs, photos and videos.

Wonder will she comes to Tech.Ed SEA…

I can read this, can you?

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too.
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs pselse bolg it.

Good read of SharePoint’s initial code name and history

It’s really sleepy after a heavy lunch, if you want something interesting and geeky to read about, check this out.

Sharon Richardson, who is an ex-Microsoftie has an interesting blog post about SharePoint. After reading it you will make sense of some naming convention within the product.

There is also a thread on Facebook on the original SharePoint product codename (go check out if you want to ‘8’). Legend said, as with most Microsoft code names, is supposidly the place where the team goes when the product is delivered.

SharePoint development methodology white paper published

Have you ever wonder how to manage code base when you want to move your custom SharePoint solution from you development team site to a UAT server or production server? The folks at Redmond came out with a whitepaper on the best practices to answer the following questions

• How to manage team development for large MOSS projects?
• How to deploy content and code between development and production environments?
• How to prepare your develop efforts for deployment in a remote hosted environment?
• How to enable developers to participate in several projects at the same time?

You can download it here.

Affordable but powerful antivirus in the market

Russian based Kaspersky Antivirus 2009 just came out but our Malaysian distributor is still selling the older version (Version 7.0) at RM45.00 per machine. If not mistaken the 3 users pack sold for RM65.00 at Low Yat. The price is based on 1 year subscription. You can check out the price from Lelong here. This is rather cheap because the US price is USD39.00.

Compared to the more popular yellow box antivirus from US, Kaspersky may not got updated as fast or as powerful in most cases but when compared to those free antivirus in the market, I realize Kaspersky detects and removes a lot more computer viruses. I found out this recently when I conducted a  training at PJ and the lab have  only a few machines installed with Kaspersky while the others are installed with the free ones. So subsequent I found out majority of the PCs there are infected except those with Kaspersky.

Conclusion Kaspersky has a good price per feature ratio given it low price but good performance and low memory consumption. I would recommend it to home users but not enterprise because the lack of manageability and provision tools.