.Hibri

Want to created a color picker just like the one in Photoshop ?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/colorpicker.asp

An Australian school bans the iPod, on the grounds that it encourages isolation and turns people into social outcasts.

"A private school in Australia has banned its pupils from listening to their iPods. The yuppie consumer gadget will not be permitted in class, because it encourages kids to be selfish and lonely, according to the school principal."

I have to agree with this though. We are increasingly shutting out our environment with all sorts of electronics and withdrawing into an electronic shield.

However, on the lighter side should iPods carry health warnings ?

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=143&var2=0

A very helpful article to optimize your Windows system. I've tried the suggestions on my Windows XP Pro laptop. There is a significant and noticeable difference now. Diskeeper is required to defragment the hard drive and the page file. A trial version of Diskeeper is available.

The article provides a good explanation of Windows memory fundamentals. A free page file defragmentation utility is available from Sysinternals.

This is what I have done to my system (Intel Centrino 1.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 60GB).

1. Install Diskeeper, and defragment the hard disc.
2. Check the page file usage using the taskmanager performance tab. Monitor the max size under normal use(Outlook, winamp, OneNote,Word, Visual Studio,Opera,Azureaus).
3. In the virtual memory settings, set the initial size to 512 MB and the maximum size to 768MB. 
4. Use Diskeeper to defragment the page file at the next boot.
5. Schedule Diskeeper to run regularly.

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/27297

Now if only they would release it !!.

The release date has slipped to the end of this year. I wish they would just release the runtime sooner or even backport some of the enhancements and bug fixes.

Here is an interesting book from O'reilly

Mind Hacks

"This exploration into the moment-by-moment works of the brain uses cognitive neuroscience to present experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, subliminal perception. Each "hack" examines specific operations of the brain. By seeing how the brain responds, you'll learn more about how the brain is put together. If you want to find out what's going on in your head, then Mind Hacks is the key."

There are sample mind hacks http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindhks/.

I was looking at how to implement a load balancing/load sharing system for a data centre.  The data centre hosts websites and other servers on a domain name www.mydomain.com (for example). Servers within the data centre are load balanced by Cisco Content Switches. The company wants 3 data centres. The traffic coming to www.mydomain.com should be shared among the data centres providing redundancy and scalability. These 3 data centres are in different physical locations, and will be served by different ISPs (ideally).

The solution to this is to implement a DNS based load balancing system. In this solution the primary name server for www.mydomain.com will be replaced with an "intelligent" DNS server.

Instead of replying to DNS request with just one IP address, this smart DNS server will give out the IP addresses based on the load at each of the data centres. The client resolving an IP address for www.mydomain.com will get the IP address of the data centre with the least load.

The DNS server can also stop clients from going to a data centre that is not functioning.

This solution is explained in more detail at http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/undergrad/4ba2.01/group8/DNS.html

These are some of the solutions available in the market.

http://www.sysmaster.com/s_net_dns.htm

Cisco GSS Global Server Load-Balancing

Microsoft, AMD and Sun begin their partnership.

Will we see Sun servers using AMD processors running Windows 2003 ?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/11/ms_gets_sunkit/

http://blogs.msdn.com/eec/archive/2005/03/03/384874.aspx

1. Keep each slide brief , but cover the main points. Do not cram a lot of text on the slide.
2. Keep the presentation notes simple. Do not have a huge pile of notes. Your notes should be brief and expand upon the text in the slide.
3. Keep eye contact with the audience. Look at everyone. This has two affects. First, is that you can see how the audience is responding and secondly, it builds the confidence levels since it feels like you are talking to someone and not just an empty room.
4. Know the power of pauses and silences. Pausing during a presentation gives the impression that you are confident. It also allows to recover from nervousness. Use frequents pauses to make the presentation enjoyable, and not seem like reading something
5. It is normal to be nervous. If someone says that they are not nervous during a presentation, then something is wrong with them. It is natural. You have to know that you are nervous and not let it overwhelm you.
6. Always look at the audience, and not at the screen or the computer.
7. Do not talk down to the audience. You are the expert in what you are presenting, but do not treat the audience like dummies.
8. You must be able to explain anything you put on the slide, no matter how insignificant it is. If you put something up there and someone asks you a question about it, it will look very very bad if you can't explain it. So if you don't know what it is, do not put it on the slide
9. Relax, and smile.
10. Practice, Practice and practice. No matter how many you have done, do this. It builds confidence
11. Never try to read from your notes. Remember, you are presenting not reading
12. Create your own presentation, and make your own notes. If you are using someone else's slides, atleast make your own notes

This is now hosted at www.webfusion.co.uk.
dasBlog is the only engine I found so far, that is built using .Net and does not need a database.
However, I had to do some code changes so that it will work on my shared hosting account.

1. Use of XmlNamespaceUpgradeReader
I changed all occurances of

XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(DayExtra),Data.NamespaceURI);
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileStream))
{
XmlNamespaceUpgradeReader upg = new XmlNamespaceUpgradeReader( reader, "", Data.NamespaceURI );
DayExtra e = (DayExtra)ser.Deserialize(upg);
}

to

XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(DayExtra),Data.NamespaceURI);
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileStream))
{

DayExtra e = (DayExtra)ser.Deserialize(reader);
}

The XmlNamespaceUpgradeReader class causes a Security exception, due to a policy implemented by the host.

2. The startup code reads the registry. This is also not allowed. The code accessed the registry to read the time zones available on the server. This code too is disabled. It is now hard coded to the UTC time zone.

Good thing  I had the source code. More power to Open Source. :)

Finished debugging the code, had to do some changes to the dasBlog code so that it would work on a shared hosting account.

I will migrate all the old posts later ....

testing