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Microsoft working on another OS, but it's more like Unix...

Apple Matters | Singularity

Some interesting stuff here about a MS Research OS called Singularity.

James makes some great points about the pros and cons, but one of his arguments is flawed.

He talks about the short-sightedness of using Sing# to code the OS and code apps for the OS. I don't see any problem in this, longer term, since MS would no doubt use their existing CLR (Common Language Runtime) architecture, which would make application coding language independant and potentially/probably the coding of the OS itself as well... (Spec# basically being extensions to [Spec#] extensions to [C#] extensions to [C++] extensions to C)

Good to see there are some seriously open-minded people at MS!

Moment of uber-geekness...

Not entirely sure why, but I went hunting for myself on Google (actually, I must confess I do this every year or so...) and found that Google Groups has me way back in 1992!

"craig humphrey" - Google Groups

RAID5 catching up with RAID0

It's long been well known that RAID5 creats additional overhead (thanks to parity information) which makes it slower than say RAID0 (striping).

While following up something I was reading today (distributed.net) I came across this 3ware page, touting the performance of their recent SATA2 RAID contoller. While their main point is to compare with their previous SATA1 RAID controler (and the performance increase that they've managed), just look at the RAID5 vs RAID0 performance.
Read is only 13% behind, write is only 9% behind, and across 8 drives, you've only lost 12.5% space.

That's pretty hot in my book, that's a paltry 11.5% penalty (if you want to think of it that way) to achieve coverage against single drive failure... Imagine how the 12 and 16 drive versions do!

BTW they don't mention how much on-board cache they're using, I'm guessing the full 256MB.

Running Windows without a swapfile

I know i've done this every so often to do a good solid defrag, but I must admit, it had never occurred to me to run this way the whole time.

I've got two desktops and a laptop, all with 1gig RAM. My primary desktop would probably struggle (thanks to a Netscreen/Juniper java based console), I think the other two could be prime targets, at least until I start VS05 & SQL05 development again...

http://agileprogrammer.com/geeknoise/archive/2005/10/16/8673.aspx

How to Build an Intel Mac

Hmm... someone leaked an early release of Mac OS/X for INTEL...
So now the latest trend is showing everyone how you can get it working on XYZ Intel based hardware....

ExtremeTech

BuilderAU

Might have to see if I can locate a copy and have a little play...

Even more Sony DRM...

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

More Sony DRM

Sony Yanks DRM Uninstaller - Because that was a security risk, too

Sony distributes DRM - Rootkit!

All the major players out there are trying to come up with the perfect DRM (Digital Rights Management) solution to stop all this CD/DVD pirating. So Sony starts shipping CDs with it's own flavour of DRM that auto-installs on your PC when you put the CDROM in. Only, they then try to hid the DRM software using XCP, which is basically a rootkit! XCP can be used to hide ANY process/file/folder/regkey that starts with "$sys$"! And it turns out it's also remotely exploitable! (Recieved a signature update for it just yesterday!).

Fortunatly the boys at Symantec have a free scanner/removal tool. So if you've recently bought a Sony Music published CD, you might want to give this app a run against any PC you've put it in.
Symantec Security Response - SecurityRisk.First4DRM

MS gets all leaky on us...

There's a bit of a bru-ha boiling on the net around some leaked emails/memos from Microsoft: Miguel de Icaza [memos can be found here]

Miguel and others point out that it's all a little bit suspicious and staged, which to my uneducated eyes appears true, though having seen some of the emails/memo/presentations that we get at my office... Sometimes the powers at be really believe (and write) this stuff.

Who knows, I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft, I have to use their products (by-and-large) and they often do some really cool stuff, some of them are even relativly cheap. But when somethings not working, or you're trying to make that next logicial development step... they often start to fall short and the support isn't always helpful.

MS have learned a lot of lessions, through making a lot of mistakes, and the've come a long way, they and their products are definitly improving (and bloating unfortunatly), lets hope that things just keep getting better.

RainbowCrack Goes Online and Commercial

RainbowCrack Online

VoIP phone Denial of Service!

Get lots of people to ring the same guy and shout "Boo"!

Field Notice: [Cisco] FN - 62121 - CP-7940G and CP-7960G May Reboot if Volume is Set to Maximum

Summary: The IP Phone may reboot if volume is set to maximum, a call is placed to it, and the caller makes a loud noise.

Object based querying of data sources

Very informative video from the Channel 9 team over at MSDN.
Object based querying of any (more or less) data source: arrays, XML, DBS, etc.

Some of the comments below the vid are interesting, particularly the comment about FoxPro. I've never used FoxPro, but I'm sure Delphi had/has similar methods for data source access (considering that Anders is ex-Delphi...) and I have vague recollection of Oracle doing something similar with Pro-C? But that was years ago, no idea where it went.

Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ

At last a justification for having a WinCE4.0 PDA...

OK, so I've got this Harrier PDA/Cellphone, which is all well and good, but what really can you do with it (other than make phone calls, TXTs, crappy pictures and Solitaire?

 

Here comes the answer... get a 256+meg SD card for it and load Quake3A!

 

That's right, this guy has ported the now open source code from Q3A to WinCE4.0!

 

Now all I need to do it persuade the boss to let me get an SD card...

 

[BTW I've previously tried to get the SANDisk 256MB+WiFi card working with my PDA... it don't....]

Remote surveilance of CRT's and LCD's

Saw an episode of Numb3rs last night, it included the remote surveilance of a computer LCD screen.

No while the monitoring of CRTs is well known (The US DoD first talked about it in 1947! ARC Search Results: Details pitty they haven't digitised this!) I hadn't heard of it being extended to LCDs yet.

OK, so I'm not security guru (I'm supposed to be developing most of the time), but I still hadn't come across this.

Various TEMPEST (see above ARC link and here) discussions mention that some LCDs do intefere with TV reception, leading to the conclusion that there might be something readable there... See here [first of three myths], here, here,

However you can get TEMPEST compliant LCDs here, here, here and even a whole range of computer equipment here.

But no sign of a device to remotely monitor LCDs yet...

This is as close as I've gotten. It mentions the CEI Tempest Receiving System, but all the pics are long gone and no mention of LCD support. But it does mention using telescopes to look at reflections... or even the modulation of the power LED on a montor!

Did just find this 2003 paper , so it is possible, and this guy has done it, but it's not the LCD screen that's being snooped on, it's the cable connecting the graphics card and the LCD! [in this case on a laptop]

I wonder if anyone has done any comparisons on the different types of graphics card and monitor/LCD connections? (DVI-Analog, DVI-Digital, standard PC[?], Mac, Sun...)

Very interesting field. Far more intreaging than the cracking of Excel passwords that I did at work today...

Looks like Blue-Ray is dieing the death of underliverable...

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News

All the Bandwidth you can eat! And then some!

Computerworld > London is global internet bandwidth capital

Is this steganography?

Select/highlight the image.

10 Minute IIS5.0 hack

Flash video, showing someone hacking an IIS5.0 site in just 10 minutes.

Whoppix and WHAX demos from whoppix.net and iwhax.net [flash]

Place Shifting - View your home TV/Cable/Sat from anywhere, over the Internet!

TomsNetworking Product Reviews : TomsNetworking : Sling Media Slingbox

Very cool idea, hard to justify in NZ where you pay for your (broadband) bandwidth usage (or you're capped).

Intellisene for SQL!

PromptSQL: Intellisense style help for MS Query Analyzer, VS.NET 2003, Management Studio and VS 2005

What a cool idea! Especially since MS apparently have pulled it from SQL Server 2005... couldn't get it to work properly, apparently....

The slacker..

Hi People,

OK, I've been a bit slack on the tech blog of late... that's an understatement...
The jokes have trickled in, thanks to the likes of Con and my IT co-conspiritors (at least the ones that aren't leaving/left!).

So anyway, here's what I've been up to:

Battling Hummingbird's DM and KM products. Mainly to having very little clue :(

Spent three days last week at MicroSoft TechEd, Jesper Johansson and Steve Riley are still the highlights! Not a lot new on the security front, although MS are pushing IPSec policy again, to isolate server from the bad guys, desktops, even each other... Personally, that's what a firewalls for, but I'm happy to have more layers, after all, security is like Ogers.. erk! I mean Onions :)

Recently joined in the Total Sport 12 Hour MountainBike "race", well, we put up three teams in the 6 hour race anyway... (look for REC A/B/C in the results, I was in REC B) Loads of fun!

Thanks to Nolan getting older, I got to go PaintBalling recently. My first time and I had an excellent time, getting hit 2nd lowest number of times, and no injuries, dispite a shot to the neck at close range. We played two fields [1 and 6] of capture the flag, the first game (two 30 minute halves) no one even got close to the flags, the second game, I buddied with Nolan to capture the enimies flag about 2 minutes before the end of the game. Nolan made it back to the base, only to find the other team had done exactly the same thing. Will definitly have to do that again.

Started to get Blog spam on Friday Crud, oh well, at least someone must be reading it, even if it's just a bot....

Sent the family off to Paihia for a holiday with my in-laws, would have been nice to have gone too, but it give me the excuse of working the weekend and late nights to get back on top of some of my projects at work... [and to blog a little]

That's it for now, I had wanted to blog from TechEd, but just got to busy (had to come back to the office every day... even after the mammoth TechFest!)

Have fun people and quit pressuring me to go back to Wellington!

Radio NZ will be simulcasting David Lange's memorial service

Radio New Zealand

Given that they're a radio network, I wonder if they'll be using video?

10Gbit/s All the bandwidth you can eat...

broadband � News � 10Gbps Monster Connection - Scientists have all the fun...

Pah! Users will find a way to fill it... Next year it'll be 100Gbit/s...

Dell's new Inspiron XPS Gen 2 is "laptop of the moment"

Tom's Hardware Guide Mobile Devices: The World's Best Gaming Notebook? - Introduction

Creaming even the Acer Ferrari 4000! (which is admittedly is a thin&light).

The rest of the world makes fun of our "Telco"

Yup that's right, rats took out one of Telecom NZ's fibre paths and then just two days later a spade took out the rest of their North Island network. That's right, our major "Telco" only has two paths for it's core "carrier grade" network. So much for their "Five 9's" propaganda.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/24/0249231&from=rss

ComCom suggests Telecom take it's own pill...

http://www.comcom.govt.nz/MediaCentre/MediaReleases/2004/telecommunicati
onscommissionertele.aspx

The Commerce Commission is suggesting that Telecom NZ take a quick look
at what it's (subsidiary is) asking Telstra (in Australia) to do, and
then apply it to it's operations in NZ.

Heh heh, all rings and round-a-bouts... Telecom is beating up on
Telstra (in Aussi( for doing exactly what Telecom is doing in NZ...

These guys are more one-eyed than a Canterbury fan!

64bit .Net? v2.0 only - nearly...

Came across this interesting blog entry.
By default v1.0 and v1.1 apps will only run in the 32bit mode on 64bit Windows.
And even if you force 64bit mode, using a 64bit loader/wrapper, it will only stay 64bit if there are no 32bit dependancies.
Kinda logical, but it would have been nice if they'd used some kind of 64-32bit glue, so 64bit apps could have 32bit dependancies.
Isn't that how Win9x worked with it's 16bit parts?

http://blogs.msdn.com/vladimirsadov/archive/2005/06/23/432096.aspx

When is a crack not a crack?

"When it presents no real threat."
Yeah, right! Some Indian programmer breaks Microsoft's anti-piracy scheme and that's no threat?

http://theinquirer.net/pocket.aspx?article=24134

Unrest over Microsoft's grading scheme for staff...

Looks like Microsoft's "innovative" grading scheme for staff (affecting bonuses, promotion, etc) is causing a fair amount of unrest...

Symantec Worm propogation simulator

http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/content.cfm?articleid=5479&EID=0

Talking furniture?

Sounds like a university project has gotten loose!

Instant Fame

Telecom NZ have had enough of money grubbing advertising agencies...

So now they want us to come up with their adverts! Want Instant Fame?

Rather a lot of "Adult" examples...

The Joy MINTEL/INTAPPLE/MACTEL?

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/693.html

More Apple on INTEL

This is one of the better takes on this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/archive/2005/06/06/425849.aspx

Steve Jobs confirms rumors - Apple to transition to Intel CPUs

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News

It's true.. [sigh]

PCWorld.com - IRam Speeds Windows XP Start Up

PCWorld.com - IRam Speeds Windows XP Start Up

It's funny, solid-state hard drives have been around for ages, but have always cost an arm and a leg... So why has it taken so long to come up with a simple little board with RAM slots and a battery? Kudos to Giga-byte for doing it! But you've flawed your system.

You're using SATA (presumably v2.0 at 300Meg/s) for the data transfer! (dispite already being plugged into the PCI slot). 60x faster? That would make the average SATA drive run at 5Meg/s.

Still, US$60 (plus RAM cost), starts looking very attractive...

Oh well, at least they'll saturate the SATA channel :)

Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?

Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Just when POWER CPU's are poised to take off (thanks to being in the three leading next-gen consoles), Apple is going to switch to INTEL! Now if they were switching to AMD... (but AMD often have volume problems, so probably not a great idea)

But as this article points out, if OS/X will run on INTEL (sounds like Pentium-D or Pentium-M targets), then presumably it can run on AMD (AthlonX2 and 64?).

I really don't get it. These rumors have been coming and going for the last couple of weeks and I for one hope they're not true (I much prefer the idea of Apple adopting INTEL Xscale for some small device, though it does go against all that Apple have ever stood for.)

Please Apple, please stick with the POWER CPUs, they're about to get cheaper (hopefully, thanks to the volume of console sales), OS/X already runs on POWER, Apple have already changed CPU architecture once before (Motorola 680x0 -> POWER), applications on OS/X on POWER often outperform Windows on INTEL despite the huge gap in MHz [PentiumM/Athlon show that MHz is not king].

With the battle of the multicores now ramping up, these are going to be interesting times, and with IBM backing INTEL on it's own hardware (only servers, since it sold of it's PCs) and yet backing POWER for Apple (existing G5), Sony (PS3), Microsoft (X360) and apparently Nintendo (Revolution - not clear if this is actually a POWER CPU) and in it's Unix (AIX/Linux) servers... I wonder how much pressure IBM can bring to bear on Microsoft to develop Windows on POWER... (at which point head to head comparisons would get real interesting...)

Actually... did a little more reading... word is that the triple core CPU going into the X360 is of the POWER line, but the multi-core CPUs for the PS3 and Revolution are custom CPUs. Which still makes life interesting since MS has had to port the Xbox OS to POWER, which means that porting Windows can't be too hard... But does reduce the potential CPU volumes...

[sigh]I should stick to developing... I don't even have a console... don't really want one either...

Windows x64 home truths...

Nathan Mercer (Microsoft NZ) has been running around New Zealand, touting Windows x64 with AMD and has put some interesting tit-bits in his blog.

I was reading this article from Microsoft and noticed a few things:

• Windows x64 does not use 64bit memory addressing, it uses 40bit! (OK, that's still 16 terabytes of addressable memory.. but still, a little misleading)
• WinXP Pro x64 has a physical RAM limitation of 128Gig, while Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition has a limit of 32Gig!
• One of the reasons for increased performance is the increased number (and size) of CPU registers.  Hmmm.. but we see this often with CPU revisions within x86 (SSE/SSE2 [and SSE3?] added new, longer registers).  But by and large, the main reason for performance is the increase in physical RAM, if you have it installed...
• Security is improved. Data Execution Prevention (DEP) in this case.  Two points here:
1. MS implemented limited DEP in software, even when you don't have a DEP capable CPU
2. There was no reason that DEP support couldn't have been put into x86 CPUs, INTEL/AMD just need to give you a reason to upgrade...
• Compatibility.... Hmm... if we don't use Windows x64, there's no compatibility issue...  If we do use Windows x64 aren't we glad that it's "... essentially feature comparable with the 32-bit versions."  Hmmm... that's "comparable", not "compatible".  I guess MS is starting to learn some lessons from Windows on Alpha and Windows on Itanium (OK, so the underlying CPU's weren't x86 compatible either, but they're doing it for Xbox 360...).  BTW no 16bit support at all!  No support for 32-bit drivers (better hope your printer/scanner/modem/webcam/etc vendor has released a new driver...) or applications that depend on 32-bit drivers (except MS Exchange, funnily enough...)

In summary, I'm sure this will all be moot point in a year or two, since you'll only be able to buy machines with x64 based CPUs and hardware vendors will have released drivers and no-one will notice the difference in performance, cause MS Office will be bigger and slower, Windows will have even more bells and whistles (Longhorn?) and for 90% of corporate users, a P4 2.0Ghz, with 512MB RAM, will still be more than enough to run WinXPpro with Office2003...

 

[I must be grumpy today, too much ranting, better do some work... yeah, like that's going to cheer me up!]

MS Snubs porting to PowerPC

Computer World article

Key phrase: "No, this is not one of our supported platforms."
Of course not, you've only recently started porting the Xbox code to PowerPC, so of course you don't "support" real Windows on PowerPC.

Key phrase: "...no plans to port to Power at this time."
Maybe not, but I bet MS have a team doing a feasibility study...

Given that the console market isn't as big as the PC market (thanks to corporates?), though it's probably pretty close, which means that whatever hardware is used in the consoles will become very cheap (OK, so in the console's themselves it's subsidised by the price of software/games).  Can you say "Server Farms"?

And if IBM are at all committed to the platform (and they're probably already doing it for the AIX/Linux community), how about multicore PowerPC blade servers?  Talk about packing a whole lot of punch in a very dense form factor.  BTW I see their existing POWER Blade fits into their standard BladeCenter, alongside INTEL based Blades... nice.

Then again, how much of the server market does IBM have (HP/Compaq & Dell are probably fighting it out), how long before IBM sells off it's server division?

Google Toolbar now supports Blogging!

Just downloaded the latest Google Toolbar and it supports blogging!.

Just a basic plain-text editor, that links to www.blogger.com. But still, makes it even easier to blog while I'm at my desktop and spot something interesting.

Now I just need something for my PDA... must take some time to find one (or an HTML email editor...)

Hmmm... I also wish blogger.com had a better way to support attachments, particularly images... hint hint...

If you're really bored... You can follow my luck with the MS newsgroups...

I've got a few background issues at the moment:

• One is Performance Monitor on my Win2k3 Dev box.
  It's gone nutz and lost all the performance objects (CPU, Index Server, Disk, etc, etc) and only displays numbers...
  Someone has previously reported this, but got no response and their post has mysteriously disappeared from the MS Web Newsgroup but thankfully still appears in Google. [Actually, and I thought I had, just found that I posted to the groups a while back on this and still no response, as an MSDN Universal subscriber, I'm supposed to get a response within 48 hours from MS or an MVP...]
• Another is with the ISA2004 install procedure for setting up SQL as the logging back-end. [MS, Google]
  Looks like there's a mistake in the docs...
• An older one is based around an ISAPI filter for IIS, to do user impersonation based on client IP address, but I'm still waiting on the MVP to write up his demo code.

Another issue I have, which I haven't posted yet, since I'm still trying to narrow it down, is with Index Server on Win2k3.
Just a couple of weeks ago, it went ballistic and decided that it needed to index millions of documents in directories that only had a few thousand docs.
I think I've narrowed it down to a performance setting. If you set Indexing to "instant" and there are more documents than it can scan in a given interval (haven't found where that interval is documented yet), then they just start piling up... And it gets worse if you have multiple catalos... I have three. One (System) has around 200,000 docs to worry about, another (custom for an app) has about 100,000 and the third is the standard Web one, with only about 1000 docs.
Why this happened all of a sudden I don't know and I'm sure I didn't have the Indexing set to "instant" when the problem started. I changed it to that to try and get through the indexing quicker! This seems to be an old problem [link above is for 2002], so I would have thought people would have hit it more often and MS would have fixed it so that the same document doesn't appear in the "Docs to Index" queue more than once, or for re-indexing not to get queued until the last one completes.

If I could get Performance Monitor working, I'd check out the disk activity, since CPU/RAM usage is low (on this Dual XEON 2.4GHz HyperThreaded 2Gig RAM, 2*36Gig SCSI [RAID 1], 3*72Gig [RAID 5]) it must be disk holding it back, but it didn't use to be a problem, all three catalos have been around for months and the size hasn't changed much. Oh well, I'm pausing all the catalos and then letting them index one at a time, when that's done, I'll change the performance setting (back to lazy) and hopefully they'll be happy... If not [yells]MICROSOFT![/yells]


Oh and just remembered anotherone that's in the background.
We run SharePoint Team Services v1.0 (aka 2001 I think) and it's got a quirk (pre OfficeXP sp3) of not being able to delete users once the user table get's fairly large, due to too many foreign keys. (infact SQL goes nuts and lets everything fall on the floor...)
I've followed the proceedure on the support page, twice now and it still does it...

Right now I've got it going off doing a "Server Health Check", which entails matching up all the files and DB records, making sure that everything makes sense... Which promptly got it sending out Change Notification emails [on my behalf] for things that haven't changed... I guess they were changes that were queued up in the system somewhere... [sigh] scared the heck out of some of our users when they thought I was messing with documents [I work for a lawfirm remember...]
Note to self: don't let MS products do "auto repair" functions, just get them to detect and report them. Then I can pick up the pieces without scaring the users...

MRTG 2.12.1 broke my graphs :(

I've been using MRTG to do network usage graphing for a long time and it's been a great, basic, free tool. But I recently upgraded to v2.12.1 and it appears to have broken some of my graphs :(

Usually I have the 2Mbit/s Frame Relay interfaces (on our WAN routers) set up to be unscaled, so that they top out at 2Mbit/s, which makes visualising the usage very easy. While the LAN interfaces I had scaled, so that the max of 6Mbit/s of traffic wouldn't dissapear into the 100Mbit/s of graph.

Now MRTG has decided to scale all the graphs and has got the max wrong for the LAN interfaces... so my pretty graphs are messed up... Threw the problem onto the MRTG list, I'll see what happens.

On the plus side, MRTG now support logrithmic scaled graphs, so small nuances in traffic don't get lost amongst the spikes! YAY! Time to update some of my configs.

The Pentium 4 is dead...

Kudos to Tom's Hardware Guide for doing a great job of comparing Pentium M's with Pentium 4's and discovering that the Pentium M looks like it beats the P4 hands down in almost all benchmarks.

Turns out the P M has more in common with the old P3 than the P4.

The catch?  You need the CPU Upgrade Kit CT-479 from ASUS, which only works with some Pentium M processors and a small number of ASUS motherboards... But still a very cool (and quiet!) idea.

All this talk about AJAX

I seem to recall a collegue (Aidan Humphreys - no relation) and I, did some work in 1998/1999, that used JavaScript on the page to do dynamic updates of dropdown-lists.

The JavaScript called a Perl CGI backend into a propretry stock tracking system.

Maybe not as well defined as AJAX, but I'm sure we weren't the first in this arena.

We were working for CSK in Frankfurt at the time (I see they're now called Imagnos), using their Slinghot product.

Please tell me this is a joke!

Apple to addopt INTEL chips?

Right when both the leading next-gen consoles are moving to PowerPC and Apple wants to move away from it? I don't think so. Apple should be looking for ways to integrate the two new multi-core CPU's into it's computers, especially as console volumes will bring the price down!

And can anyone see OSX on PS3/XBox2 and/or PS3/XBox2 emulators on OSX?

StarWars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Well, just like most geeks, I headed off to see Episode 3 last night, down at The Berkley in Mision Bay. Nice little theater by the way (you can take your beer into the movies!)

I wasn't expecting too much of the film, having heard a mixture of reviews and seen a number of shorts. But in the end, I was quite impressed, heavy on the action (particularly lightsabre scenes), nice SPFX (mostly) and a good effort to tie things in with E4-6.

On the downside (or is that darkside?) Padamin still didn't age (but got pregnant quickly, while Anikin was away?), but Anikin does. Yoda's lipsync was abysmal (Back to muppets for Frank), the backgrounds were often blurry (may have been the focus on the projector) and the constant use of Tem Morrison was initally comical, but then I remembered he was cloned, Duh!

All-in-all a cool film, that needed seeing on the big screen. I wonder if there are any 1080i/p digital theaters in New Zealand?

XML document parsing in classical ASP

Unggg... The bain of my last two days!

I've gotten into the bad habit of coding ASP in VBScript, virtually all the XML examples are in JScript and C++. VBScript really isn't the place to be passing around Objects and either I've missed something (quite possible give MS's atrocious XML docs) or you end up doing nearly as much work as if the XMLDocument object didn't exist...

Oh well, just as well it was just some quick'n'dirty proof of concept code to interface between Tikit (taxonomy system) and Hummingbird's Portal. Time to hand it over to my assistant to code (properly) in Java.

[still need an HTML emailer for my PDA, so I can put links into these posts]

Updated my CV

Updated my CV recently (must update web one too...)
It's been about a year since I last did, aside from some training, couldn't really put anything of note in it... [sigh]

Developing for Windows Mobile 2003 SE.... nearly...

Thought I'd help out and write some code for the PocketPC RSS feed reader that I use (PocketFeed). Downloaded the source... Fired up VS.Net 2003... project type unknown...

Darn it... need to load in all the PocketPC SDK and then I'll probably discover that I need to use VS v6 :)

UPDATE:
After much hacking, slashing, editing of paths, adding of libs, SDKs and patches...
PocketFeed compiles and runs on the PocketPC 2003 emulator (which is supposed to be Windows Mobile 2003 SE... [sigh])

Internet over gas!

10 Gigabit wireless, delivered over gas lines!
Can't see that arriving in NZ anytime soon...

BTW my first post via email, on my PDA/cellphone.

[edited: hmmm I need a way to do html emails from my PDA...]

SQL Error in ISA2004 install

Found a mistake in the ISA2004 install the other day.
If you want to log to a (MS) SQL DB, then you have to run a couple of SQL scripts against the DB you want to log to, then set up an ODBC connection.

It talks about giveing permission to a particular stored proceedure, only it doesn't exist...

Thanks MS. No response on the MS newgroups on that one...

Tax breaks for R&D in NZ, finally!

The government has finally come around to the idea that tax breaks for R&D are a good idea... even if they are only going half way!

Craig joins the blogging world

OK, so I've been reading various blogs for a while now, mainly via RSS feeds to my PDA/cellphone, but figured it was about time to start my own.

I have no idea what will end up on here, it will probably get forgotten about quite freqently, but hopefully I'll at least put my Friday missives on here (jokes/interesting links).

Perhaps I'll even vent some vendor based anger on here too :)