David Platt on Why Software Sucks
I came across this video by David Platt where he is interviewed on Why Software Sucks. Although it is about 2 years ago, it is still very relevant today.
2010 World Cup SBS TV Schedule in a Google Calendar
The world cup is just round the corner! Can’t wait! This year I am determined not to miss a game or any highlights. So I have created a special calendar with the entire SBS 2010 TV schedule, and now Google will wake me up in the morning through its nifty SMS notifications!
I was amazed that I wasn’t able to find something like this already anywhere on the net. So I decided to do it myself. Luckily SBS had a schedule in PDF format already – and after little magic with data extraction and transformation I am quiet pleased with the results 
Unfortunately wordpress doesn’t allow IFRAME, so just click on the image below to get to this public calendar…
SBS World Cup Calendar
Let the games begin!!
Color schemes for Visual Studio!
I get apps like Explorer and Chrome having the ability to schemetaize look and feel, but I was sincerely surprised when I learned about schemes for Visual Studio. Seriously, since when did developers start caring about how pretty it looks and feels, as long as it gets the job done! Or is it just engineers!
Anyhow, here we are. I haven’t found anything I like yet – but I’ll be watching that space. Enjoy!
Buzzwords in communication
A very interesting article on why buzzwords are bad for effective business communication. A must read:
Australia’s NBN too slow …
Google in Feb announced that they are planning to experiment with a 1Gigabit FTTH (Fiber to the home) network in selected communities in US. And our very own NBN promises 100Megabit only with a price tag of 40 billion. This may be fair enough, since our NBN is designed using proven technologies available in the market and not experimental ones, but for an venture that will span 8 to 10 years, the think tanks at NBN should be thinking about building a network to deliver services of the future and not only of the present.
I say our very own NBN Co. should partner with Google and experiment the same thing! Seems like a no brainer – build for the future, not for the present. At least I hope NBN Co. will be quick in adopting the latest innovations that are made in FTTH regardless of who the vendors are, and more importantly ensuring that the network is designed in such a way that reduces future costs and times for upgrades. Because otherwise, 8 years and 40 billion dollars later, we will still find ourselves on the back foot.
.. more innovations..
After stumbling into english central, I checked out the portfolios of google and atlas. There is a lot of innovative things happening around the globe! Anybody interested in taking a look at where the big guns are placing their bets, check it out here..
http://www.google.com/ventures
http://www.atlasventure.com/ourportfolio/
innovations in teaching
Whats the latest in innovations..heres one..
A new way to learn a language. There is this website that teaches english communication skills by using every day speech content and speech recognition. Its catered by region, so it uses the localised pronunciations, which is fantastic. Founded by just two guys in 2009, who are experts in the field of course. The site is free currently perhaps because it is still in beta, however, we’ll know in the future. They have the backing of google and atlas, so I am sure they will come up with some way of ensuring return on their investment. But overall, what a great idea! A new way of learning a language – any language for that matter. I don’t see why it can’t be adopted to learn French or Hindi or Italian.
http://www.englishcentral.com
Team Foundation Server and Sharepoint Services
This is my first post after a very long time. Recently I found myself referring to my own blog to on how to use the Fusion Log Viewer. I thought to myself, thank god I posted that. So when I came across this rare but tricky problem in the installation of TFS 2010 across multiple domains, I decided to post it promptly…
I recently installed TFS 2010 in a multi-domain environment, (a) DEV (b) TST and (c) PROD with one way trusts from (a)-(c). TFS was installed in the DEV domain. Of course all the enterprise logons are against active directory on the PROD domain. This meant that developers accounts on the PROD domain must be given administrator privileges on TFS Sharepoint applications to create/manage team project collections and/or team projects… Simple enough I thought.. but it took a while to figure out.
In order for sharepoint to query other domains that do not trust the sharepoint domain (i.e. 1-way trust), sharepoint’s people-picker with be configured with the “stsadm” command line tool with the correct credentials.
There is a comprehensive post by Rajnak here on how to use this command line utility to set the properities of people-picker object.
Fusion Log Viewer
Otherwise known as the Assembly Binding Log Viewer. If you are using .NET Reflection to dynamically load Assemblies, you might encounter the following exception from time to time:
{“Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.”}
Fear not – although it took me a while to figure this one out – but its ok, you can thank me later =)
Read the rest of this entry »
Google Notebook
So with this recent discovery and hype about Chrome, I decided to check out the other Google applications. And thats when I discovered Notebook. What a nifty little idea! Keep your notes online and they travel with you where every you go. So this post is to let people like me who don’t know anythign about Google’s nifty little Notebook and what you can do with it.
How to use it? Well just sign into Google’s notebook at www.google.com/notebook and start using it.
There are a couple of ways you can take full advantage of it though. The most nifty way is to download the Firefox browser extension and have the notebook travel to whereever you surf. Here is a screen shot of how you can simply drag and drop contents into the notebook:
Just drag&drop or type in your notebook
Or you use some other browser, such as Chrome (suprisingly Notebook does not add-on for Chrome yet), just add the Notebook Bookmarklet to your bookmarks.
[Update]
I created this post a while ago, but never posted it. Anyway, am posting it as is – with a small update! I also recently started using Google Tasks. It’s an add-in to Gmail web client. The nifty thing about this one is you can take any email and quickly create a task related to it. Lovely. Now only if Gmail IMAP would support this. Then my tasks will travel everywhere with me.
