Word 2007 blogging

Testing blogging from Office 2007.

Now there are two tools that can be used for posting to a blog. You can use the Windows Live Writer, or you can Word 2007 to publish a post to your blog.

I had some problems editing existing posts from Word 2007. Live Writer didn't have any problems editing a post that was originally created in Word 2007.

IE7 on XP

I've had some problems with IE7 on XP. It seems a little unstable. I just finished installing XP on a test system, and the first few minutes caused IE7 to crash. I just cannot use IE7 at a consistent basis, because it just doesn't seem stable enough.

ideas...

I was watching the first part of the Scobles two hour geek talk video and they talk a little about HDTV. I don't watch TV, and don't own a TV. Mind you that doesn't mean I don't watch TV shows. For instance, I watch heroes online. And I prefer it that way, I watch it when I have time. I hate the idea of coming home, and plopping myself in front of a TV at the end of the day. Channel surfing is such a waste of time. I just don't understand why anyone would want to buy a TV?

Also, I really liked the idea of two screens. I'd like to have dual displays on a laptop for sure. Ofcourse that would eat up your battery life, but its a good idea. I'm sure gamers might have an interest in something like that.

Google Reader shared items now in a blogger blog side bar

If you scroll through you will find an entry in the side bar labeled "Adnans shared items". Right now it has just one item that I've shared so far for testing. Now I have a reason to share items, since their is an easy way to display/visit my Google Reader Link blog. Googles integration of its apps continues to the benefit of its users!

Best Tech stories of 2006?

Dave Winer on his blog says "Steven Levy is looking for the best tech writing of 2006."

For me the best "tech story" in 2006 was told by Jon Udell on his blog at infoworld. He has moved on from their and continues to tell his story here. His weekly podcasts with people who are working on real innovation, great mashups/web tools created throughout the year, great use of screencasts told the best story of all.

nicotine free posts

These last flurry of blog posts have been nicotine free! 48 hours, and still going! :)

opensource evangelizing -> KDevelop 3.4 is out!

This is an amazing open source IDE. And version 3.4 is out!

on pissing of the blogosphere!

Roberts gone and pissed of the blogosphere for not linking to his Intel video.

I love the videos that Robert creates, and link to them. The Intel Video however, was not interesting to me. The bottleneck on the core 2 duo machines that I've been working with is I/O. I am quite excited about the 128 GB flash hard drives. Faster hard drives with no movable parts. Whats not to like? Hopefully seagate (scobleshows sponsor) has a product like that in the works so that Robert can interview them. That is an interview that I would definitely promote! Heck, maybe Robert can even interview sandisk who announced the upcoming drive! :)

extending vista trial time

Now this is certainly interesting:

What may be news to you, however, is that you can easily extend the 30-day Windows Vista grace period to 120 days. No hacks required. This is an official, supported operation directly from Microsoft.

With the amount of testing I do, I'd say this was a good enough period for a test, wiping out the drive, and reinstalling and testing again. I think the version of Vista downloaded from MSDN has something like 10 activiations, and I must have already done at least five if not more. This should help a lot.

more burningcrusade on ubuntu

wowbc_loggedin
Originally uploaded by awasim.

After the updates I was able to log in. The only problem I saw was the items in the bag had their graphics messed up. Other than that, everything seemed fine. Just to make sure I finished two quests and I had no problems. :)

burning crusade on ubuntu

wowbc
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Here is a screenshot of Burning crusade running on Ubuntu on a XPS M1210. Its patching right now so I haven't actually played, but I'm hoping its going to be as good or better than my experience here.

First Virus

I was confused to read this:

A reporter just called me and wanted to talk about my virus, Elk Cloner, that I wrote back in 1982, when I was in the 9th grade.

I had the distinct impression that the first computer virus was the Brain virus, and I was pretty proud of the fact. It was written by a Pakistani, and I'm a Pakistani! Or at least a variant of it was.

After digging around a little, I found this entry by Bruce Schneier which explained that Brain might have been the first PC virus. But the Elk Cloner was written for the Apple II, hence, its the first computer virus. Cool, I'm fine with Brain being the first PC virus! :)

The strange thing is that Bruce Schneier's entry celebrates 20 years of the ElkCloner Virus, and the entry is from last year! Hmmm...

how important is a title?

Dave Winer talks a little about titles, and why some posts of his don't have titles. I love the way Dave's software works, and sometimes wish for similar software. Their are times when I have posts that I don't want to give titles to. However, one of my friends subscribes to my feed via livebookmarks in firefox. And I found that if a post doesn't have a title, its ignored. So titles are important for me, and I wish it wasn't so.

I haven't heard Dave talk about the OPML editor recently. I wonder how active the development for it is. If I could get it to post a blog to my server, I'd definitely use the software. I'll have to try it again soon.

del.icio.us

I unsubscribed from http://del.icio.us/tags/python today. More and more of the links were spam, and it was just irritating going through reading those ridiculous titles. On top of that, their were repeat entries which meant the link should be a bookmark, that can be perused every few days or so at a less frequent pace. Technorati is doing a good job of keeping spam away, but most of the links I get are from livejournal. They are mostly journal entries of people thinking of learning Python, or installing Linux. But their are still some good articles I find, such as "Feeding a Large-scale Physics Application to Python". Hence I'll stay subscribed to those feeds for now.

Vista

Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting

The third machine was a new, small Dell XPS M1210 laptop. In general, Vista ran smoothly and well on this Dell, but some operations were annoyingly slow, including creating a new message in the built-in Windows Mail program. This surprised me, because the Dell had two gigabytes of memory and a fast processor.

It just so happens that I've been using the exact same machine as  mentioned above for about a months. And I've had no problems at all. Just to see, I started up the built-in Windows Mail program, and created a new message. No slow down. It might be worth mentioning that while I did this, I had a Windows 2003 Server installation in progress in Virtual PC 2007. No slow downs. Weird.

on TechBlog the writer says:

That's simply wrong. I have installed Vista on all kinds of computers, most of which have 1 GB of RAM, and I have never found a feature that's not available to me with unless the PC had 2 GB.

And its the same experience for me. No features that are only present when you have 2 GB of RAM.

Ice in Austin

Ice in Austin
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Here is a cool pic of a bush outside my apartment this morning!

upgrade to burning crusade?

Uhh... you can upgrade online!
How much will this cost me? Will I have a life after?

According to the faq, you still need to get the expansion for the new content. Doesn't say whether one will have a life after purchase though! :)

But this dude has the answer!

I played from midnight to 6 AM, and there were no crashes or lag spikes.

This is good news:

Install went perfectly in wine at 12:30am this morning. It even created a desktop shortcut pointing to "wine worldofwarcraft.exe". I'm so happy.

Ubuntu Edgy
Dell Inspiron 610m

flickr photos for burningcrusade.

Linus interview (video)

A three minute interview with Linus Torvalds where he talks about his surprise for the "resilience of 2.6 kernel".

ICE in austin

Everything is closed because of this.

Update: adnanwasim.com might go down. Their must be a loose ice covered cable somewhere that is causing the electricity to go out for a few minutes. Even though the server keeps running on battery power (its an old Dell C600 laptop), the cable modem goes out of power. sysadmin.adnanwasim.com is hosted by blogger, so it should continue running.

media hacking...

I first watched the screencast jon linked to, before reading his post completely. While watching I kept scrolling the screencast to see if I could control the video, or how long the video was. Their were no controls. Turns out Jons post is all about that, and the hackery he had to go through to get some controls on the video. I'm glad to see Jon hacking around again... its the reason he is one of my favorite writers!

the burning crusade arrives...

burning crusade

Slashdot thread

swift

swift
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Here is a screenshot of Swift, the windows browser that uses webkit the engine for safari on OS X. This is version 0.2. dotNet framework required. Does this mean this could be ported to Linux to run with Mono?

Swift

Thanks to Techmeme.com -> Safari on Windows (Mary Jo Foley) -> Swift wiki, I found contrary to what I believed Swift development is moving along. Screenshots once I have them, its a dotnet app, and I didn't have dotnet installed.

And hey, while we are at it, why not a Safari for Linux! :)

new browsers

Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again

...next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". The target release date is sometime in the third quarter this year and it hopes to release a major version of Firefox every year.

...

Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months".

Umm ... wow. 18-24 months?!? From what I had been reading I thought Microsoft had learnt its lesson, that is to release fast and often. But just look at the firefox dates and Microsoft dates.

Its becoming more and more apparent that for large projects open source development model is far faster and achieves better results. Just look at Firefox vs IE, or Ubuntu vs Vista. Heck even Python/Ruby vs. C#/Java (thought I'm not really too sure about this last one yet).

macfuse, correo, ajax debugging and more

I ran across Macfuse yesterday, which coupled with sshfs should allow mounting of directories over ssh.

Then two cool links from Simon Willisons blog. First is Coreo. Just as Camino is for firefox, I am hoping Coreo is going to be for thunderbird. The second is Ajax debugging with firebug.

Here is some good starter tips on debugging javascript in IE7.

On use of Word for HTML rendering in Outlook 2007.

malware

I got pointed to this article that does a basic run through of malware trends. The article introduced me to a new term "Piggyback" attack. According to the paper referenced in the article,

A 2006 study, performed by Dr. Steven Gribble at the University of Washington, crawled the Web looking for infected content in a piggyback attack. The study crawled more than 20 million webpages and found over 20,000 unique executables.

IE removal

He found using another browser a jolting experience. He was setting up a router for the legal team, so they could get their email there, because the lawyers were struggling with it, and lo and behold, the software that came with the router overrode his preference -- set for Mozilla's Firefox -- and insisted on launching IE instead. Not only that, but although he tried to override it, his system insisted on running IE instead of Firefox henceforth.

Reading this article on Groklaw reminded me of a similar situation that bothers me in windows.

Firefox is set as the default browser on the system. If in MSN/Live messenger you click on the mail icon to check your email, the browser launched is IE. Irrespective of what access defaults you have set. This is stupid. Each time Microsoft comes out with a new version of messenger I hope that they will respect the settings I have for my browser. No such luck yet. In this day and age I refuse to accept any reason for not respecting a users choice of web browsers!

big boss interview on podtech

Big boss video via Scoble.

Love it when Peter Rojas of Engadget talks to Michael about blogging.

So conflicted. I want to say more but I'm biased. Watch the video I guess.

(Ok I can't take it, I'm going to have to say something. Dell is listening people, help us get better! :)

Here is the link to the video on podtech. I like the title:
Dell Explores Social Media

KDE 4

There is a lot of work going on around KDE4. The move to SVG seem to be going well. I've been seeing a lot of discussion around qtscript. And this:

You can easily develop Qt4 projects in your KDE3 environment using KDevelop.

And their is this interview with Aaron Seigo.

Windows Home Server

Looking at this thread on techmeme.com one would think that this was new stuff. Oooh, you can add hard drives to grow your disk! This is so absolutely new! Not!

Domain name update - You are now at sysadmin.adnanwasim.com

Thanks to scobles link blog I found this article which shows how you can now use your own domain name, while at the same time not breaking your old links to your blog. So now this sites address is sysadmin.adnanwasim.com instead of vasim.blogspot.com. If you go to an archived link for vasim.blogspot.com/link it simply forwards to sysadmin.adnanwasim.com/link. About time Google gave us this feature.

more scobleshow

Man, Robert is a machine. He has a ton of videos!

For example here is live.com PM Sanaz demoing live.com. Here is maryam interviewing Sanaz.

Then we have interview with John Edwards.

Then we have Om Malik.

Then we have...

I give up, just go to scobleshow.com.

Plus, videos in flash now! :)

Update: Scoble blogged about his sudden burst of videos here!

More Hak.5

New episode of Hak5 is out. Please digg them, they so need to be on the first page for podcasts! :)

They did this cool live show where one could call via skype into the show, and the show was being broad cast live! Plus communicating with the people on IRC during the show and so on!

WSGI and Python

I wasn't sure how I could use WSGi even though I had been hearing about it. From what I understood it was supposed to be a common way for Python web frameworks, since their are so many of them out their.

I found this video which helps clear things up a lot.

scoble and Dell

Generally I try to keep away from work related stuff, and just talk about technology. However I saw scoble and my new employer are having a conversation.

The few weeks I've been here have shown me that this statement:
"it’s really about our customers’ experience when they deal with Dell" is truly ingrained here. I was surprised that I see it not just in speeches, but engineers asking how will this be better for the customer? Only my view from what I've seen, I just work with computers! :)
Anyways, back to tech stuff.

PS. Disclaimer in the sidebar applies!

wow and ubuntu

wow and linux
Originally uploaded by awasim.

Spent some time today getting this working properly. I used this howto to get it working amongst others.