Unto the pure, all things are pure

[Superceded by Super OLED .] Bought my second Nokia E-71 today, for US$140 on a US$30 plan contracted for two years. I could have traded-in my one-year old one for US$140 but I didn't as the new phone is for my daughter. This phone is still the best considering all factors. The GPS receiver alone is worth the price. What I like about the phone (all equally important to me except infrared): a. Tethering without issues b. Slimmer than an iPhone c. Exchange client d. Full QWERTY keypad, albeit a bit small e. Reasonably good camera for all the emergency situations f. Two cameras g. Video recording h. HSDPA, Wifi, Bluetooth with A2DP i. Expandable storage through MicroSD j. GPS k. VOIP according to standards l. FM radio m. Browser that can see most web sites n. Plays MP3 and WMA o. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF viewers p. Live Messenger client q. It's hardy. Have dropped it from height quite a few times and none the worse. r. It can stand upright on its bot...

I am wondering why people still need a mouse, especially on a notebook. A quite common scenario I see is someone brings a laptop into the meeting, and then spends the next five minutes plugging in the charger and the mouse and then booting up. With all those cables, the laptop is no more a mobile computer!! I have not used a mouse for the last thirteen years , that is, since I got my first notebook, a Compaq Armada 4100. It has a touch-pad. Between 2000 and 2004 I was using the Compaq M700 and that has the stick. The stick was tough on the finger due to the force required. Even the stick is better than the mouse. For the very simple reason that it takes less than one-tenth the time for your hand to leave the keyboard to reach for it. So I can do things ten times faster than a mouse user. The touch-pad is still the best pointing device as it requires the least effort for a lazy person like me. A well-tuned touch-pad would allow me to move the cursor across a 1600-pixel wid...

The only time I have used an anti-virus software for myself was in 1987 (yes, more than 20 years ago) when I checked out a version from an Israeli company. I disassembled it, examined the machine instructions, and promptly uninstalled it as I could not relish the idea that every int 21 call must go through a third party. Since then I have not installed AV software on any of my computers. If you have problems updating the MSE anti-virus files due to a proxy server, you may want to skip the long story and jump to the last paragraph below. My daughter started using Windows 95 at age 5 and went through the peak of virus mania circa post-2000. My wife uses the computer daily to check mail and browse the Internet but she belongs to the group of the most elementary and novice type of user you can find. So within my family you can find the full range of computer users. All our computers are running Microsoft Windows and none of them has AV software installed. It's 10 years later and ...

If you are a .NET developer, Assembly and File version would be familiar to you. They can be set in the Designer UI (project Properties page, Application tab, Assembly I nformation button...) which basically updates appropriate attributes in AssemblyInfo.cs. Now, there is a less well known number - the Product version . It is not well documented and most developers ignore it altogether with no side-effects most of the time. However, it is an important number and it seems that, of the three, Product version is the most widely used. The three version numbers simply take the values you give them or: a. If Assembly version is not explictly specified, it takes the value of 0.0.0.0. b. If File version is not explicitly specified, it takes the value of Assembly version. c. If Product version is not explicitly specified, it takes the value of File version. In Windows Explorer of Windows XP and Server 2003, you can see from the properties of a file all three version numbers. In W...

I thought it would be neat to have Hyper-V Server on a notebook, with Windows 2008 SBS as a guest OS, and then load some more legacy OS'es to test a piece of software I was developing. I have a 1.5-year old Compaq Presario (Core 2 Duo) lying around and I used it. I chose to install the Hyper-V Server clean before installing any guest OS'es. That went fine and trouble free. Not a squeak that the CPU was or was not suitable. T Then searched around and found that Hyper-V Manager was needed. I downloaded the version for Vista 32-bit. It installed fine. But it won't connect. Complained with the famous error: You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer XXX Did some tedious preparatory steps as indicated in John Howard's blog . But I just did: 1) create the common user, 2) netsh advfirewall ... 3) DCOMCNFG on the client. Hyper-V Manager now connects fine and I can instal...

Now we all know that Bill Gates uses three screens . I have been using Extended Desktop in Windows for coming up to ten years now. I think it's one of the great things that Microsoft has done by making it easy for display adapter drivers to be developed to work in such a manner. My current set up is the 17" 1440x900 built-in of my notebook and a 1680x1050 standalone running off my notebook VGA port, with the external display positioned directly on top of the built-in display. I populate all the places I frequent with the second monitor (same specs), so that I can just plug in when I reach there, just like the power charger. I am not using three displays because: a. I don't know of any notebook that can drive two external displays, not even with the additional video port on a HP docking unit. Using a video adpater reduces the mobility of my notebook. b. I tried using three monitors but find that I spend much time moving my mouse to where I want to go (even though m...

Sending mail is an activity required in many applications. The SMTP protocol is clearly defined in RFC 821 in the last century. It is a beautiful piece of work and this can be acknowledged by the fact that it has remained largely unchanged since. Microsoft's .NET has all the classes in the System.Net.Mail namespace to make sending mail a breeze. You can read through the documentation and Google for the many examples and tutorials if you are new to this subject. What I would like to share today is that sending mail in .NET can be made even easier by configuration. The following two lines of code are all that are needed to send out a mail: MailMessage msg = new MailMessage("x@gmail.com","bgates@microsoft.com", "Test","This is a test"); new SmtpClient().Send(msg); There is no need to embed in your code SMTP server names or passwords. That is bad practice because when you deploy your...