Unto the pure, all things are pure

I use the quality of Windows Messenger as a barometer of Microsoft. In 2000, it was MSN Messenger.  It came after Yahoo Messenger, but surpassed it immediately.  The features were really convenient.  Those pleasant audio notifications when your friends come online or send you a message became the standard noises in the office.   Remote Assistance worked, and I used it to help troubleshoot the PCs of many friends located far away.  There was even a real telco connection and you could dial to real phones .   File transfer worked if the firewall wasn't too strict.   PC to PC voice was excellent. In 2003, MSN Messenger was the largest network, eclipsing AIM and Yahoo Messenger, with 30 million customers I think. The ability to make any animated GIF into an animated emoticon was priceless.  Pressing F2 you could use it like a walkie-talkie .  File transfer worked all the time.  So did handwriting , which was absolutely critical when ...

Today I helped a friend who had trouble connecting her HP Photosmart B210 to the Apple Time Capsule. The error message on the HP printer was not useful, something about MAC filtering being turned on at the wireless router.  This is patently not true as MAC filtering was not enabled and any other PC could just connect to the Time Capsule by entering the correct password. After two wasted hours, it was down to the type of encryption used.  The (old) Time Capsule was on WEP.  By changing it to WPA, it worked.

Everyone tells me gambling isn't directly defined in the bible. Here's my take. Gambling is not playing a game of chance. If it is, children playing Snakes and Ladders would be engaging in an act of sin. (Perhaps it is and I am unaware of some Christian groups out there who prohibit Snakes and Ladders.) Gambling is not placing a bet. If it is, a farmer who buy some seeds hoping to reap a harvest later in the year would be making a huge gamble that the weather would turn out favorable. Gambling is not gaining something without honest labor. If it is, a Boeing 747 pilot lifting 400 tons across the ocean with the mere effort of his fingers would be doing something sinful. And a person inheriting a house from his parents would be a born gambler. However, all the generally acknowledged forms of gambling are invariably games of chance and require placing bets. We will talk about honest labor later. What then is gambling? From what I have read from different sources, ...

Sometimes geniuses do fumble. Visual Studio is without question an engineering masterpiece. But the LINQ to SQL connection issue is really a silly mistake. Why would anyone want to compile a connection string, with password and all, into code? Anyway, the geniuses did provide a good alternative.  The problem can be solved easily without having to modify anything generated by Visual Studio. The DBML Designer generates a few constructor overloads for the DataClasses1DataContext class (assuming default naming). One of them takes in a, what else, connection string! So, when you instantiate your data context, just use this constructor instead. This is what I do for my particular application: DataClasses1DataContext db = new   DataClasses1DataContext ( ConfigurationManager .ConnectionStrings[" xxx "].ConnectionString);

The hardware engineers did a fantastic job. The way the specifications of Bluetooth are developed, with all the different profiles to cater to every conceivable application, shows the professionalism and brilliance of the people behind Bluetooth. The same cannot be said of the software people. Virtually every notebook PC comes with Bluetooth these days. But it is effectively useless. The dreams and aspirations of the Bluetooth creators are not, and cannot be, realized. It is a utter complete waste. The culprits are Microsoft and the driver developers of the device makers. If some of the original goals of Bluetooh were realized, everyone would be able, among other things, : To exchange files between notebooks instead of the hassle of a thumbdrive. To connect to the Internet on the road through the mobile phone in the pocket, seamlessly. To control a PowerPoint show, for example, with a pointer device using Bluetooth, instead of having to plug in another dongle. I had gon...

It seems that most people, especially present day young ones, have problems understanding my Apollo 11 illustration .  I will try again with another example. When the most well-known bank in my city had a million customers, it had 50+ branches.  Almost every customer operated a savings account where each was given a savings book.  Every deposit or withdrawal transaction was printed as a one-line entry in the book with the latest balance in the second last column.  (The last column was a comments field.) Every teller in the branch had an IBM terminal.  Customers would fill up and sign a form to withdraw money, or just present cash to deposit.  The teller would open the savings book to the page where the last entry was and insert the book into the printer next to the terminal.  She would push the book all the way in.  When she hit the key to print, the central mainframe computer would send out the exact number of line-feeds so that the latest tr...

Probably something like 80% to 90% of the new found computing power goes into the graphical user interface. This is on personal computers as well as mobile phones. The sleek graphics painted in a window that we take for granted require billions and billions of computing cycles, repeating and repeating every time something on screen changes. The graphical UI is obviously a great enabler. It allows lay people to use the computer where previously only trained professionals could. However, do not let this be a distraction. The fact that a small fraction of an iPhone powered the complete operations of a bank or sent men to the moon and back cannot be erased. And it is repeatable, with great ease.