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The newest issue of German computer magazine c't has an article about a new technology integrated into Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista. It's supposed to monitor your behaviour, e.g. which options you click in message boxes and store it in form of click profiles for each user. That data is then used to adapt Windows to change default buttons or not not display confirmation messages at all, because Windows knows what you clicked in the past.

Today I'm updating our main development server which runs Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server to the newest version Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server. Don't wonder about the names. That seems to happen when marketing guys get involved :-) I'll keep a log about how it goes. Here it is.

Microsoft released a preview of Windows Desktop Search 4.0 this week. The most interesting feature is that you can access the search index over the net. I've installed the preview on two machines running Windows Vista. Before v4.0 if I open a shared folder in Windows Explorer and use the search function, Vista started searching the network folder file by file and displays a note that this takes a while:



Now when you have Windows Search v4.0 on both systems Vista queries the index on the other machine and you get the results...

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Have you ever seen xEyes, a small tool usually found on every Linux box? It's a small application showing a pair of eyes following your mouse cursor. Somebody even a built real life version. But now look at this:

http://cubo.cc/

Have a nice weekend.

This weekend some bishops complained about the commercial TV station's program. They think action movies like Peter Jackson's "King Kong" or "Die Hard" should not be shown on Easter Weekend and that the program is an "attack on public order". Do their TV sets have no "off" switch? And why should people who not share their beliefs not entertain themselves with some movies?

When I read about this discussion I recognized that one particular movie had not been shown this weekend, even if it would have fit the occasion ;-)

A few days ago, Astronomers observed an extraordinary event. Swift, a satellite used to study gamma-ray bursts recorded an explosion which was so strong that the optical afterglow could have been seen with a naked eye making it the farthest object that could be seen without a telescope or other technical means. It's distance is 7.5 billion lightyears, that's about 7.09x1022km. And it means that the event happened 7.5 billion years ago when the universe was less than half its age and Earth didn't exist yet. The burst probably stems from a star collapsing into a black hole.

Polish "Pi of the sky" detector which continuously looks for optical flashes in the night sky recorded the burst. And wikipedia has some pictures made by the swift satellite.

...

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Imagine this: You have an mp3 player plus a Windows Software to fill it with music. That software has an auto-update function to keep itself up-to-date. A lot of software nowadays has. Via this auto-update the software manufacturer now tries to sneak a totally different application onto your PC. You think that nobody would do such a silly thing?

but the weekend is close and here's something funny to end the work week (sorry it's in German language)

Apple-User im Gespräch- Tuxler

:-)))

SwyxWare v6.12 has a feature which allows you to call yourself. "That's stupid", you think. It's not. :-)

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This is a blog entry which I found on my hard disk and thought I had already posted it. But because I cannot find it anywhere on my blog, I'll post it now, even if the decision had already been made several weeks ago:

When planning new release, we have to decide which operating system versions we need to support. For the next major release I once more suggested to no longer support Windows 2000 Server for the SwyxWare server components. For v6.0 and v6.10 that suggestion had no success. But this time my boss and our product management did not object. However, they wanted to get some feedback from some important customers, partners and our sales department first. And this time the decision has been made:

The next major SwyxWare release v7.0 will no longer support Windows 2000 Server.

One feature of SwyxWare v6.12 is the exclusion of SwyxIt! mobile devices when a call is delivered. In SwyxWare v6.11 if you've enabled SwyxMobile each call you get is automatically delivered to all of your logged in devices including SwyxIt! Mobile. Calling your mobile is not really necessary when you're working in the office. A call routing rule which first tries to reach you on you office phone and on your SwyxIt!Mobile after that would be useful, but that's not possible in SwyxWare v6.11.

Yesterday I wrote about Swyx Trace Tool and mentioned that there's a document describing how to setup your own upload server. We're expecting that some of our partners and distributors might want to provide an own server for their customers to upload trace files.

These instructions will be released via Swyx knowledge base in the same timeframe as SwyxWare v6.12. In addition to the step-by-step guide to configure IIS for uploads from Swyx Trace Tool there will be a sample application showing how to build a ticket ID checking web service and a notification mechanism.

In case you're interested the current draft of the document is here.

Any feedback welcome. Just leave a comment.

The stuff we server guys usually create does not have a graphical user interface. For SwyxWare v6.12 there is an exception. It will ship with Swyx Trace Tool. That's a small application installed with SwyxServer which allows enabling logging globally for all services. In addition to that you can use it to collect and upload trace files to your Swyx Partner or to Swyx. I've already written about it. Swyx Trace Tool is currently being implemented by Marcus Mucks, one of my team members. Here's an overview with some screenshots.

Last August I wrote about updating my main development machine to Windows Vista x64. YesterdayAbout a week ago, I decided that it's now time to do the same on my notebook. It's not possible to directly upgrade from Vista 32bit to x64 so I made a backup of my user folder to an external hard disk and started from scratch.

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Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ has been awarded this year's Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. Congratulations. He really earned it.

Here's a famous quote from him about C++:

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."

BTW, if you're interested in how and why he designed C++ the way it is, you should read his book "The Design and Evolution of C++". But be warned, it's not as easy to read as a Dan Brown novel. And you probably need a little background in computer science to really appreciate it. :-)

Today is one of these Mondays again. After a night with only a few ours of sleep, because I have a cold, I decided to go the office early. Upon arriving I learned that our main development server is not accessible. It hosts Team Foundation Server, which is our main source code repository. Our team's sharepoint website, which has all the development documents (specifications, etc) is located there, too.

A few minutes ago the first of our IT guys arrived. He couldn't access the server, too, neither remote nor from the console in the server room. After rebooting it he learned that the file system on the system partition is corrupt and Windows does not boot . But on the other hand we will now have the chance to check if our regular backups are working .

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I can't wait to see this movie