- Feature pack for C++ programmers
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Just found out from my good friend Damien Watkins that there is a big update to the MFC library.
What can you do? Build Office 2007 style ribbons and menus, docking toolbars (like Visual Studio), tabbed documents, etc.
There's a great walk-through on the Visual C++ blog.
- Security Vulnerability Research & Defense
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I just found this blog - looks like it is new. I like it - very high technical content on what makes various vulnerabilities tick.
Not for the technically faint hearted! It includes network protocol details, code (well some initializers anyway) and disassembly!
Check it out here: Security Vulnerability Research & Defense
- Malaysian food considered fattening?
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This article in Sydney Morning Herald talks about how Malaysians are (supposedly) finding their food rather unhealthy and looking to improve their diet.
This probably isn't a big shock for Malaysians reading as food is one of their daily little guilty pleasures.
For other readers - let me assure you now - food is a national obsession in Malaysia. Most people spend their time at meals discussing other meals they have had and whether they are better or worse than this one, and what they will be having for their next meal. Food blogs are very popular - it's quite common to see people using a camera phone to snap a photo of their meal.
In fact - my colleagues, if allowed to vote on the company off-site trip, will almost always ask to go to a resort in Langkawi which offers all-inclusive 24/7 room service (so you can call up at 3am and get yet another plate of fried rice and some fried chicken wings). My suggestions (resorts that offer activities such as diving) are somehow seen as rather weird .
When the first Malaysian went up into space, what was the topic of conversation between the Prime Minister and the astronaut (angkasawan)? "How is the food?". One of the official experiments conducted by the ankasawan was "Malaysian Food in Space".
Yet there's little to no awareness or interest in having healthy food. Diet drinks are hard to find (outside central Kuala Lumpur they barely exist). Coffee and tea come with sugar automatically included. Tomato and chilli sauce in Malaysia are chock full of sugar. And if you are lucky enough to work with public sector a lot you'll find that all meetings come with curry puffs or cakes (kuih).
Add to this kind of diet to the fact that most of my Malaysian friends eat 4-5 meals a day (with "supper" being an official meal, along with "morning tea", "high tea" and general grazing that continues throughout the day) and you can see that a high diabetes and heart attack rate is a pretty logical consequence.
Of course, people visiting Malaysia absolutely love the food - even the western food is done very well here. I usually point out to them (with a smile) that this is probably because of the copious addition of fat, sugar, salt and MSG to the food. It's the old French cooking trick - every sauce tastes amazing when then first item in the recipe is 2 pounds of butter. If you're just visiting of course it doesn't matter too much... but perhaps those of us living here should be a bit more careful.
I'll think about it right after I finish the Christmas Turkey tonight (just RM 200 including all the trimmings, great stuffing and gravy.... it's the second one I've had already this month)...
- Guitar Hero 3
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I've been playing a lot of this lately (and GH2 as well) and it's a fun and very addictive game.
Just read a great description of someone finishing "Through the Fire and Flames" on Expert. This is a fiendishly difficult track that I have trouble doing on Medium level, and give up on Hard. It gives me cramps to just think about it.
Here's a video of some guy doing it:
- STay at home servers
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This is very cool - Stay-At-Home-Servers.
The videos are great... "You can't domesticate a server!"
And the book is a classic:
Being the crazy off the wall thinker that I am - I believe I may be one of the next to dare to have a "Stay at home" server. I know my friends will tease me at first but once they see how my files are backed up and photos shared easily... I'm sure they will ease off a bit.
But of course a lot of my friends would find this easier if the server were at the bars/cafes that they use for their Internet access.
Coming next - Windows Bar Server - the "stay-up-all-night" server.
- Cyberjaya presentation - Software + Services and Web 2.0
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I'm there right now and we are just finishing (fashionably late - LOTS of questions today). The event itself was on Facebook - held at our Innovation Center in Cyberjaya. I don't get out there as often as I'd like to actually so it was great to get out.
I gave an introduction to Software + Services at this event - just very quickly so people can get an understanding of some of the different trends in industry, before we got on to the very popular topic of Web 2.0.
I've put my presentation into my SkyDrive below. Testing this out for the first time so interested to see if people can access it.
Rohan Thomas presented on Web 2.0 - there was a LOT of interest in Silverlight and Web 2.0 technologies - every time I see Popfly demonstrated I'm more and more amazed by how people enjoy Popfly - although it does take a bit of time to understand what it actually is and does. Welcome to the social :-)
- Offsite in Putrajaya
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So two weeks ago we had a team offsite in Putrajaya - here's a nice picture Rohan took:
- Visual Studio 2008!!!
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Visual Studio 2008 has been shipped!
If you are an MSDN Subscriber you can download it now - otherwise you should be able to buy it from a Microsoft reseller in January 2008.
You can see Soma's blog (Soma is the "god" of Visual Studio) on this here.
Top features - I asked SK Tang, our resident "demi-god" of Visual Studio and he says:
- LINQ - Language INtegrated Query - making possible to write SQL without quoting SQL strings - it's actually integrate into the programming language.
- Continuous Integration - in simple terms, the build server can automatically build, test and deploy around the clock.
- Quality and complexity tools - allowing you to measure how complex your code is and help improve code quality throughout the development process.
Want to get trained? How about FIVE DAYS of technical content for free?
You can check out this training kit (120Mb download!).
Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit – Now Available!
![clip_image002[7]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/frankarr/WindowsLiveWriter/VisualStudio2008and.NETFramewor.5shipped_C003/clip_image0027.jpg)
The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit contains a full 5-days of technical content including 20 hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos. The technologies covered in the kit include: LINQ, C# 3.0, VB 9, WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server.
Download Now
- Windows LIVE out of beta
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My break with blogging is over as I've now updated my Windows Live and Live Writer is installed again. I don't think I can blog without it...
http://get.live.com/ to install.
Now I just need to figure out how to moderate comments more quickly...
UPDATE: more details at LowYat!
http://www.lowyat.net/v2/latest/new-windows-live-services-online-now-2.html
- Ramp UP - Learn .NET and build your career
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Want to gain the latest Microsoft .NET development skills, but not sure where to begin?
Want to do it *online* without having to install Visual Studio
And want to be rewarded with 50% off discounts for MCTS Cert Exams, E-Learning content or 30% off Self-Paced Training kits?
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx
- Study at your own pace
- Community of peers
- Acquire real-world development skills
- In-depth content...
The labs - running in Internet Explorer as a virtual machine!
Instructions are embedded in the panel on the right... no need to flip through lab manuals... although you can download them if you want.
This is nice because you can even copy & paste (although you need to use the special Action to copy from the host computer's clipboard to the virtual machine).
Of course if you have Visual Studio 2005 installed it might be bit quicker. But the responsiveness is not too bad for a virtual machine over a long long web connection.
Enjoy!
- Tech.ED LOLCATS
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So I swear I will get this out of my system at some point. But right now - check this out...
Yes that's right - Tech.Ed LOLCATS. Frank Arrigo is collecting these.
- CAPTCHAs - MSR Asirra - LOLCATS PARADISE
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What is a CAPTCHA I hear you ask?
Well I only just learned the phrase myself, which was rather humbling as I thought I was pretty knowledgeable on web terminology. Obviously I'm getting out enough.
Ever had to decipher one of these?
Well it turns out, this is a CAPTCHA - Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's also an example of going a bit overboard with the acronyms. However, acronyms are very popular in Malaysia so I'm sure my Malaysian friends will appreciate an memorize this acronym and use it without explanation in future...
Obviously it's used by online services to stop automated abuse of the system.
However, there's many problems with CAPTCHAs.
- Accessibility for the blind/dyslexic/intoxicated/easily bored (although there are audio captchas!)
- Computers are getting better at beating them - companies specialize in solving captchas for a fee
- The harder you make the CAPCHA the more you drive away real people who cannot be bothered passing such a difficult test
This New York Times article discusses the issue in more detail.
Obviously it becomes bad business after a while to stop people from being able to prove that they are actually a human. It's even bad business just to make it annoying for people - I'm pretty sure most of your customers would prefer not to be forced to think about hard things.
I mean - imagine having to solve sudoku every time you create a login to a site. Ok actually I know a few people who would quite enjoy that. But I'm talking about normal people.
What do normal people like?
Well it turns out that quite a few people like pets. In fact, pets are one of the most popular leisure industries around for the last few millennia. For example, 63% of American households contain a pet (versus 34% having children!).
So wouldn't it be useful (and ridiculously cute) if you could combine pets with CAPTCHAs to verify people humanity by making them look at pictures of pets?
Well now you can! Thanks to the work of Microsoft Research and a partnership with Petfinder.com you can use the Asirra project (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access - yes the acronyms have not improved, just the technology) to identify cats and dogs instead of solving difficult puzzles or going cross eyed.
And best of all, if you see one you like, you can adopt them!
The database has over 2 million cats and dogs - which means you can't easily store all the pictures and automated the recognition.
Which means... logically... you'd have to implement a real cat/dog recognition system.
But I am left thinking ... facial recognition is improving enormously for humans so we can recognize individual humans with computers pretty well now.
Surely it can't be that hard to implement cat/dog recognition? We don't have to individually recognize the animals "Oh that's garfield... and that's lassie". Just cat or dog is enough. And an 90% hit rate would be enough (giving a 28% chance of getting it right with 12 pets to categorize).
Of course, after our recent encounter with LOLCATS I'd be very keen to see LOLCAT recognition. This could be used to identify hard-core Internet geeks from ordinary users, for example.
If you were really mean you could use CAPTCHA techniques on the text to make it really hard to read ... the best of both worlds. So identify the LOLCAT then type in what it is saying. The annoyance of the system would be made up for by the funny things the LOLCATs say.
The only problem with this system is that I'd probably burst out laughing for five minutes because I am still finding LOLCATs very amusing.
Of course - another approach is to realize that there's one thing even more popular than looking at pets. And that is looking at beautiful people... so why not mashup "Am I Hot or Not" with the CAPTCHA concept? See hotcaptcha. Of course beauty is subjective... which means it might be very hard for computers to figure out this one.
- Project Shutter: Live in my City - Take Great Photos; Win Cool Prizes!
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Check out this competition - open in Malaysia (and neighboring countries).
Calling all photographers in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, India and mainland China!
Project Shutter: Live in my City has just launched and with it the opportunity for you to win some great prizes by taking photos of the unique food, culture and architecture that represent the country (and city) YOU live in.
The winners in each category (food, culture & architecture) will walk away with an awesome HP Pavilion Notebook running Windows Vista Ultimate and an HP Photosmart printer!
So arm yourself with a digital camera or camera enabled phone and get snapping - you have until June 29 to submit your entries.
For more details or terms and conditions check out www.projectshutter.com
- LOLCODE - the latest programming language
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What's the latest programming language to hit the streets? LOLCODE.
What does it look like? Well, this is "Hello World" in LOLCODE.
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE
Where on earth does this come from? Well, it's like one of those crazy Internet memes that is like an "in-joke" that has grown completely out of control.
First, there were "Image Boards" where people posted photos they found on the web that they thought were amusing. Then for some reason, on Saturdays, people started posting pictures of cats with amusing captions... which were, for some reason in Internet slang.
Here's some examples:
So adorable huh? Well Saturdays became known as Caturdays and the picture posting continued. The cats were called "lolcats" due to their tendency to say LOL and use other internet slang.
Plenty of ideas cropped up like - "INVISIBLE" pictures
Or the snowclones - I'm on your X, Ying your Z:
And I just liked these ones too much to ignore.
So now you should be able to understand most of this:
BTW IMPLEMENT A COUNTER
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
We see loops, increment operator, printing, if statement, module loading and variable declaration. Oh yeah, and a comment. Note that LOLCODE is all in capital letters.
Of course, we can immediately see this will make programming much easier for people who have played a lot of World of Warcraft.
I haven't seen a .NET version yet but it shouldn't be too hard... once they add object orientation. NOOB will be the NEW operator of course...
Want to see more? Checkout LOLCODE . You can find plenty of LOLCATS as well...
- BillG vs STEVE JObs?
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Interesting set of videos... I think the interesting part is discussing the fact that technology is not a zero-sum game - for Apple to Win, Microsoft does not have to Lose. There is enough market and demand for many companies to follow their dreams at one time...
TechEBlog » (Video) Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs
