SQL Server 2000 professional

Just completed the Microsoft certification for exam 70-229 : Designing and implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition.

This was tougher than the previous two Web and Windows application development with C# .NET exams, mainly due to the fact that we are only familiar with the very basic features of SQL Server in practice. After studying for this exam, you suddenly see the real potential and capabilities of the Server and some cool ways of doing things you never knew existed before. That's the whole point in becoming a Professional after all !

My next target is to do the exam 70–320: Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Seems like another tough one.

Check out my current Transcript at the Microsoft site by using
Transcript ID: 658532
Access Code: mcp2Hethu

Windows XP SP2

If you are anyone like me, you'd want to be the first to try out Windwos XP Service Pack 2. It's still in the Technical Preview RC2 stage, but it feels so good to have it installed anyway.

Some of the first things I've noticed:

• It has Windows Firewall enabled by default. So when an application tries to open up ports, it gives the following screen allowing us to allow or block the operation.

• When opening a suspicious attachment in my Outlook, it gave me this security dialog:

• There's a new fancy Security Center in ControlPanel, which allows you to take care of all security related stuff in one place, enabling Virus protection, Firewall, Automatic Updates, etc.
• IE has a built-in Popup blocker, and it displays a cool yellow Information bar right on top when it blocks popups, and you can click it to enable the popups.


• IE no longer has the Media Bar. Thank god, I never seem to have had any use of that anyway.


• Add/Remove Programs now groups all the Windows Update hotfixes together. Earlier I really had more entries of hotfixes than actual applications installed in my machine. (sick!)

There are other minor changes, here's a good review with screenshots.

Does Size matter?

It sure seems so.

Microsoft has announced that they will be giving 250 MB of space for HotMail. This is following the recent upgrade by Yahoo! Mail to give 100 MB of space. Looks like the days of 2 MB free mail accounts are gone forever!

They still have to beat Google's 1 GB space limit in GMail.

GMail Rocks!

Finally!

I was fortunate enough to get a GMail invitation. After clicking in the invitation link and registering for GMail with much enthusiasm, my heart sank to see a Server Error during the fist attempt at login! It seems I was not alone!

I was able to log in after about 20 minutes, however. And the experience so far has been astounding. GMail beats every other webmail client I’ve seen heads up, by using state-of-the art DHTML magic to give a neat and super fast user experience. (no don’t bother, “View Source” is not going to reveal anything, its obfuscated!)

The Spell Checking is awesome! Replying or forwarding is faster and easier than Outlook! Google sure amuses me forever!

Still, I was disappointed when GMail didn’t allow me to create hethu@gmail.com email address. It forced me to choose a username with at least six characters, so I had to settle for hethu.n@gmail.com

Taking over the desktop

I’m sure you have gone through this frustration: You install some program and before you know it, it’s all over your system waving hands at you saying “click me, click me!”. It’s on your desktop, start menu, quick launch, favorites, explorer toolbars, Send To menu, New menu, and sometimes in the Startup folder and even in the system tray. They sure make damn sure that they won’t go un-noticed. Geeez…

ICQ and Yahoo Messenger are just two of them.

Raymond Chen of Microsoft Windows development team, whom I have become so fond of recently, describes this issue perfectly:

In Windows XP, the Start menu pin-list is for users to put their favorite icons. It is not the place for a program to decide unilaterally, "I am so cool. I am your favorite icon. I just know it. So I'll put myself there because, well, I'm so cool."

What's particularly galling are the programs that, as part of their install, decide that they are so cool they want to be everywhere to make sure you don't miss out on the coolest most amazing program ever written in the history of mankind, so they go into the Start menu, into the Fast items, onto the desktop, into the Quick Launch, onto your Favorites, take over as your default autoplay handler, and even hang out as an icon next to the clock on the taskbar just in case you somehow missed all those other places - and each time you run them, they go and recreate those icons and settings in case you "accidentally lost them".

I hate those programs.

Why Microsoft fixes YOUR bugs

The recent article from Joel is an eye-opener. It walks you through a mini-history lesson as to how Microsoft won the desktop. Among other things, he shows how MS will go down-the-hill because of the current trend for the adaptation of Web based apps over Win32 apps. The theory is simple; Microsoft will no longer be able to hold on to desktops if all future applications are made to run on any Web Browser. Joel suddenly became the hero-of-the-month for the Slashdot crowd.

While the Linux zealots jumped around fantasizing about winning the desktop, I was more impressed by the work Microsoft has done to make their win. For example, how much work they have done to make Windows backward compatible. Quoting Joel:

"SimCity had a critical bug: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away.

The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

People complain Microsoft can't fix their own bugs, they fix other's bugs too DAMN IT!!

Kiss me Britney one more time!

She's at it again. Britney and Madonna did their lesbian french-kissing act at the last MTV Music Awards shocking everyone. Seems like she wants to do it again!



This is simply a publicity stunt just like the Janet Jackson's boob show off last February.

Gives people something to talk about, not to mention the fans who'll die to see this live on stage (more ticket sales)! Great publicity already!



Stay tuned: Ooops... she's gonna do it again!

Mario doesn't wanna know...

The latest song from Mario Winans (ft. P. Diddy) - I Don't Wanna Know is a great lay-back-and-relax R&B with a touch of P.Diddy's soft rap.

According to him, he doesn't wanna know if his girl is cheating on him:

Somebody said they saw you
The person you were kissing wasn't me
And I would never ask you
I just kept it to myself

I think about it when I hold you
When lookin in your eyes, I can't believe
I don't need to know the truth
Baby keep it to yourself

[chorus]
I don't wanna know
If you're playin me, keep it on the low
Cause my heart can't take it anymore
And if you're creepin, please don't let it show
Oh baby, I don't wanna know

I'd rather know why, but not really who.
Anyways, cool song...

Think twice before you Publish...

Recently, my friend wanted to publish a website to a FTP sever using Office Publisher 2003. His attempt has failed miserably and ultimately he ended up writing a lengthy Blog post on how dissatisfied he is about Microsoft, in general.

The root problem for the story was that, there was no way he could specify an FTP address to publish his web files in Office Publisher.

In Windows, there are several ways you can Publish your files, it could be HTTP publishing (using FrontPage Extensions) to a Web Server, FTP publishing to an FTP Server or File Copy publishing to a local network share, etc. This is a general theme in Windows; be it website publishing or file uploading to an online file storage, such as MSN file storage.

As an example, to create a FTP location to upload your files, go to your My Network Places and create a "Network Place" with your FTP IP and login information. This will act and behave much like a "folder" for Windows where you can copy and move files just like you would in any other folder.

Going back to my friend's problem, in Office Publisher when the "Save As" dialog is shown, all he should do is select the proper Network Place to "Publish the Site". Simple...

The rational is, Office Publisher (or FrontPage for that matter) doesn't care where and how you publish your website. All it does is communicate and synchronize a Folder -- be it local or remote!

Backing up your Windows settings

How often do you backup your Windows? Well, usually never, which is really a bad practice. But you need to at least take a backup of your stuff when you are planning to format your machine and start afresh.

Recently I did exactly that. Backed up my files manually by copying folders and formatted my machine, to later realize that I have forgotten to backup my Favorites folder. Too late. :-(

It is also very tedious to get back everything the way it used to be, desktop wallpaper, color themes, shortcuts etc.

Utilities we rarely use already exists in Windows to get this thing done. To backup My Documents, Favorites, desktop cutomizations etc., you can use the Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup

Click to enlarge image

To backup your MS Office settings, use the "Office - Save My Settings Wizard".

Outlook 2003 UI Challenge

Today I wanted to set my Outlook 2003 to "Mark emails as read when previewed for xxx seconds." I remember that this option was there in earlier versions of Outlook somewhere.

It took me more than 4 minutes and a lot of patience to find this among the gazillion options in Outlook 2003.

Take the challenge and try to find this in Outlook 2003 as fast as possible!

Why you should Un-Learn and think New

One of my good old friends in Melbourne wanted to learn the all hot ASP.NET, from his own words to, "keep in touch with the latest technologies and to see what all the hype is about".

Well, I recommended him to download the free ASP.NET IDE called WebMatrix which itself was developed in C# and is only 1.3 MB with all the GUI and fancy MS editing features.

For a person who comes from the good 'ol ASP days, the first thing I tell them is to throw away the ASP knowledge and learn the .NET way of doing web development. It takes some time to fathom this, because we are not used to thinking of web pages as having events like button clicks, load events, render events and such that run on the server side, and to seperate HTML markup from code.

For the old ASPer, it takes time to think this way, but once you get the hang of it, you'll feel back at home!

It's surprising how Microsoft has come up with a unified programming model for the Web Apps and Windows Apps that work much the same way with .NET

Way to go MS, I'm awaiting for Longhorn devlopment!

Fighting CrapWare

If you are anyone like me, you'd be trying out all the latest geeky shareware and freeware apps on the Net and you'd end up with lots of SpyWare, AdWare, AnnoyWare and basically a lot of CrapWare that you didn't ask for.

All this time I've been using LavaSoft's AdAware to remove all these crap. A free and a better alternative I've discovered recently is the SpyBot - Search and Destroy. I am so impressed with what it does, and it actually discovered several vulnerabilities that AdAware failed to recognize.

Be sure to check that out!

Game: Max Payne 2

One of the best action games I've played so far is Max Payne 2. The story, the cinematics, and the shooting in Bullet-Time is quite impressive, to say the least. I've played 6 hours at a stretch late night and now stuck at the grand finale to kill the "bad-boss".

Couldn’t figure out how to kill the 'ol' bad boss while he's throwing bombs at me, so had to finally look up the web for some hints. :-)

Ok now, armed with that infor, I'll kill the bastard tonight!!

Being a Professional

Today Microsoft has updated it's database to show my latest MCP status.

Check out My Transcript by using
Transcript ID: 658532
Access Code: mcp2Hethu

Anybody wanna hire me?