eForce - the elite force

I have installed Windows Defender (beta 2). last week, wanted to try the latest anti-spy software from Microsoft. 
I was so happy that today the Windows Defender gave me a warning notification that it has detected some adwares on my machine.
But when I chose to remove them, guess what... I GOT the famous BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. !!
I continue to try several times and tried to quarantine them, but I was presented with the same screen of death :(

After several tries, I finally found the solution. i.e. Boot up my Windows in Safe mode and delete the adware from there.

Sigh. 

Below are the highlights from:

http://processors.ithub.com/blogs/processor/archive/2006/02/17/6128.aspx

"The issue comes down to the way Windows XP Service Pack 2-equipped notebook PCs react to the presence of USB 2.0 devices. With a one of the devices attached, the machines basically burn more power and thus, when switched to battery power, don’t run for the same length of time on a battery charge."

"The condition seems affect each machine differently. However, some Intel Core Duo systems lost 40 minutes or more of battery life, tests run by AnandTech showed."

"Microsoft, the sites say, has described a fix that involves tweaking a machine’s Windows registry. The fix, in and of itself has an interesting story, as Microsoft appears to have originally kept it out of its public knowledge base, meaning PC makers and other close partners had access, but the public did not."

So if you are using Dual Core notebooks already (lucky you), please remember to patch your machine :)

http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/server_beta.html

And Vmware Workstations 5.5 has been the Analyst's Choice eWeeks Labs in the 20th Feb 2006 issue, scoring Excellent for its usability, hardware and software support.

Here is the review about VMWare (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1927278,00.asp)

and Virtual Server 2005 R2 (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1927284,00.asp)

Fat bonus on the way. It is time to visit this web site to calculate how much you are getting from this year budget.
http://app.mof.gov.sg/budget_2006/benefits_calculator/index.asp (mmmm still ASP page.)

To know in detail what is Singapore Budeget 2006 is about. Click here.

Microsoft and its hardware partners will continue to develop new digital media devices aimed at challenging the dominance of Apple Computer's ubiquitous iPod music player, Chairman Bill Gates said on Friday.

Gates said the market share for digital music players compatible with Microsoft software is around 20 percent, a figure that is lower than he would like."

URL: http://news.com.com/Gates+We+will+challenge+iPod/2100-1040_3-6038294.html?tag=html.alert

So who will be MS's hardware partner? Hope that it is Creative Technology. Uncle Sim, please dun let us down.

Microsoft plans on Wednesday to kick off the test version of Office Live, the company's collection of Web hosting and business applications for small companies.

"The company is targeting businesses with fewer than 10 employees. With Office Live, Microsoft is offering e-mail, Web domains, Web site hosting and other services for free during the beta. Once Office Live moves to final status around November, the most basic package of services will remain free. Microsoft will sell other packages on a subscription basis."

URL:http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+launch+Office+Live+beta/2100-1012_3-6039007.html?tag=html.alert

So this Office is not the Office Productivity tools that we used in our machines (i.e. Word and excel). It's Web hosting and email. What a confusing name?

Whast about Hosting Live / SME Live? 

Several big names in the local and global IT industry are banding together to bid for a Singapore government IT contract worth S$1.5 billion (US$918.3 million).

6 consortia have submitted pre-qualitfying proposal

They are:

• EDS, Singapore Computer System (SCS) and Avanade
• Hewlett-Packard and Singapore Techologies (ST) Electronics
• NCS, IBM, Singtel, Alcatel, Lenovo, Dell Computer and Sun Microsystem

Cisco and Microsoft are member of all three consortia as providers of networking equipment and productivity software.

More report from ZDNET Asia

Follow up from Kit Kai's post about DNN VS SharePoint by Bil Simser.

Richard Dudley had also provided a short summary of the comparison. SharePoint or DotNetNuke?

I quote "DNN is really an easy website creation tool, while SP was designed to be an information repository and collaboration tool in a corporate environment."

Here are some pictures I took went I visit the Singapore River Hong Bao 2006.

Live performance by senior citizens from China

The famous "Change Face" performance

Huat ah!!!

Makan time...

Can you find your animal zodiac?

5 minutes short fire works everyday @ 9:30 pm till 12 Feb 2006.

Another interesting series of articles from Jensen Harris, sharing with us the rationale why Microsoft have decided to give us a brand new UI for the next generation of Office Productivity tools.

It is definately a must-read for anyone who is interested about HCI design (Human computer interface).

Part 1 - The Why of the New UI

This gives a very quick introduction about the history of Computer User Interface. Starting with the birth of the first UI systems: Alto and Star systems - Xerox research lab to Mac.

Part 2 - Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past

Jensen brought us down the memory lane looking at the first five major versions of Word for Window: from Word 1.0 to Word 97. (Anyone still remember how Word 1.0 looks like? I dun.. Because I was using WordStar and WordPerfect  then.. haha) Many people should also know that many of Office UI  paradigms  were  inherited  from Mac. (yes Macintosh)

Part 3 - Combating the Perception of Bloat  

As more and more functions and UI widgets (i.e. more menu items and more toolbars) are added to the subsequent Office release. User started to complain about feature overloading and feeling that there are lesser and lesser screen estate are left for them to work on their document. Hence, MS comes out with various idea to reduce the BLOATED effect: Adaptive Menus and Toolbar Rafting.

Part 4 - New Rectangles to the Rescue?  

This is the era of Office 2003, where Office Assistant and Task Panes were introduced. Jensen shared with us the downside of these new UI features and a very interesting quote from Nathan Myhrvold's First Law of Software: "Software is a gas."  Every time we add a new UI mechanism, it fills up.  Because we only added and never renovated/ reorganized/ removed, complexity went up each release.

Part 5 - Tipping the Scale 

Jensen illustrated with charts on how the number of items / toolbars and task panes in Word increased exponentially by the release.

Part 6 - Inside Deep Thought  

It is definitely a tricky task to design a productivity software used by 400 million people.

Now, I understand what is the "Help Make Office Better” balloon in Office 2003 is for. It is known as the Microsoft Office Customer Experience Improvement Program or to the MS chaps, they called it "Service Quality Monitoring".

About 1.3 billion sessions of data was collected since Office 2003 was shipped and over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days. Finally, MS is no longer relying on their ingenious guess work when it comes to UI design.

Part 7 - No Distaste for Paste  

Here is the result of the Top 5 Most-Used Commands in Microsoft Word 2003 from the “Microsoft Office Customer Experience Improvement Program”:

• Paste
• Save
• Copy
• Undo
• Bold

Any surprise? I am NOT, I am one of many avid users who enjoys using keyboard short-cuts to do all these tasks. Mainly to show that we are the POWER OFFICE USER!!!

Part 8 - Grading On the Curve
Finally, Jensen concluded on how MS used the information gathered from “Microsoft Office Customer Experience Improvement Program” and the formulae “data + human = design” to influence the UI design of the new office.

After said all these, with millions of users already got used to and master the skill of swimming in the “pool” of Office features. Wonder if they will be willing to jump into another new “pool” of features and dun get drown?

Sad news :(

Dozens of bodies have been pulled from the Red Sea after an Egyptian passenger ferry carrying around 1,300 people, mostly Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, sank.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1575413

Spent some time to watch some of the webcasts done by gsnowman about SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service.

Highly recommended to beginners or anyone interested to know SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service works. Plenty of demos and explainations.

• Session One: Introduction. This webcast gives a flavor of the entire report lifecycle: report design, report management, and report delivery.
• Session Two: Delivering reports. This webcast is about ways to get reports to users. I showed an ASP.NET application that integrates with a report by linking to a report URL, a Windows Forms application that called the web service to browse available reports and then displays the report in a browser, building standard and data-driven report subscriptions, and uaing the Windows Forms control from Visual Studio 2005.
• Session Three: Report Builder. Everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about ad hoc reports. How does a user create an ad hoc report? What does a developer have to do to make the database available to end users?
• Session Four: Report Design. I build reports with tables. I build reports with matrices. I build reports with lists. I build reports with charts. I build reports that link to other reports.
• Session Five: Extensibility. Our intrepid hero calls custom code from a report. He gets data from a web service. He does a directory of the file system using a custom data source. He even uses a third-party charting control for Reporting Services.
• Session Six: Management and Security. We learn about SQL Server Management Studio, and see the security model for reporting services. We also see diagrams of a scale-out architecture for a high-capacity, fault tolerant, enterprise grade reporting solution.

Lesson learnt and experienced: The report design tools: Report Designer and Report Builder are not very compatiable....disappointed :(
I found out something very funny (or I dun know how to do it), even the report models created using report designer cannot be used to create reports in report designer (how ironic!!). But, only can be used in report builder.

Anyone tired out that?

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/gsnowman/archive/2005/10/19/482905.aspx

Saw this ad for my MUST WATCH documentary of the week - DIET WARS!!!! from CNA (Channelnewasia).

You can stream this video to your PC from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/ (very slow on my broadband...pathetic) or we can watch it together on 05 February 2006, 1900 hrs @ CNA. :)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Boeing Co. on Wednesday reported that quarterly earnings more than doubled, easily topping expectations, on improving margins in its commercial jet and weapons units, and raised its profit outlook for 2006. The fourth-quarter results and rosy forecast dispelled concerns the No. 1 U.S. aerospace company would have a tough time maintaining momentum after commercial jet orders set a record last year. The stock, which surged in 2005, jumped nearly 5 percent in early trade on Wednesday.

However, Singapore Airlines has posted a net profit of S$397 million for its fiscal third quarter. The profit for the three months to December was down 14.6 percent from the same period a year ago. But the numbers were better than what analysts had expected. Not surprisingly, high fuel costs ate into the profit margin.

Source: http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=11074619&src=eDialog/GetContent (Boeing) and http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/191319/1/.html (SIA)

Microsoft releases beta of latest browser

CNET's Robert Vamosi takes a look at the changes Microsoft has put into its beta version of IE 7. The browser is now available to the public.

Visit this link to watch the video -> http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6033554.html?tag=nl.e703