Wat'z Clouding the Computers ?

SQL EXPRESS on VISTA

If you have installed an SQL express on vista and try to explore the SQL server with Management studio it doesn't open up, does it?

Why ?
During installation login accounts are created and by default the account from which the installation is performed is a part of the 'BUILTIN\Administrators' group. While in Vista coz of the UAC changes it gets added only to the 'BUILTIN\Users' groups, which essentially gives you a narrow scope of control that barely allows one to just connect to the server period curbing one to perform the basic admin acts like creation of a db.

What to do ?
Open Management Studio in Administrator mode.
Create a new login for the desired user with admin rights

Hope MS folks fix this at least in the next SP.

Zoom'ng the futuristic Sony Vaio

Vaio Zoom casts itself into a pair of transparent glass plate and a completely opaque slate when turned off, it works on a holographic technology.

1-2-3 main( ) windows annoyances :

• DLL hell

Almost all the windows applications are dependent on some DLLs and its very common that a DLLs is associated with more than one application.As the development is going on concurrently the DLL file is now replaced with a newer version and there is no guarentee that it is backward compatibile which would result in breaking the functionality of the other vendor applications.

• Windows complex software install process

A software installation in windows involves copying several files into the directory, sometimes into though highly discouraged, updating entries in registry, putting shorcuts on start menu, desktop etc. Now again the user prefrences are stored in the registry/ folder which makes the application movement to an another host a cumbersome process. This also makes the clean uninstallation of the application usually not possible.



Securtiy
A windows system is generally unsafe, in that a third party vendor application can silently access system critical resources / perform some operations like deleting the files, sending emails and so forth. Sytem must track such [The uninvited BSOD] activites and prompt the user if the operation is valid.(I'm quite satisfied with the Vista behavior on this)

Web Maps

The Web Trend Map 2007 : this awesome, cool map was drawn by IA [source:InformationArchitects].

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Here is yet another interesting version of the map which represents the website traffic based on the surface area of the country[source:Explomap].

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A Dropout's Speech at the Graduation Day

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more
creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more
people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are
suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the
world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the
people who pay the taxes.

An epitome of capitalism himself urges pl to work on reducing geneder inequality. Read Gates speech at Harvard Grad day

Safari Safari Safari : So far from the Windows ecosystem

(Safari crashed when I tried to report a bug)

While skimming through the Google news page, I was a bit puzzled to see the headline
Jobs has unveiled "Safari3 beta" yesterday for the windows and Mac flavors.

I was looking forward to check out the browser myself , well I succeeded downloading and installing the Safari browser easily without any bumps. As ever I opened a new tab to load Google ,the first thing I observed was that the font rendering was very thick and blurry.

Reporting a bug seemed quite easy and quick with the cool "bug" button the toolbar, perhaps they are themselves weren't quite sure about the quality.Then I went on opening a few pages (from:MSDN to:youtube) before I could realize the strength of the "safari.exe" process.It almost consumed 3/4 times more memory than Opera and grabbed 80% of my CPU resources while Opera still used only 5% for the load.

Apple claims that it is 2 times faster than IE and 1.6 times faster than FireFox, but the numbers against Opera weren't released yet? this testifies Opera as the fastest browser(forgive me FF attics).It is far behind Opera,FireFox and IE in feature offering (themes, widgets, speed dial, keyboard shortcuts, activeX support, lack of windows protocol support like minimizing, //stability// so on and forth).

Safari for windows has been my worst browser so far, with 3 crashes and the crux is that the browser crashed once when tried reporting a bug

Faulting application safari.exe, version 3.522.11.3, faulting module Safari.exe, version 3.522.11.3, fault address 0x000c2492.

For more information,
see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

These nasty bugs reveal that the just ported browser which not even qualifies to be a alpha release .Its just a piece of compiled code for windows platform, I ever wonder how the word "beta" means to different companies *with Google strengthening it and rest of the world (MS & Apple) diluting it*. From what I have read, there are several security flaws 4 DoS bugs and 2 remote execution vulnerabilities more details here

Finally Safari has shown its presence on windows with numerous flaws, if Safari is released with all these bugs unfixed then people have to whine.