Kit Kai's Tech Blog

But this time, it is not the NDA Tap customers or MVPs have to sign, but it is actually a product! It's XBOX 360 and a Nissan car combined! When you park the car, you can fire up XBOX 360, and play Project Gotham Racing 3 on the flip-down seven inch LCD screen... You won't believe how you can control the car in the game... With your own car's steering wheel, gas pedal and brake pedal!!!

Imagine people outside looking at you in your brand new Nissan, frantically turning your steering wheel left and right, but your car is parked in the car park!!!

But this is really cool!!! Read about it here...

Some of you might have know that I've got myself my first home, and not only busy with community stuff, but also busy finding interior designers to do my home, finalising details for my wedding... Microlau recommended me www.singaporebrides.com to look for experiences with various reno stuff... I chance upon this thread, and this is really what I hope SgDotNet would become one day. People advising people, discussing, taking the initiative to organise outings even before we get our keys! This it the first time I know who my neighbours are even before I step into my own house for the first time! I've been living in Bukit Batok for so many donkey years, and all I know is my neighbour is Malay, and we do greet each other once in a while...

Come one guys, this is your IT community... Let's liven things up!

Finally, I got my msn messenger account into msn beta... Though it is still buggy now, I'm able to use what I need most... So I've dug a hole in my harddisk and burried Trillian... RIP my friend... ;p

Since Trillian is buried, I will no longer use ICQ or Yahoo... Just in case you wonder why I'm not online for some time...

BTW, I don't have any invites to give out... Sorry Wen Ching..

Sigh... where has the quality gone too...

I'm not a good story teller, so pardon me...

Two weeks ago, someone joined the company who has experienced with configuring cisco router... My colleague was training him how to install sharepoint, sql and ad... Give him instructions to follow... one of them is supposed to navigate to "//myserver/path/"... That guy, really typed in "//myserver".. My colleague asked him, is your server really called myserver? he said yah... and you know the story...

Next... my colleague is teaching him that to find a webserver, everything has to be translated to IP address... He don't understand, and my colleague asked him to ping a url... He asked... "what is ping?" Man... my colleauge almosted wanted to say, "when you ping a server, the server will pong back to you" but didn't dare, in case he asked, "what is pong?" and to think that the guy can configure a cisco router...

Look at this pen... It's just amazing man... It can read ur hand writing, play music, translate... check out these videos...

Calculator

Keyboard

Translator

Thanks to Firedancer, I'm finally on msn live beta... Now that MSN has finally implemented the ability to rename my contacts, which is one show stopping feature, since I have contact who is crazy enough to put "."... How in the world would I know who is .??? Hee hee...

Yeh... finally, i can throw away trillian for good... I hope... ;p

Saturday marks the end of an eventful week. Both Sukhdev, Microlau and I were not only busy with the Community Launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL 2005. This is the first big event solely organised by the usergroups. Being as resourceful as he is, Sukhdev got lots of goodies for the event, like books, softwares, food... The MVP team in Microsoft Singapore (Lilian and Howard) helped us tremendously as well, booking the Microsoft Auditorium as well as a 200 seater room in NTUC, as well as XBOX 360!!! The two xboxes is even better than the one I saw in USA, and even Microsoft Visitor Center itself, as those were debug sets, loaded with 3 full versions of games! I don't know about the rest of the members, but Howard and I really had fun trying to head shot each other.

Even though it is a Saturday, both rooms are PACKED! Filled with interested techies, that are willing to sacrifice their Saturday to learn something new. To these guys, KUDOS to you, and I really hope you have brought something home with you. The drop out rate at the end of the day was pretty low as well, and we didn't even announce that there were lucky draws... Thanks guys!

For SGDN, "powerful" speakers like William Tay, Lim Boon Tiong and Alan Andrew, Alvin Lau (who co-presented with Alan) feed the members with deep information of ASP.Net, Web Services as well as Team Foundation, while newcomer Bernard Oh did a great job with VB.Net (Though I still like my C#!).

Last but not least, it is Alvin's BIRTHDAY!!!

I'm so tired today... Wanted to work on something, but now I can only stare into the LCD of my laptop... Tomorrow is another long day, and night, as I have lots of new technology to play and learn, especially Workflow Foundation, Asp.net, and something you could easily guess... And Saturday is COMMUNITY LAUNCH!!! Prepared and organised solely by usergroups of Singapore! Whatever plans you have... don't miss this for anything!

Ever come into the situation where you left your virtual machine in saved state, and you got to copy from your desktop to your laptop because you need to do a presentation, or you are travelling or for whatever reason it might be? The worse part is that your drive letter is different, and when you start your virtual machine, it won't start because the harddisk path is different. Then you will try to change the path of the harddisk, but yet you couldn't. Virtual PC / Server won't allow you to change the path of your harddisk if your machine is still running. Yes, Microsoft perceive that if your virtual machine is in saved state, it is still running. You will probably start thinking to your self, "Did I save my work".

Do you need to lose ur saved state? Read on...

Open up the .vmc file, and you will see that it is just an xml file... Locate . This is where your ide adapters are specified... a few nodes inside, there will be a node. Intelligent guess is 1 refers to a harddisk while 2 refers to a CD-Rom. Inside , there is a . Inside is which contains the path to your harddisk. Just change the value, and you should be able to start your virtual machine now...

I don't know how many of you out there actually uses differentiating disks to create your libraries of virtual machines to do testing and development, so I can't gauge how useful this post would be.

I have a library of virtual machines all properly sealed up using sysprep. From windows 2003 base, to sharepoint 2003 base. Any technology I get to work on, I always try to keep a base machine so that I can create new environment to test new stuff with just a few clicks. I'm sure you know by now Sql 2005 just launched recently, so I went to build a base system with Sql 2005 and some other server product. As usual, I sysprep it and make the virtual harddisk read only. Then I create a differentiating disk, and start up the machine.

I thought it would work, like sql 2000, but instead, I got this error message.

"A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - No process is on the other end of the pipe.) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 233)"

I couldn't find help in Microsoft managed newgroup, and I keep asking around, since sysprep helped me save lots of time especially when starting new projects. Finally Sukhdev, SQL MVP and Singapore Sql Usergroup lead helpped me solve the problem. When you install SQL 2005, make sure that the server is not started before you sysprep the machine. Once you start up the differentiated versions of the base machine, do whatever machine renaming before starting SQL 2005.

Getting your hands dirty on Visual Studio 2005 already? Noticed that you are repeatedly typing the same code over and over again, but not really willing to work on the xml files used to power the code snippets feature in Studio? Check out this editor... It allows you to create code snippets in different programming language as well.

Update:

After using it for a while, I find that it is useful in creating code snippets, and creating them in a single xml file. But maintaining them isn't very intuitive... One sorely lacking feature is the ability to delete a code sniplet in the xml file, and the ability to add namespaces...

The more I play with code snippets, the more I get the feeling that code snippets are after thoughts in C#...

For new comers to infrastructure, here is a excellent description of different RAID configuration.

 The flight back home was the roughest I had as yet… On the first leg, the flight was pretty smooth, until we are approaching Japan. As the aircraft turns to approach the runway, we met turbulence… The aircraft was vibrating, especially scary when you look at the wing… It's almost like this bird flu plane…

The second leg was even worse… The plane was jerking so badly for 10 to 15 minutes that my colleague was jerked out of his sleep… But it was pretty fun for me… I just finished watching a movie, and urgently need to put out a fire (nature calls)… So I walked along the aisle to the washroom during the turbulence… It was really fun, as at some point, you literally feel weightlessness… Lots of people feel scared when they are in turbulence (especially the plane captain, don't you think so?), but for me, I treat it like a rollercoaster ride… This ride is awesome, cos you can't see the track in front, which adds to the fun… ;p

In about two hour time, it would be hello Singapore… Good to be home, but I'll sure miss Seattle…