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Showing posts from December, 2006

Deciphering "Broadcast Channels" on Windows Mobile

for all those, who possess a Windows Mobile - it is full of functionality in every corner! there has been one that has been bugging me for long - "Broadcast Channels". this is one that has been there on the phone since long but I didn't know what to do with the same. so here is some info for those who have the same thoughts: Start -> Settings -> Phone (icon) -> More (tab)-> Broadcast Channels (enable checkbox) -> Click Settings Button -> Choose Language (drop-down menu) -> Recieve Channel Lists (enable checkbox): The following are operator message codes. You'll need to enter these in manually into the text box Operator Message Codes: 000 Index 010 Newsflashes 020 Hospitals 022 Doctors 024 Pharmacies 030 Road Reports - Long Distance 032 Road Reports - Local 034 Taxis 040 Weather 050 District Cell Information 052 Network Information 054 Operator Services 056 Directory Enquiries - National 057 Directory Enquiries - International 058 Customer Care -

New Multimedia Gadgets for Live Spaces

  · new Soapbox Gadget developed by the Soapbox team for uploading and showing your personal Soapbox videos on your Space · gadget which allows you to include custom HTML in your Space · video player gadget which can place a video from any of the popular video sites on your Space · YouTube video player which allows you to place a video from YouTube on your Space · slideshow and badge ) which have two different styles rotates pictures based off RSS and/or tags · polling gadget for adding a poll to your Space · Gadget subpage or the Windows Live Gallery   Technorati tags: live spaces , microsoft

Adding HTML signature to Outlook 2007

When i moved to Outlook 2007, i lost my earlier Feedburner that i so much loved! I wanted to put that back in my signature. However, the familiar Tools - Options -> Mail Format -> Signatures button didn't help. When i pasted the HTML there, it retained the HTML as text without changing anything. So, here's something that told me what to do. I saved the snippet in a file and ended it with extension .html. I opened the file in IE and copied the required section y selecting and then using Ctlr + C. Then i went back to the signature window of Outlook 2007 and pasted this using Ctrl + V. This put the signature there!

Your 2 Cents About Microsoft Community Support

The Windows Server Product Team would like to hear from you about User Group Community support. This is a direct anonymous survey, with the goal to improve services targeted towards User Groups. Microsoft wants to know what your experiences are with the community resources and information that is available to you today as a member of the User Group Community. They also want to know what you think could be done to improve your Community Experience. This is your chance to make your voice heard, so please take a couple of minutes to provide your candid feedback via the survey so they can provide the most effective experience possible. Link to the survey: User Group Community Survey . Thanking you in advance, The Windows Server Community Team from http://www.nogeekleftbehind.com/

Yahoo finds characteristics of Influential consumers

  Interesting findings on top influencers: http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=222291 the only thing is that the study was conducted on Consumer electronics ($300 or greater purchase), Automobiles, Vacations (Family vacation including a hotel stay) and Home mortgages.

Invitation for Internship at Micrsooft - IT India (GDCI), Hyderabad

Intern Program’ at Microsoft IT-India About Microsoft IT-India : Microsoft IT - India (earlier known as GDCI), is a seamless extension of the global Microsoft IT teams in Redmond, USA. Microsoft IT-India is a four year old organization, with talented IT professionals, and is a great place to build career dreams and aspirations. Microsoft IT–India develops mission critical applications that support Microsoft businesses worldwide and manage s Microsoft worldwide IT infrastructure. Working on next generation technologies to create software that helps Microsoft and its customers realize their full potential, is a challenge that drives us. We are looking for ‘Academic Interns’ Internship is a unique programme at Microsoft, which gives an opportunity for young and talented minds to see through the myriad technological innovations. ‘Academic Interns’ will come on board in Mid-January 2007 for a period of minimum 5 months (as part of fulfilment of their academic degree). All positions are

Windows Mobile Device Center

running on Vista has been a pleasure.. i was recently issued a toshiba portege M400 tablet and i installed Vista on the machine. what toshiba forgot to tell me was that i needed a BIOS upgrade and there was no mention of it either on the support site. the downloads they have is for earlier BETA releases and they didn't work on Vista Enterprise RTM. heck, even the tablet mode didn't kick when when i rotated the screen :( What worked though was their biometric device with the driver that was supplied at the support site. thanks to internal MS tools, i got to upgrade my BIOS to v3.x. with that everything started flying perfectly! next came my Windows Mobile device and syncing it with my tablet. unfortunately, Vista didn't seem to have activesync that i had grown so used to... so i had to look around and discovered that i need Windows Mobile Device Center to sync my windows mobile with my PC. TechNet had some content on it and told me that for first time use i had to connect my

Red Hat steps in where Microsoft left in Kerala

So, Mr. VS Achuthanandan frees Kerala state of Microsoft and invites Red Hat to come in :) Economic Times reports that Red Hat will be raking in all the moolah from the schools. In my earlier post on the issue, I had asked the same questions: Who is going to install and maintain the Linux systems in various schools even when the software is FREE? Who is going to re-train the students and professors on a new technology that is used only on 5 - 10% of the world? Linux certifications - who needs them? The answer has come - implementation vendor Red Hat.  it is indeed the state spending its money YET AGAIN for an idealogical high ground. What the govt. is doing is really a duplicate effort and the rupees spent here could have been utilized somewhere else on areas where it was needed. Technorati tags: kerala , linux , myopia , red hat , microsoft

MS develops alternative to Flash

While on the web, what is the one technology that you would think of when developing light weight games? FLASH of course... it is light weight and has plenty of developers/ designers available on the same to make the content. there has been no alternative to flash, well almost till NOW! Microsoft has come up with a new technology called WPF/E. The technology is currently in BETA and is a subset of its desktop counterpart - WPF. This technology can not only run on Windows but also on Mac and in future on Linux as well. When you run any WPF/E application, it would first install a runtime of around 2 MB. This is different from .NET 2.0 or 3.0. the tool currently being envisaged for use with WPF/E is Expression Interactive Designer that works using XAML. As of today, one can design UIs using the Interactive Designer and then import it into WPF/E (that also uses XAML). Some sample applications and more information on WPF/E including games are available at: www.microsoft.com/wpfe So thos

XNA Game Studio Express Has Been Released!

XNA Game Studio Express has been released! To download the released product for Windows, head over to: http://msdn.com/xna/gse/ . This tool helps develop games for even XBOX 360. To hos the game on XBOX 360 you will need additional things: You can now also purchase a subscription to the XNA Creators Club from the Xbox Live Marketplace on your Xbox 360 console if you have an active silver or gold Xbox Live subscription. On the Xbox Live blade, go to "Xbox Live Marketplace" Select "Games" and then "All Game Downloads" Scroll down the list to find the "XNA Creators Club". Here you'll be able to go under Memberships to purchase a 4-Mo membership for $49.00 or an Annual (12-mo) membership $99.00. You'll also need to download the XNA Game Launcher from the same area. Having done so, you will find a new XNA Game Launcher program on your Games blade under Demos and More. Once you're up and running, please refer to the XNA Documentation

Adding RSS feeds to Outlook 2007

The next step was to add all my RSS feeds to the Outlook 2007. I have been using RSS Bandit earlier to read all my feeds and I exported all the feeds from there as an OPML. Next, while in Outlook 2007, I imported the OPML using the RSS Subscriptions (right click) -> Import an OPML file option. All my feeds got imported. Things to note: While I added it to my personal folder, the feed got added in the Mailbox J All the categories were lost from OPML and a flat list of feeds was only available. Now I am off to reading my mails oops! RSS feeds…

Office Outlook 2007: Rules Migration

Migrating my older Office Outlook 2003 mailbox was seamless (or so it seemed). Outlook 2007 (with the help of Exchange Server 2007) was smart enough to figure all my settings just from the email address that I had specified during configuration. I easily added my older 2003 PST file using the normal Data File addition procedure. What didn't happen was migration of rules from older system to the new one. For some reason, I could see them listed in the Tools -> Rules and Alerts menu but they wouldn't fire. After breaking my head for a while this is what worked for me: One TIME only: On the Rules and Alerts box, Click on Options and then Click on "Upgrade Now" button. Then you will need to close the dialog boxes using Ok and apply J Now For every rule: Delete the rule Click Apply Click Ok Recreate the same rule Click Finish Click Apply This is intentionally detailed for skipping any "Apply" or "OK&qu

Exchange Server 2007 is released

Microsoft has shipped Exchange Server 2007 to manufacturing. Customers can sign up for a free evaluation of the software at this Web site . Over 500,000 beta testers helped shape and strengthen it. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 delivers fantastic: · Unified Messaging that delivers voice mail and fax messages to the Exchange inbox · Greater mobility support – for example, IT administrators can enforce security policies on mobile devices with greater control and granularity and end-users get full fidelity HTML mail · 64-bit architecture that allows organizations to increase the number of users per server or allow larger mailbox quotas while reducing per-mailbox storage costs · Anti-spam that ensures mail from your contacts gets through, while keeping the bad stuff out Today within Microsoft over 125,000 mailboxes are running on Exchange Server 2007 with more than 30,000 of those enabled for Unified Messaging.  They currently have great availability of around 99.95%!   the only thing th

ECMA approves Office Open XML as a standard - MS Office becomes standards compliant

ECMA has approved Office Open XML as a standard. This means that all the MS Office products (2007 product line) are now standards compatible. Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress have worked together as part of a cross-industry collaborative effort. Further, ECMA will submit the standard to ISO for potential fast-track certification. Corel and Novell have already announced to create products on the same standard. so what is being shared here? Source Code of Office applications - NO Format of Office formats - YES Is the current .docx etc Open XML (ODF): No Can one get an ODF file from MS Office files: YES (via addin) The format documentation is extremely detailed, with over 6,000 pages of specifications and samples. Developers can create applications that can interoperate with Open XML with high fidelity across different types of applications and usage. here are s

I upgrade my machine

My machine has been upgraded to a Toshiba Tecra M400 Tablet. It is preloaded with Vista Enterprise RTM and Office 2007... ..................... I am off to the New Day!

Windows Live Search for Mobile Available in BETA

Windows Live Search (WLS) in BETA has been made available for mobile devices. this is one of the products that analysts are predicting is going one up against Google maps: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/smartphones/windows-live-search-for-mobile-vs-google-maps-mobile-218467.php you can use both Windows and J2ME phones to use this. WLS installs a mobile client on your phone and you can then use that client for all your searches. While WLS has been good for cities in US, India is still missing from the areas mapped by WLS. Google seems to do better with India. Wonder how long before India is mapped and made available online by WLS.

Digital Games Genres

Lifted this from a survey i was filling. this kinda details various genres of games in existence today :) Action (ex: Prince of Persia, Grand Theft Auto) Adventure (ex: Myst III, Clock Tower 3) Arcade Classics (ex: Pac Man, Defender, and Donkey Kong) Card, Board & Casino (ex Hoyle Casino, Monopoly, Hearts) Driving Combat/Mayhem (ex: Twisted Metal, Full Auto, and Midtown Madness) Extreme Sports (ex: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, SSX, Dave Mirra BMX) Fighting (ex: DOA4, Soul Caliber, Street Fighter) Flight/Space Combat (ex: Crimson Skies, Freelancer, and Ace Combat) Flight Simulations (ex: Flight Simulator, Combat Flight Simulator) Kart-Style Racing (ex: Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing) Life Simulations (ex: The Sims, Zoo Tycoon) Massive Multiplayer On-line (ex: World of Warcraft, Everquest II, and City of Heroes) Music & Rhythm (ex: Parappa the Rapper, Dance Dance Revolution) Off-Road/Rally Racing (ex: Rallisport, Colin McCrae Rally, 4x4 Evolutions) Platformers (ex:

Now Get a FREE Vista / Office 2007

MS is running a promotion by which you can get a FREE Vista copy or Office 2007. The theme of the promotion is that Vista and Office together are much better TOGETHER . To win, you just need to finish viewing 3 webcasts for each product. You can reach this site at: http://www.powertogether.com The conditions for this promotion are: open only to legal residents of the 50 United States (includes District of Columbia) 18 years of age or older So, if you qualify for the above two (for Indians this woul dbe more difficult ;)), head over to the site and win genuine products!