.NET From India

Emotional Computers?

A lot of research is going to into getting computers to understand emotions and to also express emotions. An article on the new extentions to speech synthesis that adds emotions (Free, but registration needed).

Excel is Cool

Was doing some work on an excel spreadsheet and I entered 1st and then did the normal drag the corner to create incremented values. I assumed it would create 2st, 3st etc and I would have to go and change the stuff.

I was delighted, when Excel understood my need and created 2nd, 3rd etc. Incredibly cool..

How did you lose your data?

I was just catching up with some older mails and found this very interesting and humorous:

What's your most interesting data loss story? Hopefully it doesn't compare to any of these, the OnTrack data recovery top ten list of Data Disasters.

Polled from the most bizarre stories of the data recovery company in 2004.

Data Defrost - One man brought in a hard drive in a wet plastic bag. He said he had read on the Internet that if you place a broken drive in the freezer it would fix it. So he tried that method and asked the recovery engineers not to laugh.

Reckless Recycling - One man tidied up his computer folders and inadvertently deleted the ones he meant to keep. He then cleaned up his system, emptied the recycle bin and defragged the hard drive before realizing his error. He now triple-checks files before deleting them for good.

Rowdy Relatives - A man suddenly found his laptop would only boot up to the 'blue screen of death,' putting his data at risk. A week later, his nephew admitted that he used its screen as a punching bag to relieve his frustrations with the slow computer. The man sent his nephew back to live with his parents.

Digital Disaster at 19,000 Feet - The Polish explorer, Krystof Wielicki, dropped his digital camera when climbing the Himalayas on his latest expedition, smashing it to smithereens and damaging the memory card in the process.

Gone in a Flash - One medical company worker completed 1,200 customer billing entries - a process that took several days - when lightning struck the transformer outside the building. Everything was gone, including all the bills she had just prepared.

Baby Blues - One couple had hundreds of pictures of their baby's first three months on their computer. When a virus struck their PC, the computer manufacturer advised them to reload the operating system but they forgot to save the data.

Construction Calamity - During the construction of a large office building, a steel beam fell on a laptop computer containing the building plans, crushing the laptop.

Toilet Trauma - One man became so mad with his malfunctioning laptop computer, he threw it into the toilet and flushed a couple of times.

Road Kill - A woman placed her laptop on top of her car while she got in. She forgot about the laptop, which slid off the back of her car, and she then reversed straight over it and reported hearing a 'crunch.'

Runway Wreckage - A laptop computer was run over by an airplane. Even Ontrack's recovery engineers don't understand how it happened, but that was the customer's explanation.

- from SQLCentral

Computer Language Architecture :-)

A very interesting analysis of the way Computer Languages have evolved and how layering has happened..:-)

CNUG Students in the News

The Students Chapter of the Chennai .NET User Group, CNUG Student made it to today's Hindu. The article talks about how CNUG student is helping students out here in Chennai.

Read the article - All about .Net

MSDN Today

I am speaking at the Chennai MSDN event today. The topic is "Inside the guts of the CLR".

Refactoring out of VB 2005

Well, a real sad news indeed. Refactoring goes out of VB 2005.

I am not sure if this will hit the productivity with VB.NET, unless refactoring is part of your process. But this sure gives a lot of fodder to the C# better than VB group. That too now that the C# group has added EnC support to C#.