.NET From India

IE7 Beta 2 - Week 1

I have been using Beta 2 of IE7 for almost a week now. No major crashes and it is quite stable. No major changes to the UI compared to the Beta 2 preview. I think the new list of open tabs is appearing as a dropdown menu near the Quick Tabs is new though.

The major irritant for me in this release is the changes made due to the law suit relating to the ActiveX controls.

Polaris uses Lotus Notes for mail and its web access if built on Java. The change forces you to click the Applet/ActiveX to activate it. So now every time I need to write a mail, do near enough anything with my mail, I have to click twice to do it. There currently is no way to actually turn this feature off, the only way is for the web page to be modified by the web owner.

And ofcourse, this affects all Flash web sites too as Flash currently runs as an ActiveX.

Are you using SPL?

I was reading thru some of the newsletters that I get and I come up against this piece of code

The Infamous Hello World Program.

Romeo, a young man with a remarkable patience.
Juliet, a likewise young woman of remarkable grace.
Ophelia, a remarkable woman much in dispute with Hamlet.
Hamlet, the flatterer of Andersen Insulting A/S.

Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.

Scene I: The insulting of Romeo.

[Enter Hamlet and Romeo]

Hamlet:
You lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward!
You are as stupid as the difference between a handsome rich brave
hero and thyself! Speak your mind!

You are as brave as the sum of your fat little stuffed misused dusty
old rotten codpiece and a beautiful fair warm peaceful sunny summer's
day. You are as healthy as the difference between the sum of the
sweetest reddest rose and my father and yourself! Speak your mind!

You are as cowardly as the sum of yourself and the difference
between a big mighty proud kingdom and a horse. Speak your mind.

Speak your mind!

[Exit Romeo]

Scene II: The praising of Juliet.

[Enter Juliet]

Hamlet:
Thou art as sweet as the sum of the sum of Romeo and his horse and his
black cat! Speak thy mind!

[Exit Juliet]

Scene III: The praising of Ophelia.

[Enter Ophelia]

Hamlet:
Thou art as lovely as the product of a large rural town and my amazing
bottomless embroidered purse. Speak thy mind!

Thou art as loving as the product of the bluest clearest sweetest sky
and the sum of a squirrel and a white horse. Thou art as beautiful as
the difference between Juliet and thyself. Speak thy mind!

[Exeunt Ophelia and Hamlet]

Act II: Behind Hamlet's back.

Scene I: Romeo and Juliet's conversation.

[Enter Romeo and Juliet]

Romeo:
Speak your mind. You are as worried as the sum of yourself and the
difference between my small smooth hamster and my nose. Speak your
mind!

Juliet:
Speak YOUR mind! You are as bad as Hamlet! You are as small as the
difference between the square of the difference between my little pony
and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little
codpiece. Speak your mind!

[Exit Romeo]

Scene II: Juliet and Ophelia's conversation.

[Enter Ophelia]

Juliet:
Thou art as good as the quotient between Romeo and the sum of a small
furry animal and a leech. Speak your mind!

Ophelia:
Thou art as disgusting as the quotient between Romeo and twice the
difference between a mistletoe and an oozing infected blister! Speak
your mind!

[Exeunt]

Yes, that is supposed to be executable code, but not in any language about which you will be picking up a book on in your neighbourhood tech book stall :)

This is in what is called SPL or Shakespeare Programming Language. They even have a translator to convert spl code to C.

My first thought when I saw this was to think, this is the perfect languge to take revenge on the C/C++/C# programmers who said that VB code was too descriptive for them. (most prob they got tired typing all thos ;s :))

IE7 Beta 2 is out

Beta 2 of IE7 is out today.

I am just back from a dinner hosted by the IE7 team at SFO today and they released Beta 2 to public at 9pm pacific time today. Robert Scoble is down here for a few days and he invited me to go with him to this event. It was a fun event (I enjoy talking tech and so it was fun). So thanks for that Scoble...

You can download Beta 2 here.

I will post my thoughts on the new version in a few days after I download and install it.

Out of the Country

I will be travelling out to Dublin, CA for a few weeks. I am starting off from Chennai tonight and I take the Singapore route to SFO.

If you are somewhere in the Bay Area, regularly read this blog and are interested in meeting up (I know too many conditions..;)) just ping me.

Unsigned Drivers and Vista

I just installed a newer build of Vista to try out. The first roadblock I hit was to get my modem working. I use a AirTel DSL connection, that uses a Globespan Virata ADSL modem. But they have a very bad driver. It is unsigned and you need to know exactly what settings you have to use to get it to work.

In Beta 1 I had got it to work on Vista, but doing exactly what I would do to set it up in Win XP. So I did the same in the new build. The installation went fine, but the device was not working. Playing around a little bit in the device manager and trying to update the driver, I came up with the error message saying that the driver was unsigned.

A bit of googling, showed that x64 version of Vista will not allow unsigned Kernal mode drivers and that the x32 version would need Admin privilages for installation of unsigned drivers. OK, I was admin and still it does not work. Now sure what the problem is, if someone has sucessfully installed a unsigned modem driver, do leave some comments. I will post more if I do solve this.

Update (11th) - I tried with the Diable driver signing check boot option, still no go..

A Personal Blog

I have started a separate personal blog at http://manand.typepad.com/thoughts_from_india/

This will be mostly non-technical, basically my thoughts on anything that catches my fancy. This blog will continue to focus on the technical stuff and everything else goes into Thoughts From India

Free Virtual Server??

I had mentioned a few days back that VMWare was preparing to released a free version of the vmware server.

Looks like Microsoft has prepared a strong reply to that move. It announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 would now be a free download. So now the fight for the virtualization space has started...

Office 2007 File Formats

I was playing around with Office 2007 B1 over the last 2-3 days. It is well documented that the new .x formats (docx, xlsx etc) are compressed XML formats. It is not very well documented on how you can actually take a look into them easily. The easiest way, I found, was to just rename the file as .zip, open it and extract out the contents. You now have all the internal XML data as seperate files.

As of now, I am unable to do the reverse, of taking the extracted file, changing it and putting it back into a valid office document. Maybe it is to do with the fact that I am using winrar to create my zip files and not winzip. Anyway, will play around some more and let you know the result.