Finally

Both Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 are finally available to MSDN subscribers.

I already got leaked versions from the torrents so this was just great opportunity to check whether SHA-1 matches. Guess what, it does. :)

Since everybody is trying to download these images right now, torrent also gives better experience.

Same general slowness and server crashes are nothing new for MSDN site (remember Windows 7). Maybe Microsoft should just embrace torrent network as distribution media instead relying on its own (obviously inadequate) infrastructure…

World IPv6 Launch

Tomorrow is World’s IPv6 launch. Are you ready?

P.S. It is not too hard.

* Drive

It seems to me that Internet drives are everywhere.

For a while we had DropBox as undisputed king of remotely synchronized files. When it prove successful, we got bunch of others, among which SugarSync seemed like most serious contender.

This week things got interesting with Microsoft introducing SkyDrive. And today we got Google onboard with Google Drive.

Only company missing action is Amazon. Yes, they have their drive also but they are missing half-decent sync client.

With so many heavyweight players around, things are bound to get interesting soon. :)

I Like Unique Identifiers

As I was finishing my order of MSDN magazine I was puzzled with one field. It said “In lieu of a signature, we require a unique identifier. In what month were you born?”

I am not quite sure in what universe month of birth is even close to being unique…

P.S. It is January.

Using IPC-3605N Without EaZy Wizard

My laptop has no DVD drive since I removed it a while ago in order to get another hard drive in. Therefore I was little bit unprepared when I bought myself ZyXEL IPC-3605N camera. User guide told me I have to run tool found on CD that I could not read.

I am lazy, so first I tried to download that tool (eaZy Wizard) from ZyXEL pages. Only when I could not find it anywhere (thank you ZyXEL for forcing users to keep CD around) I decided upon more imaginative solutions.

Since manual did mention some addresses in 192.168.0.x range and that range being most often used, I set my laptop’s wired network adapter to 192.168.0.254 and connected camera directly to it. Than I used MagiWOL’s import functionality to scan network for all MAC addresses in range 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.253. That resulted in single hit - my camera was at 192.168.0.100.

After finding out IP address, all I had to do was to enter this IP in browser and use “admin”/“1234” as user/password combination (not “admin”/“admin” as user manual suggested). With that I could proceed with setting-up configuration.

And CD was left forgotten.

WinDays 2012

I will hold a presentation on WinDays 2012.

This year theme will be .NET Micro Framework. Although this platform works very close to hardware, I will try to avoid too much electrical engineering theory and just show what can be done with it in practice.

All examples will be shown on Netduino Plus, probably cheapest way to start working with .NET Micro Framework these days.

[2012-02-29: Unfortunatelly, I will not attend. My stay in USA got prolonged and, due to certain limits of physics, I cannot be at two places at same time. :(]

Highly Improbable

Welcome to my new web server. And for the first time ever, it is Linux-based.

I haven’t moved because Windows were unstable (haven’t had any issues). I haven’t moved because of bugs (PHP is buggy on any platform). I haven’t got tired of .NET (C# rules!).

I moved because of SSH. I grew tired of plain-text FTP where any kid with Wireshark could get my password.

My hosting company made sure that server change went smoothly. They just switched DNS records and, poof, my website on new server started. It is true that, for a while, there was no CSS or JavaScript but culprit was found in W3 Total Cache plugin. It just didn’t like being copied around and quick uninstall sorted that out. :)

There were few other minor issues with upgrade service for VHD Attach and QText but they had more to do with subtle differences between Windows and Linux hosting than with any real error.

Now let’s just hope that I don’t break everything. :)

Again

More observant among you might notice that there is already new version of VHD Attach. Those who use it on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have no reason to worry: only difference between versions 3.00 and 3.01 is that VHD Attach now supports Windows Thin PC.

If you happen to use Windows Thin PC than just remember to install .NET Framework 4.0 before VHD Attach and you should be just fine.

In the Year 2011

As usual, first post in 2012 is great chance to recapitulate what was going on in previous year.

There was total of 106 posts (which is slight decrease from last year) with around 40% of them being related to programming and 10% being related to my programs. Rest of posts is anybody’s guess - I am annoyingly bad at assigning categories to posts. Improving on that might even be my New Year’s resolution. And, as it happens with all of those, it will fail miserably. :)

Total number of visits has increased to 90,000 (from 54,000 last year) so I would say that blog has some traction going. Search engines bring little bit over 50% of traffic (90% of that being from Google). Referral sites bring 30% which means that there is almost 20% of people who enter this link directly.

Analysis says that 25% of you are from United States, 10% from Germany and further 30% from all around world. My own country (Croatia) brings 2.7% to the table. That leaves something like 35% of people that have no location on this world. Either browsers got better at hiding their tracks or aliens just love my blog. :)

Internet Explorer still leads in browser wars with 36% of visitors using it. I was pleasantly surprised that majority of those using it were at version 8 (55%) or version 9 (33%). That leaves only 12% for older versions of IE. Firefox was second with 33% and my favorite Chrome was third with 25% of a pie.

This year also marks special moment for me - I left Blogger platform for self-hosted WordPress site. This step included not only efforts of installing WordPress (which was really easy) but also manual conversion of 340+ posts. And it was worth it since WordPress gives me much better control over almost every aspect of my blog, since speed is improved, since I was able to integrate everything with my old site, and list goes on and on. Only downside is that I am now responsible for making backups and paying for hosting costs but it is small price to pay (and one can always make a donation).

Happy new year to everyone.

Fax 0

What to do when you are stranded in foreign land and you have an fax to send? As always Internet brings solution to a problem.

My search gave me lot of results for Fax subscription but very few that allow simple one-time sending. Even worse, most of those that do allow single payment had issues with my Croatia-issues credit card. After long search I did found one that I could use.

FaxZero.com has rather simple page where you can opt to do single send (with ads or with payment) and their subscription. I tried sending single .pdf files with payment and everything works as expected. Once your fax is uploaded, you are taken to PayPal. As soon as payment is completed your fax is in sending queue. It does take some time to send a fax but you will get confirmation on your e-mail. It does everything you would expect of fax service.

However, there is dark side to this. As soon as I sent my fax via FaxZero, I started getting new spam. It amounted to total of ten or so spams before my spam filters started working again. Yes, it might be just coincidence that those spam e-mails started arriving as soon as I gave my address away. But my experience teaches me that real coincidence is rare thing.

My final verdict about this service is to use it nevertheless. Just be sure to get yourself some throw-able e-mail that you can close once fax is sent.