Because some posts just refuse to be placed into a bucket

Windows 7 - VHD

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I am giving lecture at KulenDayz 2009 developer conference. I am quite curious how it will go since I am primary a developer and this is my first lecture in system administration track.

If you are in neighborhood, please do come.

P.S. Guess which one I am on this picture (hint: look what pumpkin’s eyes are saying)…

Project Natal

Today I was on coffee with dear friend and I learned that Microsoft has something called Project Natal. There I said that almost nothing can persuade me to get Xbox.

I saw this video and I changed my mind. There are things that could make buying Xbox a viable option.

Bing

There is new Microsoft’s search engine called Bing. Name itself reminds me of Alan Ford’s quote: “Hello, Bing, how’s the brother?”. While meaning of that greeting is not so nice (trafficking stolen goods), it means that I will remember it without problems.

Search interface is clean (with nice picture background) and search speed is good. However, after spending one day with it, I cannot say that I am too excited. When I look at all those things it can do, I feel cheated. All that seems really useful, but in reality almost everything is limited to North America. All I got from it is just generic search engine results.

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P.S. It even fails at recognizing that I come from Croatia. Getting results of Slovenian pages does not help me much.

Juni Vs By.hero

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I stumbled upon this video of Zerg vs. Zerg Starcraft match.

Until now, I though that this match-up cannot last more than ten minutes. Boy, I was wrong.

3-In-1

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I got Nivea Active 3 from my wife and I consider it ultimate product for men. It combines showering gel, shampoo and shaving cream. Not only that you solve almost all men’s hygienic needs (no toothpaste inside), you only need to remember to buy single product. That is precious.

While this is primary showering gel and pretty lousy as anything else, it is definitely something you want to take on trip with you.

If they only had bacon-flavored version…

KulenDayz 2009

If you work with Microsoft technologies, you should definitely visit KulenDayz 2009 conference. It is community organized event held in Croatia with quite a few international speakers.

Conference will last for three days. First and last day will be fun, but second day will be all about learning. Sessions will be mix of Code camp style sessions (no fluff, just code) and Chalk&Talk (hanging around with flip chart). I definitely recommend later since amount of information you can get during informal chat is just amazing.

While small fee is required for lodging and events, conference sessions are completely free. Do feel free to register and join us (be quick, number is limited).

P.S. If you are wondering, Kulen is type of spicy sausage native to Slavonija.

Windows 7 and Virtual Disks

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Today (2009-04-23) I gave lecture about virtual disk support in Windows 7.

Here are some links I promised:

If you are interested in this topic, you may wish to check this blog at later times also. I will be adding more detailed explanations of VHD API and updates to this C# implementation.

P.S. If you get “Privilege not held” exception message, run Visual Studio 2008 as administrator. VHD API requires elevated rights.

[2009-04-27: Windows 7 RC will have some changes regarding Virtual Disk API. Major ones include changing names of some functions (E.g. what was SurfaceVirtualDisk is now AttachVirtualDisk, what was UnsurfaceVirtualDisk is now DetachVirtualDisk) and structures. Once RC is out and I install it, I will release update of code.]

[2009-05-01: Code is updated.]

Code Samples

Blogger is fine service, but if you want to write some source code inside of post, you are on your own. However there is solution in form of SyntaxHighlighter [2010-12-31: I swithed to it is WordPress’ SyntaxHighlighter Evolved].

From now on you can see code like this:

void Main() {
  Console.WriteLine("Hello world.");
}
Plain text samples are also allowed.
Some lines may be highlighted.
But not all need to.
<xmlPart param1="value1" paramX="valueX">
  <sub>Test</sub>
  <sub>Test 2</sub>
  ...

This looks great if you have JavaScript enabled.

P.S. This post may change from while to while since I will be using it as testing ground. Unfortunately, you can see how exactly code looks only once you publish post.