Understanding AES
How to understand Advanced Encryption Standard (also known as Rijndael)?
If you use/test Windows Server 2008 R2 on your laptop, you will notice that your wireless adapter is disabled by default. And you will also notice that you cannot enable it no matter how many times you try. Problem is that wireless connection requires Wireless Zero Configuration service running and that one is not installed by default.
Only step that is required is adding “Wireless LAN Service” feature. Just go to “Server Manager”, select “Features” and after you click on “Add Feature”, you will get list with quite few features to select from. Only one that we need is “Wireless LAN Service”.
After quick installation (no reboot is required), your wireless is available once more.
How to understand Advanced Encryption Standard (also known as Rijndael)?
Visual Studio 2008 had one great feature - guidelines. While this may seem as irrelevant feature to casual observer, it is indispensable if you are used to editing text document in RFC style. It was useful even in code files as a signal that line is getting too long and you need to consider continuing your code in next line.
Visual Studio 2010 (beta 1) gave us brave new editor with lots of features but, as you may guess it, without this one. For all people who loved this feature, it is quite sad that it will be omitted from final version also. While I can understand that it was never official feature to start with, I cannot get over it.
However, life goes on. There is great extensibility support in new Visual Studio so someone may even write this. Who knows, if time allows, maybe even I will do that.
[2010-04-06: Paul Harrington did it. Guidelines are back.]
Google Sync had support for synchronizing both contacts and calendar events over ActiveSync for quite a while now. Finally support is extended to e-mail account.
Instead of IMAP account that gets “pulled” for updates every X minutes, real “push” e-mail is supported. This both speeds up process of getting actual e-mails and decreases cost since TCP/IP traffic is almost non-existent when there is no new e-mail waiting.
Whole thing integrates perfectly into Windows Mobile as direct replacement for Exchange Server and only thing still missing is support for tasks. I am sure that this is coming sometime in the future.
One of comfort foods of my childhood was simple stale bread dipped in eggs. Nearest description of it would be french toast. However, while french toast is mostly on sweet side of equation, I will give you salty variant here.
Since almost always I make this from old bread, all calculations are based on amounts needed for one half of loaf. Be aware that this measurements are only approximate since I usually do it in free-style.
First ingredient would be egg. You will need four of them. After I use fork to break eggs and make rough mix I add some water to mix. Six table spoons should be enough. Water just makes eggs less dense so we can add some flour to make it denser (two topped table spoons are good measure). I find this very necessary since without flour bread will soak too much oil. Do not forget to add some salt here.
Heat up the pan and put one centimeter of oil inside. I put knob on mark 3 (out of 6). I would call this a low-temperature setting.
Slice bread in one centimeter slices and dip it inside of egg mixture. Keep it in for ten seconds, pull it out, and then dip other side. Ten seconds is just approximate guess since it highly depends on mixture density and type and age of bread.
After dipping, throw it in pan. Keep in pan until bottom is bright yellow-brown and then flip it to other side. When both sides are done, just put it on some paper to soak excess oil. My cooking time is usually in range of two minutes per side.
After few minutes on paper, it is ready to be served. More often than not, I make this late in night and eat it only in morning since it tastes good cold also.
Modifications
I like to add bell pepper (red works best for me) to mix. Just slice it in small-small pieces before putting it in egg mixture. Quarter of paprika is more than enough. If this is not intended for kids or weaklings, you may add chilli pepper also. One should be enough per batch.
Most common modification to this is dipping bread in milk before putting it to egg mixture. While this will make it softer and it will make step of adding water and flour unnecessary, it will also make it taste different. I prefer to skip this.