Need a Google wave invite? I have a few I can share

As of this posting, I have about 7 invites left for google wave – Drop me a comment with your email in the comments and I will send you one.
If comments are closed for this post, it means that all invites are sent out !

Develop 2-client Video chat application

I have been using MSN Video chat for quite some time.. Lately, it started to fail with different symptoms – 2 way video works and 1 way audio works. 1 way audio suddenly stops. Or, the audio does not work at all.. and so on.. I have the ‘latest’ version installed at both ends..  Cant use Yahoo as it cannot get through my router for some reason. Gmail video chat is really bad. And Skype --- well it works fine, but has different set of problems..

Then I started to ponder upon developing a custom video chat app so I can install it and have the chat get going (thus eliminating the streaming servers that these otherwise famous vendors use for their video chat apps).Primary goals of this app:

1. No logins/logouts
2. Voice echo should be eliminated
3. Point-to-point chat (no streaming to intermediate server(s))
4. Fast frame relay with good quality video(use good codecs?)
5. Will/should not be a ‘broadcast’ like app.

Possible solution(s) were to use Flash and/or Silverlight. Some of the posts that I bumped into are:

1. Jonas’ post
2. Rene Schulte’s post

Will post more on this if-and-when I get this project completed.

Skydrive on the desktop

Last couple of days I was trying to find a tool that will allow me to ‘backup’ my huge photo collection on to the web somewhere so it can be ‘safe’ there (safe from crashes etc atleast) – Don’t know about the security though.
I realized that Microsoft Skydrive has 25GB space, so long as there is a hotmail/live account.
The next challenge is to be able to ‘copy’ a huge folder structure on my desktop to the skydrive  since skydrive offers an activex control using which a few files can be uploaded at one time. This would not work for me, obviously. Upon googling, I bumped into the following tools:

1. Gladinet -  This is really a great tool as it has copy (folders with contents) feature besides a backup feature that will periodically backup you source(desktop) and target(skydrive) folders. So far, so good. Home license costs about $39. It even supports other cloud storage providers. I tried out the free version and for some reason, was not happy with it (the errors are not descriptive enough), if a task fails, and retries do not work to name a few
2. Skydrive explorer – This is yet another nifty tool (currently in beta – v 1.1) that does the same thing, except for the fact that you cannot copy folders just as yet. File copy works like breeze (ie., create folders on skydrive manually and copy all files from a folder to the skydrive folder).  I will wait for this tool to come out of beta (or atleast till such time folder copy support is added). Down side to this tool is that skydrive cannot be ‘mapped’ as network drive (in its current release, atleast).

I must add that I have tried these tools on Windows 7 Home Premium (x64).

Virtualbox: Expanding A Disk Drive

This works like charm !! 

Virtualbox: Expanding A Disk Drive

Which antivirus is best for me?

The answer is ‘it depends’.  But I suggest looking at this independent test site (perhaps not affiliated to any of the antivirus vendors). This site has various metrics in terms of what was tested and how it was tested etc. Read the reports and choose what solution may work best for your scenario.

My experience is mostly driven from a ‘home-user’ perspective where I expected and need the following features for the so-called 'antivirus’ tool on my home PC:

1. Cheap (free is better, though)
2. Should not hog up PC’s resources (while scanning/realtime protection)
3. Protect from all  worms/threats/viruses/spyware/malware/browser help objects etc (No bad stuff, period.)
4. Less # of false-positives
5. Should not interfere with any other installations etc (most of the times, you read on the web to ‘disable’ the antivirus if you cannot install something – that’s simply weird and *stupid*).
6. Light footprint.

So far, I have tried the following antivirus tools (in the past):

1. Norton – Feels good, but i think it has heavy footprint.
2. AVG Free – I suspect my PC got infected really bad when I had this about 2 years ago. This tool may have improved ever since.
3. Kaspersky – Seemed fine, but after its keys started appearing on the web and the recent hacking of their site, I sort of got little disappointed.
4. Webroot AV with Antispyware – Looks good.
5. Microsoft Security Essentials –Currently have this on my home PC(laptop) – Looks good.
6. CA etrust suite – Had this on my work laptop. Felt it to be little heavy and slowed down the system, but it was installed by our IT.
7. Microsoft Forefront – Currently have this on my work laptop. Seems to be good (in terms of performance, atleast).

Footnote 1: if there is an ‘installer’ file that you have explicitly installed on your PC, then no antivirus can help you detect it atleast (other than the ‘do you trust this publisher’ like dialog at the beginning of installation).

Footnote 2: I have Ubuntu on one of my hard disks for the last year-and-half or so, and its fantastic – I have not installed any antivirus on it till date (I dont have any important data on it, though).. Yet, its been quite fine.

Annoying quirks/limitations with sharepoint (WSS 3.0)

Have you ever wondered what you cannot do with a technology before going ga-ga over what you can do  – Here are some of the cannot-do-easily items (limitations) with WSS 3 :

(Note: some of these may have been ’fixed’ with recent service packs):

1. Event handing: List Events do not fire on UserInfo list (more info here).
2. Synchronous add list event will not contain item properties (more info here).
3. Following need a ‘fix’ for a site created from template (.stp) using object model:
   1. Field lookups (more info here)
   2. Workflows need to be reattached (more info here)
4. Memory leaks. More on this here, here and here.
5. Custom code – If you need code to be hosted in a user control in your sharepoint page, you have two options – WSS user control or asp.net user control. You would be much better off using asp.net user control and hosting it in a SmartPart. This works like charm. (and one less thing to learn about wss sdk as you may already be aware of asp.net user control API).
6. Webservice – There is not a easy way to create/reply to discussion boards using web service.
7. Multiple emails – Cannot send email to multiple persons(people or group field with multiple selections) from sharepoint workflow.
8. Referential integrity (aka Lookup fields) – The cascading deletes/updates for lookup fields in WSS is a real pain.
9. Declarative workflows in site template – If you create a site from a site template that has declarative workflow(s), the workflows do not work. (declarative workflows are the one that are created using Sharepoint Designer).

CAD in cloud

I have been following the ‘cloud’ concept lately and I must say the concept seems quite impressive.  I read Oleg Shilovitsky’s post on Autodesk’s Twitch – More on Twitch in this post.

If-and-when the CAD systems (agreed, Autodesk is the first, PTC and others, do you hear??) go into cloud (atleast a private cloud for those who companies who have issues with IP/security), the installation and maintenance of the CAD workstations could be brought down considerably (needless to say, the cloud servers must beefed up really well), so should the connectivity(frames/sec etc). The users should not have negligible/zero latency effects when they use the CAD tool run it the cloud.

Interesting subject - Will have to watch this space..