I've been neglecting my blog:( Well as of today it will be an entry a day.:)

A few days ago I had to install Windows XP on a PC that I was selling to a friend. This usually simply exercised turned into a night of lost sleep because Windows XP apparently doesn't like hard drives formatted with Linux. I popped the Windows XP disk in the drive, pressed any key to continue and then....nothing. I tried another Windows XP cd, thinking the last one must have been faulty. Nothing, just a black screen. I swapped out the CD drive and tried again, nothing! In desperation I tried the Linux (Fedora Core 4) CD which worked perfectly. Grrrr!

I then tried an old Windows 2000 cd I had and strangely it worked. Bermused, I formatted the drive with the Windows 2000 disk cancelled setup and then tried to boot off the Windows XP disk; it work first time. For some strange reason Windows XP setup just didn't like the fact that I previously had Linux installed. It would be interesting to hear from someone at Microsoft about the reasons for this problem....

Finally after four years of toil I've finished my Bachelor of Information Technology. Now I can put BInfoTech after my name on business cards:) It is such a good feeling, almost the same as that feeling when you finish school. It's like you can now do all the things that you couldn't before because you were studying but don't want to do them. You couldn't wipe the smile off my face if you tried.

I'm in the middle of creating an SOE (Standard Operating Environment) and found a neat little way to import and export Dialup and VPN settings. Go into your network connections dialog and create the connections that you wish to export. Then go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk and copy the file called rasphone.pbk. The next time you need to create those connection you just copy the file to that location. Or if you are building an unattended installed or network install of Windows XP place the file in your $OEM$ dir like so, $OEM$\$Docs\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk.

(Be aware that if you are doing a dialup connection you may need to manually edit the connection if you have imported a .pbk from another machine that does not share the same modem.)

Do you even get the urge to try something new? Well if you learn one thing in the next 12 months make sure it is 'Monad', the new Microsoft Shell. It isn't finished yet but already the power and flexibility of the new shell is clear. You'll need to get the .net Framework 2 RTM for it to work but after that point your browser here and get the latest copy of Monad.

Now this is an idea that I am actually doing to try and develop over the next little while. What I think would be really cool is a calendar control similar to the one on the right that is created from data that comes from an Exchange calendar. It would also need the ability to drill down deeper and just show the appointments/events for a single day or list of days.

This is absolutely hilarious!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8890993777704907613&q=BSB

You may remember a little while ago I blogged about...well blogging....anyway it is over here: http://blog.project84.net/BlogsAreTheyTakingOver.aspx

Like many I'm sure, I've become addicted to places like Bloglines and memorandum. What really cheeses me is that people are just ripping off what's popular and putting it on there own blog. At the risk of being flamed I am going to pick on Scoble because....well he is easy to pick on ok.  I visit his blog because I know that he is the dude who started the whole channel9 thing and he works at Microsoft. So naturally I'm interested in what goes on in that sphere. If I wanted to know about Google or Sun or whoever, I'd go visit one of the regular news sites. I can read too you know and despite what my colleagues may think I have also mastered the copy/paste thing. Lets take a step back for a moment...why is it that we blog? Isn't it because we want to share our lives, our world, our view? Don't we blog because we think that others might be interested in what it is that we do or think? A lot of people are worse, they just link to whatever everyone else has on their blog....wtf? If your going to blog I think your should follow some lose guidelines:

• Blog about what it is that you or your company does. In the end that is going to be the best news because people aren't going to be able to get it anywhere else.
• Don't blog about something in the news or on another blog unless you have something substantial to add to it.
• Remember that readers are principally interested in your sphere not someone else's so make your content is as unique to you or your company as possible.
• There are news sites and blogs, they are two very different things.
• If you've started a blog for the sole purpose of promoting something then I think you've missed the whole blogging thing. Don't get me wrong, blogs will intrinsically generate activity around a product if that is what your blog is about, however that shouldn't be your focus. We don't want to know how much it costs or what discounts we get for reading about it in a blog, we want to know what it can do and how it does it. We want to know why it was done that way.
• I'm sure there are lots more but this will do for now.

I find that the most interesting blogs are those that give me something that I can't find somewhere else. I love reading Scott's blog because I always learn something that I didn't know before. Those of you out there that are just mindlessly posting to your blogs on topics that 100 other people posted minutes before, I'm sorry to say that we're not interested. Anyway...just me 2 cents.

At the organization that I work for we are required to use under-privileged accounts for all tasks except where admin rights are necessary. For this we are to use the RunAs feature of windows. Now in the course of a day, especially if I am debugging or developing something, I often end up doing a RunAs and typing my username and password a dozen or so times. What would be really hand is an application that you can RunAs once which in turn is able to launch other processes when needed. Ideally it would live in the system tray and you could right-click to display a list of application that you can run with elevated credentials. You'd also want some means for the program to allow addition/deletion of programs and a portable way to store the list of applications.

This actually has a lot of potential because you could design it in such a way that would make it very modular. What I am thinking is this, create an Interface called ITask with definitions for a Run method. Then we can have different tasks implement this interface for say running programs or mapping a network drive, etc. As a minimum ITask would also want some properties for say Name and location/file or something like that. The the sky's the limit! Keep a collection of ITask object that correspond to items in the menu and you've got yourself a handy little app! Any thoughts?

I happened to have deleted the Show Desktop icon in my quicklaunch bar the other day. Now I didn't realize how much I used this lovely little button until it was gone. So I search with the mighty google and found the following: