I've been really close to the "Live" development platform and have tested most of its products from their beta versions so when I found out today that Microsoft has released two new Live products on public beta namely Windows Live Gallery and live folders I've rushed to the Live Web site to download and try them.

Unfortunately I was too late. For some reason Microsoft decided to pull back its releases and disabled us (people on the other side of the Atlantic that sleep when US is awake) the download of those new products.

At least the folders live program, clearly stated from the beginning that the program was not available for my market (that is Greece), Photogallery on the other hand behaved very strangely sometimes showing the download page (although the download link was broken) and sometimes showing the default live betas one, making me wonder if I did something wrong.

After loosing some time trying to find out what was going wrong, I gave up and decided to stop bothering....

Does anyone know why Microsoft decided not to go through with a public beta and why this had to be decided after releasing it for a couple of hours?

I've decided it was time I moved my blog to a newer blogging engine for a long time but didn't have time to go through with it. Well yesterday I did as I had a few hours to spare (although it took me more than that eventually).

I've decided to use SubText as my new blogging engine as it supports .Text data import and since my old Blog was based on .Text this would come handy.

After solving a number of database related problems (I even had to run the db installation scripts manually) I managed to get it up and running again. Hope that everything works as it previously did.

If you spot any errors, or have any comments don't hesitate to contact me.

I'm sitting at the Prague airport waiting for my flight back to Greece. Yes I've been to Prague for the last couple of days for vacation. Prague is beautiful and very romantic so I suggest you take your soul mates and visit it. But lets take it from the top...

Accommodation

Me and my wife were booked a room at a 4 star hotel called Barcelo which overall was nice (had a very rich breakfast that spoiled my on going diet :-( ). Unfortunately it was poorly situated (although near Microsoft's offices) outside the city center (2 bus and 5 metro stops away from the city center) and behind a cemetery. Believe me it's not the nicest thing to wake up in the morning and see a cemetery out your window. What's more on the second day of our staying there, we returned to our room to find our door open. It seems that it was left open by the cleaning personnel after cleaning the room at the morning and left open for the rest of the day :-o. Thankfully nothing was taken from the room (I had left my laptop that day in the room) but non the less things like that should not occur in a 4 star hotel in any hotel for that matter.

City - Country

The city is beautiful as I already told you, and you must be prepared to walk a lot if you want to really enjoy it and see all of Prague. Czech people are nice, although a bit cold (as all Northern European people are) and not so happy in speaking in English. Czech republic has joined EU but hasn't changed its currency to Euro yet thus making it a very cheap city for those carrying Euros. You normally have to change money at exchange centers but don't worry if you do not get the chance as everyone will be more than happy to be paid in Euros at an "interesting" exchange rate ;-). Food is great, if you like eating meat, Prague will please your gastronomic desires in many different ways.

Weather

Always take an umbrella when you visit Prague, you never know when it's going to rain. The weather on our three days stay was overall nice and worm, it rained only on our first day. On our last day at Prague, our guide said that this was the hottest day Prague had for many years and it was only 32 degrees Celsius (wait till they reach 40 like it did in Greece this weekend ;-)).

Buying stuff

Due to the currency issued mentioned earlier, things are relatively cheap in Prague. You'll have to search for the better prices though and of course avoid buying from the tourist shops, they usually sell at the highest possible price (same as in Athens). Czech is famous for its Crystals, Porcelains and precious stones (my wife had a blast ;-)). A thing that annoyed me while searching for small souvenirs and gifts was a wooden toy puzzle that showed Europe. In it not only FYROM was named Macedonia but some of the Greek Aegean islands were To be perfectly honest I was more angry with the Greek government not doing anything to prevent these from happening than with the Czech people selling them.

Anyway that's more or less all I had to say about my trip to Prague, now back to work, till my next summer vacations...

Thanks Savas

I like trying out new software (although I'm not an MS employ I'm dogfooding ;-)). So I usually download and test every beta that comes out. To do that I use Virtual PCs, as I don't want to mess up my production machine. I create these virtual machines on a removable disk so that I can run them on any PC I work. So when Microsoft released its new Windows 2008 server operating system public beta program, I rushed to download it and install it.

Unfortunately, it seems that Microsoft changed its Virtualization License scheme in Windows 2008 server OS from the Windows 2003 server one as it now needs re-activation for each PC you run the virtual machine. It also looks like you only have 1 activation per serial number as it will prompt you with an error message if you try a serial number that is already in use.

Thankfully, you can order as many licenses as you need from Microsoft's site since they're still free but this will be a serious problem (at least for me) when the server is officially released.

Have you tried Apple's new Safari browser?

Well if you have, you'll notice that most of the sites (not just my site ;-))won't display correctly, it takes forever to start and has a number of crashes (at least had at my PC). As for the claimed browser speed, it's obvious that if you decide to ignore half the elements, styles an other objects other browsers render, you'll render faster. Even though running my tests on various sites, I didn't see the performance difference they claim their browser has. So I can't help being skeptical, how did they came up with their diagrams and with statements like these:

"...the fastest, easiest to use web browser in the world..."
"..up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer..."

After investigating the missing Live Writers's spell checking problem for a while, I discovered that the problem was caused by my computer's regional settings (Greek). As it turns out, spell checking is only enabled when Live Writer is started using the en-US regional settings. The unfortunate assumption by the Live Writer's team was that since spell checking works only for English, it should be disabled for any other regional settings :-s ... If that assumption was correct, then other programs like Office for example shouldn't have spell checking either, for non English regional settings PCs.

Anyway, searching the web I found a patch you can apply that solves the problem (partially though). You can built a custom launcher that sets the CultureInfo object of a new Application Domain to en-US before launching live writer from it. You can do this like that:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFiles);
    path += @"\\Windows Live Writer\\WindowsLiveWriter.exe";
    AppDomain appDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain("Live Launcher");
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
    appDomain.ExecuteAssembly(path);
}

Unfortunately this solution does not work when you use the Blog this button from IE. So I'm still hoping for a patch from the developers team fixing this apparent problem.

It's been almost two years since I bought my last tech gadget so I guess it's time I start searching for a new computer.

Unfortunately I have to sell my current one as a) I need the money for the next one and b) I don't want to put it in a drawer and leave it there. The laptop is in perfect condition and has all the features and performance (It's Vista rating is 3.8) almost any user could need (It's currently running Vista Ultimate and a Windows 2003 Virtual PC at the same time without problems for example).

If anyone is interested give me a buzz...

Technical Specs
Platform
Intel® Centrino®
Chipset
Mobile Intel® 915GM Express
CPU
Intel® Pentium M 1.87 GHz, with Enhanced Intel® SpeedStep® support
Memory
DDR2 SDRAM (2 x 1024 MB)
Optical Medium
DVD+-RW/+-R DL/RAM
Hard Disk
EIDE Western Digital 80 GB
Monitor
15" Glare SXGA
Monitor Resolution
1400 x 1050
Graphics Card
ATI Mobility Radeon X700 with 256MB memory
Connectivity
modem V92/V.90, WiFi 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth2, Ethernet
100 BASE-TX/10 BASE-T
Media
Intel® High Definition Audio, 1 WebCam
Connectors
1 i.LINK™ (IEEE1394), 1 RJ-11, 1 RJ-45 (Network), 4 USB, 1 VGA, 1 PCMCIA I/II, 1 Card reader.

As promised I've created a silverlight video of my interview at Microsft's innovation day event. I've used clackerzone's super Live Writer addin that enables you to encode (uses Expression Media Encoder) and upload your video directly from Windows Live Writer with a few simple steps.

Enjoy...

One of the features I really loved about Microsoft Live writer was its spell checking one, so I made sure before downloading the new beta2 version that it wasn't removed. As I read it was instead somewhat enhanced by enabling inline spell checking.

So I downloaded and installed it only to find out that my spell checking capabilities were gone. There's no Spell Check button as there was in the previous version (it explains, as if you have inline spell checking you don't really need it) and inline spell checking doesn't work.

Does anyone know where Live Writer's spell checking has gone?

This week I had to install a couple of web applications that used Microsoft Ajax on ISS7 for the Innovation Day event. Unfortunately there were some backwards compatibility issues that made me use the backwards compatible Asp.Net application pool and not the new default app pool.

Although the web apps loaded ok I kept getting a Sys not defined javascript error and as you can probably guess (Sys is the root namespace for Ajax javascript libraries) there was no Ajax behavior on these apps. After investigating for a while it turned out that if you're planning to use IIS7 to host Ajax enabled web sites using the Backwards compatible app pool you must delete the

<system.webServer>
    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/>
    <modules>
        <add name="ScriptModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
    </modules>
    <handlers>
        <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-ISAPI-2.0"/>
        <add name="ScriptHandlerFactory" verb="*" path="*.asmx" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
        <add name="ScriptResource" verb="GET" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>

section from your app's web.config file because it disables the download of the Ajax javascript files.

As promised I've uploaded here all photos I "stole" (he had it coming, using my computer to post to his blog does not come cheap ;-)) from Panos digital camera.

I'm also going to publish a video interview that was taken by the guys of StudentGuru community, showing off all the cool stuff we're building at www.dol.gr as soon as I manage to download Microsoft Expression Media. I'm planning on encoding it in Silverlight and publish it on https://silverlight.live.com/. So stay tuned.

 I've spoken a couple of times about innovation in Greece and I'm glad when I see other people talking about it too. So when I was invited to show all the things we're building at www.dol.gr at Microsft's Innovation Day, I was thrilled. Luckily there was WiFi netwrok availableso here are some snapshots from the event. Stay tunned more will come later...

 

 

Special thanks to Panos for the pictures