Need a brothel? Ask Google

Need a brothel? Ask Google or How about George Bush inspired version of World Map by Google Maps

Open up Google Maps UK
Lets say i want to look at something in Europe. Zoom out a bit and click the -> to move right. Hold on its a bit blank.
Keep clicking and suddenly you notice Alaska looming. What the heck.. Where did the rest of the world dissappear. I think Google's taken George Bush's idea of it.

It that wasn't bad enough. While you are on Google Maps. Click on Local Search. Type in Brothel in E1... lol surprise surprise. Oh well... all in a day's work.

Surprise Surprise

I have been very lazy off late. Hardly get time to put down a blog. Anyways time for some good news. I am getting married in a few months time :)

Visual SourceSafe VSS 6 - Reset Lost Admin Password

Microsoft: Visual SourceSafe - Loss Admin password

I have used this techinique a number of times. Use your fav hex editor... i prefer ultraedit and open up the um.dat in /data dir. Reset the bytes from offset 80

0:80 55 55 bc 7f 41 64 6d 69 6e 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0:90 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0:a0 00 00 00 00 90 6e 00 00 a8 01 00 00 00 00 00 00

This information is at YOUR OWN RISK

Save the file and close the editor. Open sourcesafe admin and open the database. VSS admin will behave as if the admin password was never set.

TalkTalk broadband sucks

I consider myself a power user who doesnt necessarily take backups too often.. i just download stuff over and over again :) there's limit to the hard drive space and the cds and dvds you can burn and have lying around...

i used Pipex for over 2 and half years and i moved from pipex to talktalk purely because it was cheaper.. it was offering me 512 k for about 19.99 and 1 meg for 25 quid provided i had talktalk phone billing.... well i moved on to them for a 1 meg account...

surprise surprise... within two months they write to me saying that my usage is causing network load / usability issues... and that they are disconnecting me from the 15th of march... the worst part is that i download hell lot less than what i used to download before....

Carphonewarehouse and their TalkTalk ISP sucks... they don't offer unlimited downloads as claimed in their advert....... I have decided to download a complete set of iso's worth gigs from msdn just to give them more grief..... it was nice doing business with you guys...

Learning to survive as a non geek

Learning to survive as a non geek.... i have just started a new blog...

Still alive and kicking

Ahoy people... hope life's treating you all good... yes i am finally recovering from excessive social indulgence on my part. yes yes i know once a geek always a geek.. but i am turning into a better geek...
got a girlie and a great social life... even work doesnt seem all that bad... hahaha... had a great time this christmas... was in poland stuffing all the delicious cakes... was back in the country for new years and well its been a great start to the new year...
it can only get better... keep your fingers crossed for me....
ciao ciao

Its almost winter: time for hibernation

well i have a very interesting work life... i really enjoy it when i am all stressed out... but as with all the good things... it just don't last forever... so i am done working really hard for just about a month and its time for hibernation... yeah i will i could stuff myself and then sleep for 6 months %>).. what i will end up doing is the usual... listening to music... surfing the web and this time around i will finish my site :)

hopefully will post often from now on.. ciao ciao

MSN Messenger 7 BETA

Earlier today was randomly going through blogs and i read Cornerit's review on it. Googled up MSN 7 and read stuff about it being leaked into public domain %>) oh well... found it at softpedia.

Its been pretty stable so far... been running for like 6 hours and so far so good... Found a few things like enhanced smiley packs and backgrounds etc... dont know if it was a part of MSN 6...

you have another feature called nudge.. its mentioned at places... if you have used yahoo messenger then you would have given your mates a buzz... sort of shakes the window with Buzz!!! in red bold... nudge is a similar thing except it doesnt look that annoying and the text is not in red :) enough said... find out the rest of the features yourself...

it's worth a look... if its unstable... just use Add/Remove programs to remove it and download the current 6.2 version of msn.com

Burning DVDs off DVB Recording

I have gigs and gigs worth of recordings things like music videos and Everybody Loves Raymond (ELR) and Scrubs. I sort of stacked them up thinking its worth it till they come out with DVDs of ELR and Scrubs.. the problem is that i need to keep buying hard drives each episode is 650 megs plus... so finally decided to burn them into proper DVDs.. used TmpgEnc's Dvd Author

This is the normal process
Complete recording has adverts etc which have to be removed plus there's a mild audio/video sync which needs to be corrected. This is a great tool PVAStrumento to seperate the audio & video based on parameters like change in audio / video formats... which is great cause Channel 4 broadcasts the adverts at 16:9 but the shows ELR & Scrubs are broadcast at 4:3.. once you get the seperate split audio / video files use bbmpeg to merge the required audio / video streams. finally join the mpeg streams using tmpg's mpeg tools.

That what it takes go get one episode cleaned up... its great quality.. and since there are no plans for dvd release just yet, might as well burn it up... anyways... spend a chunk of this weekend doing just that and guess what... cleaned up 25 odd gigs here and there... not too bad huh ? still plenty more to go...

SpeedDater - UK and London Speed Dating

Having recently decided that i was done being a geek... a friend of mine suggested i give speed dating a try... well i dont like 3 mins... the next one... approach... so instead went for the Lock & Key Party... it was such a good laugh.... more on it here... SpeedDater - UK and London Speed Dating, Online Dating speeddating

Pull-o-meter - How do you score ?

Vivek gave this Pull-o-meter link and here's what it had to say....

Beer Monster

You’re no shrinking violet, that’s for sure, and confidence is half the battle in the pulling game, but you’ve still got to take a bit more care of yourself during an evening out if you’re going to stay at the peak of your pulling powers. Don’t want to wake up next to a minger now do we?

----------------------------------

See i know the lines... i am just horrible when it comes to saying them... :) Fancy a shag ? will have to try it some day. as Dawson keeps telling me... it works... though i will have to watch out for the mingers... lol

I am done being a Geek

I have spend a while trying to figure things out.. and i have made the decision. I am done being a geek... i need social life...

This is my invite to everone out there...
Hi I am getting married next week. See you there. Don't worry about getting me any gifts, Just get me someone i can get married to.

lol... that sums it up... well actually no it doesnt sum it up.. i dont want to get married just yet... i need a full time girl friend... time to divorce the PC(s).

Good News

About a fornight back I got really really fed up of Smoking and my consistent giving it up and starting all over again. So this time I decided to give up forever (Normally when I used to give up, I used to put it like - till the next time). Anyways I am almost back to normal now. And I have realised that if I do not smoke, my Attention Deficit Disorder calms down a bit. I actually did not know I had ADD untill i gave a psychometric test last year. The results came out excellent but suggested that I have a check for ADD.. lol.

Well not smoking it has its side effects too... But have been there too many times before I always warm people to stay on my good side atleast for the first few months. Wish me luck cause I have been going on about this for a long time.

Off late I have been working on my site again dotnet911.com. You might be surprised with the choice of domain name as one of my friends put it... I am restricting my site to american psyche. The reason being 911 as you are no doubt aware is a emergency number. Its funny when i give my email address out to people.. its hermit at dot net 911.com and they say 9 11.com ? Really winds me up cause i have to go about explaining what 911 & 9 11 mean to me and the population on whole (unforunately i am in london and not many people share my opinion on using 911 instead of 999).

Anyways.. I payed for a SQL server database to my host and once i finish a few bits & bobs I shall upload it. Hopefully every few days I will add an article on to it. Depending on the usage and feedback i will either keep it going or I will remove it in a year's time and save myself some money %>)

BTW don't ask about 70-320... i will come back to it in a few days.

My Perspective on India and the People

Every once in a while i get on to a newsgroup and i see some really really lame posts... some of them are from indians who do not know who to ask or where to look... which can be really really annoying at times... things like.. i want to do MCAD my email id is blah blah blah.. please email me the details.. this things can be found at Microsoft Certification Site.

And there are people from around the globe... some comment saying that its worrying how people dont know a thing about English or Technology and that a whole lot of work is being outsourced to them... I think it always better to educate people (even the one indians so love to call Foreigners) and i looked up some facts and put them down saying actually its not too bad...

What do i get back ? a reply from a self proclaimed Patriotic Twat... calling me an @sshole and asking me to not belittle my country of birth in front of foreigners... i couldnt believe this... somethings never change... mate... learn to appreciate facts.... do you really know what India is and even being an Indian is all about ?

i have been across most of India.. from Gujarat in the West to Delhi in the North to Assam in (Northeast) to Tamilnadu in the South.. i have seen a lot of india in those 24 years... The only difference between me and a whole lot of Indians is that I think from a different prepecitve.... and that was one of the reasons why i was termed a UBI (Unfortunatly Born in India). Most people who dont like the fact would rather dish out and i got called that a lot because i prefer to live with the facts than boast on false pride.

At the end of the day i am a programmer... i go by "Show me the Money" attitude. And yes i do have Indian morals but hey this isn't a war and I am here to make a living.

And finally you can still dish this as well and say whatever you wish to... yes even if you think a real indian in one who stays in india and makes it big... Only accepting the fact can get you a step closer to making a difference.. in India and everywhere in the world.

70-320 and .net Remoting

over the last 2 weeks i have been studying for 320 and hell... its bloody extensive... i was told be prepared to think hard for the exams... i am having to think hard well before the exams....

though its been fun most of the times... Amit's Kalani's book gets a very good feedback from me.... Remoting is so much fun... though it sort of reminds me COM programming not even close to it in complexity... we used to have ClassFactory out there... there was even a ClassFactory2... though i only used it to the extent of object creation and returning the object. In remoting we can use it to expose Remotable object as a client activated object by using Class Factory as a bait and making the host think its the Class Factory (usually set as Server Activated) we are after...

Tried all sort of stuff.. the best part about remoting is that its not complex... and you can set most of the stuff in config file. Had a look at IIS hosted Remoting and just a piece of advice. If you are connecting to SQL Server (with Remotable object) and are using Trusted Connection..
a. Disable Anonymous Access (Keeping it in Windows Authentication mode)
b. set impersonate identity = true in the applications (web application's) web.config

if you want to debug a IIS... start the client and attach to the aspnet worker process...

went nuts trying to figure out what was wrong... then found out it was authentication failure on sql server for NT Authority/Network Service

oh well...

Yukon Developer session

Went down to Yukon developer session organised by microsoft uk. couple of nice presentations... it so good to be at a developers session rather than one of those sales pitches.

It was interesting to see actually managed code within inproc hosted CLR with yukon. A sort of mix and match of managed code with TSQL. TSQL is still the fastest thing when it comes to relational data. Managed code within Yukon is more for computational intensive task.. conditional.. loops.. string manipulation etc. Saw a brief overview of data.sqlserver namespace overview.. the classes and how they can be used. Use of partial classes and user defined functions. More on it here.

We can even have managed UDTs. the only requirements are that they should take a string as contructor and should implement a method called Parse.

TSQL has a good set of enhancements... stuff like DDL triggers (oh yes on create, alter, delete etc).. use of common data expressions... reminded me of subqueries and how we used to name a resultset... similar in broad terms but CTEs can be used throughout the context of the current query.. not just current TSQL query within a block. they have added things like Try and Catch blocks.. though as the program manager put it.. they keep changing their minds on the exact syntax :)... and absolutely thrilled by Rank and Rownum etc.

The day ended with Analysis server enhancements and DTS.. Me and a friend Leon were talking about what the heck ETL was... i reckoned it was more like eXtensible Transformation Language... not even close... rather it stands for Extract, Transform and Load. More on ETL here

some links refer to beta 1 documentation.. unfortunately.. you will need to check the books online for that. That not all... the next version of MSDE.. its called SQL Express now and its still free is available for download ... you can also get you hands on books online.. check this page

70-320

As i mentioned earlier i have started preparing for 70-320 and i am using amit kalini's book, its actually a nice book... it was a bit concerned about what i can expect but it's not too bad. already picked up a few things like Xml to Datasets and vice versa. Though i seriously think i should have a physical book instead of an ebook... its painful.

Evolution vs creation

a couple of weeks back i had two people from watchtower and they talked to me about my religious beliefs and what i think of religion etc. since i didnt know them i was pretty much frank about it.. its not too difficult being an atheist

well today morning i had a knock on my door and it one of the two people who had visited me along with her husband.. since i was uncomfortable last time around talking on the doorstep.. i invited them in... had a nice chat with them.. i showed them a hymn i dug out from Rigveda its the Creation Hymn.

Anyways... it was nice talking to them... atleast somebody has ears to my philosophical side.

about time i got my act together

been playing about for a while... and i think its enough for now... need to finish my MCAD.... am planning to give 70-320 in 2 weeks time. After that will try and a drastically different route... a friend suggested *nix cert... i am not too sure about the idea though i dont mind hands on *nix....

Refreshing my c++

This week i have spent time reading up on c++ again... it doesn't look that bad anymore... the first day was horrible... so used to c# now... i would love to move on to c# permanently but i am keeping my options open again after a long time.. and i reckoned that a bit of c++ & *nix won't do much harm ...

it does take away all the play time i had scheduled for framework 2 beta.. but its just this week... hopefully while i am at it.. i will install mono on redhat 9 and i will get rotor implementation as well... just have a look around..

sometimes i think i download and install just about everything... wish i had more hours to actually play with it all rather than having to decide one over the other.