Where is my Pack ?

Oh boy! I am receiving monthly updates for MSDN subscription via DHL. But where is my welcome pack? Even yesterday I got 12 dvds, but something is terrible with my initial cd/dvd collection.

I got a booklet, a letter and subscriber id card as the first shipment; second one is halted at customs asking me to pay taxes (it arrived via a wrong way due to an address issue) and now receiving updates.

Though I tried to contact MSDB center to get a solution, still no luck with me :-(

SmartClient Deep Dive

.Net code crunchers, Hurry up!

Special event is coming down for .Netters on this Friday. Sessions are conducted by two of our own resources and one speaker from India.

Date/Time: 31st March 2006, 4.00 PM Onwards
Venue: NDB Bank auditorium, Colombo 02
Sessions:

(1) Data binding in smart clients - by Prasanna Amirthalingam
(2) ClickOnce Deployment - by Wellington Perera
(3) Developing VSTO Applications (Visual Studio Tools for Office) - by Dr. Nitin Paranjape

Register NOW @ http://dotnetforum.lk/register/deepdive

$$$$

My Guru has gifted me one another fabulous thing. Wela gave me a gift voucher to obtain a precious MSDN subscription few weeks back. Cant think of an ideal way to convey my gratitude :-) I am about to receive my welcome pack with number of cds and dvds. So then my home pc will run on fully licensed softwares. And rest of the year is gonna be full of adventures. This is the best windfall I got in my career.

To get the maximum advantage of this opportunity, I need to upgrade my pc within next month or two. Damn! I’m outta cash, looking for every possibility of earning some quick bucks.

Anybody looking for a keen partner for a robbery? Stop here, you are at the right place and drop me a mail. He he…

Colombo blogosphere meet-up

I stepped in to barefoot garden cafe last evening along with Casper to join with sri lankan bloggers’ meet-up. Razor, Chaminda and Wela joined after a while and it was kinda unfamiliar at first coz we were new to the neighborhood. With the fall of dark, gotta know each others and felt very much glad to be there. Big thank goes to indi for organizing the thing and hope we all can keep it up.

There were ppl, I’m reading their blogs daily but haven’t seen ever before. And some ppl knew me by my blog name, but haven’t met me ever before. It was a nice blend of ppl of many varieties. Great to meet you guys > Mahangu, Dilantha, Chamil and all of other folks… still confused with names, who and who..

I’ve stolen wela’s snaps and published here.

Chao till next day…

Adobe released a heroic wrestler to the arena of web development tools.

“Go beyond AJAX with Flex. With Flex you can do your job faster, more easily and with fewer errors”

That was an advert about Adobe Flex 2.0 beta which attracted my eyes. I went ahead, downloaded and installed. Phew! Look at this. It took my breath away…..!

Rich text editors, Colour pickers, Video displays, Sliders, Tree views all are built in together. Flex development and runtime environment allows you to create rich interfaces web applications.

Flex supports a component-based development model. We can use the pre-built components included with Flex, can extend the Flex component library by creating new components, or can combine pre-built components to create composite components.

Below is a bit from their introduction;

Flex defines a development and runtime environment that lets developers familiar with server-side technologies build rich front ends for applications that take advantage of Flash Player. While executing in Flash Player, your application can interact with server-side functionality, such as databases, web services, Java objects, and other server-side services.

Flex brings the power of Flash to developers who are familiar with traditional programming languages and server-side development environments. In Flex, you use a standards-based programming model to develop an application, describe the user interface, configure user-interface controls, and define data bindings.

I’m still playing around with the IDE and will keep my blog updated about mysterious things I found on Flex.

Ubuntu - Linux for human beings

Linux for human beings, well I tried the so said Ubuntu last night at home. I agree with the fact that it is an impressive alternative to windows. I’m afraid to call it as an Operating System, coz my friendly neighborhood spider said it not an OS, it is a distribution…. Whatever… here are some of the screenshots from my Ubuntu desktop. The creators might have thought a lot about taking screenshots, that’s why they have dedicated a separate menu section for that.

Vista Flavours

Microsoft delivered five different versions of the Windows XP operating system. They treated different types of PC hardware (for example Windows XP Professional Tablet PC Edition for mobile PCs and supports handwriting recognition and Windows XP Media Center Edition serves for home entertainment system).

And now they are gonna deliver five different versions of Windows Vista. Each version is focused on the needs of a specific type of usage instead of different hardware platforms. Target is to make sure that everyone has an offering tailored to meet their specific needs. Namely they are as follows. You will find detailed descriptions on each of these flavours on Windows Vista page.

Windows Vista Business
Windows Vista Enterprise
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Ultimate
Windows Vista Home Basic

Weda Mahattaya

I am outta good health during past few days. Since I was tired with western medicines I thought of going back to Aurvedic. I was directed to a Weda Mahattaya, who is having many letters following his name. I have been there for couple of times now and on my last visit he asked me “son, do me a favour, can u go to the shop nearer and bring me two cigarettes” Oops… he jammed the things...

Most Wanted One Dayer

Most wanted one dayer in the history of Cricket. Nothing to depict, have a glance at the score card.

Good Bye Thunder Bird

I was using Mozilla Thuderbird as my mail client as well as my RSS reader for years. But once the machine crashes, there is no easy way to claim my inbox or address book back other than transferring bulk files. (Is there any?)

Now I have passed the ball completely to Outlook 2003 which has some additional features as well, like Outlook calendar and Outlook tasks (Wela gave me a brief session on those stuffs few months ago)

Then I had to find a perfect RSS aggregator. I asked from number of experts and finally chosen RSS Bandit. Yeah, its pretty fine, light weighted, cool and easy.

Developer's Song

I caught this from a mail received, its really cool.

The Developer's Song for Project Manager
(Sing to the tune of Celine Dion's Because You LovedMe)

Because You Told Me

For all the bugs I had to fix
For all those hours spent after six
For all those specs I had to read
For every thing you made me speed
For every change you made me do
For every time you blamed me too
I'll be forever thankful baby
You're the one who worked me up
Never let me go
You're the one who pushed me through it all

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'coz you believed

I did everything I did,
Because you told me

You gave me timelines that made me cry
I had no choice but to tell you lies
I lost my mind, you brought it back to me
You said no client was out of reach
You stood by me, I took the fall
I used your plan for toilet roll
I'm grateful for each day you gave me
Maybe I don't know that much
But I know this much is true
I did everything because you told me to