The Whole Story

Nokia today announced it has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own, at a price of EUR 3.647 per share. The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian Limited shares it does not already own will be approximately EUR 264 million.

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I went back through the internal e-mails turned over in the antitrust suits against Microsoft, looking for new insights into Bill Gate’s personality. Read on for one of the gems that turned up, showing Gates in the role of chief rabble-rouser. It shows that even the Microsoft co-founder isn’t immune to the frustrations of everyday computer users

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I have heard a bunch of stories floating around the place regarding a relaxation of current domain name rules (.com, .net, .org, etc) however I have absolutely no idea on whether its actually true or not.

The word on the street is basically that domain names could soon be more than just .com (.net, etc) giving you the ability to register domains such as “www.pcgames.game”, “www.movies.film”, etc. The regulators of domain name rules (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have announced this recently at their annual meeting in Paris which will build on the standard .com, .net or country domain names.

Its quite an interesting story, post your comments if you’ve also heard anything about this and if you’ve found sources online, post their links it would be great to find out if this is actually happening.

Are you a VB.NET programmer who’s ever looked through the windows eventlog (eventvwr.exe) thinking to yourself “How can I get my program to write events to the eventlog”? Here’s how:

Public Function WriteToEventLog(ByVal Entry As String, Optional ByVal AppName As String = "VB.NET Application", _
Optional ByVal EventType As EventLogEntryType = EventLogEntryType.Information, Optional ByVal LogName As String = _
“Application”) As Boolean

Dim objEventLog As New EventLog

Try
‘Register the App as an Event Source
If Not objEventLog.SourceExists(AppName) Then

objEventLog.CreateEventSource(AppName, LogName)
End If

objEventLog.Source = AppName

'WriteEntry is overloaded; this is one
‘of 10 ways to call it
objEventLog.WriteEntry(Entry, EventType)
Return True
Catch Ex As Exception
Return False

End Try
End Function

The function WriteToEventLog has 1 parameter (entry to write to event log) with 3 other optional parameters specifying the Application Name, Event Type raised (Information, Warning, Critical) and the logname (whether the entry is written to Application, System, or other log within the event log).

I find this very useful especially in very large applications where writing an external log (besides .txt or .log files) becomes tedious. Writing entries into the event log is really create when you’re writing windows services also.

Hope this helps, please feel free to send me an email if you have any questions.

Pete Wright who is was a programmer for Microsoft Windows one day dreamed of joining Microsoft to contribute to the computer industry and really change the way people use computers.

“I dreamed of working at Microsoft. When Microsoft joined up with Accenture to form Avanade the word ‘consultant’ sounded so wonderfully romantic to me and I wondered if ever I’d make it there as one of the elite band of Avanade consultants, spreading the Microsoft message all over the world. I dreamed of systems that would change lives, help people, and do cool new things never seen before”  - Pete Wright (MacDailyNews).

Now how things change so quickly. Everybody who knows anything about computers knows that Microsoft’s flagship product ‘Microsoft Windows’ is a spaghetti code situation at best, once with the idea that complexity in how an operating system is designed would better the overall product has eventually ended up with a product that is a nightmare to code for, and almost a bigger headache for an end-user to use.

So Pete has done what many programmers im sure have thought at Microsoft before, he has jumped ship to go work for Apple Computer to work on a project which prides it self on end-user simplicity, and a much more managable code-base…Apple MacOSX.

To read all about Pete’s experiences with working with Microsoft and his jump into MacOSX, be sure to check out his blog entry entitled “Goodbye Microsoft, Pete has left the building!”. It is really interesting and well worth a read if you are a programmer youself or student with the same dream of working with Microsoft has Pete once had.

Video of a Nintendo Wii Controlled ‘Smart home’. This is really cool, I wish I could control my house like this…

How cool was that!

Yay! My university exams are finally over. I cannot believe it, there was a time there where it felt as if they would never finish. Although I have finished, I recently got a new job in Melbourne that I start tomorrow so no breaks for me, off to work I go. But it’s not all that bad, I’ll be working for a month then I’ll get my christmas break from work for about two weeks or so.

So I’ve got a few end of year parties coming up for uni, but I found myself wondering…If I didn’t have to goto work right now, what would I be doing for end of year celebrations? How would I be celebrating? Mmm…

• Party all day and all night
• Stay at home
• Sit by the calendar and wait for the new semester!

However you celebrate it, let us know in the comments section. I would be interested on any huge parties happening in your area and what other students get up to this time of year.

“The 2006 rally was the most ambitious of any rally so far, starting London and finishing in Los Angeles just 8 days later, with the organizers flying all 120 cars from Europe to Asia and again from Asia to Europe in 3 Antonov An-124’s and an Iceland Air passenger Boeing 757.”

Amazing!

iTunes has a really great feature which allows you to ’smartly’ list your songs by genre, artist, rating (favor), etc into a seperate ’smart playlist’ which can then be syncronized with your iPod. This makes going through thousands of songs a breeze and makes sure you’re always listening to your most favorite songs, and not “We wish you a merry christmas” in July.

I came across a really great article which discusses just this topic, How to make your iTunes playlist ’smarter’ - Five Tips for Smarter Playlists by David Gagne. Its a great article and helped me get my music sorted out. I already had my music organized in some kind of fashion (I am kinda a control freak with my music collection) but this article made me realize the myriad of features in iTunes which I had totally forgotten about and were underutilized in my playlists.

Check out the article above or find it here, its a great read for any iTunes user.

George.W.Bush has struck it again, this time with the comagulation (if that is even a word) of Internet to “Internets”. Don’t look now people…there’s rumors on the uh…Internets!!!

Oh how I love it!