Anith Gopal

So, what do you think of the Google News redesign? You like it???  Tell me where you live so I can come hit you on the head a couple of times with a tack hammer …we’ll see if that jars anything loose.  All kidding aside (no I don’t want to hit anyone on the head with a tack hammer), there is plenty of negative feedback on the redesign.  If you’re not sure what changed, the original Google News Blog announcement is here (with screenshots) and you can also see it on your own computer (for now…they may roll it out to other countries besides the US soon so this may not work perpetually) here is how to check: Login to your google account.  Go to http://google.com/news Now visit this link in a new tab:  http://www.google.ca/news The difference initially looks subtle but once you start scrolling it blares like a fog horn in your head.  I’m not the only one who thinks the redesign sucks.  The original announcement is filled with negative comments about the redesign.  Look on the right hand column of the announcement to see related posts and you’ll quickly see there are plenty of people who despise this ‘improvement’.  Even looking in the google news general forum results in the most popular threads being discussions about how bad the redesign actually is

Very interesting statistics that I’ve noticed since moving the site to a Linode VPS . If you take a look at the graphic below, the spike in the middle will probably stick out quite a bit.  Oddly enough, the spike I noticed in CPU percentage used (which is regulated for VPS at Linode) also spiked up disk usage…mainly because I began to swap when cpu/ram use skyrocketed.  All of this happened with Ubuntu 10.04 installed.  CentOS was the first distro I tried but I quickly switched to Ubuntu when I spotted a really nice how-to in the Linode document library.  Oh, and please excuse my horrible gimp skills on the image below…it was a quick and dirty editing of the image: cpu usage After switching to Ubuntu, I began receiving alarms for my account due to the high usage of CPU and disk.  I attempted to tweak settings and configuration files for about a week and realized it just wasn’t going to work for me.  I switched to Debian Lenny and the move was a positive as is reflected in these pictures. disk usage I was hoping Ubuntu 10.04 would fit for me since it is a long term support (LTS) release.

We recently found an issue in the Team Explorer 2010 client while performing backwards compatibility testing, and unfortunately, this wasn’t a bug that we were able to fix for RTM.  This issue will be documented in the RTM ReadMe, but I wanted to make people aware of this should they go searching the web. This issue only occurs when using a Team Explorer 2010 client to modify permissions on Team Foundation Server 2008.   Upon checking the "Inherit security settings" check box on the "Security" tab of the "Properties" dialog for an item in source control, some users may hit a condition that results in a null reference exception.  This null reference is the result of a pre-existing condition with out of sync identities that some TFS 2008 instances may exhibit.  Due to the changes in how identities are managed in TFS 2010, this issue will not occur for 2010 servers.  If this null reference is hit while modifying the inheritance settings, the state of permissions displayed in the "Security" tab may be inaccurate – that is, what is displayed by the individual permissions checkboxes may not be the actual state of that permission.  Clicking the "OK" to save the permissions changes may then result in permissions being set that differ from what the user expected (re-opening the dialog will show the correct permissions after they are saved).  Clicking "Cancel" on the dialog will result in no changes being applied to the permissions.

  There are a lot of timeouts in WCF. let us summarize it here.

Symptom: ================ I’ve meet some cases where TFS version control operations can be quite slow when the TFS deployment is based on a virtual machine like VMWare or Hyper-V.

  CodePlex Foundation begins accepting projects – SD Times: Software Development News

A really thought-provoking blog from Steve Malloy at Turnkey (himself a Scotsman), and reminding us that this is a  season for giving.   I recently spent a weekend at one of the busiest shopping centres in Glasgow trying to raise funds for our Rotary Club’s ShelterBox campaign (see http://shelterbox.org/ ). I’ve done a number of these – Tsunami, End Polio Now etc – and two things never cease to amaze me

  Avez-vous déjà essayé de définir un membre par défaut sur une dimension qui est décliné en rôle ? Lors du déploiement, vous devriez obtenir l’erreur suivante   En effet, comment le moteur Analysis Services pourrait savoir sur quelle dimension il faut appliquer le membre par défaut ? Le seul moyen d’attribuer cette propriété est de l’écrire en script MDX enregistrée dans le cube comme le montre la figure ci-dessous.

Official press pass from MSFT: Microsoft Unveils Microsoft Project 2010 Part of the next wave of Office-related products, Microsoft Project 2010 helps customers reduce costs, improve efficiency, and simplify project and portfolio management. Similar to SharePoint 2010, notice how the “Office” has been removed from the name:

Here’s an issue that some of our WMI enthusiasts have been seeing in the field. When remotely querying the Win32_Product class to determine what software is installed on a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system, a “Generic Failure” (0×80041001) error is returned. If the same query is run locally on the target system, it works just fine.

With appropriate acknowledgment to Phil and Kirstie, this week’s random blather seems to have evolved with a dislocated theme; and rather more so than is usual in my weekly ramblings. It started with a series of events that made me wonder if I am somehow dislocated from the rest of my corporate employees and the huge organization of which I’m part. Mainly due to some unexpected emails that popped up in my Inbox….( read more )

Av Fredrik Normén, Cornerstone At the moment I’m updating a code example for my Silverlight 3.0 course and have added some exception handling to the code. I also got a question about how to handle exception while calling the Load operation of the DomainService class. So I decided to write a blog post about it, maybe someone more have the same question.