While earth has a lot many creative and highly talented artistic Homo sapiens , i come from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity Betelgeuse. After setting foot on earth and acquiring a point-and-shoot Sony Cybershot DSC-H7 a few weeks back, i decided to give this whole artistic thing a shot.. and here are them results : Found in Deviant Art & Picasa Web
One of my recent favs being "A New Dimension" - its a wallpaper i made for MSDN Channel 8.

I'll be adding more of my deviations and pics after one of my- self signed NDA's are lifted.

IE8 Beta 1 was released this MIX! The current beta of IE 8 is cosmetically similar to IE 7, lacks a spell checker. On the other hand, it does come with some developer tools to view HTML/CSS/JavaScript with the ability to trace the JavaScript Stack. No live editing of code yet. How would you change IE 8? Go ahead and leave your comments...

Here are my thoughts/observations/ideas/rants/.../etc:

 * Domain Name highlighting is a good addition
 * Visually Identical to IE 7
  * Renders ACID 2 nice and well
 * Gets a 17/100 on ACID 3
 * No spell check (yet)??
 * Lack of easy interface customization
 * No compelling new features
 * Channel 8 is quirky on IE 8

What i'd like to see in the final release:

 * Auto detect best rendering solution based on script/css errors
 * Manual switch rendering modes without the need to restart browser
  * Easy customization of Interface including changing position/size/color/icon of all UI Elements
 * Developer Tool with capacity to modify code
 * Spell Check please
 * Better ACID 3 scores
 * A product with a more continuous development cycle with decent feature updates and refreshes
 * A good offline browser engine for AJAX sites (similar to Google Gears)

I read this article on the wired today about a blind teenage cracker who is specializes in phone phreaking and did a lot of damage.. I think the kid should have remained hacker and stayed away from the dark side. It's acceptable to speak to the pope but wasting government money is something else.

Anyways, in case you hackers happen to read this, you got my respect.. and feel free to inform me about any vulnerabilities in my site.. thank.

Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 officially RTM'd on Feb 4, 2008 . The RTM build was nothing but RC Refresh 2 code ; so some of them testers already had the RTM before they knew it. The testing part was really fun - I kinda liked it even. But then came the RTM gold bits , wasn't as pleasant as expected ; partly because us techies got the binary standalone installer for RTM not the Windows Update way. My system was a fully loaded Vista Ultimate with loads of installed software and loads more of tweaks - it was running on minimal services, which i suspect to be a partial cause of my 48 hour installation ordeal. The installation went on for a solid 36 hours (on an infinite cycle) before it failed and I reinstalled vista and i'm in the process of getting all the software back on.

Normal users have nothing to worry, your final two updates required to make the jump have been delivered in the previous patch Tuesday. You should expect SP1 to be delivered via Windows Update sometime in March/April.

Vista SP1 brings with it many tweaks including fixes for the infamous file transfer issues. And of course Ultimate users continue to get dust.

Update: Seems like I wasnt the only one having SP1 RTM install issues, and Microsoft has fixed them.  And here is more info on post SP performance.

This is a funny one, super awesome funny.. i suggest you watch this

Life At Microsoft - The Truth Revealed

Requires Silverlight : a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows. -says microsoft.

Jake from 8bitjoystick has broken the news on 360's latest revision codenamed 'Opus' and 'Valhalla'. In short, Xenon age cases are going green with Opus internals and Valhalla will unify the CPU and GPU into a single chip thus further reducing cost and hence lower prices! hurray!
The 360 is currently on Falcon, Jasper is expected in Fall 2008 [price drop this holiday season??]; Opus is not expected hit retail shelves, and will most likely serve as replacements to the RROD's we send in. Valhalla is expected to be last of 360's iterations before the 360 becomes last generation and a new XBOX takes over.

And now on to Major Nelson; new updates to xbox.com - you can now modify profile information from within the site :)

In rather unrelated and disheartening news, January 2008 NPD numbers show the 360 at third position (which is usually reserved for the PS3). This drop in sales could be attributed to supply chain issues Microsoft is facing and well Blu-Ray gains in the format wars. But the overall numbers (cumulative) still point to a strong second for the 360 and a rather laid back bottom-of-the-pile for the PS3.

Thats all the 360 news for now folks.

Walt Mossberg's got an early preview of Lenovo's latest , the X300! It's also slim, not super-slim; but fits in a manila envelope. The X300 has a higher price point and starts at a full 1000$ over the MBA. No options on Hard drive configuration here- only a 64gb SSD ; comes with 3USB ports, WiFi, built in optical drive and options for GPS all packed in a 3.12 pound package that runs on removable batteries. Apple could take a few cues from this development and so can Lenovo (on the design aspects).

Update: More details have emerged about the X300 , and it has been spotted in the wild!

Update Again: Watch the X-300 taken apart. You'll notice the level of user serviceable components. Thats a big plus!

My desktop floats on an average Intel C2D E6550@2.33Ghz,Gigabyte 965P-S3,2gigs DDR2@667Mhz, NVidia GeForce 8500GT-512MB; all running at clock speed and with CIA2(CPU Intelligent Accelerator) Disabled. On top of this I run vista x64. My usual Northbridge temperature (as measured using external device) is about 50*C (112* F) - this is while doing normal work and development. But the strange thing happens when i start playing Crysis - while my processor tends to get worked out (and the temperature rises), i notice that the Northbridge temperature drops to 40*C(104F).Initially i dismissed this as an error, but after trying out Crysis 4 times, I can confirm that this is happening. I'd like to know if this has happened to anyone else?

Update: Tested the theory on Quake 4 as well, the results are surprisingly similar.