Alchemi - .NET Grid Computing Framework

Alchemi [.NET Grid Computing Framework]

"Alchemi is an open source software framework that allows you to painlessly aggregate the computing power of networked machines into a virtual supercomputer (computational grid) and to develop applications to run on the grid.

It has been designed with the primary goal of being easy to use without sacrificing power and flexibility.

Alchemi includes:
The runtime machinery (Windows executables) to construct computational grids.
A .NET API and tools to develop .NET grid applications and grid-enable legacy applications.

..."

Cool...

Now how to put this to use...

(via Ohad's WebLog - .Net Virtual SuperComputer (GRID))

BlogExtension Plug-in for Windows SharePoint Services

SharePoint Thoughts - Discussion view

"The BlogExtension Plug-in for Windows SharePoint Services (yes, I know I have a knack for picking long names) is ready for use. In the tradition of big search companies whose names rhyme with noodle, I'm going to call this a Beta Release (even though you won't see word beta anywhere, nor is functionality truncated).

Why is this a Beta Release?
Feedback is needed...
Does the UI make sense?
Does it work like your other plug-ins? (this is where I have little to no comparison data)
Ideas for improvement?
There is no documentation (or than this post and the download page).
I may have to change things around a bit. Time will tell.
Lets all be trendy by using something that is in beta. :)

What do you get out of it?
Two plug-ins: one for publishing content and the other for simply publishing links.
A really cool way of interacting with your SharePoint sites and blogs.
Zero cash investment free is always nice!

Installation instructions:
Unzip the download file, run the exe.
Either point your RSS reader to folder where the plug-in is installed or manually copy the files to your reader’s “plugin” folder.
Boot your RSS reader and configure the plug-in.
Publish to your heart’s content"

Sounds interesting. I'd be even more interested if I was using a full client RSS reader instead of Bloglines... Still I'm thinking about it for internal blog usage.

Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager (Standard)

Download details: Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager (Standard)

"USB flash drives are compact and easy-to-use devices that are similar in use to your computer hard drive. USB flash drives slip into your pocket, conveniently around your neck or on a keychain for ultimate portable storage. USB flash drives in 2005 can hold up to 4 gigs of data, which is over 1700 three-minute songs (66 hours) recorded as MP3s or about three times the content of a standard compact disc. If you share a computer, USB flash drives are a great way to store personal information. USB Flash Drives are also a good great option for saving information and share it with others. When you have many things to save and share but you have a limited number of USB Flash Drives, you will need to backup the information and restore it when needed. This is where the Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager application can help you. The Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager will help you backup and restore presentation, pictures, songs and applications from and to USB Flash Drive devices and take them with you. The application can also help you to classify and name USB Flash Drives images (for instance 'My network configuration' or 'The pictures for my grandma') and lets you see this name whenever the USB Flash Drive is plugged into the computer.

Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager is available for Windows XP only. "

Sounds kind of interesting... The only downside for me is that my primary work machine is Win2K (and when I upgrade it will be to Win2k3.

Still my home machine is XP (and so is my wife's) and I have a couple flash drives, so will have to play with this (or maybe hook up my wife/son).

Only in LA...

Star Wars Line Update

"Since I know everyone is dying to find out what's going on with the Star Wars line I've taken it upon myself to read through the entire thread at liningup.net as well as call them several times now and here's the facts of the moment: ..."

LOL. I love LA... :)

Land Walker Robot

Sakakibara Kikai's Land Walker Robot : Gizmodo

"Sakakibara Kikai's new Land Walker robot may look ridiculous, but it has guns. There is no word from the company on whether or not it has any ammo, but the mere fact that it has guns makes it awesome..."



I gots to get me one of these!

A bird's-eye view [Google Maps with Satellite]

A bird's-eye view

"Have you ever wished you could see what someplace looked like before you got there? A house? A hotel? A freeway exit? We thought you might find it useful, so we've incorporated Keyhole technology into Google Maps and Google Local. Now when you type an address into Google Maps, you can click the 'Satellite' link and see a view of the area. ..."

Pretty cool... These Keyhole satellite pictures are great quality at a high resolution (in most areas). They are also pretty recent, more so than any other that I've come across (I guage this by looking at my neighborhood. Most don't show the damn cluster houses that were built in the field behind us a couple years ago, cutting off our view of the mountains...)

For example, here's why I like Simi. There's a hill on the way into Simi from the east that has a big smiley. You can see it here (zoom in all the way), Simi Smiley. Every time I see that smiley on the hill on the way home I can't help but smile.

:)

SQL Server 2005 Virtual Lab

Visual Studio Hosted Experience

"Step into the SQL Server 2005 Virtual Lab for Free

It's simple — no complex setup or installation is required to try out SQL Server 2005 running in the full-featured MSDN Virtual Lab. As part of the MSDN Virtual Lab, you will have full access to SQL Server 2005 through the following modules:

SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
SQL Server 2005 Introduction to SQL Server Management Studio
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
SQL Server 2005 Server Management Objects
SQL Server 2005 SQL CLR Integration
SQL Server 2005 SQL Query Tuning
SQL Server 2005 SQL Server and ADO.NET (Lab A)
SQL Server 2005 SQL Server and ADO.NET (Lab B)
SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Enhancements
SQL Server 2005 Web Services
SQL Server 2005 XML Capabilities

You get a downloadable manual and a 90-minute block of time for each module. You can sign up for additional 90-minute blocks at any time. "

Want to play with SQL Server 2005, but don't want to play the beta install game? Or you just want to check out a couple of the new features? Then Microsoft's Virtual Lab's are for you.

For 90 minutes you get your own Virtual Server session where you can play with SQL 2005.

Pretty cool for a quick and dirty peek. There are a bunch of other Virtual Labs to check out too...

(via Matt - Are you ready to experience SQL Server 2005? - SQL Server 2005 Virtual Labs now available)

How To Sysprep a Virtual PC Image

The Soul of a Virtual Machine : Sysprepping a virtual machine

"You can create a base virtual machine with the operating system and applications you want, and then copy its .vhd file to use for other virtual machines. When you do this, it's important to run a tool called Sysprep on the base virtual machine. That way, when you start a virtual machine that uses a copy of the base virtual machine's .vhd file, the guest operating system will be assigned a new SID, GUID, MAC address, and so forth when it starts up. This way you won't end up with network conflicts between different virtual machines that use the same copied .vhd file. ..."

Pretty detailed instructions on how to Sysprep a Virtual PC guest OS image...

This is something I need to look at, as I'm copying base images and reusing them all the time. Also this might help when I restore a ghost image to a VPC.

(via Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] - Sysprep your virtual machine)

Tree Surgeon 1.0 [Development Source Directory Tree Setup Utility]

Tree Surgeon - Confluence

"Have you ever spent a few days setting up a new development tree? Have you ever spent several days setting up several development trees? Have you even spent weeks trying to perfect all your development trees using a set of best practices?

If the answer to any of the above answers is 'yes', then you'll like Tree Surgeon!

Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator. Just give it the name of your project, and it will set up a development tree for you in seconds. More than that, your new tree has years worth of accumulated build engineering experience built right in.
Give Tree Surgeon a spin today!

Tree Surgeon 1.0
Tree Surgeon 1.0 is now ready for download. Its pretty simple, but it is fully functional. Its based on Mike Roberts's article How to setup a .NET Development Tree [my post on this].

Download the installer, and just run the GUI. Your generated project will appear in a sub-directory of the Tree Surgeon Application directory and you should move it to wherever you like to develop on your machine (the meta-root if you read the article above.)

Your generated project has a Visual Studio solution waiting for you in the src folder. Also, if you go into the project root directory, you can run an automated build. ..."

This is pretty cool.

In about 2 seconds you get a complete dev tree, already setup witn NAnt/NUnit and ready to be compiled.

The only issue from my seat is that out of the box it creates C# projects. But that's a little thing and the source is available...

(via Larkware - The Daily Grind 593)

NSurvey 1.9 Released

free .net survey software solutions web based

"NSurvey v1.9 is now available for free from the release download section.

V1.9 is another step toward the goal to match enterprise and indivual needs with a free professional survey and form application.

NSurvey supports now one of the most requested feature which is the capability to create multi-languages forms. The core engine has been updated to support this is an easy and intuitive way to use. Creating a single form in English, French or any other language is not a problem anymore.

A new tutorial / documentation section will also open very soon to help you with all cool and 'hidden' nsurvey features using the excellent flash demo generator from http://www.instant-demo.com/ .

Meanwhile here is the complete change list of v1.9 :

New features
------------
NSurvey's form engine has been fully updated to support multi-languages forms
User languages can be prompted or detected automatically from cookie, browser, session or query string variable
Results can be filtered by a specific date range
Results can be filtered by the language choosen by the user
IMPORTANT change on the Addin's interface, a new LanguageCode property has been added to allow multi-language addin's
Parent matrix questions text is now show along the child question's text in the results
Xml language resource file naming is now based also on the full name (eg: en-US -> en-US.xml). In case the full name is not available the engine will try to load the file based on the two letter name (eg: en -> en.xml). This allows a greater flexibilty for multi-region languages like arabic, chinese etc ....
Results can be shown as Pie chart graphics
Branching and skip rules are now also cloned in the clone process ..."


The VERY cool NSurvey has a new release out...

If you're doing surveys at work/on your site/etc (how I hate the "Fill out the attached Word doc survey and email it back" surveys) or if you are interested in seeing the code for a cool ASP.Net project you should check this out.


(via TheServerSide.Net - NSurvey 1.9 Released)

Extend the Common Dialog Boxes Using Windows Forms 1.x

Smart Client Developer Center: Extend the Common Dialog Boxes Using Windows Forms 1.x

"Describes some techniques for placing Windows Forms controls inside the standard File Open dialog box. You can use this ability to provide 'preview' or 'open as' behavior in your own applications. The same techniques can be applied to the other common dialog boxes. (8 printed pages)

..."

Sounds interesting.

Network Security Toolkit (NST)

networksecuritytoolkit.org

"Welcome to the Network Security Toolkit (NST). This bootable ISO live CD is based on Fedora Core 2. The toolkit was designed to provide easy access to best-of-breed Open Source Network Security Applications and should run on most x86 platforms.

The main intent of developing this toolkit was to provide the network security administrator with a comprehensive set of Open Source Network Security Tools. The majority of tools published in the article: Top 75 Security Tools by insecure.org are available in the toolkit.

What we find rather fascinating with NST is that we can transform most x86 systems (Pentium II and above) into a system designed for network traffic analysis, intrusion detection, network packet generation, wireless network monitoring, a virtual system service server, or a sophisticated network/host scanner. This can all be done without disturbing or modifying any underlying sub-system disk. NST can be up and running on a typical x86 notebook in less than a minute by just rebooting with the NST ISO CD. The notebook's hard disk will not be altered in any way.

NST also makes an excellent tool to help one with all sorts of crash recovery troubleshooting scenarios and situations."

Another cool sounding bootable CD OS/Toolkit.

I wish I could be rebooted and "transformed" as easily... :|

(via Kent J. Chen's Weblog - Bootable Network Security Toolkit)

VisualStudioHacks.com

VisualStudioHacks.com

"Welcome to Visual Studio Hacks.com! (vshacks.com works as well)

On this site I plan on posting information about add-ins, macros, and tools for Visual Studio. Each item will have an overview and screenshots. I have already posted a number of tools and add-ins, I plan on trying to post at least 2-3 a week.

Visual Studio Hacks.com is a companion site for the book Visual Studio Hacks, but it is more than just that. All of the content on this site is original content, even though it may cover some of the same add-ins and tools covered in the book.

Future plans for the site include a section for Articles and Tips as well as Forums."

Sounds like this could become a cool site. There are already a few "hacks" posted, with more coming I'm sure.

Best of all, there's a complete RSS feed.

(via .Avery Blog - VisualStudioHacks.com)