Picture this: You’re a developer who frequently writes console applications. Each day after work you go home and head to bed, you close your eyes and burnt into the darkness is the ever so familiar output of command prompt jargon.
Does the above sound like you? Sick of screen-burn in your eyes?
Well Microsoft have answered your call to give your eyes a rest

Introducing the “Consolas” font Microsoft developed specifically for developers!!

“When we began work on a project to create a new set of fonts which would take maximum advantage of ClearType, we decided to develop a fixed-pitch font for developers - because no one ever thought of their needs, and we realized a highly-readable fixed-width font would make their lives a lot easier…
…The Windows International fonts team is also working on another version that’ll support Vietnamese, and also the line draw characters that we made to support the console window.”

See for yourself-This image (as shown on IE blog is of the standard 8 x 12Px Raster font used by default in CMD.exe

Compare this to the Consolas type fonts:

You can defiantly see how much more cleaner and easy to read the new font looks compared to the old Raster font (you can’t fit as much on the screen - it’s a trade off for the best in my opinion)

Now, this font comes bundled with Microsoft Office 2007 but if you don’t happen to have Office installed or available to you Microsoft have provided a download for the font from here.
To install the font simply do the following in CMD.exe

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas

logoff

Note: In Windows Vista, you need to run the reg command from an elevated command prompt… When you log back in, Consolas will be an option in the “Command Prompt” Properties.

That should make the reading of Command Prompt output a whole lot more easier… Still, personally this font reminds me of the font used within Konsole/Terminal in Linux.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7e40-4807-8a86-b3d36fab68d3&displaylang=en

I love Windows as much as the next guy however there are certain features on Linux that I really wish were in Windows. E.g. The Power of Bash or Multiple (Virtual) Desktops.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Code Plex program I stumbled across a program that allows users to run multiple desktops within Windows XP & Vista. Its a completely open-source program (yay) and even supports Vista’s DWM based aero interface (They seem to have found a way around the slowness of the SDK however).
This virtual desktop program takes advantage of this new API and uses some tricks of its own to provide a powerful virtual desktop manager with a full screen thumbnail based preview. You can have as many desktops as you want and can seamlessly switch between them.

Some of the programs key features include:

• Multiple-monitor support
• Per-desktop backgrounds
• Sticky windows to exclude windows from the virtual desktop manager
• Live Vista thumbnails of all of your windows (Will only work in Vista-XP does not support WDM)
• An infinite number of desktops only limited by the amount of memory in your computer

Download and toy around Virtual Desktop Manager here http://www.codeplex.com/vdm

Pretty cool huh?

Today, Microsoft Live Labs is announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

MSN.com with Word 2007 theme! 

Update 7/14/07: MSN.com has removed the theme

While so many people wanted to get their hands on iPhone, some of them have their own iPhone usage. One of the customer uses his iStrength with an iHammer doing an iSmashing on the highly sought iPhone… Why o tell me why???

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when a couple of amateurs offer a video homage to our Cracking Open the Apple iPhone gallery – by way of the Captain Caveman school of computer diagnostics – we can’t help but feel slightly insulted, embarrassed, and highly amused. That’s video gold, people. Nice work.

Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=755&tag=nl.e138

Issue: iPhone impact on the enterprise

Make no mistake, the iPhone is a consumer electronics product. It’s an uber-phone aimed at digital enthusiasts who want to use their phone to have a better Internet and computing experience on the go. Of course, no one wants and needs a better mobile computing experience than business users. That’s why the iPhone could quickly spill over to have a significant impact on businesses.

Many businesses and IT departments are already anticipating iPhone requests from employees. In response, Gartner analysts are advising businesses against adopting the iPhone for a variety of reasons, including:

• Lack of enterprise-level security
• Lack of support from mobile e-mail providers (BlackBerry and Good)
• Limited backup options
• iPhone’s $500 price tag
• Apple’s inexperience in delivering enterprise products

In its research note titled “How to Plan for User Interest in the Apple iPhone,” Gartner even went so far as to estimate that the total cost of ownership (TCO) of supporting the iPhone will be double the TCO of supporting the BlackBerry or Palm Treo.

Full article can be found over at: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=518&tag=nl.e138

Consider the following scenario. If you have a computer that uses a high definition audio device, which is running Microsoft Windows Vista, and you are using Windows Media Player 11, handles and memory may be lost because of a leak in the Lsm.exe process.

As you fast forward through your Windows Media Player library, or have a playlist set to repeat, you may lose a large amount of handles in a short amount of time. This can lead to performance degradation and in some cases, “out of memory” error messages and other unexpected behavior. If you review the Task Manager you may notice that Lsm.exe is consuming a large amount of memory.

This issue only occurs if the following statements are true:

• Your computer utilizes a High Definition Audio Device
• You are running Windows Vista, or Windows Vista 64-bit.
• You are using Windows Media Player 11 to play back audio files.

There is a hotfix available from Microsoft to resolve this issue, however in some cases this may not resolve the issue. The following workaround is a method that I have tested on several systems that exhibit this issue and have found that it does indeed resolve the issue.

• Click on Start, and then click on Control Panel.
• Click on Hardware and Sound.
• Under Sound, click on “Manage audio devices”.
• Select your output device in the list that appears (the default output devices is commonly labelled “Speakers”)
• Right click on the device and from the context menu click on Properties.
• In the “Properties” window, click on the “Enhancements” tab.
• Tick/check the option box for “Disable all enhancements”.
• Click on OK to dismiss the properties window.
• Click on OK to dismiss the “Sound” window.
• Close the Control Panel window by clicking the Close (”X”) button at the top right of the window.

NOTE: You will have to restart your computer in order to reclaim previously lost memory and handles.

This article was posted by MSBLOG’s Kristen Kenny on his personal blog: http://www.canucky.net

Spring is in the air, and like many of us, Microsoft is looking to slim down for summer. Despite its former reluctance to support thin-client computing, it looks like Microsoft has loosened up and clarified its licensing when it comes to thin clients. MSFT has claimed that it will loosen the strings that it currently has on thin-client licensing a more “supported” feature in its Windows OS rather than the gray area it currently is now.

First, they are going to permit streaming Vista directly to thin clients, allowing it to boot from the network instead of a local hard drive-until now it was only really a Unix/Linux (and MacOS) concept. This means that any updates/program installs made on the server will be applied to the Thin-clients as soon as the next user ‘logs on’. This is because the OS resides on the server itself.
The use of this technology is all well and good but impractical in some instances because the use of Thin-clients chews up huge amounts of bandwidth!

The other change is a new subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD).VECD lets you host Vista as virtual machines on something like VMware or Virtual PC. Currently, in my environment we do something along these lines. VPN users connect to a farm of VMware ESX servers running multiple copies of Windows via RDP. Since they are just using RDP, we only need one port open on our firewall, which keeps home PC cooties off our network. Since it’s to a PC that’s actually a virtual machine on ESX it’s simple to expand the number to meet increased demand.

Until now, this has been a gray area as far as licensing is concerned; with VECD it is now legitimate, although there is supposed to be a fee schedule based on the number of devices you are using it with. The cost will be different for full PCs and thin clients, but Microsoft’s announcement does not go into much detail.

Only time will tell…

Microsoft Press Pass: Found HERE
Info Sourced from: http://arstechnica.com/

1. Make a list or a How-to tutorial: If you look at past Digg posts, you will find an endless number of ‘Top 10 Photoshop tricks’ tutorials and ‘Top 30 CSS’ sites lists. To top it all, take this post as an example!

2. Flame the RIAA: Post any story that is negative about the RIAA, it is definitely going onto the front page.

3. Flame the RIAA again!: Flame the RIAA again and make it to the top, twice! You can add in MPAA and Sony too to spice it up a bit!

4. A Witty or Catchy title is always a Bonus: Post your story with a catchy title, this applies not only to Digg but to anything you write. ‘Why this is’ ‘How the RIAA..’, ‘5 reasons…’ are a few examples.

5. Write about Digg and Kevin Ross: Diggers love Digg and just about any news related to Digg and its founder.

6. Write about the evil alliance: Writing anything bad about George bush, Fox News, Wal-Mart, Microsoft will get you there…

7. Write about Google, Apple, Firefox, YouTube, Ubuntu: These are the good-doers in Diggers eyes. Write about them and you will be on the front page (I hope). C’mon how many freaking Ubuntu articles have you seen on the front page?!!

8. Get your friends to digg for you: A friend in need is a friend indeed and this applies to Digg as well. Add top diggers to your friends list and Digg their articles. They might Digg your articles in return and vice-versa. You can also get all your 50+ (MSN) messenger contacts to Digg for you, Hey you can even co-ordinate a massive digging session!

9. Use a fancy profile icon: Looks go a long way. On the predominately white background Digg page, bright coloured Profile Icons stand out. You have more chances of being Dugg if you have a colourful profile icon, as this attracts attention.

Digg this article!

10. Last but not the least: Write a ‘10 steps to get onto the Digg Front Page‘ article! Hey, it is worth a try…

Have you ever hope to have some trainings on Microsft products? Wait! What about Macromedia, Corel or even on managing your data center?

Guess what? This training is not by Microsoft, but it’s by HP Learning Center. HP is providing free learning courses on 46 different courses which includes Software technogies (which includes Linux…), IT Pros, Business Skills, In-house Marking and Real Estate.

I haven’t attended any of the classes yet, but I do suspect that somewhat the instructor will be introducing a lot of HP solutions to their students, it could end up into a marketing thingy from HP.

For a full list of all available courses that HP Learning Courses are providing, please see:

http://h30187.www3.hp.com/all_courses.jsp

To find more information about it, please see:

http://h30187.www3.hp.com/

Anybody with experience attended any of the free HP Learning Courses? What do you think? What’s your feedback towards it? Post back in the comments section! We would like to hear you out!

I do not mind if you are using Gmail than Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail), as I’m a Gmail fan myself (loads way faster for me)

Have you ever wonder which website gave out your email when you register yourself in some website? Here’s a simple trick you can use:

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a “+” in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all massages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

Does it work? I haven’t try it out but reports say that it works!

Does Windows Live Mail have something similar? Is there something in the works? What do you think of this feature? Leave a message!

Source: http://www.hedir.com/introduction/about17942.html

Update: According to Kevyn, Yahoo Mail already has this implemented. It is called “AddressGuard”. You use [basename]-[keyword]@yahoo.com. Thanks Kevyn!

Remember the Microsoft Office 12/2007 test drive website we blogged about in June 06? This test drive site allowed the common user to try out tasks in a sandbox environment before they bought the product sight unseen.

Well Microsoft have just launched a new test environment site for people to try out many Vista related tasks before the product goes on sale in a few weeks and without having to install Vista on your computer.

Where the Microsoft Office 07 test drive used a Citrix client to connect to the remote server this new Vista test environment seams to use a Virtual Server/Computer plugin to view the test environment in a browser window which I find to be superior when connecting to the sandbox.

All nerdyness aside this innovative idea is sure to win Microsoft customers for their next Generation of Desktop OS be warned however-when I tried it I found the whole thing to be dead slow so be patient its bound to ease up soon.

Find the website here
Source Active Win

As you may or may not be aware, there has been some controversy regarding Google’s tips on some search phrases.

Some see this as a good thing (it’s helping users), some as a bad thing (they’re using their position as a monopoly), and some really just don’t care (it’s their webpage, people see it’s not a search result, what’s the big deal?).

Personally, I think this is a bad thing - but one which I’ve seen coming for a long time. It’s not the tip per se. After all, most companies would do this anyway. It’s the fact that Google says they’re not like most companies.

Remember the lawsuit against Microsoft regarding IE7? They said Microsoft was using their monopolist position to increase usage of Windows Live Search - the default search engine in Internet Explorer 7. They said they “don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN on install”, that “users should choose” and that “companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services” - this despite the fact that it’s very easy to change the default IE search engine. (link)

Fast forward to this week, and we see that Google has done something as “bad” as what they said Microsoft did - if not worse. They are using the trust people have in them to advertise their own products. Unlike IE7, where competitors could easily add a link for users to change their default browser, here there is no way for Google’s competitors to create an ad like Google’s. A “tip” with a picture is very different from a link which is clearly marked as being “sponsored”.

As I said, I’d expect this from most companies. But not from a company whose PR department doesn’t get tired of saying “We’re not like most companies”. I see this not as a “meaningless tip”, but as a sign of what’s to come - Google betraying the trust people have in them.

And what do you think of this? Feel free to comment!

Recently (July 18th 2006 to be precie) Microsoft acquired Winternals Software-a site created in 1996 by  Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information.

Yesterday Microsoft made all their old utilities available to the public (the free ones anyway), as well as some brand new ones such as Process Monitor 1.0.
Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, or even a home user, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications.

You can find the new site located here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx

Even if you don’t use Windows, it’s almost certain you’ve heard about activation - when you install Windows you can use it only for a few days without activating. After that, you’ll need to activate it (ie. communicate with a Microsoft server to tell it you’ve just installed Windows, and receive a message saying if it was successful or not) or it you’ll only be able to start Windows in safe mode.

But does Windows Genuine Activation (WGA) work? Not likely. Is it completely transparent and hassle-free for legitimate, paying customers? Maybe in a parallel universe, but not on Earth.

Being a beta tester for several companies I format my computers all the time. I have a handful of licences, but I don’t keep track of what licence is installed on what computer - the family computer has an OEM version of Windows installed, and on all other computers (which get formatted at most once a week) I use the first product key I can grab. I have 3 full XP licences for 2 computers, so I’m certainly not a pirate, right? Not according to Microsoft.

I don’t know how many activations you’re allowed to have during a given time period, but I’ve lost count of the number of times Internet activation failed because I had activated “too many times”. When this happens you have no alternative but to call - not too big a deal, right? Wrong. I don’t know how it’s like in the rest of the world, but at least in Portugal there are two phone numbers - a regular paid one, and a toll-free one. The problem? More and more people don’t have fixed phones anymore, just mobile phones, and here in Portugal you can’t call the toll free number from your mobile phone - you get a signal like the number didn’t exist. If you want to activate from a mobile phone, you have to pay the 10 minute phone call (this includes trying to activate by phone, hearing all the instructions you can’t skip - I’ve tried countless times - and explaining what happened to the operator you’re transfered to when activation fails).

Furthermore, your copy isn’t deactivated when you uninstall. Imagine you work on a small business which owns a boxed version of, say, Office. You’ll be doing a presentation later that week, so you install Office 2003 on your laptop, since now you only have Office 2000. You install and activate, but something went wrong with the upgrade - addins stopped working, random crashes… You format your computer, and install and activate Office 2003 again. This time everything works, but at the last moment you find that your laptop is too old to play that embeded video in your presentation, so you uninstall Office and install and activate it on your boss’s brand new laptop. Chances are you’ll have a problem activating, even though these are legitimate uses - you can have the boxed version installed on only one computer, which was the case here. However, because programs aren’t deactivated Microsoft thought Office was installed in 3 computers at the same time when in fact it was installed in only one. Trying to convince the operator that you’re not breaking the licence can be though, or at least take some time. And if you think this was just some made up story of what could happen, think again - this happened to me last Sunday.

But think about it - just who is prevented from installing pirated copies of Windows? Have pirated copies of Windows stopped circulating? They haven’t - on the contrary, with the widespread usage of peer-to-peer software it’s never been easier to find cracked software, including software which requires activation.

So to sum up… Is WGA serving its purpose? No, and I honestly don’t believe WGA in Vista will be any different. What WGA is doing - and it does this brilliantly - is annoy paying customers, preventing them from doing their work. I’ve lost count of the number of times I went to some company to prepare the computers for some presentation later that week, and ended up having to install OpenOffice.Org because I couldn’t activate their copies of Office. If anything, WGA is the #1 reason for people to stop using Office and Windows.

Resources which are currently being wasted with WGA could very well be used for more interesting projects - perhaps make some Microsoft Research prototypes a reality, or creating new products all together. As it is, WGA is doing nothing more than making Windows, Office and other products which use it a bit more expensive because of the money spent on developing and maintaining it.

Edit: It was suggested in the comments section that I simply don’t activate Office and Windows, since I will be reinstalling them anyway. Since Office (at least all the versions I’m using) limit you to opening Office applications X times, I have to activate. I can’t take the chance of needing to edit a document or make a presentation, and have Office tell me “Sorry, you can’t - you need to activate”. Regarding Windows, it could work if it weren’t for the fact that without activating I can’t get access to Windows Update and a lot of downloads on Microsoft Download Center. To be able to fully use those two services, you need to have an activated copy of Windows (not all downloads from the Download Center require activation, but many do).