Andrej Tozon's blog

Microsoft recently launched a new Live service called Windows Live QnA (Beta), where you can ask all kinds of questions, answer the questions to which you think you know the answer, and also vote for the best answer, given by others.

So if you have a deep or silly question no one around you knows the answer to, head over to Windows Live QnA and ask away...

And if you need an invite to get there... post a comment here.

Miha writes about doing regular data backups to prevent losing valuable information we're all storing on our disks... and perhaps not caring about it as we should.

There's more to experiencing disk failure, even if you do regular backups... when your disk fails, you get to find out how good your backups really are... and what exactly are you storing in your archive.

It was about a month ago, when my primary disk failed... data lost... Yes, I have backup copies... or so I thought... When browsing through several CDs and DVDs, I kept on seeing my business/dev files, backed up all over again...  the same, exact duplicated stuff all over the place... Code, Outlook files, Documents, more code, ... But personal things, like gigs of photos... partials only. The archive I thought I had was incomplete.

Ok, it's not that bad, it turns out that I actually will be able to restore some data - but for a price. So next time you're about to skip backing up your image gallery or other personal files, because you think you don't have the time (or enough DVDs) to burn a few more copies, think about what's more important to you - your business or your personal life. Or... how much are you willing to pay for your memories?

Anyway, this sounds like a solution... I also like FolderShare for synching files among computers, reducing the risk of losing the data.

Ever wanted to contribute to MSDN documentation? Visit MSDN Wiki and submit your content. RSS feeds are available to help you track recent additions.

To learn more about new VSTS member - Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals - take a look at some new screenshots, attend Webcasts and download PPT from the first Webcast.

If you're interested in developing services for the Windows Live Platform, visit the new Windows Live Dev site.

WinFX gets a new name. Here's .NET Framework 3.0!

Last night I installed both Windows Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 on my HP NX7010 notebook. For Vista it took about 4 hours to upgrade from Windows XP, more than half of that time was spent on the last step. After the final reboot, my screen went blank. Nothing... So I plugged the notebook to the main monitor and started The quest for the missing screen. After one hour of freaking and tweaking the video settings I uninstalled the new video driver (Vista installed MS' Radeon 9000 driver) and reinstalled the original ATI's Radeon 9200 driver, which finally helped. OK, I'm not getting Aero Glass and the performance is poor, but this is Beta, running on an old(er) box, carrying not more than 512kB of RAM. The next thing was resetting the wireless connections' security settings, which all went brain dead. I attribute their memory loss to the Security intervention.

The Office 2007 upgrade was over before I knew it. Silent and quick.

I already feel comfortable working with new Office; adjusting to Vista will probably take a day or two more… I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the fact I have to confirm almost every mouse click, therefore I'm disabling UAC for the moment. Too much security might just kill the productivity.

If words Atic Atac bring a nostalgic smile on your face, hurry up to Retrospec and download this excelent ZX Spectrum game remake for PC [just released today]. Now, I haven't been into gaming for some time, but 20+ years ago, this one had us kids pile up in front of the TV for whole afternoons after school...

Google trends has some interesting stats...

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Also, a new WLM Beta was released a couple of days ago. The current version is 8.0.0689 and is available through http://www.ideas.live.com/.

Finally found some time to upgrade SLODUG's CodeZone-SI portal on the final Community Server 2.0 release. I also reskinned it so it looks a bit, but not much different.

As I write this, Community Server 2.1 has been announced for July, adding one new major feature - tags. Including tag cloud... [yeah!]

I've just upgraded this blog to Community Server 2.0. Since I'm not hosting this site on my own servers, the upgrading procedure wasn't so trivial. Database updating required some custom table tweaking due to strict [hosting provider's] security policy, but after after a few hours of peeking and poking, the site seems to be back in  business. Got me worried there for a moment....

A friend of mine recently showed be The Wayback Machine, a part of the Internet Archive. It's an online web-site archive, containing more than 55 billion web pages, collected over the internet in the past 10 years. And, like its title says, it really takes you back in time, when web sites were simple and, ... well, ugly ;) The journey through time begins with typing the web address of a web page you want to re-visit. The results show different time slots when that page was archived. And the archive really is huge! I immediately visited all the web pages of the companies I used to work for and author/maintain their web sites, including @kviz, a small web project, which I did for some of my friends. It was an entertainment web site, featuring various quizzes, solving which would get you prizes from sponsor companies etc. The application was written in classic ASP, included membership management, online quiz editing and publishing, polls, backed with the Access MDB database. A project run from 1999 through 2001 and I really enjoyed working on it. Now, looking 5 years back, I can only say... yes, things were so simple back then... :)

Now hurry and rediscover your own past...