Hi All,

I’m just home from a BBQ at Miha’s. We always try to get together with the ex-MSNZ family that are either based in Seattle, or are in Seattle for the Tech Ready event. This visit was no exception! Thanks Miha for an excellent night, and for hosting the venue!

For those that have been around and have dealt with Microsoft Services (predominantly) in the past, you might recognise some familiar faces here.

Nick.

Hi All,

Well it’s been a longer trip than I expected! I caught up with Ronel, Steve and Michael in the lounge at Auckland Airport, we shared a few drinks and then we departed for San Francisco – I managed to score an upgrade which made the journey more comfortable – the glasses of port went down well! :-) 

We landed at San Fran on time - once you go through customs, you pick up your luggage and drop it off so it can then routed to the appropriate destination for connecting flights. Steve was highlighted as someone that needed to be checked more thoroughly rubber gloves as we went through security (via a random check)..

Unfortunately for me, my bag ‘tag’ had fallen off in transit, so I had to re-check in. Lucky for us that this occurred, as our flight to Seattle had been cancelled (due to no crew being available), and the next flight for us on United Airlines wasn’t available until tomorrow. We then had to make a choice – fly to LA, then onto Seattle, or fly to Bosie (Idaho), then onto Seattle – we took the second option.  Michael had picked up some Fejoa vodka for a friend in duty free in NZ, however since the introduction of the new rules for liquids (100mls), the bottle had to be either checked in (er.. his luggage was already on route), we could drink it (er.. didn’t seem like the most sensible option… Well I was keen), or discarded – the ground staff seemed very eager to take it off our hands!

We arrived in Bosie a few hours later, and had to have new tickets issued for our Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. As we passed through security (again) we had all been marked (randomly, well maybe not) as dodgy, so our contents and us were checked for explosives etc :-) Bizzar thing - Boise has a tagline 'City of Trees" (as per above) - As we flew in, the land was extremely barron - American humour?  

My luggage arrived as expected, however the others were not so lucky… Their's didn’t arrive for another hour or so, so I taxied into town to have a few beers with the team that had already arrived.

It's great to be here again, and I'm looking forward to the week ahead!

The Microsoft Office Outlook Team have just announced a new beta version of the Outlook Connector - the add-in that lets you sync your Windows Live Hotmail data in Outlook. In the past, email and contacts syncing was available for free, but syncing your calendar was only available with a subscription service. No more! Calendar sync is free! Not only that, but the calendar syncing service now also syncs with the Windows Live Calendar Beta service, too! That means you can sync your work calendar in Outlook to your personal calendar in Hotmail to your family calendar in Windows Live Calendar and vice versa. And since Windows Live Calendar supports calendar sharing, other shared calendars that you have access to will also sync back to Outlook. The new Outlook connector is faster, more reliable, and, as always, free. You can download it from here.

Nick.

Hi All,

Well it’s been many years since I set foot in a Scout hall, and I survived again! :-) Liam had his first night at Keas tonight, and thoroughly enjoyed it! I loved the camping, adventures, exploring outdoors etc so we decided to introduce Liam to Keas to see if it was cup of tea carbonated fizzy. One of the challenges in moving away from a city, then returning, is that your social network becomes eroded over time. I wanted to get involved in something I enjoyed, meet some new people, as well as give something back to others in the community (looks like I’ll become a leader too) - Oh..yeah, and Liam of course needs to enjoy it. This was the first night of the term for Keas, so it kicked off with placing the kids in “Possies” (groups) and nominating leaders and seconds (deputy leaders). Next on the agenda was a bit of fun - “Battleships”. The kids were split into two teams, some tables are placed on their sides (so the kids couldn’t see each other) and the kids had sit on the floor behind the tables. Throw in a few tennis balls and play Battleships. If a ball hits you without a bounce, you’re out. The kids loved it and went nuts. Next was ‘crafts’ – create something that reminds you of “fun” was tonights theme. There were are a few talks and some education along the way and we finished up with the kids helping to clean up and an allocation of points for the teams for the night.  Here’s a few photos taken from my batfone.

Vanessa will take Liam next week as I'll be in Seattle, and all going well, we'll sign up and get into it :-)

Nick.

Hi All,

Want to remote desktop into your phone? An application called My Mobiler will let you do so. This Windows desktop application allows you to control your Windows Mobile device via its Active Sync connection. By running this app, you can use your computer’s mouse and keyboard to interact with your phone. You can cut, copy, and paste between mobile and desktop and you can even drag and drop files to be transferred between the two devices. You can also configure the app to work with your preferred FTP client software.

MY MOBILER v1.23 (06/15/2008) - FREEWARE

• View your mobile screen on your desktop.
• Control your mobile by using desktop keyboard and mouse.
• Copy/Cut/Paste text between mobile and desktop.
• Capture mobile screen.
• Drag and drop files to your mobile.
• Support ActiveSync / IP Connection
• Support Mobile Explorer (File Browse)

DOWNLOAD

• Download MyMobiler v1.23 (PC Install)
• Download MyMobiler v1.23 (ZIP file)

• Support Windows Mobile 2003
• Support Windows Mobile 5.0 / 6.0

Nick.

Hi All,

It was a shocker of a day yesterday, persisting down with rain, so the boys and I decided to head out to see some friends in Oxford. Oxford is an small farming settlement ~30 kms from Rangiora. Vanessa has been away in Wellington since Thursday, and is due back tonight, so it’s great for me to spent some solo time with Liam and Lach before heading out to Seattle this coming weekend. We visited and drove through the Waimakariri and Ashley gorges on the way to Oxford and Rangiora , it’s been years since I’ve been out that way.

We ended up arriving back into Christchurch about 7pm, grabbed some fish ‘n chips for tea. then the kids got ready for bed etc. The boys had a ball throwing stones in the river (and almost throwing themselves in a few time).The Waimak gorge is pretty cool, I’ll have to check and see if there are any caches hidden round there for next time I’m out that way – would be a great spot for some fishing and camping too!

Nick.

“Linux creator Linus Torvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys," as part of a wider critique of what he said was self-centered behavior in the IT security industry.”

In an e-mail to the Linux kernel developer mailing list, Torvalds said a section of the security industry was dedicated to finding bugs in software only to publicize their findings and gain notoriety. The row erupted in the Gmane mailing list after a developer for the PaX Team, which patches the Linux kernel, accused Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers of "covering up (the) security impact of bugs" by not clearly labeling them as security flaws.

See here for full article. Also see Linus's mid-merge-window reflections (See last paragraph, I wonder if this is what he meant?).

Hi All,

It’s just over a week now until I head off to Seattle again. I really enjoy my visits there, both from a work and personal perspective. It’s a great time to connect with people you deal with around the globe, make some new friends, as well as sink some suds and poison your liver. This time I’m staying at the Warwick which looks vastly superior to the Red Lion where' I’ve stayed the past two times. TechReady is run twice a year, typically in February and July, and it is THE event for technical Microsofties in the field. We are surrounded by the product groups and receive deep technical training on what is currently in the market as well as what is coming down the pipe.

I’ve have some excellent side meetings organised with the follow teams:

• Dinner with the Daylight Savings Team & Product Lifecycle Team to talk about our experiences in New Zealand with DST and the challenges we faced, as well as the challenges that Australia faced and continue to face as they trial the change of DST in various states.
• Dinner with Premier leads to provide feedback on behalf of the APAC region on Premier Workshops
• Catch-up with IE8 Product Team - (still to nail down..)

If you’re ever in Seattle, there are some excellent things to do, here’s a few:

• Pike Place Fish Market
• Baseball game @ Safeco
• Space Needle
• Experience Music Project and Science fiction Museum
• The Museum of Flight – Boeing
• And of course visit Microsoft HQ/Campus - (Don’t carry cameras and take lots of photos – drives the security guards nuts unless you have an employee badge)

Monday night is the night where a bunch of ex-pats and current kiwi employees with get together and enjoy a BBQ and a few beers ah Miha’s place (I worked with Miha when I lived in Auckland – the first vehicle he drove was a TANK, he’s eastern european (mad man!) from Slovenia). For me, this is one of the highlights of the trip. It’s fantastic to see how well we do off shore, and confirm the adage that Kiwis are hard workers and can and do contribute on the world scale. 

Then there’s the shopping – North Bend is excellent for clothes/shoes etc and Frys for geek ‘stuff’!

So 9 days and counting until I fly out..

Nick.

Hi All

Have you ever wanted to know the name of admin@gmail.com? Now you can. Through a bug in Google calendars the names of all registered Gmail accounts are now readily available. All you need to find out the names of any gmail address is a Google calendar account yourself. Depending on your view this ranges from a harmless "feature" to a rather serious privacy violation. According to some reports, spammers are already exploiting this "feature"/bug to send personalized spam messages.

Nick.