This site is absolutely hilarious!
A site dedicated to creating projectile weapons from common office stationery. Outstanding! Hours of fun for the whole family (office family that is). My favourite is the Super Maul with Laser Sight.
You have to check this site out. Nearly had me in hysterics!
You may have noticed that I\’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging front lately. I’ve been horrendously busy implementing a meta-directory for a client. This thing is an absolute beast – synchronising an SAP HR system with 3 (yes, 3!) Active Directories plus a bunch of other minor sync tasks. This makes for a hideously complex set of provisioning rules as you might imagine. We’ve been making use of Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server 2003 and been having some interesting experiences. More about this a bit later, I’m not quite up to talking about it yet. I will say that the product is really good and really frustrating all in one go! Really good in that it is incredibly easy to setup and get started and for simple attribute synchronisation between directories it’s great. The really hard yakka comes when you try to do something a little more advanced – like provision Exchange accounts for example. Now at this point you’re probably thinking “that’s sounds really easy. It should be able to do that” And I would agree with you. This is apparently one of it’s core functions. But do you think we can make it play nice. No! We’ve had to park the mailbox provisioning part of the project and come back to it later it’s just gotten too difficult. Now it’s probably something really simple that we’ve just gotten wrong somewhere and we’ll kick ourselves when we figure it out, but from research on the net it appears there’s an enourmous amount of confusion and pain around this very thing. Lot’s of posts with similar problems to ours… Oh well, we’ll get there eventually. Hopefully MS can come up with something that’ll help. The biggest problem is the shocking state of the documentation and examples around the product. MSDN is essentially useless when you’re trying to do more complex things with the product. The descriptions of the API functions are woefully inadequate and the API’s themselves are incredibly confusing. The CreateMailbox API call is overloaded with 6(!) slightly different calls and they all seem to do different things (but there’s nothing to say what those things are!). Sorry, don’t mean to rave on, but it’s hard going trying to decipher a product from the outside in 
Now this is something I\’ve been wanting and thinking about for a long, long time…
Access to Sharepoint sites from a PDA that’s nicely rendered! Ian has made an awesome start and is working on a generic rendering interface for Sharepoint lists. Can’t wait.
Check it out here: www.wssdemo.com
Here is the link to Ian\’s post: Web Log
This page detects the OS type and redirects to a PDA friendly page that lists the contents of the site. Just a demo at this stage, but hey, this is huge!
Since my original post on this topic a while back, I've been in contact with CAML girl about this project. It appears I misread the the description of the various modes that the CAML Query builder works in. I thought it required a component to be installed on the server for this to work. But this is not the case. There is a server component that you can install, but you can also work exclusively through web services mode using only the standard WSS web service. This is very cool. Nothing to install on the server unless you want to! Great!
Apologies to CAML Girl and the rest of the team.
Link: CAML Query Builder V2
I was trolling around the “blog-osphere” today and came across TabletPCBlogs, a site that provides free blogs to people writing about tablet pc’s. One of the blogs on the site had a link to this article by Dyas Lawson about improving your handwriting.
A very interesting article that explains the differences in writing styles – finger-writing and hand-writing. As he points out most people taught to write after about 1955 are finger-writers, ie they draw the letters using only their fingers. This results in a cramped, untidy writing style (eg mine!). To obtain elegant, flowing hand-writing, you actually need to utilise your whole arm and shoulder in the action and not really use your fingers at all. Bit of a revelation that was. But it makes sense when you think about it a bit.
I think I’m going to go and practice my handwriting for a while now
Interesting article via the Windows Mobile site on how you can use your WM device to capture random ideas and create new connections between them to come up with innovative solutions. I like the concept behind this and I use this as often as I can (the main reason being, as the article points out, “memory is fragile”, especially mine). Worth a read (it’s not very long).
Sick of the default Sharepoint site themes? Don’t blame you. Here is a free theme from GraphicalWonder.
Not sure if it’s really to my taste but it’s nice to see some fresh looks.
Now this is cool!
Build CAML queries for dynamically updating Sharepoint lists. The latest version adds some neat features:
You can now choose whether you work in object model or in Web services mode. It means that you now can use the app on the SharePoint machine itself and on a client accessing the SharePoint content via the Web services. When working with the object model, you can only query for content. If you opt for Web services mode, you can query but also now update content in a SharePoint list using CAML.M You now also have the possibility to make use of parameters and give these parameters a value at runtime when using the CAML Server Helper to execute the saved CAML query string.
I easpecially like the ability to work from the client rather than having to code on the server itself. Makes things alot easier.
The tool lets you point to your Sharepoint site and browse the available lists and pick the fields you want in your query and then run a test to make sure it is right.
The only slight downside to all this coolness is that you need a component on the server side to parse and execute the CAML query. Bit of a pain if you don't manage the server yourself. Oh well. Still cool!
Link: CAML Query Builder V2
A couple of very cool looking HTPC's from AOpen. I particularly like the slimmer XC REC6 because of the size, but the specs of the bigger Media Center Server 400/410 are pretty cool. It has slots for 7 HDDs! It also appears to have (or support) multiple video input sources and output sources.
"The device also supports multiple screen output, allowing you to display the video output of different TV channels to separate video output devices"
The other nice thing about the XC REC6 is that it's built around the Pentium M. Means less power consumption therefore heat generation therefore less cooling requried therefore quieter. I'm all for that!
Both units have built in VFD's to see what they're doing (little bit redundant on a media centre, but hey), and controls on the front and also come with remotes. They both run Windows MCE.
I like this current trend of making the HTPC's look more like traditional audio equipment. Makes them look a lot more stylish and who wants a beige box in their living room. Another factor to consider is – where do you put the traditional shaped PC media center. Most people have AV housing that is not designed for traditionally shaped PC equipment so it ends up sitting untidily on the floor next to the cabinet and the cabinet is probably nearly empty now that the PC has taken over the duty of all the kit that was in there originally.
My friend Craig pointed me to these "eHow-tos". They are Windows Media files that help get you started with developing with Windows Mobile 5.0. They start out fairly basic and progress to some reasonbly tricky stuff (building WEb services for Windows CE 5 for example).
A good resource if you're new to WM5 development.
Link: : Mobile Application Development eHow-tos and Tutorials
