I twit now (oh and I still blog)

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I'm sorry I'm probably very very late to the bandwagon, but there's a few reasons for this:

  1. Just ain't very keen to login to Facebook all the time to just update a status
  2. I know twitter had been the thing...  I'm trying to redeem myself
  3. Was at powertodevelopers event, when everyone was whipping out their iPhone / windows mobile to twit, I didn't have an account so it was a bit embarrassing
  4. Unless you twit you won't know what it's all about...

Anyway, follow johnnliu (double-n)

Late blog (as in, not a live blog) Australia Power To Developers event

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So there I was, sitting in the front row of the Power to Developers event in Sydney Convention Center.  A really great place by the way - it's like 5 minutes away from my home.

Steve Ballmer's presentation of Windows Azure is certainly very energetic.  He did the "Developers, Developers, Developers" chant - I cheered!

Gianpaolo Carraro's presentation on Windows Azure services was interesting, it certainly got my hands all itchy.  *Waiting for that SQL Data Services invite*

Tim Sneath's very excited about Windows 7, WPF and SilverLight.  I bumped into him outside the convention center and asked him about his visit to Sydney, in hindsight what I really should have asked him was which of these cool technologies should I spend all my time on?  How do I choose!

All the technical presentations were flaky, with the audience bursting out in laughter whenever Gianpaolo says "Oh Come On!"

I also got to meet heaps of people that I worked with over the last 3 years as well as some that were in SSW before that.

Shout outs:

the SSW crew,
David Klein, Adrian, Marlon
Ciprien, Ben Scott, Christian Maslen, Gordon Salier
Adelle, Peter

Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) has a nice new look

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Most people probably have a Hotmail account, but like me, probably haven't visited it for quite a while.

Anyway, they unleashed a new version recently that looks a lot slicker.

(This is in Chrome)

image image

Very cool. 

I still think it misses the conversation threading view which is really fantastic in gmail, also I think tagging emails is still better than folders for organization.  But it's fast and snappy and doesn't require you to use IE for the full experience.

Seriously thinking to split this blog

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I like blogging about what I'm doing, but in some aspect, there are different areas that I would like to blog about:

Software Development

  • Some really interesting problems and how we solve them
  • Some really annoying bugs and how we got around them
  • Some totally unexplained and undocumented feature and how we figured out how it all worked

Software Project Management

  • This is not my forte, but as you get experienced in this industry it's probably inevitable that you end up doing project management work
  • Project management deals a lot with the risks, processes and communication with clients.

Gaming

  • What I thought about WOW
  • What I'm thinking about WAR
  • XBox, XBox Live
  • PC gaming, in general

Rants

  • Stuff that happens, usually something about my laptop - honestly if my laptop was working fine you guys would never even know I was using a Dell Studio 17 (BTW, after the technician fixed it, it's working really well now)

iPhone special: No contacts in the contact list when I couldn't talk to my Microsoft Exchange server

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I interrupt my usual rant about .NET (and Dell laptops) to bring you a rant about my iPhone.

Story begins like this...

So we had a bit of a DNS hiccup with our Microsoft Exchange server.

When I pop over to use my iPhone, it says "Cannot Get Mail. The connection to the server <mail server> failed"

Fair enough.  Not the iPhone's fault.

Then I lose all my contacts.  In my contacts list, there was "No contacts".  There were 200 contacts before.

Panic

What, really?  Yes.

I must crazy.  Someone who designed this must be crazy.  It couldn't be the iPhone.  It must have been me.  I thought I must be mad.  It must have been a bad push / sync, or something.

Resolution

Anyway, I frantically tried to look for a solution, but it was only until when I finally got it to connect to Exchange server again after the DNS issues were sorted out, and hey, all my contacts re-appeared again.

I contemplated on restoring the phone, but my contacts were synchronized with Exchange, iTunes isn't tracking it:

"Your contacts are being synced with your iPhone over the air from Microsoft Exchange."

So I couldn't sync mail for an hour.  I also have zero contacts in my iPhone for an hour.  From the point where the iPhone decided that it couldn't sync with Exchange, apparently it also decided that it should now hide (or remove - I can't tell) all my contacts.

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

jliu