Happy New Year!

I will not make any outstanding new year wishes! I never accomplish those!

I just wanna have fun, learn and make more exercise!

I need to learn MOSS 2007, so I downloaded  the Microsoft virtual machine available in  and tried to make the hand-on-labs. When I download/start any vm, the first thing I do is visit MS update site and install all available updates. So I did it. after a couple of hours installing, I rebooted the machine and.... guess? SPS didn't work anymore..

The first problem I saw was this "The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}".  I found the solution here: http://geekswithblogs.net/mhamilton/archive/2006/12/19/101568.aspx

After following the steps described there SPS went alive ...

Some days ago I saw at a friend's home he had the Folding@Home client running. I have decided to intall it at home. The programs is supposed to create a massive parallel computing grid all over the world, distributing work items all over the computers in order to solve problems relating health investigation. It has clients for Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3 and even ATI Graphics Cards.

I think this is a great idea and if it can be used to develop treatements for diseases such as Alzeimer and so you should install it.

I have little experience using/programming such computing grids (I used pvm under Linux) while at college. It was my favourite class!

Looking at the

Alfredo has tagged me with a new "meme": How would you retire with 5M€?

I don't know if I would retire with such an amount of money, but what I am sure is that it would change my life quite a bit.

First of all, I would spend up to one million in a new house, maybe in Madrid, maybe in other city. I think it shoul be an attic near city centre. Maybe in Switzerland because of taxes. Here in Madrid I would maintain my current home.

Second I would spend one million in buying a house for my parents and my brother (500.000 for each should be fine).

After some time of hard, boring, work I have had time to write a post in here. I hope I have more time to write things from now on. There has been nothing quite interesting in the last months, so you have not missed much...

PS: Back in black is the title of an AC/DC Album (the first released after Bon Scott death)...

Sometimes you just develop a page and when you finish it, you realize that the page wheights a lot, and you don't know where are all those bytes.

Maybe the first thing to see is the viewstate, you must be careful when using it and remember not to store datasets on it, they take lots of space. You can use a tool to keep the viewstate at the server (you can use mine :-D) but I've found problems with it while using ajax, it seems it does not work properly...

When working with ajax and update panels, the size of the pages (specifically the size of the form being submitted) has a great importance, because when we program we trend to make pages that make more postbacks to the server. So to reduce the payload has a great effect on the user perceived performance.

The other place where we usually don't look at ...

Yesterday, while adding features to an Excel VSTO app I made half a year ago, I realised that some parts that worked fine on a Core Duo, worked slow to death on a PIII, after looking at the code I realiced that I had a huge loop that set the values on the cells and set the proper number and font format. Taken from the point of elegance it was perfect, centralized and easy to change, but from the point of performance it was really bad.

The reason is that every time yo access an excel object, there is an interop call, with is quite a "heavy" thing. This is one of this cases where elegance collides with performance.

The solution is not to format a cell at a time, you can get a hole range (not a single cell range) with the function get_Range and apply format to all of the cells at a time, thus calling interop just o ...

Today, while surfing the net, looking for some software to unlock my mother's old cell phone (mine has gone to hell and I'm using a 5-year old one), I found lots of sites when you can unlock your cell phone for free.

I have unlocked two phones, you just introduce the IMEI, the model and the company and magically you get a code that when typed unlocks your phone :-D.

I unlocked mine at: http://www.gsmspain.com/unlock/

Well, I've been up to my neck in work, so I didn't have any time to write posts. The site has even been hacked :-D (the only bad thing about it was the rude words the hacker put at the home, the good part about it is that It helped me to thighten the security a bit).

I hope that next easter days I can write some posts and release the code of the blog module with all the changes (many and serious) I'm trying to implement.

Here is a new security blog: http://security-samizdat.com/ a new top-notch security site driven by professional security consultans. You'll find non-biased information, and collaborations from high level professionals.

The main point about it is the independant, "agnostic" info exposed, I'm tired of sites that favor Windows or Linux and ignore studies from independent sources.

BTW if you don't know what Samizdat is you can read it here.

If you try to add this to a tableadapter you'll get an error:

SELECT DaysOfWeek
FROM ProgramStartTimes
WHERE Time <> DATEADD(day, @NumHours, GETDATE())

The error you get is:

Argument data type datetime is invalid for argument 2 of dateadd function.

The curious thing about that is that if you move the dateadd to the select part (not after the where) the generator works alright:

SELECT DaysOfWeek, DATEADD(day, @NumHours, GETDATE())
FROM ProgramStart ...

I'm finally tired of DNN Blog module, so I've started making changes on my own, the module will be publicy available, and hopefully will be easy installation instructions if anyone want to use it.

It's a year since no updates have been made, the code has no comments at all, has a lot of identified bugs and still there is no public solution to them, the solution is checked-in but there is no release, so the solutions are useless. I'm sick of it, the bolg makes use of lots of deprecated functions, the html code has lots of errors and there are hundreds of warnings when you compile it.

Instead of being a killer module, DNN blog module is crap, so I will not use it until there is a big change in how it is developed. Have this people heard about continous integration? ...

Well the first month of 2007 is over, so it's time to have some thoughts about it:

• I'm doing pretty much exercise. That's fine, I'm loosing the extra xmas weight!
• My new job is going fine, excelent people and work environment. I hope the project ends as we all expect. It's a long way until we end it, but it looks good.
• Going out pretty often, my social life is going well, after some months of  not having much time for myself.
• Starting some personal projects on February...
• I've not gone to any MadNUG meeting. That's a little thing to improve...
• I have to call some friends I don't see since a long time ago. That's a big thing to improve...