John Liu's SSW Blog : rant

re: Dell Newsletter

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:54:19 GMT

After reading yet another Dell monthly newsletter, I decided to reply to it. I figure it’s rant-worthy. Hi Mr Dell, When I purchased my laptop, I was after a couple of spare 9-cell battery for longer battery life, and I was told it was out of stock, which is fair enough – these things go out of stock from time to time. I specifically left instructions that when they are in stock, I would like to be notified. Because I _really_ want them. It has since been 6 months, and I find it hard to believe that...(read more)

The new flood of stuff coming out of Windows Live are really nice

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:10:57 GMT

I do have FriendFeed, but I think too little people know about FriendFeed ( http://friendfeed.com/johnnliu ) - but it's a very techy solution. I think Windows Live's offerings will reach more people quicker. Anyway, It's already hooked to to my blog, MSN messenger I've got 2 web activities enabled: Flickr Twitter still waiting for a few more web activities to become enabled: digg youtube facebook Theoretically I can just use the RSS feed from these, but I want to see what additional...(read more)

Lemmings 4D game

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:13:48 GMT

I'm pretty sure Lemmings stopped at 3D. But I think there's room to make a 4D game: Implement in SilverLight - Utilize the harddrive - add special tools that are time based - add time-warp portals Read More......(read more)

Windows Live configuration sync

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:11:44 GMT

I had this idea that popped up when I was listening to the current .NET Rocks - The Future of Web Development Panel. I was listening to the panel lamenting about having to manually configure their development environment per machine that they use and thought, geez surely this can be solved perfectly with Windows Live. Sure enough, within minutes of this idea popping in my head, one of the guys on the panel stated this, and got overwhelming applause. That is one great idea. So, you have Windows Live...(read more)

I twit now (oh and I still blog)

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:49:59 GMT

I'm sorry I'm probably very very late to the bandwagon, but there's a few reasons for this: Just ain't very keen to login to Facebook all the time to just update a status I know twitter had been the thing... I'm trying to redeem myself 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 Unless you twit you won't know what it's all about... Anyway, follow johnnliu...(read more)

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

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:58:32 GMT

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...(read more)

Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) has a nice new look

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:16:26 GMT

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) 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. Read More......(read more)

Seriously thinking to split this blog

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:01:52 GMT

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...(read more)

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

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:58:57 GMT

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...(read more)

An injustice

John Liu .NET: Time for Fun in .NET — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:47:11 GMT

I went out and met a bunch of people over the farewell of a good friend and past colleague over a really fun project I was on. Over drinks I heard a really disheartening story of what's been happening since I left. In the beginning, when I was still there... We had a new CEO for this public listed company. He's really big on agile development. Agile was billed as the next biggest thing throughout the organization. From the top down, processes were reviewed to be more agile. Both development...(read more)