When I started to play with computers (literally, play with computers) back in 1988, the computer had the shape of a box. Actually two boxes, one a 14″ CRT Monitor and the Computer itself. Most of us some of us still use the desktop computer, but the trend today is that computers are becoming smaller and smaller and more distributed. It’s seems that everyone today has a laptop either a MAC or a PC, and in many cases you will find that a family household holds between 2-3 computers. 

So how does cloud computing comes into play? very simple. Every one today uses somekind of cloud computing service like gmail, flickr, facebook. We use it to store picture, information, movies etc. With the Web 2.0 revolution a lot of software that we used on our computer we could now use a web application. If its office, google has a pretty good alternative. For personal finance you could use mint.com and the list could go on and on. 

I think the next step in this evolution is pretty obvious. The next generation computer will have a touchscreen, and a wireless network card. The operating system will be very small and compact and will just need to do one thing, connect you to the Internet. Once you got the connection, what else do you need?

Of course this next step has its disadvantages like privacy and security. Think about it, the simple notion is that the services that we use online are hosted on servers owned by corporations. So if you think about it, whatever you put online is out there and you don’t always know who could be sniffing around.

In sum, like it or not cloud computing is here and its here to stay. Due to the relative low costs of servers and equipment companies like Microsoft and google are spending millions of dollars on building this cloud environment and the consumers are flocking to use these type of services. And I think that if you at it at the 50,000 feet level this all makes sense.

More about Cloud Computing:

• Wikipedia-Cloud Computing 
• YouTube - What is cloud computing 
• 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing  
• What is windows Azure?

Usually, when I shop online I would look for th cheapest shipping method, unless of course it extremely important that I have the thing I’m buying within’ a day. Most cases, if I ordered online, I could wait the 5-7 business days till I get the thing.The problem is that shipping cheap cost you more than you would expect.

For example, if I order something personal that I can carry on my way home I will order it to the office, but if its too big than I need it to be shipped to my home. Well, here is the problem. First, they will never tell you when the item will arrive to your home. Second, the messenger will come and of course and nobody will be there to greet him so he will leave a sticky note indicating the next time that will appear… I don’t how they manage their time but always they put 10:30-2PM which means that that day I have to work from home unless I want to drive 15 miles to get the item.

Now, you would think that if the messenger puts 10-2:30, he or she will actually be here… HA! you guessed wrong. So ,here I am still waiting for my package (btw it’s already 4:30). I wish that the shipping companies (UPS, DHL and Fedex) would invest a little bit in making the quality of delivery better because each coin has two sides, as a business owner I will not ship with a company that makes me salty at home all day long waiting for my package.

To work with the website is very easy. First, you fill out a very simple registration form and activate your account by email. Then, you can import your contacts or enter them manually. After that, you just call the Jott number and dictate to whom you want to send the massage and the message itself.

Here are two helpful links regarding Jott.

• How to use Jott
• Get Things Done Over the Phone with Jott

I just finished reading this post and I decided, No more excuses. So, this year one of my resolutions is write more. Easy to say, right? well in order to write more first I need to find out why I didn’t write as much I wanted. After much research and thought (30 to 60 seconds… what!? it was easy to find the answers), I came with the following list of top 3 reasons that I do not write more.

1. No time - Pure excuse, I only need 15-30 minutes a day, I could actually write before I go to sleep, work, whatever… I’m sure that if I put my mind into it I could find the time. I can record my favorite show, write something in the blog and then go back and see the show, then I could even skip the commercials….

2. Nothing interesting to write - duh? I am a software developer who opened his own business two years ago, grew it and although its still a small business its doing pretty well so far. So this again is unfortunately another lame excuse.

3. My writing skills are crap - OK, English in not my native tonuge but I still have basic writing and reading skills.
Second, I could always get a book, oops I have a book, I just need to open it and read it a bit.

So no more procrastinating, here starts 2008… let start blogging…

Enjoy…

The video

So in order to disable it you need to run the following steps:

1. run command prompt as an administrator (right click on the command prompt)

2. run these two commands:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

I recently discovered google labs’ reader. I was very impressed. Basically, Google reader is a RSS online feed utility. With Google Reader I found a solution to this issue. It gets all the information from the CSS and displays the images and text from the post itself, which makes it easier to navigate between different blogs and websites while staying on one website. Although, it still needs some improvements (for example: organizing the blogs) , I would give recommendation for anyone who read on a daily basis more than 2-3 websites.

Another feature I like is that the reader has a mobile version which allows to have the same useful capabilities of the regular Reader only in a mobile environment. (It works great with my BlackJack phone).

Note:
After I posted this posting, I found this guide from Mitchelaneous to Google Reader…

I must say that I am impressed about the capabilities of WordPress. Moving the blog was easier that I thought. The reason I moved my blog is that I feel that in 2006 I didn’t pay to much attation to my blog and I could have written and shared more tech and intresting information with my readers. So one of my resolutions this year is to write more posts (and lets see if I could stick by it) and to have a brand new design to my ingenious code blog.

Happy New Year!

Y

In most cases a query like this:

use AdventureWorks
go
select sum(TotalDue) from Sales.SalesOrderHeader

will return: 140707584.8246

In order to resolve this issue I create a small user defined function that formats the values and return it a well formated currency value.

alter function udf_CurrencyFormat  (@number money)
returns varchar(100) as
begin
return '$' + convert(varchar,cast(@number  as money),1)
end 

After deploying this function a query like this:

select dbo.udf_CurrencyFormat(sum(TotalDue))
from Sales.SalesOrderHeader 

Will Return: $140,707,584.82