What & Why?

On my recent trip to USA one of the biggest challenges was a constant need to evaluate all the US units and figuring what they mean to me. Miles, feet, inches, gallons, ounces, Fahrenheit… Come on, guys, it’s about time to switch to normal measurement system! ;)

Nevertheless I’ve liked it there and would definitely want to go again. So, Microsoft Lithuania contest to make an Internet Explorer 8 accelerator with trip to MIX11 as a grand prize couldn’t come handier.

When first paragraph met the second one in my head, I knew immediately what to make for this contest.

Please welcome my Automatic Unit Converter IE8 accelerator and complimentary site. You just select some text on some site, click the blue accelerator button, hover over “Convert to Metric” and get all the known units in your selection converted to metric.

Why not just use Google, Bing, etc.?

1. Not everything work automagically with Google and Bing. 60 ft 5 inch works, but 60'5" doesn’t. Often you have to tell Google what your target is. Building an engine to figure that out is one short step away from just converting the values. So I just made that step myself.
2. Multiple values in arbitrary text. When you are looking at a text containing multiple values (like in the screenshot above) you don’t want to select and convert them one by one.

What about other systems and directions?

I would probably improve US-to-Metric over time and add Imperial-to-Metric. As for converting these back from metric I’m not personally interested in it. That said I’ve created a conversion module in away to allow expansion and I’m ready to make it open source. So, if someone is up for the task, let me know and I’ll post the project online and implement selection and specific accelerators for different scenarios into the site.

Vote for me!

My accelerator is listed on the contest page as “Matų konvertavimas”. Click on “Patinka” if you like the accelerator.

I have 9 days left on my Visual Studio 2008 trial and suddenly "Upgrade..." button no longer leads to "Content not found" page. It was still "not found" a week ago or so, but now it looked promising. Unfortunately digital registration is only an option for customers in USA and Canada. So we (the rest of the world) are still out of luck.

So I assume I'll have to go the old-fashioned way and it sucks.

See also:

• Part 1: Why is it so F#...ing Difficult to Buy Visual Studio!?
• Part 2: Visual Studio Trial Upgrade: 24 days later

Apparently the most popular Bill Gates quote is "fake":

Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Bill Gates. Take for instance "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640K bytes of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough.

... Gates has addressed the 640K quote in interviews. "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time ... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again," he told Bloomberg Business Applications in 1996.

The Quotable Bill Gates

Dang. The world will never be the same.

I wanted to wait a month before checking back on this issue but recent post by ScottGu (more on this later in this post) changed my plans.

So, it's been 24 days since that post. Thanks to DotNetKicks, Dzone and, obviously, Google that post was viewed more than 1100 times directly (not counting views through RSS, as part of the whole blog, etc.). I'm pretty confident that someone from Microsoft directly responsible for these things or at least someone who knows someone who is in some way related to this has seen it.

Today I tried to repeat the quest and failed exactly the same way as almost a month earlier. The only difference was that MSDN's header design has changed and "Content Not Found" page looks prettier now.

Now back to the a/m ScottGu's post. Only things why I wanted to upgrade to VS2008 right now were to play with Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC. Sure I'd like to use VS2008 with other things but for now I work on 2.0 projects and there's no immediate need for 2008. And from that post it appears that I can do my playing from VWD Express 2008 meaning that I can delay upgrade to VS2008 for as long as I want (if ever). This is no way a solution for the actual non-upgradeability problem but it's not my fault that Microsoft doesn't want my money.

I remember going through something like this with Visual Studio 2005 but back then I've swallowed my pride and called my local "pusher" and got the VS2005 old fashioned way. Now, 3 years later, I want to buy Visual Studio 2008. Let's see how this goes...

Note: I live outside of USA and any other "major market" for that matter

Upgrading through the Trial

I've download and installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional 90-day Trial. Now I go to Help->About and see the "Upgrade..." button. Hooray!

When I click it my browser opens a page saying  "Content not found".

How crazy is that!? This is a current product by a MAJOR corporation so how could something like this happen?

Other ways

OK, let's swallow some pride again and go through the product page. Closest to the words "buy" or "purchase" is Pricing - let's go there. First link there is Worldwide Purchase Information. Hooray again. When I go there I see information about buying an MSDN Subscription but I only want a standalone VS2008 Standard or Professional. OK, there's a section:

Additional Purchasing Options

• Purchasing Visual Studio: Find information here.

[Skeptical] hooray. So now we get to this page. Looks promising. I click "Buy or upgrade now" and get to Windows Marketplace page where all of the online merchants listed ship to USA and Canada only. And I would actually prefer a simple license key (which must be an option (see below)). Dead end again.

Now I remember that there was something about upgrading from Trial on the Trial download page. Here it is:

Upgrading from Trial Editions

When you are ready to upgrade from an installed trial edition of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server (or the Workgroup Edition of Team Foundation Server), you don't have to completely uninstall and reinstall those products. For more information, see How to: Upgrade from Visual Studio Trial Edition (a Visual Studio 2005 topic, but still accurate).

The "how to" page has the following:

To obtain a product key

• Purchase a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition at a retail location. The product key is listed on the sleeve of the DVD or CD.

  —or—

  Order a Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition product key online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/. The product key is sent to you in an e-mail message.

Click on the http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/ - "Content Not Found"

Our local Microsoft website has a list of "old-school" companies who can order you a hard copy from the warehouse and you'll get it in couple of weeks or months (which was what I tried to avoid and was supposed to succeed).

I hope that someone at Microsoft reads this and at least fixes all the "not found" issues and specifies accurate information. At the very least tell me that there's no way for me to buy this online but don't make me waste half a day trying to find a correct way to navigate your website! Theoretically I wasted more time (equals money) looking for a way to make a simple transaction than the transaction is worth. Very frustrating.

My daughter is 8 (soon to be 9). She has her own PC for a couple years now. Until recently she only played the games I installed, painted with Wacom/ArtRage and played online flash games on a couple of sites. But some time ago she started "discovering the web" on her own and question that interested me theoretically for more than a year became really practical: how do I protect her (read "control") from the evil sides of the Internet?

After some research (not much actually) I came to conclusion that no one provides such an end-to-end solution like Microsoft's Windows Live Family Safety.

What is it?

Basically it's a small app you install on XP or Vista PC and a web application to control it. You can limit what sites your child can visit, approve/filter her Live Mail/Hotmail contacts, Live Messenger Contacts, etc.

It also integrates to some extent with Windows Live Spaces so your child can blog, share photos with friends, etc.

How does it work?

You need to have LiveIDs (Microsoft's accounts) for all the parents and children and add them in appropriate roles.

Then you set up what your child sees by default. In my case recommended settings (for children 0 to 10) were to block all the sites except kids friendly sites and those explicitly allowed by parents. Now when Daniela wants to visit a site that is neither known to be kids friendly nor in her allowed list she is presented with a page informing here about that and 2 options to ask parents permission. She can ask by filling a request and then you can approve or reject it in web interface or, in case you are at home, she can just call you and ask to approve the site simply by logging in with your LiveID and clicking "Approve". You can also monitor what your child browsed and what attempted to browse but was blocked.

I haven't played with contacts management yet but I assume it's done in similar manner.

What I like so far

• the system is easy to use and well integrated;
• all the main bases are covered: surfing, email, IM, social networking;
• I didn't meet any major resistance from my child (unlike expected) :)

What I didn't like so far

• there's no Russian or Lithuanian GUI (and probably not many other languages are covered, if any). It's not a major problem since there aren't many things for the child to read and it could be even good for learning English, but anyway I think the fact is worth mentioning. And, btw, when you go to download Windows Live apps it tries to play smart and detects your browser's desired language and shows you Live apps in that language only. And Family Safety is not included in the package if it's not in English. So make sure you download the English version;
• all of the features are obviously tied in Microsoft's Live services. This is not unexpected but I wish there was some open standard (or is there?) to connect such filters and web services. Anyway now my child is stuck with Windows Live Messenger and I'll have to use it too (well, I'll still use Miranda, but with one more protocol). Good move, Microsoft :)
• while FS blocks general search engines there's no kids friendly search engine by Microsoft (or I couldn't find it). There's no such thing by Google, too. Yahoo has kids.yahoo.com so this is what we'll use for now.
• I'm not sure if this is related to FS or this is just a Spaces feature, but you can't make your child's blog public at all. I understand that this is related to child's inability to understand everything about privacy issues and stuff but I think an option for pre-moderated public blog would be really nice to have. Cause now even I can't subscribe to my daughter's RSS feed.

Though the cons section looks much bigger than pros, but in reality I'm really satisfied with the solution so far and we'll see how it rolls.

Windows Live Writer is the first full-scale consumer product to ship out of Microsoft's camp built on the .NET Framework.
NeoSmart.net

This is fun. Never thought about it.