I have just switched over to UVerse. I Already had a pretty good thing going with comcast but i wanted the upgraded speed. So I went with the TV and Internet Option. This has been a huge mistake. The modem they give is a modem/voip/wireless/bridge box. Yeah it sucks really hard. I already had a couple of router/access points spread over the house and now none of them work properly. The DHCP server on the att 3800hgv-b router sucks it continuously drops the ip for anything connected to it. Not to mention that the AT&T Uverse people play pass the phone call for over a hour while I kept asking where i could turn the dhcp router off. Turns out you cant as all the TV’s now use the router as well and they need it. So I can’t just disable it and go back to using my tried and true netgear router’s dhcp server…UGH. So that said if you aren't satisfied with the retard version of the router admin that comes with it you can log in to the 2wire advanced version here.

2wire att 3800hgv-b – advanced settings

http://192.168.1.254/mdc

Assuming you haven't changed the ip of the router. This should help with some minor issue’s. Good Luck…And remember if you thought At&t sucked before don’t be fooled by clever marketing they still suck.

I was sitting next to my friend a IT Pro and I asked what he was using for Anit-Virus Software. He told me about this great software that was free that he installs on all of his systems from AVG. Check it out and tell me what you think. At least it will it get the icon out of the system tray. Tell me what you think.\

Download it Here

http://free.avg.com/download?prd=afe 

Have you ever found it hard to make a meaningful New Years Resolution. How about getting the randomized? Now you can with a cool little app about from Pop. Once you have entered a user name you can just spin the week and you instantly have some new years resolutions that you won’t live up to.Have fun!

Try your own http://resolutionrandomizer.pop.us/ecard.aspx... I'd love to hear what you get!

Tweebay is a Free way to buy and sell your stuff using the power of Twitter.   Tweebay allows you to buy and sell stuff easily and takes away the complexity of the process. Selling is easy, you have 240 characters to describe your item and can upload one photo so you need to make it count. So thats it, Have fun...

If you don’t know by my blog I am obsessed with windows live writer. It has some things that it doesn’t do well but has a bunch of stuff that it does great! So with that said. One of my favorite browsers is firefox and they just released a version of blog this for firefox.. One of things i am really looking forward to IE8 once it come out of bug mode. One of my favorite things is that MS is making plug-ins for fire fox… Yeah go with your bad self…

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9968

Live It, Love it, Blog it….

Microsoft just released SQL server sp3 for 2005. Just when you thought it was time to move to 2008 it still is, but if you are still running 2005 look into this pack enhancements.

The purpose of a service pack is to provide a tested intermediate-level upgrade that contains fixes to bugs encountered since the last version release. Service packs don’t typically add new features to the product, although they might provide enhanced behavior to features that were new in the most recent version but weren’t completely ready by the release to manufacturing date. However, Microsoft doesn’t always abide by this definition of service pack, and there have been SQL Server service packs that have added new features, new columns to existing metadata objects, or even entirely new metadata views or functions

Also if you’ve previously applied hotfixes or recent Cumulative Updates (CUs) for Sql Server 2005 SP2 (CU12 or CU11). The most succinct explanation of the relationship between SQL Server 2005 SP3 and the various CUs, including SQL Server 2005 SP3 CU1, which will be released in a week, can be found on Aaron Bertrand’s blog. You can find a list of bugs that have been fixed in SQL Server 2005 SP3 at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=955706.

Great Post From the VE Team Re-Posted Here

As a follow up to The North Pole – A Virtual Earth Christmas Experience, the VE Team created a Santa Tracker to track Old St. Nick on his trek around the world hosted by MSNBC (direct link to application here in the case you can find it on MSNBC). As Ed Young would say, “we’re gonna take this to a whole ‘notha level.”

Quite literally, in fact. Because this Santa tracker is updated dynamically and Santa’s sleigh is elevated to illustrate his magical flying capabilities – not to mention the elves worked extra hard to change the pushpin blip on a map into a 3-Dimensional object inclusive with real reindeer (Rudolph leading the pack), Santa himself and a bag full of presents. After all, they are more than just a blip on the map now aren’t they?

If you aren’t sure how to navigate the application, some brief instructions are provided for you.

To locate Santa along his delivery route in Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D, you will need to install the Virtual Earth 3D plug-in in order to view it.  If you do not have this plug-in, you will be prompted to install it when the page loads.  If your pop-up blocker disables this prompt, you can download the plugin here.

This experience may take up to a minute to load on your screen.  Once Santa has been tracked, you will see the an alert that “Santa has been located!”

Click on the “OK” button to zoom in on Santa flying over his current location. Keep an eye on the page load status indicated by the Virtual Earth globe icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. The page is fully loaded when the globe is completely colored.

Use the Virtual Earth tool bar to zoom, pan or tilt the page to see Santa, his sleigh and reindeer from different angles in 3D and to explore the location over which he is traveling.

Virtual Earth 3D requires the following to run on your computer:

• Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Vista

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7 or later, or Firefox 2.0 or later

• 250 MB or more hard disk space

• A 1 GHz processor (2.8 GHz or faster recommended)

• 256 MB of system memory (1 GB recommended)

• 32 MB video card (256 MB recommended) that supports Microsoft DirectX 9

• A high speed or broadband Internet connection

So, enjoy the holidays. Check on Santa’s progress by frequenting the Santa Tracker hosted by MSNBC. He’ll be at the North Pole until midnight tonight and then begin his journey around the world. Wait! Tonight at midnight??? Yep. Those of you inside the first time zone by the international date line aren’t surprised, are you? Everyone else, see the complexity? 

Great Post Team VE!

What happens when you get a dev and turn him into a developer evangelist you get Jason Mauer. While at PDC Underground TechZulu’s Geoffrey Emery Interviews Jason Mauer about what it takes to be a developer evangelist and what he was interested in at PDC which includes Windows 7 , Workflow 4, Visual Studio 10 and developing XNA. The XNA Framework is a set of managed libraries for Windows, the Xbox 360, and Zune. These libraries enable you to be more productive by using a set of unified class libraries to develop C# games. If you are new to game programming, or just want to review the basic steps toward getting a simple game up and running in XNA Game Studio, see the how-to articles in Game Programming Basics. Once you develop the game using this technology you can launch on the Zune or Xbox live via their online store a very cool technology. All this and more in a great interview from Jason Mauer.

Jason’s Blog - http://www.jasonmauer.com/

creator Club  - http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

XNA - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb198548.aspx

workflow - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735967.aspx

Visual studio 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/overview.mspx

I have been getting into cloud computing in a really big way/ I just read a great post from Oakleaf System that put a test harness on all the different cloud computing systems out there, With the exception of       s(s)ds (soon to come) and Google. It is a great through down and worth a read.  Here is a link to the article

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/test-harnesses-compare-amazon-ec2-with.html

Here is a spoiler if you don’t have time to read the whole thing

Following is a comparison of EC2 execution times with those of the original OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project that’s described at Azure Storage Services Test Harness: Table Services 1 – Introduction and Overview, et seq.

Action:	Page	Count	Insert	Delete	Create	Update
EC2 with SQL Express	0.005	0.002	0.019	0.380	0.112	0.374
EC2 with SimpleDB	0.048	0.094	0.048	10.094	22.142	10.855
Azure Table Services	0.215	0.188	0.155	5.820	5.310	6.561

I was surprised to find Azure Table Services’ execution to be substantially slower than EC2 with SimpleDB for single-page SELECTS, iterative counts, and single INSERT operations.

With the exception of the Insert operation, you can verify the Azure Table Services timing data because the harness is available whenever Azure Data Services is up. EC2 services will be made available on request for brief periods (contact roger_jennings[at]compuserve[dot]com).

Make sure you read the comments there worth a gander.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11646261&postID=1093778038105568110&page=1

Reading through my feeds this morning I caught a great post from Mashable about twitter phone apps. Thought I would help the windows mobile twitter lovers out there.

ceTwit - Windows Mobile client for Twitter written in c# and .net framework.

GPSTwit - Adds location tracking to Twitter on Windows Mobile devices (iPhone too)

PocketTwit - Free client (donations accepted) that works with Twitter and Identi.ca accounts.

Twitter2Go - Very basic Twitter app with limited features.

TwitToday - Small app for Windows Mobile devices with standard Twitter features.

Twitter Answers - The Twitter version of Yahoo answers. Ask and answer questions with this application.

Quakk - Open source Twitter client, which means not as quick and easy to install and update.