Venu Anuganti Blog

Since couple of weeks on my Windows Vista (Dell Precision 470, 2 Xeon with 2G RAM), the external USB hard disk (500GB Western Digital MyBook) is getting annoyed, still could not figured it out what is going on. Suddenly the drive contents becomes empty even though the disk is mounted…and doing a power recycle on the external disk does get the disk remounted and access to the contents…but still was wondering why it is becoming so…

Its not one time or two times, it happened more than 10 times in the last one month. Yesterday even my Sandisk MP3 player became in the same way…this leads to suspect that there is something hidden bug in VISTA which is causing this or might be my system as this is almost 2 years old.

On 2005-Dec-05, I received the first check from Yahoo! publisher network (YPN) and may be I started using it a month before that. Even though I could not find any info on when I joined the YPN, may be good idea if they could display in the YPN profile whats the age of the account…I am still successfully running the YPN on all my blog sites (currently this is the only active blog, rest of them are all history).

Before switching to YPN, I used to have Google adwords; and once I made a switch, I never had a chance to look back…and never had any problems with YPN…interestingly I found YPN was displaying the content related ads much better than adwords by picking the tags from the blog entry…where as adwords most of the time used to display random ads which are not even related in any form.

Today I tried to login to my Comcast online account from its first page to see the current bill; and I found that the password field is taking clear text and the text is visible directly as shown in the picture below:

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After testing a bit found that it is actually a bug when you focus the mouse on the username field and if you just started at the first character without deleting the whole visible text (username) under the user name field, it just keeps the text as is…what a bad design…

As suspected earlier, Dell has finally announced additional product line to its small business called ‘Vostro‘. This is indeed a good sign and long pending activity from the DELL. So far; the only option was Latitude and Precision models and now they have Vostro. Vostro seemed to be reasonably priced and they are below Latitude and which can make the sales to pitch and can help lot of small companies to opt Dell.

I already found couple of good reviews on the Vostro-200 desktop, but yet to see cnet review on this.

As currently I use Macbook pro with Windows Vista under boot camp; I would like to see an alternative in coming weeks (because I boot to Mac OS only for Terminal, so having a laptop PC is much better). If I get a chance, I might buy Vostro 1400 notebook for day to day development in comparison to Macbook pro because:

• It is 14.1 inch screen with 1440X900 resolution (same as that of Macbook pro)
• It is just 5.39 pounds (same as Macbook pro)
• It allows up2 4GB
• It has Wireless-N Wi-Fi
• It has 4 USB ports (Macbook pro bas only two)
• It has full-sized keyboard (I hate the key alignment in macbook pro, especially delete, and all arrow keys)
• It has much better battery life than Macbook pro, if I opt for 9-cell 85WHr Li-Ion Battery
• It has 8-in-1 media memory card reader (Macbook pro does not)
• It has ExpressCard/54 slot (Macbook pro has ExpressCard/34)
• It has S-Video out (Macbook Pro does not)
• It has only 15-pin VGA video connector (Macbook pro has DVI with DVI to VGA connector) (Wondering why Dell didn’t add DVI as default one, unless I missed it, because most of the small business might have external LCD connection)
• One-touch access to calendar, contacts and files in seconds with Dell MediaDirect (not sure how it works)

Today I received a snail-mail from Dell, which had a 4-page publicity on Dell’s Small Business telling, “We believe: On July 10, small business will finally get what it asked for”..and all other tag lines for “We believe” stuff without indicating what it is.

Dell also has the similar stuff online teaser with 20 different teaser taglines. I am still not sure what it could be, but guessing it could be a big product line announcement or something in similar lines. If thats the case, I am more than happy to see a new business laptop models from Dell; which can actually compete with Apple Macbook series.

I am curios to see what Dell will announce for SMB on July 10th.

Recently am playing with a DLL project on Windows using visual studio 2005 on Windows Vista 32-bit (its sp1 with vista extentions installed, 8.0.50727.867). When I needed to insert a .def file to the project, it is prompting with an error; which I never seen….the error is not even an error…looks like internal error or kind of assert as in the screen shot below:

Something is wrong..now I need to find a way to add .def file so that I can export some functions as API.

Since few years I was wondering why Dell never sell their computer systems and other consumer goods (notebooks, desktops, LCD monitors or TVs etc) through any of the direct electronic stores (frys, bestbuy, circuit city, wal-mart) like HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Gateway, Apple, Fuzitsu or Acer does. Thats where the majority of the systems are sold to home end users and college students.

So far I only saw Costco selling Dell products other than direct Dell website. Today just happen to see the announcement that the Dell will sell its computers at Wal-Mart . This is a good sign for the company, this will also allow the company to bounce back on the market that it lost to HP and Apple recently. Hopefully we will see Dell products in rest of the electronic stores in coming days.