VNC (an abbreviation for Virtual Network Computing) is a great client/server software package allowing remote network access to graphical desktops. http://www.tightvnc.com/intro.html

I'm very fortunate to be recently acquainted with Charles Hughes, the president of the BCS.  He is a very genuine and passionate chap, and I was pleased to be able to join him for his BCS residents dinner at "The Banqueting House" in Whitehall.  It was designed in 1619 and completed in 1622 with the ceiling paneling decorated with paintings by Rubens.  The guests of honor were the Duke of Kent and Lord Sainsbury.  After dinner entertainment was most spectacular with the band of the Royal Corps of Signals marching up and down between the tables playing excellent marches and other tunes.

I never went on a Rugby Tour when I was at school, however Im making up for it now with Marlow Rugby club and my 2 boys.  This is our fourth tour (2 to Brean Sands and last year to Eindhovan).  This year we visited the Hague and Oisterwijk RFC and had a fantastic time.  There were a few hickups, such as when I left Luke in Calais whilst I sailed across the channel with Oliver, but it all turned out fine in the end.

Full details and pictures at http://www.iwaszko.com/RockersRevenge2006

In the versions of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services that are earlier than Windows SharePoint Services SP2, you could write a document library event handler that used the object model without explicit impersonation to access Windows SharePoint Services.

I spent 4 hours wondering why I couldnt get this to work and then found the following MS article saying that SP2 had "changed this behaviour by design !"

Full Article at: Document library event handlers that use object model code without explicit impersonation fail with the "Cannot complete this action" error message after Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 is installed.

(I found it via another very helpfull blog by Mike Walsh of WSS FAQ from a goggle list of WSS updates)

Outlook Redemption is a toolset for users of Microsoft's Outlook (WikiPedia link)

OutlookSpy is the ultimate Outlook developer tool. Integrated directly into Outlook

Connecting to multiple IEEE 802.11 networks with one WiFi card

VirtualWiFi is a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. It abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card. This new functionality introduced by VirtualWiFi enables many new applications, which were not possible earlier using a single WLAN card.

Full article: http://research.microsoft.com/netres/projects/virtualwifi/

Ive been interested in speech recognition with Dragon and IBS's sytem for a long time.  However 90% accuracy still means a lot of slow error correction and Ive still to be convinced.  Perhaps Windows Vista will provide the technology to make this input method mainstream.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/01/speechinWindowsVista/default.aspx

My 12 year old son was asking maths questions the other day and we got onto the root of minus 1.  I remembered it as being "j", however it is infact "i".

Here is an extract from good article explaining "i"

What is the square root of minus one? In other words, is there a number which when multiplied by itself, produces an answer "- 1"?

In arithmetic, minus multiplied by minus gives plus. (Taking a debt away from someone is really like crediting a positive sum of money - and in a similar way, a sentence containing two negatives becomes positive). Thus, because (- 1) squared equals +1, the answer to Ö (-1) cannot be "minus one" (nor can the result be plus one).

As far as ordinary, everyday numbers go, the square root of minus one does not exist. However, mathematicians find it useful to invent a completely new kind of number to fulfil that role. They decided to assume that such a root really did exist, and wrote 'i' to represent it. ('i' was chosen because it stands for "imaginary").

We can now go on and find the square root of minus four: the answer is '2i', because

Full article

Upgrade a server or virtual server
To upgrade your server to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, run Setupsts.exe. Running Setupsts.exe upgrades your server and the default virtual server. If you have additional virtual servers to upgrade, you can upgrade each virtual server individually by using the upgrade operation with the Stsadm.exe command-line tool.

How?

Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
Navigate to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Bin folder.
Type stsadm.exe -o upgrade -url <URL>, where <URL> is the URL of the virtual server you want to upgrade.