Always one for a bargain, I decided to plunk down some dollars and give cellular callback a go. If you're not familiar with the concept here's roughly how it goes.

You initiate a call by making a request of a service centre... you do this by either using a piece of software if you are on your PC, or by txt messaging the number you want to call to a certain short code or phone number. Here's the slide deck...

The 'system' then rings you back on your mobile and, once you answer, rings the other party to the conversation for you... A few hoops to jump through, but, talk about CHEAP phone calls. US 5c per 30 seconds to all of the major countries.... and that's from your mobile. Voice quality is excellent- if it's using VOIP it's certainly not problematic for quality.

It's sold via some pyramid scheme, but, to be honest it makes for cheap phone calls so it got my $$$. Come join my pyramid- http://www.1cellnet.com/cauld - well it's not a pyramid it some other sort of cell based, unlimied level paying... blah blah blah.... I've never been much of a fan of multilevel marketing (Away and all that garb) but it does make for cheap airtime, something I go through a lot of! Hopefully I might be able to move down a Vodafone Daytime minutes plan or two.... I think @ US10c per minute it works out just under 50% of the normal Vodafone price per minute.

Casey 'Brains n Brawn' Chesnut has been taking some flack over the content of his website from prospective employers. Bill Ryan has rolled in behind him... and I'm going to as well!

I think of all the fellow MVPs I HAD to meet when I was at the MVP Summit this year Casey was at the top of the list. Why? I had read his blog.... I had laughed my ass of a few times, but, had equally learnt some pretty cool things. He struck me as someone prepared to call a spade a spade... and with the intellectual horsepower to back it up...... Besides that he's another gym guy and I had to see if he was bigger and stronger than me...... which he is *grins*... but not by much!

As a prospective employer (which I am) I'd snap this man up in an instant (I just don't know that he'd think my NZ$ rates would be competitive when you turn them into US$).

I hope that Casey realises that an employment relationship is a two way street- he should be just as selective about who he chooses to work for!

UPDATE: There are some good echos in the chamber.....
Here , Here , Here

Lukas is blogging about the new Smartphones coming from Motorola.

He seems to have missed/forgotten/misplaced the MPx double clamshell phone- does he know something I don't? Dale Coffing had one of these @ the MVP Summit... Maybe it's becuase it looks to be becoming a a Windows Mobile SE Pocket PC device????

Not my kettle of fish to be honest... I'm think the MPX100 will be my sort of style... I'm a phone functionalty first kinda guy.

P.S. Get comments on ya Blog Lukas!

Ingo Rammer and a few others are getting into the skype thing.

I wonder if they know that there is a Pocket PC version available yet.... now this is the killer app... mobile VOIP!

Now I've always been a bit of a fan of XML......

I've written books on it...
Spoken @ Universities and other tech tiki tours around it...
...hell.... I've even got the number plate....

But there are some things that just should not be dne with XML..... one of these things is using it for writing bloody log files....

Nick (Kognition Senior Dev type guy) and I sat down this afternoon with one goal in mind..... find out why the %$^&$ our elegant and superbly architected Web Services layer was causing the ASPNET_WP process to consumer hundereds of megabytes of memory on most of the development team PCs.

The culprit was WSE. Some developer, somewhere in the evil empire, had decided that it would be a good idea to have the WSE implementation of WS-Security write to an XML log file every time something happens- this is great for debugging thought we, so it was duly turned on. Of course this developer didn't do it the elegant way as suggested by Dare, oh no... they commited the ultimate sin.... loading the whole bloody log file into a DOM (read in memory tree structure) simply to append a line... and doing it on each request of course.

The result is performance on par with a G.W. Bush press conference and a MASSIVE memory footprint. So, Mr Evil Empire dev..... do the nice thing and change the way logging works...

OK... so to recap for Google searchers who need to know about this problem in the future.

WSE has an XML based logging function. It causes the ASP.NET worker process to consume large amounts of memory. This also causes the Web Service request to be extremely slow. So.. don't enable logging.....

OK, so I've been meaning to setup my blog to work with my Smartphone for a wee while....

The catalyst though was finding out that I was being outdone by a bloody politician (Rodney Hide)......

I have been asked to explain how I manage to blog from Parliaments debating chamber. Its easy. I have a sony P900. I use Opera 6.3 as the browser. I log in over the GPRS network while sitting in the chamber and report the news from within Parliament in real time. You arent allowed to use a phone in the debating chamber but I am not. Well, not really.

...can't have that!

At present I'm MoBlogging via email and so can send photos from the phone camera. I thought about building a thin client app to blog from in .NET this morning... but instead spent most of the morning tearing my hair out trying to get Exchange to work properly. Rodney is using a browser and I don't know if he is using the P900 camera yet.... maybe we can get him to switch to a Windows Mobile device...... Rodney notes that the PM also blogs... Her blog reads more like a Monday morning Show and Tell at the local primary school....boring!

He's doing a meet the people in Dunedin on the 17th..... I might have to go and lure him to the darkside....

If, like me, you find that the Dynamic Help 'feature' in VS.NET is a right royal pain in the ass then this article from Fabrice tell you how to turn it off.

Anyway, today I found a nice way to disable dynamic help completely, for doing so go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Visual Studio\7.0\Dynamic Help

And modify the value of the Never Show DH on F1 to YES.

The mere existence of that registry key says to me some kind person @ MS thinks Dynamic Help blows goats too.....

Disclaimer:
This involves $^%$^ing with your registry.... if you %^&% it up don't come crying to me.

via the email bollocks loop.....

David Farrar has a good wee post laying the blame for the current b/s around the abolition of the Privy Council....

I've said in a number of posts that the reason that we're up the creek now is because the Govt. grossly over reacted to what was, in the end, a mere jurisdictional hearing...

I spent most of this week travelling the country with Paul Andrew and a few others presenting at the MS Security Summit series.

I mentioned a few things in my presso.. one was a book title worth grabbing.

As Nick notes, we had fantastic turn outs.

Nick notes a few experiences along the way as well... I guess I should add mine.

• The AirNZ check in system does indeed ROCK THIS WORLD. I have bagged AirNZ quite a bit in the past, but the Kiosk check system really is fantastic. The best ID to use is your Airpoints or Koru Club card. That way, if you are happy with a random seat assignment, yu can have your boarding pass in under 5 button presses. I'm a stickler for choosing my own seat though. Based something around the following heuristic (for 737s).
• Outside seat one row behind exit row only if no one is in the middle seat. The outside seat has no seat in front of it, but you really need the seat next door to be empty so you can put ya lappie on the tray table.
• Second preference are the aisle seats in row 1. Can stick your big legs into the corridor... and get off the damned plane first.
• Middle seat of an otherwise empty row of seats in the back 5 rows. By taking the middle seat you can often luck in and not have anyone seated next to you. This tip is even more important on Air NZs ever half empty trans pacific services.... always take the second seat in from the aisle towards the back. This gives you the best chance of keeping a group of others out of your row and thus allowing you to sleep, reclined, the whole way back.
• I could get CafeNet @ the Intercontinental..... but they were nice and upgraded me to their top floor rooms which have free net anyway. The intercontinental gets two thumbs up from me for net access.

Xbox 2 News
If you're interested in reading about the latest gossip on Xbox 2, then you'll want to visit xbreporter.com. One of the latest rumors on xbreporter discusses support for the .NET Framework:

• MSIL all the way
  The CPU for the Xbox 2 is rumoured to be designed to be a processor that can decode and execute instructions in Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) while at the same time being able to run x86 code, to remain compatible with Xbox  

from [http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2004/04/29/123041.aspx]