Unbelievable. Apple has done it again with the most amazing iPhone. This phone is a minimalist person’s dream. Looks like I am going to be switching from T-Mobile to Cingular this summer so I can get my hands on this beauty.

The features I find most compelling are:

• Only one button and no keypad
• Full fidelity web browsing
• Intelligent, non-sequential voice mail
• Portrait or landscape mode

My current phone is a Sony-Ericsson W800i. It has a number of the iPhone features, packaged in a very usable Sony aesthetic package. However, Apple’s minimalist approach to the hardware and the tightly integrated software puts it in a whole different league. 

I was having trouble installing Windows Vista on an HP Pavilion zd8000. Repeated attempts yielded the same result — during the “copying files” phase, the machine would blue screen with a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA STOP error. STOP errors are typically hardware-related, so I went through the drill and disabled anything out of the ordinary in the BIOS setup, re-seated the memory etc. No joy.

I then tried the Vista recovery option, and found an option to run memory diagnostics. Since my drive is a new partition and has no OS, this would not run (of course, the error message was not helpful at all…it just said “there’s a problem”). After Googling a bit, I found this cool site — Microsoft Online Crash Analysis. The site has a detailed guide to using the Windows Memory Diagnostic and an ISO image containing the memory diagnostic software. I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD and booted up the machine with it. The machine booted up and instantly ran a series of memory tests from which I determined that one of the 1GB memory chips is bad. Removed the memory and the blue screen problem went away.

I have added the memory diagnostic CD to my collection of Windows disaster recovery tools. If you are getting intermittent blue screens, try this software…it will help identify or eliminate bad memory as the cause of the problem.

One of my favorite moments at the last PDC occurred just after a few of us (i.e. Shaun Walker, myself and a couple of other DotNetNuke Core Team members) had stopped by the fulfillment room to pick up The Goods. Just outside, we bumped into Miguel de Icaza. For the next ~10 minutes, primarily Shaun and Miguel schmoozed about Open Source and such. It was fascinating to be in the company of such Open Source pioneers. Enough reminiscing...

Today, Miguel posted on his blog that the Mono VBN compiler had successfully built "Hello World" on Linux. This is huge and opens up some amazing possibilities for DNN. I realize it's a long way off, but this brings the possibility of an unmodified DNN on a LAMP or similar stack that much closer.

DotNetNuke forums user odontech has posted an excellent collection of DNN-related links which I am reproducing here:

DotNetNuke Factoid

Community

· A community of over 300,000 members

· [link] Within the top 25 Open Source Projects at SourceForge.net (by Page Views)

Performance

Scalability

· [link] Web Farm Support

· High Traffic Reference Sites

· [link] DotNetNuke itself handles ~ 15 million pageviews daily

· [link] Georgia Institute of Technology > 10 million pageviews daily

· [link] WildVoice.com > 6 million pageviews daily

· [link] Transperth > 6 million pageviews daily

· [link] National Rugby League > 4 million pageviews daily

· [link] South Australian Central > 4 million pageviews daily

· [link] Vinum Canada ~ 1 million pageviews daily

· [link] University of Texas El Paso ~ 1 million pageviews daily

Security

· Public Registration
Allows the general public to sign up for accounts.

o [link] CAPTCHA
Prevents people from writing programs to create accounts.

· [link] Security Groups
Allows site users to be placed into groups.

o Group Settings

§ Auto Assignment
Automatically assigns new users into the role.

§ Public Role
Allows users to subscribe/unsubscribe into different roles.

§ Private Role
Prevents users from changing their assignmment to a role.

· Page Level Security

o Allows security settings on a page level basis

§ Ability to View Page

§ Ability to Edit Page

· Module Level Security

o Allows security settings to be set on modules placed on pages

§ Ability to View Module

§ Ability to Edit Module

§ (Custom settings available on a per module basis)

Skins

· [link] Over 70 skins listed on Salaro

· [link] Over 500 skins listed on SnowCovered

Modules

· Over 30 Core Modules

o [link] Account LogIn

o [link] [project page] Announcements

o [project page] Blog

o [link] Banner

o [project page] Chat

o [link] [project page] Contacts

o [link] Discussion

o [link] [project page] Documents

o [link] [project page] Events List / Calendar

o [link] [project page] FAQs

o [link] [project page] Feedback

o [project page] Forum

o [project page] Gallery

o [project page] Help

o [link] [project page] IFrame

o [link] Image

o [link] [project page] Links

o [project page] Map

o [project page] Media

o [link] [project page] News Feed (RSS)

o [project page] Reports

o [project page] Repository

o [project page] Store

o [link] [project page] Search

o [link] [project page] Survey

o [link] [project page]Text/HTML

o [link] User Accounts

o [link] [project page] User Defined Table

o [project page] Users Online

o [project page] Wiki

o [link] [project page] XML/XSL

· Community Developed

o [link] Over 100 modules listed on DotNetNuke

o [link] Over 700 modules listed on SnowCovered

Localized

· [link] [project page] DNN Supports multiple languages (currently 25 user submitted language packs)

Books - Five books have been published on DotNetNuke

· [link] Professional DotNetNuke 4: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET 2.0

· [link] Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals

· [link] Beginning DotNetNuke 4.0 Website Creation in C# 2005 with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express: From Novice to Professional

· [link] DotNetNuke For Dummies

· [link] Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0

Magazines / Media

· Microsoft published a 2 part webcast on DNN 4.0 (March 17, 2006)

o [part1] Overview and What's New

o [part2] Running on ASP.NET 2.0

· Microsoft published a 6 part webcast on DNN (Jan 10 – Jan 31, 2006)

o [part1] Overview and Installation of DotNetNuke

o [part2] Working with Modules in DotNetNuke

o [part3] Programming Your Own DotNetNuke Module Using Visual Basic .NET

o [part4] Using Security Features in DotNetNuke

o [part5] Creating Skins for Your DotNetNuke Portal

o [part6] DotNetNuke Architecture and Wrap-up

· DotNet Developers Journal ran a 4 part series on DNN (Dec 2005 – Feb 2006)

o [part1] An Introduction to the DotNetNuke Application Framework (Nov 2005)

o [part2] Managing an Open Source Project for DotNetNuke (Dec 2005)

o [part3] When Design and Development First Met (Jan 2006)

o [part4] Rapid Module Development for DotNetNuke (Feb 2006)

· [link] CNet published article (July 11, 2005)

· [link] EWeek published article (April18, 2005)

· [link] Visual Studio Magazine published article (Sept 30, 2003)

Joe Brinkman made an excellent post today (Repaving in a Virtual World) about the painful experience of dealing with the crapware most computer manufacturers force on us and the odyssey of re-installing software.

About six months ago, I got fed-up with the cycle and decided to end it once and for all by switching entirely to virtual machines (Virtual PC). Now, I am a convert. There is just no going back.

I upgrade my primary notebook approximately every 6-8 months. I will go from a HP Pavilion zd8000 to a Dell M90 later this month, and for once, I don't have the mixture of excitement about the new hardware, and dread about getting the environment just right. I'll copy the virtual machines over and be up and running in the time it takes the bits to cross the wire to their new home.

As Joe mentions in his post, I have multiple "theme-based" virtual machines:

• Biz - for Office apps, email, blogging etc. (10Gb disk, 400Mb memory) 
• Dev (multiple) - one standad dev VM for my business, and a couple for some other businesses I collaborate with. (16Gb disk, 768Mb memory)
• Test (multiple) -  these are throwaway VM's. I use them sometimes only for a couple of hours and then delete them. (4Gb disk, 256Mb memory)
• Media - for personal photos, music, videos etc. before I transfer them to my 2.5Tb media jukebox (10Gb disk, 384Mb memory)

At any given time I will have a combination of Biz-Dev-Test or Biz-Media or Biz-Test-Test running. Since the aggregate memory never exceeds 1500Mb, I never experience any problems. On the host, I do have Skype and my WinTV app running. These don't consume many resources and since I turned off just about every other non-essential service on the host, there is very little memory/CPU usage too. (Bonus: Incredibly fast boot time for host.)

It took a little getting used to this setup at first, but I think in the process VMs have helped me deal with another problem -- attention deficit. By setting up each VM to be specific to one general area, I have forced myself to be more disciplined in approaching tasks, especially development. Instead of bouncing between windows on multiple projects, I now focus on getting to a stopping point so I can switch to a different VM. I have all the VM's configured to have "My Documents" point to a shared folder on the host, so sharing docs is not a problem. I have not yet figured out the exact rules for when the clipboard works and when it doesn't between host-VM and VM-VM, but it is not a huge issue.

The key to excellent VM performance I found, was regular defragging. I run Raxco's Perfect Disk and the Invirtus VM Optimizer regularly on my VMs. It's like hitting a performance boost button -- things are just snappy after running these guys.

Another suggestion for saving time and effort is to get the base VMs right the first time. When I need to create a new VM, the only thing I need to do is copy the settings and disk files for the VM, edit the reference in the setting file to point to the new disk and once the VM is running, rename the computer. I figured that getting the VM right would save me countless headaches until the next major software upgrade cycle, so I invested a day in getting my base VMs just right. That investment has obviously paid off.