Luxury sports cars in costly Japan pile-up Japanese police said some of the luxury vehicles were beyond repair Continue reading the main story Related Stories In pictures: Sports cars pile-up A luxury sports car outing in Japan has ended in what may be one of the most expensive car crashes in history. Eight Ferraris, three [...]
Luxury sports cars in costly Japan pile-up
A luxury sports car outing in Japan has ended in what may be one of the most expensive car crashes in history.
Eight Ferraris, three Mercedes-Benzes, a Lamborghini and two other vehicles were involved in the pile-up in the southern prefecture of Yamaguchi.
No-one was seriously hurt, but the road was closed for six hours after the accident.
Media reports estimate the damaged cars are worth at least 300m yen ($3.85m; £2.46m) in total.
The drivers were on an outing to the city of Hiroshima
The sports cars – driven in convoy by a group of automobile enthusiasts – were on their way to Hiroshima, reports Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun.
Police say they believe the accident, which took place on Sunday, happened when the driver of one of the Ferraris tried to change lanes and hit the crash barrier.
“A group of cars was doing 140-160km/h (85-100mph),” an unidentified eyewitness told Japanese broadcaster TBS.
“One of them spun and they all ended up in this great mess.”
Ten people received minor injuries in the crash, police said.
They said some of the vehicles were beyond repair.
“I’ve never seen such a thing,” highway patrol lieutenant Eiichiro Kamitani told AFP news agency. “Ferraris rarely travel in such large numbers.”
via bbc.co.uk
Ouch!
Goodbye!!! Dear Wavers, More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. [...]
Goodbye!!!
Dear Wavers,
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.
If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.
For more details, please see our help center.
Yours sincerely,
The Wave Team
© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Wave account.
Admit it you also want one of these!
Curtsy of arstechnica.com http://arst.ch/rl6 The Kindle Fire, due for release tomorrow, landed in our hands today. As we work on our comprehensive review, we wanted to share our initial impressions. So we unboxed the tablet-like device and skimmed through our collections of Kindle material, browsed the Internet, and gave the keyboard a go. While our initial impressions [...]
Curtsy of arstechnica.com http://arst.ch/rl6
The Kindle Fire, due for release tomorrow, landed in our hands today. As we work on our comprehensive review, we wanted to share our initial impressions. So we unboxed the tablet-like device and skimmed through our collections of Kindle material, browsed the Internet, and gave the keyboard a go. While our initial impressions aren’t overwhelmingly positive, this is a device that has some serious potential.
The Kindle Fire is packaged simply in a cardboard box inside a sleeve. The only items inside are the Kindle Fire itself, a charger, and a card in a slot printed with the briefest of instructions. Right. Away we go, then!
When we pulled the Kindle Fire out of its cardboard nest, we noticed it’s pretty heavy for its size. Weighing it against the iPad 2 in our hands, the Kindle Fire is much denser, and it has a very soft rubberized back that seems meant less for gripping than cuddling. The body is thicker than the iPad 2, but because it’s only a 7-inch screen that’s closer to a 16×10 ratio, it is this close to fitting in the back pocket of my jeans.
The two long sides of the device are unadorned, but the top has a pair of speakers embedded, and the bottom has a micro-USB port sandwiched between a headphone jack and a power button that illuminates when pressed. When we power the Kindle Fire on, we get a slide-to-open arrow over a rotating selection of delightfully retro background images.
The Kindle fire starts you off with a few screens of instructions
The bottom of the Kindle Fire, with power button, headphone jack, and microUSB port
The Kindle Fire’s speakers
The charger for the Kindle Fire, unlike most we’ve seen that come with smartphones, tablets, and old Kindles, is one integrated piece, rather than a microUSB-to-USB cable and USB wall adapter.
The screen is pretty responsive to swipes and taps, particularly the carousel of recently used media and applications. The Kindle Fire sometimes seems overeager to show you its inertial scroll: even the most restrained of swipes of a fraction of an inch results in the content underneath sailing past for several seconds. With a single big swipe, the inertial scrolling took us through the entire first three chapters of War and Peace on Project Gutenberg.
The screen is very bright, even when the brightness is set to a middling level, and shows off the gray, yellow, and orange interface nicely. With a 1024 x 600 resolution, even tiny text rendered in the browser is readable.
Aside from the “carousel” of recently viewed content, the Kindle Fire has four shortcut buttons preinstalled as “favorites”: the Amazon store, the Pulse news app, and browser shortcuts to IMDb and Facebook. We could remove or rearrange them by holding down on an icon, and holding down on an item in the carousel would pop up an option to add it to the Favorites bar.
The iPad 2 vs. Kindle Fire
iPad 2, Kindle Fire, last-gen Kindle (now known as Kindle Keyboard)
When navigating the Kindle Fire away from the home screen, the four standard Android buttons usually appear along the bottom of the display (back, home, menu, search), but the home button is always isolated in the bottom left corner. When reading a book, a font size button will appear, and when using the Web browser, a bookmarks button is inserted into the mix.
While scrolling in certain places, the Kindle Fire is snappy and pretty, but other tasks, like opening books, are noticeably choppy. Page turning is stuttery as often as it is smooth, but the problem is only really bad when madly flipping pages. Scrolling through webpages can also be choppy, but tolerable so far. Pinch zooming works very well, and the Kindle Fire can rotate quickly between landscape and vertical orientation.
Kindle Fire recommends music with no prior knowledge of my taste, hits a pop fly.
We dabbled a bit with the Kindle Fire’s virtual keyboard, and so far, it’s not going well for us. This may be because the keyboard is an unfamiliar size—bigger than a smartphone, smaller than the iPad—so our fingers may need some practice recalibrating to the distribution of a 7-inch screen’s virtual keys. But so far, screeds typed on the device in portrait are riddled with typos, and the landscape keyboard is both too small for ten-finger typing and too large for thumb-typing.
This is only the beginning of a long, intense Kindle Fire journey during which we will no doubt cram so much media into our brains that the backs of our eyeballs will hurt. Stay tuned for our full-fledged Kindle Fire review in the next few days.
Further reading
There is lots of advice on the web regarding debugging CRM workflows and plugins; however I recently stumbled upon this article which has a few neat tricks in it for saving time during the “debug cycle”. Debugging CRM involves a lot of steps. These steps take time. You end up waiting forever from the time [...]
There is lots of advice on the web regarding debugging CRM workflows and plugins; however I recently stumbled upon this article which has a few neat tricks in it for saving time during the “debug cycle”.
Debugging CRM involves a lot of steps. These steps take time. You end up waiting forever from the time you make a code change to the time that you are debugging again. I wanted to share a couple things I have learned about debugging that have saved me a great deal of time.
Time Wasters:
- Starting and stopping IIS and the async service
- Deploying your new assembly
- Attaching to processes
- Getting back to debugging after making a small code change
Let’s get started…
Project Setup
I’m using a Virtual PC (actually VMWare Fusion on My MAC, but that’s another story) running Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 and Microsoft CRm 4.0; I also have Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 installed.Note: I stay away from remote debugging when possible as it requires specific security privileges on the CRM server and you will affect users that are trying to access the system. I will post about this at a later date.
To make life easier I set the build path for my workflow project to the CRM assembly folder. On my machine it is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\server\bin\assembly\. It varies from installation to installation; depends were you installed CRM! Building to this location allows us to register the plugin to disk and make code changes quickly without having to move files around or re-register anything. Nice tip – hey?
Register Plugin
Open the registration tool and register your plugin or workflow. Be sure to register the plugin to disk.Note: When you move to production I recommend registering to the database, but registering to disk works great for debugging.
If your note sure what the “registration tool” is then you are jumping the gun and probably need to refer to the CRM SDK or wait for an up coming post form me on the registration tool!
Attaching to Processes
Now that you have the plugin registered, you are ready to start debugging. You need to attach to W3WP.exe to attach to plugins since they run within IIS. To attach to workflows you need to attach to the CRM async service which is Crmasyncservice.exe.
Select w3wp.exe and Crmasyncservice.exe and click “Attach.â€
To save time with this process you can use a cool trick from Janne Mattila. You leverage VS macros to attach to the processes by using a shortcut key.
Something like this:
Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports System.DiagnosticsPublic Module AttachHelper
‘ This subroutine attaches to w3wp.exe:
Sub Attach()
Dim attached As Boolean = False
Dim proc As EnvDTE.ProcessFor Each proc In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses
If (Right(proc.Name,= “w3wp.exe”) Then
proc.Attach()
attached = True
End If
NextIf attached = False Then
MsgBox(“Couldn’t find w3wp.exe”)
End Ifattached = False
For Each proc In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses
If (Right(proc.Name, 19) = “CrmAsyncService.exe”) Then
proc.Attach()
attached = True
End If
Next
If attached = False Then
MsgBox(“Couldn’t find crmasyncservice.exe”)
End If
End Sub
End ModuleThis means you can now very quickly write code and start a debug session which is attached to the correct processes straight from a short cut key and because you are compiling into the CRM assembly folder you don’t need to copy your *.pdb file around.
But… there is a small got ya
After you have done this and you stop your debug session, make a code change and start trying to debug again you will receive a compiler error trying to build. This is because you are trying to build to a file location that is already locked by the async service and/or IIS.
To get around this create a batch file and run it every time you want to rebuild. Includes the following:
iisreset
net stop MSCRMAsyncService
net start MSCRMAsyncService
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” http://v-mat-sp:5555This script restarts IIS to unlock w3wp.exe. Then, it restarts the async service. Lastly, we reopen the CRM website in IE, so IIS will re-spawn itself. Otherwise, when you try to attach to processes it won’t be able to find w3wp.exe.
Credit: Andrew Zimmer
Tried updating to iOS 5 Beta 4 today using the new Software Update directly from the iPhone. Unfortunately it didn’t appear to do anything! But disappointed but I guess it is BETA! See the full gallery on Posterous Sent from my iPhone4 now with iOS 5 Beta 4! Posted via email from Matt Takhar’s posterous
Tried updating to iOS 5 Beta 4 today using the new Software Update directly from the iPhone. Unfortunately it didn’t appear to do anything! But disappointed but I guess it is BETA!
Sent from my iPhone4 now with iOS 5 Beta 4!
Fake Apple stores found in Kunming city, China At first glance the fake Apple stores look very like the real thing Continue reading the main story Related Stories China piracy crackdown ‘inconsistent’ China’s online retail set to boom An American blogger has discovered three fake Apple stores operating in Kunming city, China. Pictures of the [...]
Fake Apple stores found in Kunming city, China
At first glance the fake Apple stores look very like the real thing
An American blogger has discovered three fake Apple stores operating in Kunming city, China.
Pictures of the stores, their staff and a description of a stroll around them was posted on the BirdAbroad blog.
In the article, she writes about conversations with staff, many of whom were convinced that they were employed by the US electronics firm.
Apple has said it has no comment to make on the discovery of the counterfeit shops.
On her blog, BirdAbroad described the stores as a “beautiful ripoff – a brilliant one – the best ripoff store we had ever seen”.
She describes how convincing the shop was at first glance because so much trouble had been taken to copy key elements of a real Apple store.
For instance, it has a winding staircase, upstairs seating area and employees wearing blue T-shirts and chunky ID lanyards.
Staff believe they are working in a real Apple store
Shoddy construction
On closer inspection, wrote BirdAbroad, the store did not seem to be constructed to a particularly high standard.
The stairs appeared to be poorly put together, the walls were not painted properly and, most damning, it had the words “Apple store” written on the shop front.
“Apple never writes ‘Apple Store’ on its signs – it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit,” wrote BirdAbroad.
Research by the blogger revealed that the only official Apple stores in China are in Beijing and Shanghai.
The words “Apple store” do not appear on the signs of real Apple stores
A further check revealed that none of the three stores she found are mentioned on Apple’s list of official resellers known to be trading in Kunming.
What was also unclear was where the fake store had got the Apple products on sale – whether they had come from an Apple distributor or a grey market source.
The blog entry mentioning the visit to the fake store has proved hugely popular and has gathered more than 500,000 visits in less than 48 hours.
via bbc.co.uk
Amazing they actually have the front to do this…
via apple.com Love it – the new Apple Thunderbolt display!. On the list for next year, new iMac 27″ and 27″ Thunderbolt display… Posted via email from Matt Takhar’s posterous
via apple.com
Love it – the new Apple Thunderbolt display!.
On the list for next year, new iMac 27″ and 27″ Thunderbolt display…
Loving the new iTunes wifi sync with iOS 5. You can tell the device to sync from either the phone or from iTunes. Sent from my iPhone4. Posted via email from Matt Takhar’s posterous
Loving the new iTunes wifi sync with iOS 5.
You can tell the device to sync from either the phone or from iTunes.
Sent from my iPhone4.
Okay I admit I am getting really sad… but here’s a short video to follow my previous posts… new login screen, launchpad and Mission Control
Okay I admit I am getting really sad… but here’s a short video to follow my previous posts… new login screen, launchpad and Mission Control
