(OT) Cory Aquino Cortege to Manila Cathedral Pics

"Calling America" for Free

Outside the US it's tough to have free calls to America. But I figured out a site offering free calls to America and it works. I am from the Philippines. I tried to call my friend in New Jersey and we got a great conversation. But before that I tested if it really works though, so I tried calling Best Buy online store contact page.


So here's the details of how it works and the issues.
1. I go here
2. First I register to get rid of prompting back again to register from time to time. Registering the site is damn easy.
3. So, once the account is verified and created, I log in to the site and paste 1-888-237-8289 as is with dashes. The site understands it.
4. Hit Free Call Now button so it will try to dial the number. The system will try to detect the built-in microphone and speaker. For plug in headset, it just doesn't detect it. So better use the built-in speaker and microphone. This is common in laptops and notebooks.
5. I wait for the ring...it should ring out like a normal phone.
6. Then presto! I got a "hello" conversation with the operator and immediately put it down. Now try this with your friends or loved ones residing anywhere in America.


Should it failed to ring out, just refresh the browser and dial again. Sometimes the site will ask you again to re-log in.

There. Hope it helps. I tried this and worked well.

Happy calling. Let me know your experience through comments.

"odesk test answers?" Seriously?

You reached this page for answers in oDesk? You are kidding.

Here are the answers:

There's no short cut of building credibility in oDesk by cheating. Go make some sweaty preparation for the test. One tip is to open simultaneously the browser for instant research and have IDE let say for C# test on your side. C# Programming Test has lots of compile related tests and you can save some of your answers to assure correctness.

Some providers associated with companies has less than 20mins time spent on tests. You gonna be kidding! I bet they record the tests for their consultants. So that's the last tip. For a serious recorder, go seek desktop recorder like CamStudio. Remember oDesk test has almost a month of interval before you can retake the test so go take your best shot and good luck!

Hiring 2.0: The SecondLife way; even HR is innovating?

Hiring employees have been the most significant part of reinforcing one company's goal of handling growth. By far Google is doing interview of 14 times and Eric Schmidt said its worth it and it reflects on their shares. They cherry pick on most of the brightest and the internet pioneers in technology talents in the industry. Yahoo has a lot lesser times of doing interview and most of the companies do the same with Yahoo. But the thing is it cost dollars and time to pool talents and conduct such interviews. It's always a case to show personally on the interview but in SecondLife.com you do it virtually through avatar and you got that cost cut significantly on hiring process.

Why?

At SecondLife, which is a virtual community that attracts top geeks and those less techie ones to try comfortably, you can conduct any social gathering like that of hiring process. Companies who are willing to set that up will be paying some fees which is way smaller than conducting actual hiring process. Applicants will just sign up and create their own avatar which will be dressed up for the interview and try to study manipulating it on the virtual interview process. Communication is similar to just chatting to a friend which boosts self-confidence on part of applicants. The catch is that SecondLife is bandwidth hog and requires higher hardware specs specially on graphics but they are getting acceptance from the internet and to big companies.

Some companies has been experimenting using it. As an article on Wall Street Journal says:

A number of big companies put the new medium to a test last month, when recruitment-advertising firm TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications LLC hosted a virtual job fair with employers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sodexho Alliance SA, a food and facilities-management services company. TMP says it will host another virtual job fair in August.

Here is an actual setup from SecondLife that shows interview of Microsoft to an applicant courtesy of WSJ.


Some interesting user experiences are located here which depicts online community getting acceptance and that starts something is innovating. I am thrilled on how high tech companies are experimenting on this medium and they see potentials of cutting costs in this area. The SecondLife for me may be just for a community to socialize only but knowing those big companies started the risk of doing the hiring virtually is starting a fireball to new corporate tasks be done on this community. One trivial question for me is "How can a company trust someone behind an avatar?" Well, that's up for them. Ahead of it is they are looking for the applicants avatar behavior and how it is presented. Of course interviewer can't see a real head fake or a nod and a smile but things will be clearer on the psychology side as companies formulate interview analysis.

Update: There's a CNBC video on MSN about this.

Wow to new Microsoft Surface Computing

Microsoft announces this tabletop technology with touch screen which is first of its kind. You can transfer content let say a shot from a camera without plugging it into computer, instead you just place it on top of the table and let your fingers drag them onto other device – clever! The tabletop will be available from 5000 to 10000 US dollars. The ‘wow’ thing continues on this video..

I see some great innovations on restaurants, hotels, casinos, and other areas like Point Of Sale systems.

Update: There's a Microsoft parody video of this at youtube. Kind a funny and irony to Apple. The video promote the table computer but sarcastically and directly hit the Apple reining gadgets.This makes me wanna laugh. Take a look here.

Dialogs in Compact Framework and Multithreaded Environment

Recently, I got stuck with uncontrolled dialogs on POCKET PC having it pop up anywhere in my App. As the process have been like popping up dialogs in the UI using new thread have been useful as I need to do other task after popping up that message box. Dotnet developers already know showdialog in winforms are blocking, so I have to take advantage of the showdialog-blocking thing and then continue to do the later task of the code.

My code goes like this…
static void Main()
{
Application.Run( new Form1());

PopItUpAnywhere();
PopItUpAnywhere2();
}

// Pops up messagebox anywhere in the UI.
Private void PopItUpAnywhere()
{
Thread t = new Thread( new ThreadStart(RunMessageNotification ));
t.Start();
}

// Pops up a dialog form.
Private void RunMessageNotification()
{
// will popup form that shaped like a message box.
Form2 dialog = new Form2();
dialog.ShowDialog();
}

// Pops up messagebox anywhere in the UI.
Private void PopItUpAnywhere2()
{
Thread t2 = new Thread( new ThreadStart(RunMessageNotification2 ));
t2.Start();
}

// Pops up a dialog form.
Private void RunMessageNotification2()
{
// will popup form that shaped like a message box.
Form3 dialog2 = new Form3();
dialog2.ShowDialog();
}


As you might think, after popping up using ShowDialog() method without the IWin32Window type owner, thus internal process will only get active window on runtime making it its parent.

Viewing inside CF Dotnet Form ShowDialog code, here it is.

public DialogResult ShowDialog()
{
if (this.m_fShown)
{
this.OnLoad(new EventArgs());
}
bool visible = base.Visible;
base.Visible = true;
if (!base.m_fDisposed)
{
bool fModal = this.m_fModal;
this.m_fModal = true;
PAL_ERROR ar = EVL.EnterModalDialog(base.m_hwn);
this.m_fModal = fModal;
if (!base.m_fDisposed)
{
base.Visible = visible;
}
MISC.HandleAr(ar);
}

return this.m_dlgres;
}

As you might notice, method EVL.EnterModalDialog is trying to identify the parent this dialog before showing it up.

EnterModalDialog has these possible values in return:

BadParam = -2147483642,
Empty = 0,
Failed = -2147483648,
Handled = 0x1001,
InvalidHandle = -2147483645,
NotEmpty = 0x1001,
NotHandled = 0,
NYI = -2147483640,
OOM = -2147483647,
Success = 0,
Unimplemented = -2147483640

If the method cannot find its parent, said method will return -2147483642, which is BadParam causing to throw ArgumentException. But luckily, you won’t get this exception while showing it up first.

THE BAD EXCEPTION HAPPEN.

Talking about method PopItUpAnywhere() which is first executed on the code then follows the PopItUpAnywhere2(), you expect things will go right. But if dialog in PopItUpAnywhere exits first, exiting dialog PopItUpAnywhere2 will likely to fail.

Why?

Its because Form3 cannot find its parent because Form2 has been terminated earlier.
Again by executing this.DialogResult = DialogResult.OK on dialog forms, you actually let that form find it’s parent form again.

Let’s take a look on the code inside Dotnet Compact Framework,

public DialogResult DialogResult
{
get
{
return this.m_dlgres;
}
set
{
this.m_dlgres = value;
if (this.m_fModal && !this.m_fClosing)
{
this._CloseModal();
}
}
}

private void _CloseModal()
{
if (this._FCanClose())
{
MISC.HandleAr(EVL.LeaveModalDialog(base.m_hwn));
}
}

Method EVL.LeaveModalDialog(base.m_hwn), finds again the parent the Form it is associated to. Since having variable m_hwn refer to non-existent object, method MISC.HandleAr will throw ArgumentException causing your app like somewhat deadlocked in a dialog that’s not well terminated.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

1. If you are forced to exactly do the above execution of dialogs, it’s likely you have to implement Monitor class in threading to control the termination of simultaneous dialogs. Monitor class in CF 1.1 has only two methods – Enter() and Exit(), but enough to feed the control of those dialogs.

2. You can hinder dialog pop up one a time by your own logic.

My case I did all those two.

Microsoft new definition of Flash: “Silverlight”

Well, this is the Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/e) and a huge take off for Adobe Flash. Originally can run on a subset XAML but as released last April 30, 2007, the following were added.

Announcement Highlights:

1. Inclusion of mini-CLR which is part of the .Net Framework. The mini-CLR is now supporting C#, JavaScript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby.
2. Cross browser support. That means not just IE also both Firefox and Safari, and the team are also working interoperability on the Mac OSX platform.
3. Strong support to multimedia like videos, DVD and other offline content. Their demos were extremely fast. Video editing on the fly were genius and its way greater than AJAX.
4. Silverlight Streaming were also up for the said release. Microsoft allows users to host their Silverlight content and applications to this service for free.
5. Support on mobile devices.

Excellent comparisons to rival Flash together with full featured .Net 3.0 are tabulated here.

Features/Benefits	Silverlight	.Net 3.0	Flash/Flex
Rich 2D animation/graphics with audio and video	x	x	x
Industry standard video codec	x	x
Scalable video format from HD to mobile	x	x
Hardware-assisted editing and encoding solutions	x	x
XML (XAML)-based presentation layer for SEO	x
Choice of standards-based and high-performance languages	x	x
End-to-end server and application platform	x	x
Media server licensing (unlimited bandwidth)	$999	$999	$4500
Content access protection (DRM)	x	x
Client side play lists for ad-insertion	x	x	x
Robust video publishing tools and 3rd party ecosystem	x	x
High-performance, multi-core enabled client	x	x
Scalable full screen video up to HD (720p)	x	x
Native support for device-based video	x	x
Offline, document support		x
Client size	2MB	50MB	2MB
Supported operating systems	Windows /Mac	Windows	Windows/ Mac/Linux

Source: MSDN BLOGS

Demos are located here ( interactive ) and here( pictures only ).

Word of mouth from blogosphere about Silverlight

1. “Fast, very, very fast.” - Nik Cubrilovic – A blogger at www.nik.com.au and he is the CEO of Omnidrive.
2. “The engineering behind this is stunning.” - Steve Gilmore - A Microsoft hater.
3. “Microsoft ‘rebooted the web.’” - Robert Scoble, an ex Softie who evangelizes MS products. He is notable of criticizing Microsoft and praising Google and other MS rivals. Current Vice President Media Development of PodTech.net.
4. A silly question (I thought) was asked to Scott Guthrie by Robert Scoble, “Would Google use it?” Well Guthrie says, “They have to in some point.”

If you are interested playing around, get SDK here. I think entrepreneurs should take a look in this new technology that turns web even richer. For more information, you can visit the official site at www.silverlight.net.