I've noticed for the past few months that my laptop battery doesn't hold nearly as much charge as it used to. I can only get about an hour of use (or less) out of it anymore.

The Thinkpad Power Manager has a battery maintenance utility that performs a "Reset" on the battery -- charging it fully and then discharging it fully -- that's supposed to help, but it wasn't helping.

Yesterday I noticed that my battery light was flashing amber even though I was plugged in. I checked the Power Manager display, and it told me this:

Yikes! Irreparable damage? That can't be good...

Although there have been a couple of Lenovo battery recalls recently, mine wasn't one of them.

Thank goodness for my awesome Thinkpad maintenance plan though. The battery is still under warranty, and all I had to do was tell them what was going on and they said they'd ship out a new one as soon as it's in stock at the warehouse. No weird diagnostic programs to run, and no dropping off my laptop at a service center and having to wait for someone to assess the problem -- just a new battery and that's that.

That's the kind of service I was hoping to get when I paid a little extra for the Thinkpad brand in the first place.

---

[ permalink ] [ e-mail me ] [ read/add comments ]

In this session the focus will be on real-world applications of the Comet programming technique. Comet is a programming technique that enables web servers to send data to the client without the client needing to request it. First Jean-Francois Arcand will describe what a Web 2.0 Comet application is and how to build Comet applications using Grizzly Asynchronous Request Processing (ARP) and GlassFish. Next he will demonstrate an AJAX browser-based application and finally he will discuss some performance metrics measured using a Comet-enabled application.

With the onslaught of excitement around AJAX and RIAs, incredible user interfaces that engage users in a passionate and sticky experience is paramount. Creating these experiences requires much more than just great developers or creative designers. It takes both sides working together in a very disciplined and choreographed workflow that empowers designers to create world class interfaces and enables developers to implement those interfaces to create rich and engaging experiences quickly and efficiently. The designer to developer workflow is the focus of the major players in RIA and will be the defining area that decides whether your RIA development succeeds or fails. Come hear from the industry?s experts in RIA design and development about approaches, experiences and lessons learned.

We test a particular constriant in our XSLT and throw a custom exception on failure:

The March CTP of Visual Studio Orcas is out, and it includes IntelliSense support for JScript. See Jeff King's post about it. That by itself is cool, but the ASP.NET AJAX support is awesome! It uses the xml documentation in the AJAX Library to give you extra information like parameter types/descriptions. I've seen this before internally, but I haven't gotten a chance to play with it yet. I'm definitely looking forward to it! Read More......(read more)

The upcoming workshop on the WCSF next March 12th. is sold out. If you are still interested in participating please contact me through this blog and I will put you in our waiting list. We normally have some late cancellations, so you might be able to make it. Thanks a look forward to seeing you! Read More......(read more)

Last night we released our 10301 Toolkit package. David Anson already wrote up a great post describing what's in there, but I thought I'd highlight some of the great stuff the team has done. We do almost all of our prioritization based purely on customer feedback from CodePlex Issue Tracker and the Forums, and it is really great to be able to turn things around this quickly. We pay a lot of attention to the issue voting on CodePlex. We added two new components: ListSearch and SlideShow . In addition we now have localization support, theming support, and (finally!) a built-in mechanism for removing comments and whitespace from the JavaScript files, which results in quite a bit smaller download sizes for the AJAX pages. This is an issue that I've...(read more)

Via Dave Campbell (one of the funniest bloggers on my OPML), a guy named Eric Poulton is doing a mini-art series with a theme of Steampunk Star Wars.

I'm not even a Star Wars geek, and I find this to be seriously cool on some level I don't consciously grasp. Victorian-era Star Wars tomfoolery.

I honestly didn't know what the hell steampunk was before I saw these, although I've certainly seen/read the genre before. Yet more evidence of how unhip I am (in fact, my very use of the word "unhip" is probably some circular indication of unhipness -- surely there is some much newer, hipper word for that these days -- crap, I said "hip" again...).

Anyway, a little Friday fun fer ya.

?

?

---

[ permalink ] [ e-mail me ] [ read/add comments ]

Recently, in addition to the expansion of Elite Retreat, a couple more smaller niche SEO conferences have been announced. These conferences offer a great value because they allow you to be close to the facilitator. They are like buying consulting in the form of a conference.

This is an absolutely awesome feature. IntelliSense / autocompletion for JavaScript is a difficult problem (because of the dynamic nature of JavaScript) which the Visual Studio team is brilliantly solving. They were able to build an elegant solution to the problem that works reasonably well on plain JavaScript, but really shines when used with ASP.NET Ajax. The type information that we added to our debug scripts through doc comments really helps in making the whole experience seamless. Jeff King wrote a great blog post that shows what's already available in the Orcas CTP: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/03/02/jscript-intellisense-in-orcas.aspx The CTP itself can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b533619a-0008-4dd6-9ed1-47d482683c78&DisplayLang=e...(read more)

Ajax RIA + Portal + SOA = Success for H&R Block H&R Block Sr. Systems Architect, Dan Cahoon, shares how H&R Block delivered SOA-connected Ajax portlets to its more than 12,000 branch offices to deliver composite workspaces streamlining the staffing operations for the nation’s largest seasonal employer. Dan shares his learning from the project and discusses the successful pattern they are reusing to get more solutions to market quickly.

Here are some of my photos from the GAP Adventure tour I went on called Costa Rica Quest. ?The trip took us to San Jose, La Fortuna/Arenal, Monteverde Cloud Forest, and Manuel Antonio National Park in Quepos. ?There were some great adventures including: repelling off 70m waterfalls, sitting in volcano heated hot springs, horse back riding, zip-lining over the rain forest, snorkeling, as well as just relaxing on the beach! ? And of course... lots of monkeys!

Back in October at the Ajax Experience Conference, I had a chance to sit down with Jack Vaughan from ServerSide.NET to talk about ASP.NET AJAX. Check it out: Brad Abrams on ASP.NET AJAX ( Video ) I'd love your feedback or thoughts... Here is an idea of what we talked about You have described basic elements of AJAX . but when you looked at it first, what were the main components of AJAX for someone just even starting out? Jack Vaughan: So, a lot more client side caching? And, but it does have a server side and a client side, and as being at this conference, how do you see people's views on where what should be? Okay, well, the.what we called Atlas Controls and now we are calling ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. I think I saw that yesterday. What did...(read more)

Today on the www.asp.net site we posted a great new "How Do I?" video series focused on SQL Server 2005 Express (which you can download and use completely for free). The series features 13 professional videos that start at the very beginning and then explore designing tables/schemas, using data types, creating SPROCs, using reporting services and the business intelligence engine, enabling full text search across your data, and more (I'm guessing even most devs with a lot of data experience might learn some new things from the reporting services and full text search videos): You can download or watch the the SQL Training videos online for free here . In case you missed my posts on uploading a SQL Express or SQL Server Database into a remote hosting...(read more)

The March CTP of Visual Studio marks the debut of a much-requested and long-awaited feature: improved JScript IntelliSense . We’ve been working on this for almost a year now and I’m pretty excited to finally be able to share it with the public. There are a variety of topics I’d like to deep dive into, but for today let’s just take a quick aerial tour of the new features. 1. Proactive Completion List Our old list was a bit lazy and only “awoke” when you typed a period while accessing a member. Our new one is on-its-toes and is wired up to the language grammar. Net effect: it comes up when you would expect it, and you can spend less time pressing ctrl+J. =) 2. Keywords in Completion List In practice, you will spend half of your time typing keywords....(read more)

I’ve had SO MANY inquiries as to how I reocrd the How-Do-I videos I thought I’d type up a little guide. First, I use Camtasia Studio 4 from TechSmith . I do my recordings on Windows XP, but I’ve tested a beta release of Camtasia for Vista and it appears to work fjust fine. Audio… Get a GOOD USB Headset. I use the Plantronics Audio 510 USB . This really makes a different with sound quality. My audio format is MPEG Layer-3 (TechSmith LAME), 44100Hz, mono, 15KB/s When recording – I set my screen properties to 1024x768 and I do video capture as native .camrec format, I use the standard TechSmith Screen Capture Codec and record at 5 frames per second. When I produce my video I use custom production settings to create the .wmv file. I producs with...(read more)

Here is a very cool story that is being picked up by press all over the world...
? ? ? ? ?
IBM WebSphere Portal Is First to Make Google Gadgets Available to Millions of Corporate Portal Users

"IBM announced that it is the first vendor to bring Google Gadgets™ -- or consumer-style web utilities -- into commercial portal software. ?Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal"

During the course of several recent Domino domain audits, consultant Andy Pedisich discovered what was thought to be an extinct Lotus Notes security problem. Unfortunately, it still seems prevalent in many Lotus Notes R6 and R7 domains. Find out if your Notes/Domino domain is at risk for someone cracking your users' HTTP passwords.

The IIS team delivered an amazing product with IIS 6 but they sure haven’t rested in their laurels since then. They’ve been doing all sorts of great work, not the least of which is IIS 7. So I thougt I’d share this list of IIS Resources that I keep my eye on. IIS.net IIS-Resources.com IIS FAQ IIS Answers IIS Toolshed IIS MVP Blog IIS Product Site Read More......(read more)