...inside an Airbus A-340 300 with it's nose pointing towards south-west.

I have to say that SAS' WiFi internet access on their intercontinental flights is a cool thing. Could have been faster response times (currently around 800 ms), but I guess that's how it is when you're surfing via satelite.

As you may have figured out, I'm on my way to Seattle. I will tell you why soon

"Office 12" BETA2 was released for public download earlier this week. I installed it earlier today, and haven't had any problems with it. I have to say that the user interface looks smooth! I especially liked the "SmartArt"-feature which enables you to create good-looking illustrations quickly.

Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx

2007 Microsoft Office system preview site: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

Last friday my team participated in the Nordic Imagine Cup Software Design final in Oslo. We competed againts a Finish and a Danish team. And we won! The Danish team got second place and the Finish team third place. The first price was a Qtek SmartPhone. Both the first and second place go to the worldwide finals in India, and all teams got a nice SQL Server 2005-jacket

The days before the final were quite busy. We worked quite a bit on our presentation and on the demo we were going to show. The last night before the final we got some serious issues with a reluctant SmartPhone, so we stayed up almost all night, until 7 to get it working. Then it was a coulpe of hours of sleep and then straigt out to IT-Fornebu and Accenture's offices for the final.

Our team, "Team NTNU", consists of:
Jan-Kristian Markiewicz (http://thespoke.net/blogs/prismejon/default.aspx)
Gøran Hansen (http://goeran.greit.no)
Jonas Follesø (http://jonas.follesoe.no)
Hans Olav Norheim (me)

Check out the pictures from the final at J-K's Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j-k/sets/72057594125728297/

We have also got some publicity:
Teknisk Ukeblad - http://www.tu.no/nyheter/ikt/article53247.ece
Teknisk Ukeblad, PDF - http://www.tu.no/multimedia/archive/00030/Teknisk_Ukeblad_1606_30379a.pdf
Digi.no - http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=302349
msstudent.no - http://www.msstudent.no
Grunder.no: http://grunder.imaker.no/cgi-bin/grunder/imaker?id=1971

From the left: Gøran, Me, Jonas and Jan-Kristian
In front: Frode Kristensen from Microsoft Norway

Coding too much and sleeping too little is a setting I'm not too unfamiliar with. You know you should sleep a bit more and code a bit less when you have nightmares about debugging and are wondering what method of which class to call to shut off the wakeup alarm in the morning. I'm coding on a project with a few friends these days and came over some interesting code, probably caused by the setting above:

public string MyProp
{
   set {value = value; }
}

Hmm... useful property...

Microsoft Student Community NTNU, where I'm a member, will arrange a NUNit and NDoc Workshop soon. The exact date hasn't been decided yet, but it will probably be next week. I will be leading the workshop and we are going to focus on how to write good unit tests with NUnit, and actually write them. We are also going to take a look at code documentation with NDoc.

The agenda will probably be something like this:

• Presentation about unit testing in general, how to write good tests, and how to use NUnit
• Workshop where you will be given code to test
• Short presentation on code documentation with NDoc
• Workshop on NDoc

So look for the date announcement here and on http://www.msstudent.no. Hope to see you there!

By the way, I became a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA) after taking exam 70-290 today!

Update: It looks like week 18 (1/5 - 7/5) is too busy for us. We will try to hold it next week (week 19).

All kinds of IRC bots has existed for quite some time, everything from quiz bots to channel admin bots. You can't connect to IRC without seeing them. In the later years MSN Messenger has become increasingly popular, and now bots are beginning to appear here too.

I friend of mine, Frank Robert Kvam, has written one such bot, MSN-Hjelper (MSN Helper in English). MSN Helper can help you with some different things:

• Searching with google
• Looking up a number in the Norwegian telephone catalog
• Remind you of TV programs
• Calculator
• Wikipedia lookup

His wrote his bot using the free open-source class library DotMSN (http://www.xihsolutions.net/dotmsn/), which is a .NET wrapper around the MSN Messenger protocol. It is quite straight-forward to use, and only your own fantasy sets limitations for what kinds of messenger robots you can create

Add his bot to your contact list: msn-hjelper@hotmail.com 
Below is a screen shot of a conversation with it.

I went to "The Gathering" this Easter, as I have done the last 5 years. "The Gathering" is one of the world's largest computer parties with around 5000 attendees, held in the Olympic arena "The Vikingship" in Hamar, Norway every Easter. There are a lot of things going on there these 5 days from Wednesday to Sunday; scene shows, lectures, gaming competitions and other cool things.

This year things seem to have gone quite smoothly for the organizers. There were almost no queue to get in when we got there, and the network worked perfectly. In fact the Tech:Net-crew stated that they were bored and that we weren't even close to max out the internal network capacity. The internet line, though, was easily maxed out, with it's 1,5 GBit.

I have attached some pictures so you can see how big this party really is...

By the way, those of you who thinks that all big Microsoft projects are written i C/C++, check out Jonas' line count trivia.

We are doing a development project in C# in school now, and in we are (of course ) using a build server with CruiseControl .NET for continuous integration of the project. While we (the developers) and the build server are located on the university network, the test server is located in a local company's intranet. To make the build process really nifty, I decided to make it deploy the finished build right onto the test server. To do that I had to set up a VPN connection from the build server and into the company network. And this is were the fun starts.

So I went straight for it to test it - created a new VPN connection, typed in the user name and password and clicked connect. Without clearing out the "Use default gateway on remote network" checkbox. Through remote desktop. Guess what happened? Yup, the server disappeared from the internet and my RDP-connection froze. Did I mention that the server is located in a locked room, to which I don't have the key?

Then the fun started - trying to get hold of the key. After about an hour I got hold of the key and disconnected the VPN-connection.

Please clear this box before connecting to VPN from a remote server.

Later I configured the VPN connection using Routing and Remote Access (RRAS), which is a much better way of doing it...