I applied the update a while ago to office that causes the 'Office Live Workspace' dialog to show at start-up but the tick box to stop dialog from showing every time has never worked and tonight has been the  first night I've needed to use Office in a while so I thought I see if I could fix this annoyance. 

After a quick search it turns out the problem is the installer for the update only sets up the registry for the current user and as I always set up an admin account separate form my day to day user account my registry didn't have the necessary keys and thus the dialog would  always appear. There is another update that solves this problem and it can be downloaded from Microsoft. There is a Aaron Rykhus has a TechNet blog post that explains everything in more detail if you want to check it out.

A problem that I often have is trying to get the UNC path for a mapped drive so that I can pass it to somebody or that they can pass the UNC path to me. My ideal solution would be to execute a command passing the drive letter as an argument and having the UNC path copied to the clipboard so that I can then paste the UNC path in an email or instant message, so I wrote the following script using PowerShell and the PowerShell community extensions (PSCX).

If you don't already have them installed install the following:

• PowerShell
• PowerShell Community Extensions PSCX

Then save my script to a folder on your computer and run it as follows

.\DrivePath z

Where 'z' is the drive letter for the mapped drive, the UNC path will then be on your clipboard and you can then paste it wherever you like.

param(
    [Parameter(position=0, Mandatory=$true)]
    [string] $Drive = "Z:"
)

# ensure the supplied param ends with ':' 
$Drive = $Drive.ToUpper().ToCharArray()[0] + ":"

$logicalDisk = Gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk -filter "DriveType = 4 AND DeviceID = '$Drive'"

out-clipboard $logicalDisk.ProviderName

IEEE Career Watch is running with an article that talks about the most sought after skills at the moment and it looks good for .NET developer as Microsoft .NET and Ajax are some of the hottest skills at the moment. With the Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer carrying the highest pay premium for developer certificates. Check out the full report here.

Considered by many to be the father of modern computer science Alan Turing was a mathematician who has been influential to the field of computing with his work on algorithms and the development of the Turing machine. He also made contributions to the field of artificial intelligence with his Turing test, a test that is still relevant today.

During WW2 Turing served at Bletchley Park where he helped crack the German Enigma code. However despite his contribution to the war effort and research into the fields of artificial intelligence and computing he was arrested in 1952 and prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with another man. Later in 1954 after his treatment by the British authorities he killed himself.

The facts are simple anyone who works with a modern computer is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine. Because of this John Graham-Cumming has started a petition to get Alan Turing an official apology for his treatment. Alan Turing was a pioneer in what is now our field and much of what we now take for granted wouldn't have been possible without the advances people like Alan Turing made, so please sign the petition before January 2010.

Petition to: apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death

Recently I've grown increasingly frustrated with Apples' iTunes software, I find it just to cumbersome for the task it performs. I mostly use windows and find myself more than happy with VLC media player and I therefore don't want to install iTunes just for the task of placing mp3's onto my iPod. So off I went in search of an alternative and that's how I discovered Floola. It ticked all the boxes for me, lightweight, runs on multiple platforms and runs from the device thus allowing it to run on any machine when the iPod is connected.

Take a look for yourself by downloading Floola and follow the steps described in Floola's online help.