VS2008 Express

The Visual Studio 2008 Express offline installer is a corrupt image being offered for download from the Microsoft website. A lot of people have complained about the "Program too big to fit in memory" error so it's yet another bug from infamous Microsoft. It's a free product so no one really cares at this stage, unless they are paying for bandwidth.

Regex for doesn't contain

^((?!my string).)*$ Is the regular expression for does not contain "my string". Wondering how someone can come up with that? Check out the reference at:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/refadv.html

There's a basic and advanced regular expression reference section so check out both!b

Sun Java on Fedora Core 8

There's been a successful install of Sun Java 1.6.0 on Fedora Core 8 with instructions posted at: http://vertito.blogspot.com/2007/11/sun-java-on-fedora-8-install-howto.html

I haven't been able to try it yet, but I'll do so soon.

Microsoft's 2008 Platform

Microsoft is releasing Microsoft Windows 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 at an event on February 27, 2008 7am. It's a pretty major event since it marks the next leap since the 2005 release.

The best feature of the new platform is LINQ, which enables developers to treat data as entities rather than relational tables. It's like taking NHibernate to the next level and integrating it with the programming language.

Sun pushing for NetBeans

Sun is bringing it's IDEs to an end and would be helping it's customers move to NetBeans for development. It's actually a pretty good idea since most of the Java world is pretty much standardizing on either Eclipse or NetBeans. With more of the community shifting to Eclipse, the only reason NetBeans would remain alive is if there are sufficient users working with it.

IP Address Lookup

You can easily get the geographical location for an IP address at http://www.ip-adress.com . It even displays a nice little map, though you shouldn't expect it to be accurate enough to go on a hunt for a hacker with your GPS tracker ;-)

Oracle iSqlPlus

Oracle has a pretty good web based tool for executing queries against the database called iSqlPlus. It is quite similar to Sql*Plus, but is better suited for testers than DBAs. In Sql*Plus, users complained about long lines that would get wrapped, thus messing up the output. Since iSqlPlus works within your browser, it builds an HTML table containing query results with a width just enough to display all the results. It also keeps a history of previously executed statements for the sesson, so you can easily execute a previously executed query.

For a default install of Oracle, you'll generally find iSqlPlus installed at http://localhost:5560/isqlplus . Do add your comments to this post if you've had a chance to use both.