SADev

The management at Nokia have scored a big point today with the big announcement in the UK yesterday where they have made Nokia Turn-by-turn FREE. This has solved the headache of paying Nokia for convenience and also showed Nokia is aware and dealing of the moves of the big players like Google.

Seems that in the last week, and just in time for me to be in Canada where they have bandwidth, that a bunch of things have become available for download which deserve your attention:

VS 2010 Quick Reference Guidance is now out!

Plus hotfix 1 for it

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Upgrade Guidance is now out!

The new Nokia 5800 firmware (40.0.0.5) is out – which brings it up to the level of the X6 in features now!

Lastly, and sneakily at the end of this post, my latest open source tool is out. Now I am not going to tell you what it is, but it is for presenters (mostly) and requires .NET 4.0 Beta 2 and Windows 7. Hopefully the name will entice you to check out Rule 18!

I was answering a question on World Cup 2010 Dizcus and found an amazing feature on Google Maps. I was looking for maps of cities in SA, and I stumbled across this cool more info link.

More info takes you to a portal for the city with information on the time & timezone, a high view map of the area, photos and videos of the town, popular places and related maps. This is a great resource when you are looking for information on a city that you have never been too! Below is a screen shot from my home town of Johannesburg.

The Nokia 5800 I have runs on the Symbian S60 5th Edition operating system and it seems to be a decent OS, but built into it is the most interesting anti-piracy system I have seen. So how does it work? Note: I am not an expert in this, this is my view after a few weeks looking into it, so I may be wrong.

If you do not live in South Africa, you cannot imagine the excitement what next years soccer world cup is generating. In my view it will be one of the top defining moments for South Africa, up there with the ‘94 elections and '’95 Rugby World Cup. To that end I have been doing my little bit as a local to help out people with sharing knowledge on all things world cup at the Dizcus World Cup website.

If you know StackOverflow/ServerFault/SuperUser then this site follows the same design as them except focused on a non-computer topic. For the rest of you readers, it is just an easy to use website where people post questions and others answer. If you successfully answer a question or answer a question very well you get points.

So Mathew, the site owner, put up a challenge about a month ago where he said the top 5 people, based on points, would get a South African Soccer Jersey! Well I was in the top 5 (I think number 2) and so I got the email today saying I had won a jersey! Thanks Mathew for the jersey and the great website!

Cecil Tshikedi asked a great question - what is actually in an ID number:

• The first six numbers are the birth date of the person in YYMMDD format - so no surprise that my ID number starts 820716.
• The next four are a gender, 5000 and above is male and below 5000 is female. So my ID number would have a number of 5000 or greater.
• The next number is the country ID, 0 is South Africa and 1 is not. My ID number with have 0 here.
• The second last number used to be a racial identifier but now means nothing.
• The last number is a check bit. Which verifies the rest of the number.

So for my ID number it would look something like: 820716[5000-9999]0??

There you go, it’s that easy.

Haven’t done one of these for ages so I thought it was time to find out what super hero and villain I would be.

Rein got interviewed on ZA Tech Show last week and the podcast is up for those who want to listen to him talk about CocoaHeads: http://zatech.co.za/episode-48/