• Kim Kardashian writes something on Vistaprint her blog.
• A fan wants to comment on Kim's blog, but wants his own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on his own blog
• The fan posts on his  own blog and sends a trackback to the Kim's blog
• Kim Kardashian's blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to the Fan's post   

• Madonna posts something on her blog.
• A fan posts on his own blog, linking to Madonna's post. (This automatically sends a pingback to Madonna when both have pingback enabled blogs.)
• Madonna's blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to the Fan's post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

Today I encountered the above dialog in Microsoft Outlook 2010 when I was extending a meeting recurrence. This dialog box really confused me and almost prevented me from extending the meeting.

Why would exceptions be thrown? More importantly, shouldn't I know about them, in case I don't want to extend the recurrence of this meeting.

I get it that Microsoft wants to be helpful by showing the dialog box, but I think that they would have added more value to end users by telling me why Exceptions would be thrown and not just automatically ignore them.

Developer Tip: Don't just tell me that an error might be thrown, show me the error and allow me to take action on that.

This weekend I was trying to debug a Windows 7computer that was not able to access certain websites, such as facebook.com, nytimes.com and cnn.com. This only happened to the desktop computer and no other computer on the network. When I tried ping nytimes.com on the desktop computer, this is what I got:

Pinging nytimes.com [170.149.168.130] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 144.24.124.100: Destination host unreachable.

I searched around online but didn't see anything that would help. I checked the virus status, using SpyBot and Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool and they didn't find any issue. The host file, and Firewall connections did have any IP address or websites blocked. Nothing came up as the root of the cause. There's nothing in the Event Logs that would explain why the site was blocked.

I also cleared all the cache files from all the browsers, Firefox, Safari and Chrome and it didn't make any difference.

I even tried resetting the TCP/IP stack, as per suggested by Microsoft:

ipconfig /flushdns
nbtstat -R
nbtstat -RR
netsh int reset all
netsh int ip reset
netsh winsock reset
REBOOT

One thing that I did notice when I used Fiddler2 was that when I would try to access facebook.com, it would hang at fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net. There's no logical reason to why this is happening.

I am still looking into the cause, but one interusting bit is that when the computer was taken to Best Buy's Geek Squad, they had no problems accessing the Facebook sites. Which is weird, because this issue is specific to this computer. No other computers on the network encountered this problem.

The search goes on. One possible solution would be to install Windows 8, but we're not sure if that would really solve the problem.

Here's a cool trick if you have 2 1920x1080 monitors and looking at wall papers. Look for a panoramic wallpaper, something like 4912x1080 and use that as a background. What's cool is that the image will split between the two monitors. This will only happen if you have the picture position set as Tile. If you use any other selection, the image will not cross over to the other monitor.

You can find lots of really cool Panoramic pictures using Google Picture Gallery or Bing Picture Gallery. Also check out other image search galleries such as Yandex, which recently passed Bing to become the 4th largest global search engine.

It looks like Belkin iPhone cables are not as strong as people think. After a couple of weeks, the end piece of my Belkin iPhone Cable F8Z277 broke off.

Now I have to carefully plug in the iPhone in order to get it working. Luckily for me that cables are pretty cheap to find on eBay or Amazon. However, the big advantage of this cable is that it's a Charge Only cable which is useful at work since I can plug it into an available port at my work computer and don't have to worry about applications opening up.

Charge-Only cables are not as easily to be found.