Eggcellent - [11:27 AM]

Bye-bye windowsupdate.com - [4:37 PM]

MSNBC: "Microsoft kills address to foil worm" - Wow, pretty drastic move.

GREAT Visio resource - [12:31 PM]

I've been communicating over the past week with a gentleman by the name of John Marshall, he's a Visio MVP, and all around good fella. He maintains a very nice set of pages devoted to Visio, including a nice little History page. That's something we should have at Microsoft.com!

Check out his Third-Party as well as a VBA page, well done John, it's people like you that make Visio a success!

Latest Worm & The Scobleizer - [9:30 AM]

Robert Scoble: "Fixing security in Windows is an extremely tough problem. Microsoft has, what, 50+ million lines of code? It's a very difficult problem to test every piece of code when it's put together as a system. Security is job #1 here..." - I cannot even begin to tell you how embarrassing this is to a software developer. You know the guy that wrote that code was sitting in his office the day it hit cursing the day he was born. It IS PERSONAL when your code crashes, or worse yet allows someone to break into your box. Security is indeed job one at Microsoft. This last release of Visio we spent an enormous amount of time analyzing source to find possible insecurities. Next time around the job will be EVEN MORE thorough. But Robert is absolutely correct when he says "Anyone who says they are 100% sure that their system has no security flaws is lying." is spot on. Maybe lying is a strong word to use, naive more like it.

A good friend of mine has a good take on this whole situation, he says "No software is secure" and "Physical security is the best security." I agree.

Oh and one little note about your metrics Robert, what coder is slinging 100 lines of code a day? That's an exceptionally GREAT day of coding. Maybe it's copy and paste coding? I hope Microsoft doesn't expect us all to write that many lines of code per day? If it does that would go a VERY long way toward explaining security problems. Write ten good lines a day, if you can, that's my motto. In the past I've seen people rewarded for the number of bugs they fixed in a release cycle. Hey, if you don't code bugs to begin with you won't have to fix so many later. We all write bugs, it's inevitable, especially in complex systems. But we all strive to write bug-free code. A bug that causes a crash is a security problem, plain and simple.

We're always working on it, don't forget that.

Darn it anyway... - [9:09 AM]

I knew what the date was yesterday because it was our 16th anniversary, but I didn't pay attention to the day. It was Thursday, movie line day. I blew it once again.

There's been some turmoil surrounding my thoughts lately. I'll paint a clearer picture in the weeks to come. The family is fine, not trouble there THANK GOD for that. It's a little thing but I sometimes allow the little things to dance about brain and squeeze out otherwise better, more productive, thoughts. Please bear with me.

Oh, and honey, Happy Anniversary!

Bad news for browsers - [10:31 AM]

CNet News: "A patent-infringement judgment against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser has raised speculation over which company in the Web browser market might be the next target of Microsoft's pursuer" - Wow, that's about all one can say. As a developer of software I wouldn't create a product that wasn't extensible by third parties, it's just a logical choice to me. There's always something missing and if someone can extend your product from the outside why not let them? This situation seems strange to me. Let's see how Microsoft reacts. We have a treasure-trove of patents and *it's my understanding they're there to protect us from such problems. How so? Well if we're taken to court the idea would be to exchange rights to patents instead of getting a license to them.

Anywho, any browser that is extensible would appear to be a possible target. Developer beware.

* The above statement is my personal understanding of things. This is NOT the opinion, or legal standing, of Microsoft Corporation.

(You know it's bad when you start adding disclaimers to your posts! )

RSS articles on MSDN - [10:44 AM]

A friend just turned me on to this. A query on MSDN for RSS produces some nice articles. Spread the word.

eBay needs RSS feeds - [2:13 PM]

Wouldn't it be nice if eBay would generate an RSS feed for items you're bidding on, as well as items you're watching? They already do it via e-mail alerts so I bet it would be super easy for them to do an RSS feed, right?

I'm not an eBay super user or anything like that so maybe they already have RSS feeds for those things and I just don't know about them?

Note to self - [11:16 AM]

I need to go out and purchase a copy of Dreamweaver MX. All my web design buddies use this booger all darned day and absolutely love it. I think there's also a market there for some .NET specific helpers to that environment, that is if it can be done? Could I write C# based ASP.Net code in Dreamweaver MX?

Possible outages - [2:43 PM]

My ISP has informed me that there could be outages for this site over the next week. They're making some big changes that'll help us all, so please bear with us.

Thanks!

Blogger template editing is busted - [1:48 PM]

NOTE: I've just edited my Blogger post template and it's not being saved, in fact it's been deleted. So if you can read this now (1:30 PM Monday) you probably have an RSS reader. The RSS feed for my site is still being published.

Be careful editing your templates for the time being or you'll end up with a blank template. Thank God for backups. Hopefully template editing will be back up and working soon.

UPDATE: It looks like all is back to normal, about 2:00.

Weekend excitement - [12:59 PM]

I mentioned earlier our softball team played in Santa Maria over the weekend. What I didn't mention was the excitement we all experienced Friday night at dinner. Most of the team arrived in Santa Maria on Friday evening so we didn't have a three hour drive on Saturday morning. Around seven that evening we decided to go grab some grub at a local steak joint called The Roadhouse Grill. There were ten of us for dinner, including family. Everything was wonderful, the food was great, the service was great, and the conversation was lively. It's the kind of experience you expect from a group of friends. Toward the end of dinner we noticed a commotion in the bar, raised voices and bodies milling about. Soon after a group of folks were asked to leave and we resumed our conversation, began wrapping up our evening, and paid for dinner. Then we noticed another commotion beginning at the entrance to the restaurant. One of the guys on our team is a probation officer so he grabbed his badge and went to see what was going on. We could see him showing the badge to the gentlemen that were causing the problem and noticed they were becoming VERY agitated. So we started to the door in case he needed help, now a crowd was beginning to gather and I could see that one of the guys had his shirt off and was motioning for someone to "Come on!" A few seconds later there was a flurry of activity and the middle of the crowd opened up, I hear someone yell "He has a knife!", "Get the baby!", and "Where's Eric!" Not very encouraging words. Before I know I see glass shatter. I couldn't see who threw it and who was struck, then I see two guys are standing in a sort of showdown position about six to eight feet apart, one with something in his hand I couldn't make out, the other with two full beer bottles, one in each hand. The bouncer is now standing on a the ledge of a half-wall (about four feet tall) between the two trying to get them to calm down. The cops come scrambling through the door, I turn to look and catch someone falling to the floor out of the corner of my right eye. Blood running down his face. The bouncer took out both of the guys that started it. One with some sort of flying kick and the other with an elbow to the face. The guy on the floor was the one kicked, he was totally out of sorts, and didn't know which way was up. The other guy I couldn't really see but the police officers got to both of them pretty quickly and cuffed them. It was over, except for the questions. In all that action I can't believe how little I actually saw compared to others. I was too busy trying to locate my friends, and the baby I thought was in the middle of the whole thing. Turns out a couple was talking about their baby they left back at the table behind us, no harm done.

In the end one of the bouncers was actually stabbed in the shoulder (turns out it was a box knife), not life threatening, and the two guys that started it were worse for the wear.

Who's a bum? - [12:18 PM]

It looks like Kim's cousin, Seth, is doing ok in his Single-A assignment.

Hey Seth, how do I get one of those caps?

Mt. Rainier - [12:03 PM]

MSNBC: "Volcanologists determined in the late 1990s that the mountain is far more unstable than previously thought, and they have since persuaded local emergency management officials to launch an early-warning system and a major public-awareness campaign." - Wow, looks like being remote has it's advantages. If Mt. Rainier decides to go off the Visalia campus of Microsoft is safe.

There's one advantage, amongst many others, to being remote.

Thanks Robert - [11:06 AM]

I need to say thanks to Robert Dodd, twice. First off thanks for helping me figure out what was causing the problem with my fixed background image, and second thanks for playing softball with us this weekend!