Will be completely offline the next two weeks: out for vacations. We want to go to Italy again... My two childs are happy and counting the days they have to sleep until we start. Just for your information: see below whats going on with RSS Bandit:

Found on eightypercent.net:

"I just noticed that when RSS Bandit finds an invalid RSS feed, it offers to fork off to Sam and Mark's RSS Validator. ... I'm not making any excuses here, but I think that everyone can agree that one of the reasons that IE was so successful at that time was because it could consume everything that was already out there on the net -- and that meant very careful duplication of all of netscapes bugs."

The success story is true, but: HTML isn't comparable to XML. If people generate (or write by hand) a file named e.g. rss.xml it SHOULD be at least wellformed. If this isn't true, it is not XML by definition.Name it HTML and you will get at least the text within the elements within a browser, but nothing more. We do not want to write the 99'th HTML scraper/parser and do not want to repeat the same mistake twice a time.

Jon Udell about Mozilla Firebird 0.6. Really nice to know about the XML support there. The package also contains the mozctlx.dll, that's currently a (spare-time) project of Adam Lock (member of the Netscape Dev team).
But how about a native (means .NET managed) render control based on Gecko or a layered framework like Apple's WebCore ? If there would be enough time I would wrote it by myself. Someone out there just working on this kind of bits?

Read on Feedster: new variant of the Sobig worm appears. Yesterday I got a mail from "System Administrator" titled "Your mail could not be delivered" with a completely unknown receiver mail address and an attachment. Clear that I have not opened the mail. Especially wondering about that message itself: have not send any message within the last 3 days (weekend). Also received some of the messages from support[at]microsoft.com which are reported to be virus last week. Spam-/Virus is filtered here by a server side running antivirus software (also my GMX account now filters) and on the client Cloudmark also helps.
But the best workaround to not open malicious mails in Outlook/OE is to disable the preview pane and enable the auto-preview for the Inbox folder. This way I can read over the first three lines of the message, display the mail header (Right-Click-Options) and then press "Block", the Cloudmark plugin button to move the mail to the Spam folder where they are deleted every 3 days. Missing /dev/null on my machine ...

Found on Harry Pierson aka DevHawk: PowerToys for VS.NET 2003. What I have missed a long time: the Custom Help Builder. Thanks for the links!

In response to Joe Gregorio, here are my non-representative statistics:

1. Internet Explorer 6.x: 85.5 %
2. Internet Explorer 5.x: 3.6 %
3. Opera 7.x: 3.6 %
4. Mozilla: 1.8 %
5. Netscape 3.x: 1.8 %
6. Netscape 7.x: 1.8 %
7. Mozilla 1.x: 1.8 %

If you are an experienced windows programmer using VB5 or 6 the last years, C++ of course (don't know about Delphi) you should be familiar with the Win32 SendMessage() call. Ever thought you don't need them anymore with .NET? Then you are not alone...

My first impression around the time .NET was published was: never again I must call Win32 API. That is definitively wrong for any productive code that uses any GUI. Yes, there are nice new features like inheritable forms and controls and much more: but to solve specific user interaction problems you still needs the API calls, especially the Win32 API. So my todays talk goes about a well known control: the listview. (Full Story).

Just read via Sellsbrothers: Ghost Installer Studio 3.6 released. Looking around a few minutes on their website, decided to give it a try. Should be easy enough to use for small .NET community software distribution (there is also a free edition on the compare chart). For professional use I miss some language packs like italian and spain or japanese.
InstallShield Installer can be very expensively over the time: our business software has only two major releases over the last 4/5 years: release 5 (a VB5 solution) and release 6 (VB6). The first installer software used was IS 5.0 International West (3K US$). Then we bought IS 5.5 (1.5K US$), IS 6 (but not used because of the many re-imported bugs there) IS 7 (1.5K US$) and upgraded to IS 8 Developer (1K US$). Each was a International West edition. Now calculate: ...

iTunes not only for Mac: MP3 serversoftware Slimp (OpenSource).

Via Don Park:

"... I propose that, while people appear intelligent and have complex behaviors individually, people get dumber and their behavior simpler as group gets larger. If this is true, then given a large enough group of people, group behavior will be indistinguishable from the behavior of a buffalo herd. ...
...With buffalos, only female buffalos can reproduce and once a year. With bloggers, every blogger can reproduce year round without any limits to the number of offsprings. We are worse than rats or rabbits. We are worse than SARS. We are the Borgs."

The buffalo analogy does not fit very well -- who would like to be compared already gladly with a buffalo? There are mainstream topics discussed in the blogspace that are comparable to the phenomena of the mass hysteria (which fits to the buffalo herd). This forms the larger groups or communities of blogs in the space often reflected by their blogrolls. But the discussions are often controvers and not all of them are of the same opinion about the direction to go. So also the Borg analogy does not fit: the only community is blogging where assimilation can take place. BTW the term is already in use and a known as B0rg

Found on Scripting News: "Bloki is...". Nothing new, each CMS yet supports it. Does not work with Opera, needs at least Mozilla 1.3 (alpha) or IE. If someone needs a really nice IE web editor, look at YusASP.com. Yes, Chris: agree completely. But Memory Management and Speed are working items, so it was not included at the Bandit wish/feature-list. And yes, the threaded view contributes to memory use. We do not use a in-memory graph but keeping currently all things in memory although we cache also feeds to the disk.

The right stuff for a rainy day: Alice in Blibbetland, Part 1 [Dr. GUI]

Please note the RSS Bandit related links on the right navbar... All that just comsume my feed, here are the links again:

• Bandit wiki
• Bandit forum
• GDN Bandit
• GDN RssComponents

From Heise newsticker (german): Microsoft buys Unix license of SCO.

As I have posted, Bandit 1.1 is released. You can download it here. And: please, please post all bugs/suggestions to the Bandit Workspace on GDN. The item Report a bug... within Bandit's help menu provides the link. Thanks!

Not really. But hey, it just feels like that. And it is a good feeling . Don like and test it, Harry Pierson and ScottW are on the boat. Did they know about this (old, but not so obviously) feature: on any link within a browser opens a new tab with the link ( opens a new IE window, but that's a common well known one).

Dare Obasanjo is about releasing the final 1.1 of RSS Bandit this weekend (may be in a few hours). Look carefully over the release notes to know about the latest new features!

I really do agree here [via Don Box].