The UMTSWorld: "...UMTS will be the commercial convergence of fixed line telephony, mobile, Internet and computer technology." I think, they are wrong. At least for Internet and computer tech. Why? It is to expensive (remember the licenses price), it starts only this autumn this year in Germany. It is available in Austria, but only with a few hundred users. There is a next generation technology available today: i-BURST with 1Mbps per user data rate today, not only 384Kbps as UMTS now. I like their vision of the "always on" network: will be like radio listening: switch the box on and you are inside. When it will be available in europe? May be, Don Park has it already :)

ScottW points here to an article of Jeff Julian. But this is only the first step. One step further you ends up at bloglines.

Update: Thanks Jeff - I refreshed the link targets!

Just found this at Don's blog and Adrian: you are right. Don's theory isn't new: read a book written by Allan and Barbara Pease a few weeks ago named: "Why Men Don't Listen: And Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It" at amazon.com (the german one is "Warum Männer lügen und Frauen immer Schuhe kaufen", at amazon.de). There are many answers to such questions and you can certainly get a better understanding of both your own behavior and the mysterious behavior of the opposite sex. Just read it with an open mind and have fun - don't take it too seriously, but it's amusing! If Don would read the book (may be it is just done?) he will find it's refrigerator problem explained

Found on Don Park's: Funky Defined. The first time Don Box post valid and funky is good, I feel bad about my feed wasn't funky. But now I'm happy to be not funky according to Dave. Good RSS, easy to aggregate. Currently no reason to replace it. But following the discussions about Echo, e.g. here, most of the people think of Echo as an RSS (2.0) replacement, that's still the wrong point of view. The idea behind it was to propose a standard to post items and comments to blogs. If you are a w.bloggar user (like me) you may have seen the setup screen with a huge list of different blogger backend API's. That's the point: the whole list should be replaced by one item: Echo. All the things like BlogThis, IBlogExtension, CommentAPI etc. including RSS itself, but not only can be expressed by Echo. Isn't that nice? That is the point, point.

no more time to say more :-(

Very busy: we have a release day this week. Last weekend we 've worked very hard to get some important parts done (was a request by a big player aka customer).

Very busy this week (and also next weekend) continued to wednesday next week. My reminder:

• Amazon feeds: http://www.lockergnome.com/amazon/,
• BBC News feeds: http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/24#a302,
• Rotor presentation downloads: http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/rotor/workshop.aspx#Download%20Presentation.

Yeah! Figured out how to get informed about the windows system shutdown/user logged off in .NET. With the knowledge of my VB6 days (there we get the info as a parameter in the window close event) my research goes completely to the wrong direction and a search via google does not point to a similar solution for .NET.

The may be simplest code to use is this:

public class Form1: System.Windows.Forms.Form {
  // Constant value was found in the "winuser.h" header file.
  private const int WM_ENDSESSION = 0x0016;
  ...
  protected override void WndProc(ref Message m) {
    switch (m.Msg) {
        case WM_ENDSESSION:
          // Save settings, state whatever here...           MessageBox.Show("WM_ENDSESSION received.");           Application.Exit(); // exit the normal way           break; // never reached
    }
    base.WndProc(ref m);
  }
  ...
}

I'm back from my holidays. It was a beautiful time in Italy/Venedig, but everything has once an end. Now I go on reading what happens while I'm offline:

• BlogWorks 1.2 will include new nice features, awaiting the end of the beta phase.
• RSS Bandit release 1.1.0.16 is available.
• GDN Workspaces will move to a improved version: my personal highlight is the new VS.NET Addin for the GDN source control.
• Comment API was changed.
• Pottermania leads to a Pottermeter on Amazon ).

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!