A little while ago Joshua Allen started keeping a list of bloggers who work at MSFT. I always thought it was a grand joke and highlighted the kind of GroupThinktm you see at B0rg Central since you don't see lists of IBM bloggers, AOL bloggers or AT&T bloggers on various other personal weblogs do you?

This grand joke is now a joke on me. There are now [alleged] news sites that eagerly track the weekly brain farts posted to the InterWeb by myself and other B0rg. This is not to disparage my fellow B0rg employees but really 90% of the stuff in blogs [mine included] is brain fart material that is only of interest to yourself, some friends and the overly voyeuristic. I'm not sure which unnerves me more; reporters who are reading B0rg blogs hoping that some poor slob leaks some confidential shit or people who create websites to aggregate all the B0rg blogs.

More rant below.

 


 

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February 7, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

The only thing more chilling to expressing yourself in your online journal than the thought that your co-workers and manager may be reading your brain farts posted to the InterWeb is when Ziff Davis websites have links to your online journal on their front page. The previous link doesn't point to the front page which at the current time doesn't have a link but did this time yesterday. The front page currently does have a plea for people to send them more links to blogs by MSFT folks.

What an irritating way to start the morning.

More below on the source of Christ's healing power, the hundred worst things about 2002, getting Slashdotted, and the fact that Michael Jackson has lost his marbles.

Poll: Worst Thing About 2002?

 


 

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February 5, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Recent discussions at work have gotten me thinking about abstractions and how they sometimes help or hinder our understanding of how certain mechanical or electronic processes work. Virtual Memory, the Relational Model and the XML Infoset are examples of abstractions that have been useful to me while working on software. On the other hand certain abstractions [described below] have caused more problems than they have solved.

Below are my thoughts on both kinds of abstractions with examples.

Poll: Favorite Kind of Meat?

 


 

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Yesterday I added a couple of features to RSS Bandit. The one I am happiest with is that hitting the space bar now jumps you to the next unread item. This is such a neat feature, thanks to Joe Beda for repeatedly asking me to add it. I'll upload the latest installer when I get to work which means it'll be a day or two before it is updated on GotDotNet. For those who missed it last week RSSBandit is available for download here.

As an old hand at K5 I am unsurprised that there is a K5 story moderation meta-article that got out of voting. What surprises me is that we there was a time K5 got them once every 3 months and this one took longer than usual to show up. Either K5 has hit its growth peak or the last tweaks to the story moderation system were very good. On an unrelated note I am quite unhappy that K5 has no records of my stories or my comments that go back past a year. This bothers me a lot because I used to like being able to Google for old diaries and posts or point people at my old diaries. There were one or two that I'd like to keep for posterity, I better grab them from the Google Cache before they expire.

Comments below on comments by Clemens Vasters on the XML Infoset and a response by James Strachan.

 


 

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February 1, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

MSDN is going to give people the impression that I do no work except write articles. I currently have 3 articles ( one, two, three) described as being written by me and published in January. Of course, closer investigation shows the latter two are reprints of my XML.com articles and not new work. I really want to write about something besides XML in the next few months or I'll go bonkers.

Thoughts on the Über-browser, referrer log abuse, Keith Ballinger's quote "XSD is the type system handed down from God", a link to yet another Apple Switch Ad parody and a brief update on RSS Bandit.

Poll: What were you doing when the Columbia crashed?

 


 

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January 29, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Sam Ruby's blogger meetup in the Belly of the Beast happened yesterday. There were about 22 people there (for a full list of attendees go here) and it was a major geek out session. A lot of people fired up laptops half way through with lots of IBM Thinkpads being represented (Sam, Don, and Miguel had one) while I had my Tablet PC but forgot my pen at home so I couldn't show off the cool handwriting recognition.

Links to pics and my memories of random snatches of conversation below.

Poll: Best parts of last night's State of the Union address?

 


 

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January 28, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

I hate being trolled but I saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone today. Some Java zealot has been posting a series entitled "101 Ways Java is Better Than .NET" in his blog. His posts are not as useful as I expected given that I'm always looking for decent criticism of the stuff I work on but unfortunately it seemed like for every good point he raised, he'd raise five or six bogus ones. Others have already pointed out how bogus his mostly uninformed claims are. However he makes a claim about XML in the .NET Framework ( point 79) which I can't help responding to.

I'll respond to point 79 partially by answering Joe Gregorio's question.

 


 

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A couple of the us MSFT folks with blogs met for dinner at Spazzo last night. Chris Hollander has pictures in his blog. There was actually next to no talk about blogging and just a lot of talking shop about work and technology.

Irritations with the W3C website, some thoughts on XHTML brought on by reading Mark Pilgrim's recent post, thoughts on building layers of abstraction, and an update on the status of RSS Bandit.

 


 

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January 25, 2003
@ 11:58 PM

Inspired by Sam Ruby's provision of an RSS feed for the RSS-deprived Keith Ballinger I decided to quit procrastinating and do the same for Tantek who happens to be the B0rg HTML working group rep. Unlike Sam I haven't decided to provide his feed directly by converting his blog to an RSS feed every hour or so then hosting the feed on my website. Instead I've provided a stylesheet (with sample output) which Tantek or someone else can use to generate RSS from his blog and then host online or use with a news aggregator as needed.

Yesterday I bumped into a few people who would make fine guests on the Jerry Springer show, this morning I worked on an installer for RSS Bandit, and found the "best URL ever" in a Daily ShowMoment of Zen kind of way. Details about these and more below.

Poll: What would you rate the new Incredible Hulk trailer out of five?

 


 

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