If you have a need to do XHTML validation of web pages and find yourself doing it manually and probably not often enough, check this out: Ben Hammersley has built a XHTML validation tool that generates its results into an RSS feed, from any page you specify. The test runs each time you load the feed into your favorite RSS reader, so it's all-too-easy to repeat, which is nice.

"The validation is redone everytime the feed is requested. If there are no errors, the feed will be empty. Silence is golden, in other words."

Check it out - and start validating - here.

I've had two sets of epidural spinal injections to try to fix my back, and while I have had some relief, it's not solved the problem.

So, I went to the doctor the other day, and he decided its time to send me to the spinal surgeon. I guess there are a few procedure options - one of which involves heating up the intervertebral disc from the inside in order to cause it to shrink. The heated tissue scars and shrinks, so the protruding (herniated) part of the disc (which is pushing on the nerve roots where they attach to the spinal cord) recedes. The disc has a soft inner portion surrounded by a more fibrous shell, so to speak. A herniated disc is one where the fibrous shell gets torn and the center material bulges out. The bulging out part is what's pushing on the nerves. Oh, and it hurts (sometimes a lot).

Anyhow, the doctor that does this special heating/shrinking procedure (the more common procedure is a microdiscectomy, where they just go in with blades and cut out the bulging part) is in Salem, which is a good couple of hours from where I live. I guess there are a few docs in Portland that do something similar, but my doc wants me to go to this guy because its a newer procedure that heals faster and has shown good results (less scarring damage to the disc - it's more exact). So arranging visits and working with that doc will be a little complicated, and I don't even know for sure if I'll end up being a candidate for that particular method. But if it means pain relief, it's all good.

The craziest part of this problem is that most days I am uncomfortable - some pain but not unbearable. Other days (few and far between) I feel almost completely normal (I love those days). And on yet other days the pain is so unbearable it can't be described with words. Debilitating comes to mind, but that doesn't really paint the complete picture.

Anyone have any personal experience with any of these?

• Intradiscal Electrothermal Treatment
• Endoscopic laser foraminoplasty (ELF)
• Percutaneous discectomy (PAD)

The Channel 9 crew has been interviewing employees in Microsoft Research. In a video interview with employees of the VIBE group, we get to see some of the plans and prototypes in actual use in the area of future display screens and mechanisms. They're doing cool things with great big displays and multiple monitors. The dragging demo and the Group Bar demo are pretty darn nifty stuff. "Rehydrating" groups of programs I used sometime before - wow, very cool!

The Channel 9 videos provide a level of detail and flavor you'll get nowhere else: Straight from the mouths of the people working on the projects, you can find out about some of the up-and-coming inside stuff.

With a small amount of education and a healthy dose of common sense, anyone can safely use the Internet for purchasing and banking online. Plus, if you're not already doing so, if you're one of those people who says you 'just won't do it,' you're making a big mistake. Online banking bill-pay done carefully can make your financial world much more secure, simpler and more efficient. And "careful" is a pretty easy threshold to reach with some basic knowledge.

Do you know what "Phishing" is? You should, if you want to safeguard your private information. Do you know the basics of online transactions and how to make sure you're banking and shopping safely? You can learn what you need to know in just a few minutes.

Here's a resource (a pretty good one) aimed at making people smart online banking and shopping consumers:

Microsoft: Preventing Online Fraud

Check it out, and do yourself the favor of some self-education with resources like this one. I've done practically all my banking and bills online for four-plus years, without a single problem. You just have to know how to be safe, and it's not complicated to do. 

Avoiding online commerce simply because someone you know told you it's "bad" is nothing more than a valuable opportunity down the drain. You had to learn the basics of vehicle safety when you learned to drive - What if someone had told you that driving was dangerous and should be avoided at all costs, and you had believed them?

Don't miss the boat. Just be sure to take a life jacket with you.

For those who administer or work in the guts of Windows systems an networks, and perhaps those who set up and maintain applications on Windows, the Script Center over at TechNet is a truly valuable resource.

The TechNet Script Center provides one-stop shopping for system administrators wanting to manage their Windows computers using Microsoft's scripting technologies.

There's the script repository, which has lots of samples, as well as a number of good tools and utilities you can grab and start using right away.

And the scripting guys have a sense of humor. Check out the WMI Scriptomatic and its readme file, and then generate WMI scripts to your heart's content. Need ADSI scripts instead? Use the ADSI Scriptomatic. Read the accompanying text. It's worth the eye strain, trust me.

(Ok, fine, here you go: WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation and ADSI stands for Active Directory Services Interfaces)

Oh - and webcasts - so many good webcasts. This week is Scripting Week (believe it or not) and here are the webcasts for that celebration. And there are a number of very good archived webcasts, too. All network administrators are now on notice that you have to know how to do this stuff. Go learn. Now. TYVM.

Google now owns Picasa. It's am imaging tool - and it's really very good. Oh yeah - and it's FREE.

It provides a timeline- and album-based view of all your images and lets you sort through them, print them, edit them, transfer them from your camera, share them with others, make slideshows, and more.

It's cool - check out the flash demo here, and download here.

My evil twin is twitching with anticipation and excitement...

Muuuuaaahahahahahahahhhh!

Mike Nash is responsible for security at Microsoft. He will be speaking during the newly-established monthly webcast briefing on July 28th:

Date: Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Time: 8:30AM-9:30AM Pacific Time (GMT-7, US & Canada)
(Click here to register for the webcast)

Description: Join Mike Nash, Microsoft's senior executive in charge of security, for his monthly security update. Mike will provide the latest details on Microsoft's security enhancements and offer tips and insights into key security strategies for customers.  This month, learn more about Microsoft's security strategy and the key focus of improving software updating.  Mike will provide details on what Microsoft is doing to reduce the cost, complexity, downtime and risk associated with deploying software updates. Learn how these improvements can help you with patch management in your environment.

Well, no more dual telephone service for me. Last week, I made the decision to cancel my old-skool standard land-line (POTS) phone service with Qwest, after signing up for and trying out Vonage's IP phone service, which works over my Internet connection.

The LEC's (that's "local exchange carriers") better think fast. They're going to lose this game.

For a lot less money each month, I can now take my phone number wherever I want with a soft-phone that runs on my laptop and/or a portable IP phone device that I can plug into any Internet connection. I can make all the long distance calls I want. I get my voice mail messages as nice little email attachments as soon as someone leaves one for me. I am spending less money each month. It costs less. I get more features for less cash. Oh, by the way - did I mention it's cheaper than the land-line service?

I made one small adjustment to the service on the Vonage web site under my account settings that set my IP phone bridge device to max quality, and the service is great.

This is the future of home telephony, not to mention business service. Hey Baby-Bell's - wake up and make some coffee - your customers are waiting...

UPDATE/SHAMELESS-PLUG:

I just noticed - if you want to sign up for Vonage service, they have a referral program where I can send you an invitation and you'll get the first month free, and I'll get an equal service credit - good for everyone! Just email me here:  and I will send you the invite - be sure to send your name and the email address you want the invite to go to.

Their web site: http://www.vonage.com/

It's nice when people use Flash for good purposes, instead of doing so just so they can say they did it. Remember intro movies? Sheez...

But, I digress... Along the lines of good use of Flash to get the point across, check out the Microsoft Innovation site/flash movie. Not only is it effective use of the medium, it's also good and interesting information.

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/innovation/yourpotential

I don't post about polittics here for the most part, but if I see something that that makes me laugh, it's fair game for blodge-chunking (I'll explain that term some other time).

Download: This Land is Your Land

If you don't laugh, there's something wrong with you.

Now, how did I miss this???

http://portal.sharepointsolutions.com/default.aspx

Tons of well-organized information for users/administrators/implementors of SharePoint 2003 technologies. Now all we need to do is convince the owners to provide their content (especially news and categories/topics) via RSS!

I spent some time today trying to figure out why PowerPoint 2003 was throwing errors when trying to open a file that was created on a PPT 2003 system, edited by a consultant off-site, and emailed back to a staff member, where it conveniently and immediately broke.

The error displayed when trying to open the PowerPoint file indicated that a part of the file appeared to be missing. I had seen this error before, back when PowerPoint XP was brand new and in beta, when trying to open a file that was generated in the new version of the application but then edited in an older version (like PPT2000 for example) and shipped back to the original owner.

The knowledge base didn't really get me any further than my memory did, but it turns out there was a patch released for Office 2003 that puts functionality in place to work around the fact that the consultant had edited the PPT 2003 file in PPT 2000. It's available from Office Online in the downloads section.

Now, it's nice to have the patch/fix, but since it's more of a high-quality band-aid than a true solution, we will be upgrading the consultant's computer the next time he's in the office.

Remember one thing: It's never considered to be in keeping with best practices to edit files in multiple/different versions of Office programs, especially when it can be avoided, and especially in those programs that do a lot of multimedia and embedded content (PowerPoint, Word, Excel). You may not always know the problem exists (like in this case where the consultant is using their own computer system and working off-site), but if you do know it's just not worth the risk or the software savings to use the older version: It costs more in lost time to report, troubleshoot and fix the problem than it costs to install the right software.

Lesson learned: When a consultant comes on site, be proactive and make the time to ask them briefly about what they will be doing with any shared computer files and what programs they will be using while they work. Had I done that in the first place, the problem would have been resolved before it ever happened.

By way of KC Lemson, RSS feeds for all of you Exchange pro's with information you can't help but need:

• RSS Feed that points at the root of all the blogs registered for Exchange [i.e. a notification of newly registered Exchange bloggers]
• RSS feed for links to recent posts on the Exchange blogs
• RSS feed for Exchange KB articles
• RSS feed for KB articles authored by Exchange MVPs
• RSS feed for Exchange downloads

I wonder how many Exchange admins use RSS readers and feeds - if you think about it, there's some competing technology there. Or maybe it's a high percentage. I wonder if my Exchange admin is on the RSS bandwagon? ;)

No sooner had AOL and Yahoo announced they were bowing out of the corporate instant messaging game, Microsoft announced that when it releases Live Communication Sever 2005, the product's ability to support other external instant messaging servers will extend to hook up with the AOL (AIM/ICQ) and Yahoo IM networks.

This is great news for business users and IT implementers. Finally instant messaging has real, broad possibilities in the enterprise for multiple forms of communication among a broad and differentiated set of users. Communication outside the firewall will become a real and worthwhile pursuit. The limits that have prevented effective use of instant messaging are slipping away, and in today's collaborative world that's a real plus.

The current version of the Microsoft's business IM server, LCS2003, can already be connected to the MSN public instant messaging network (for an additional service fee). The next version of the platform, dubbed Live Communication Server 2005, is now in beta, and it already supports a technology concept called "federation," which allows different companies (for example partner companies, or service providers and their customers) to securely interconnect their LCS servers across the Internet. LCS uses the SIP protocol (Session Initiation Protocol), which is an established public standard for initiating and conducting communications between nodes on a network.

Okay, but then what?

Of course there will need to be even more to offer in this product down the road, and once can guess at what that might mean. I like to guess because I eat this stuff and have dreams of grandeur about where these products could go and how they could grow. My bet is on better collaboration and meetings. Microsoft's recent meeting-related investments in SharePoint (meeting workspaces) and the relatively limited but growing functionality in the current IM product seem to point that way (IP phone integration, as well as white-boarding and application sharing with clients on the LAN). Recent additions and improvements are terrific, but there is certainly room for improvement on these recent advances.

In the past there was NetMeeting. More recently, Microsoft has invested heavily in building and acquiring new communication technologies, not only on the IM front, but also with its purchase of a company called Placeware, which is the technology platform driving the company's popular LiveMeeting service. Much of the same collaborative functionality you get from LiveMeeting is available in a more rudimentary way in LCS and separately on the public instant messaging networks. But, until the unified IM clients are available, the newer technologies are limited in their reach between organizations.

But services live LiveMeeting and conferencing competitors like WebEx, Genesys and others offer much more robust and powerful capabilities that could - should someone make the bold move - be made available to the corporate IT crowd behind the firewall as a part of a server such as LCS 200x, sometime in the future. It's a logical next step - by that time, more advanced services will undoubtedly be available and locating that functionality in the server behind the corporate firewall will be a logical move. Business would benefit from self-hosting a voice and data conferencing system based on IP voice and collaborative IM technology that federates with other corporate systems privately, as well as with the public networks recently announced.

At least we can hope!