From The Raw Feed - Apparently they've finally found a way to completely eliminate the Blue Screen of Death in Windows Longhorn:

Make it red.

Now, why didn't someone think of that earlier?

Microsoft just announced that Office 12 files will all be XML-based.

XML: It's not just for InfoPath anymore... From Microsoft Watch:

The new Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats will be designated as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx , respectively. Microsoft is referring to the family of new formats as "Microsoft Office Open XML Formats."

Microsoft is committing to publish the forthcoming XML formats and make them available under the same royalty-free license under which the current Office 2003 file formats are. Licensees will be able to integrate these formats into their servers, applications and business processes "without financial consideration to Microsoft," according to the Redmond software vendor.

Awesome - this is big news, and while some will undoubtedly scoff, this is a great move in a good direction. Integration, integration, integration - EXCELLENT!

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! has posted his company's new corporate employee blogging guidelines. There's a PDF file linked from his post, along with his comments.

Blogging policies are (I think) a good thing for companies to have. Why? Because they set the stage with the proper expectations right up front, before a problem can begin. People often benefit from having the context predefined, so they know what's cool and what's not.

In other words, having a good policy enables people much more than it restricts them. That's why I'm glad my company has a blogging policy, anyhow.

More and more companies are going beyond allowing their employees to blog, and are enabling and encouraging it. What's your company doing?

Just in time to finish off the month of May, the wild irises are coming out in full force all over the place on my property...

click on the image for a 1024x768 copy/desktop wallpaper
click here for a 1600x1063 copy/desktop wallpaper

You have to actually see it to understand what's so cool about this unique music video. Eric Rice pointed to this, and I can't keep myself from doing the same:

The Sad Song by Fredo Viola: "This is a video I made for my song entitled "The Sad Song". The video was created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects."

Andy and Angie have a cool weblog where some of their great pictures are displayed. They also have an online photo gallery that you can check out. There's real talent here: great use of light and digital editing for enhancement purposes (as opposed to completely altering a scene to be something it's not). There are also some cool macro insect pictures, nice landscapes and original desktop wallpapers available.

In one post, Andy explains how he edits an original digital image to get from this:

to this:

Same original image, but a very different end result. How did he do it? Go read his weblog to find out.

Note that the images are all copyrighted under a Creative Commons non-commercial use license by Andy Purviance.

A dedicated team of police officers is currently camped at 14,000 feet on Denali, also known as Mt. McKinley in Alaska. They are climbing the mountain in difficult weather on a memorial expedition, undertaken to remember the lives and sacrifice of two police officers who were shot and killed in the line of duty last year while trying to apprehend a shooting suspect in Phoenix.

You can use the power of the Internet to track the progress of the team as they attempt to carry a memorial plaque to the summit of Denali at 20,320 feet.

The PODCAST feed with enclosures is available here. They are audioblogging the climb with regular calls using a satellite phone whenever terrain and weather conditions allow. Their audioblogged updates are automatically posted to the climber's weblog on the Cops on Top web site. The team hopes to summit the highest mountain in North America on or around June 8th.

The team is made up of members of Cops on Top, a non-profit organization of peace officers who climb the worlds highest peaks to remember fallen officers, to ensure they are never forgotten. The expeditions are made to support the families and friends of the fallen officers, as well. I have the privilege of serving on the board and maintaining the web site for the organization.

For more information and the latest expedition updates, visit http://www.copsontop.com/

Yes, sometimes the "switch" model runs the other way. Not quite (yet) in this case, buy hey, let's see what happens. Eric Rice, podcaster extraordinaire and self-described Mac guy, says he's using OneNote with a little Wacom tablet digitizer and a Windows notebook for now, but you can tell he's thinking:

"And as a result of all this OneNote mayhem, I'm now paying attention to people like Chris_Pratley, as well as the Tablet PC sites.

"This is all very weird for me. Updates as time passes."

Well Eric, you're paying attention to the right person, and as a Tablet PC guy and OneNote addict for a couple of years now, I can tell you the tools are great - one just has to try them to find out.

My friend Chris rode a Segway for the first time this weekend. I still have not ridden one myself, so it's interesting to see what someone like Uber-Geek Chris can do one one first time out.

Rumor is that there is a handle-less one in the works, and the off-road models might be interesting to me, since I live in the sticks. Heck, if you're an engineer type, you can even build a generic one, if you like.

Go Chris, go.

(follow link to video)

Tons of high-definition Windows Media video files with some pretty amazing footage from a whole slew of upcoming XBOX 360 games are available for download over at Microsoft.

This is going to be a great console - the possibilities are fun to think of... Hook it up with Longhorn's version of Media Center and you have a super-cool HD Media Center extender. Great games, too of course.

Check out the videos. Amazing. Just make sure you have a big fat pipe for downloading or be prepared to hurry up and wait. These files are 720p hi-def format, so they're pretty darned big, but super cool looking.

I'm a little slow in finding this, and it's certainly an example of my being easily-amused... But I just downloaded the Royale Windows theme, which was originally available standard on XP Media Center Edition. The download lets you use it on the other versions of XP, and I've installed it on my XP Tablet Edition machine.

Microsoft New Zealand has made it available to download, along with the New Zealand version of the Bliss desktop image (can you say "sheep?") and a cool road-sign desktop picture, too.

The pic at right is my desktop with the Royale theme and a few Konfabulator widgets - it makes for a nice background image. Click the pic for larger size.

Donnie's ironic comment made me smile:

"God, I am sick of all these productivity and GTD hacks - enough is enough. How many more tools do I need to write an email or mow the lawn! I spend more time trying/testing out all these new apps than I do on actually getting my stuff done. Talk about a paradox! Where’s Gladwell when we need him?"

I can relate. I have to test these productivity things out quite a bit. Most of them end up getting uninstalled, although a few have stuck. Many of them take up quite a bit of time, in part because they tend to hose my computer. Nothing like a poorly-written productivity application to slow a computer to a crawl. Heh. Irony.

Okay, enough about computers. Back to mowing my three acres of lawn...

From Longhornblogs.com, some of the first information about IIS7, which is reportedly code-complete and is now being integrated into Longhorn:

"IIS7 represents the unification of ASP.NET and IIS. Let me clarify what that means. Right now, ASP.NET is implemented as an ISAPI extension for IIS. That will still be true in ASP.NET 2.0. In IIS7, that changes. Instead, the concepts of HTTP pipelines, handlers, modules, XML config files, etc... are all natively built into the platform.

"Along with that, the IIS7 team has completely refactored the whole platform, so now practically every feature in the pipeline has been broken out into a separate module. From a security standpoint, this is a whole new realm for IIS..."

Read more here. Glad to see they'll be releasing it on the Pro and Server OS'es. Cool stuff.

Last-minute on my part, but I have been so busy I did not realize that tonight (Wednesday) is the monthly meeting of the Portland Area Dot-Net User Group (PADNUG).

And speaking tonight is Jason Mauer, Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, on the topic of "The Ins and Outs of SharePoint Development."

Check out Rich's weblog entry with complete info if you're interested - SharePoint use is growing quickly - good stuff to know! And hey, you can't really beat the price.

In an interesting and (at the same time, but for different reasons) rather scary turn of events, a company's computer data has apparently been locked up, by means of encryption, by an evil-doer and held ransom.

For - get this one - $200.

Tell me that is not the perfect Austin Powers moment. I can hear Dr. Evil now, from his Evil Hacker Base:

Twooooooo Hunnnnnnndred Dolllllllarrrzzzzz! Muuuhahahahahahhhh!!!

Unfortunately, it's worrisome in that through some lack of security protection or another, some bad guy was able to get malicious code into a company that located business files and packaged them up in a nice, neat encrypted (and therefore completely unaccessible without the key) form. They didn't even (necessarily) take the files off the network - they just locked them up and left them there. Maybe. Who knows.

Link to the story: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/24/1321200&from=rss

Security researchers at the San Diego-based Websense uncovered the unusual extortion plot when a corporate customer they would not identify fell victim to the infection, which encrypted files that included documents, photographs and spreadsheets.

A ransom note left behind included an e-mail address, and the attacker using the address later demanded $200 for the digital keys to unlock the files.

"This is equivalent to someone coming into your home, putting your valuables in a safe and not telling you the combination," said Oliver Friedrichs, a security manager for Symantec Corporation.

The FBI said the scheme, which appears isolated, was unlike other Internet extortion crimes.

Leading security and anti-virus firms this week were updating protective software for companies and consumers to guard against this type of attack, which experts dubbed "ransom-ware."