Wil Wheaton posts an entry about a great idea. Military troops are having their service times extended, and Google is giving away their free and highly-coveted 1GB email accounts - by invitation only - to random people. Why not do some good here, and give military personnel and their families a way to share bigger items like pictures of the kids, movies, etc?

GMAIL for the Troops.

It's a great idea.

Eli Robillard has a list of SharePoint resources that he has posted on his weblog site.

He's divided it in to topical areas and has posted a fairly long list of resources. It's a good list - check it out if you're a SharePointy type.

From Scott's site:

Greg Hughes once had a LiveJournal Blog and the only remnant of his blog was an RSS Feed/Archive.  Now that he runs dasBlog he wanted to move his old content forward into dasBlog.  So, we googled a bit and couldn't find a tool that would take an RSS (2.0) feed as input and put the entries into dasBlog.

So we made one over lunch, and here it is: RSStoDasBlog.zip (219.29 KB)

RSStoDasBlog.exe MyRssFile.xml "C:\documents and settings\whatever\dasblog\content"

Use it like this by pointing it to the RSS file and your (local) dasBlog content folder.  It will create all the needed dayentry.xml files for you to upload to your remote blog.  It will also (I think) take an http:// url to an RSS file and could be used to (possible as a service?) steal RSS and mirror them in dasBlog.  Thanks to Jerry (Chris) Maguire's RSS Framework that showed up first in Google and saved me the time of running XSD.exe on an RSS XML schema. Apparently he has even newer stuff on his site.  It's got a few more moving parts than I think it needs to, but it did the job with a few changes that I marked with my initials; SDH.

Thanks to Scott both for teaching me and for helping me get the content migrated over. I'm a lame IT-management-type of guy, not a coder, but it was truly fun to learn a little something and to find that I was able to follow what he was showing me. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Scott's probably the best technical speaker/teacher I have ever met. I'm lucky to work with a number of really creative people that also happen to be really, really smart.

Speaking of really creative and smart people, Travis is now a MSDBA in addition to being a MCSD - which is both very cool and a big deal (not mention quite an accomplishment). Not many have the MCSD certification, and even fewer have both. Congrats, Trav!

There's a pretty sudden and major uptick on our mail servers - and apparently on the mail servers of others - of instances of the Zafi worm/virus attepting to propagate itself. It's particularly pervasive, and while the payload does not appear destructive, it could quickly become a cleanup nightmare, including the possibility of disabling AV software and running in its place. If ever there was a justification for a really good email antivirus product, this is one.

From Panda Software's virus encyclopedia:

Brief Description

Zafi.B is a worm that looks for directories in which antivirus programs are installed. If successful, Zafi.B overwrites the executable files with copies of itself. By doing so, the user will be unprotected against the attack of other malware. So whenever users run the antivirus, they will be running the Zafi.B without noticing. In addition, Zafi.B searches for certain processes, such as the Windows Registry Editor, the Task Manager, etc. If successful, Zafi.B ends them. Zafi.B spreads via e-mail in a message with variable characterics that can be written in different languages, and through peer to peer file sharing programs (P2P).

Visible Symptoms

Zafi.B is easy to recognize once it has affected the computer, as it attempts to open any of the web sites stored in the following path of the Windows Registry every time it is executed: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Internet Explorer\ TypedURLs

See:

http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/virus.aspx?ID=39333 

on CA's web site for info about the worm and how to remove.

Also see:

http://www.pandasoftware.com/virus_info/encyclopedia/overview.aspx?idvirus=48433 

on Panda's web site for further info.

"Although we have several different ways to collect information about how OneNote is used, I am always interested to hear how people use it. And this forum provides an opportunity for a dialog that our other data collection systems don’t really provide. So, let's hear it. How do you use OneNote? How is your notebook organized? What do you do with it? Would you prefer a different type of organization, or even a different concept for OneNote besides a tabbed notebook?"

He goes on to describe how he uses it, how he organizes his OneNote notebooks, and then lists some of the things he doesn't relaly like about his organizational method and its use.

Chris is asking for real-world feedback here. If you're a user of OneNote, take the time to describe for him and his readers - via a comment on his blog entry - how you use the program in your daily life. He wants to hear from others, so this is your chance!

Have been trolling the web for nifty SharePoint stuff and have come up with some interesting items worth looking into. I don't post nearly enough about SharePoint here (and I even have a category for it), so here goes a few nuggets of what I think is pretty cool stuff:

SPS 2003 Document library TreeView
A simple treeview renderer for document library in SharePoint 2003. Make navigation/visualization of your more complex document libraries a little more familar.

Building Custom Alert Result Channels in SharePoint Portal Server 2003
This definitely fits in the "cool" department. Toast alerts from SharePoint Portal - would be even niftier in the Messenger (MS/MSN) interface.

SQL Server Reporting Services Webparts for SharePoint
Display business data mined and munged with SQL Reporting Services on a SharePoint site/portal. Hello, biz intelligence - is that you?

Workflow Lite for SharePoint RC1
Display business data mined and munged with SQL Reporting Services on a SharePoint site/portal. Hello, biz intelligence - is that you?

Sharing Bookmarks, Wikis, and the Zen of SharePoint
Says Jonathan Hardwick: "But first you've got understand the Zen of SharePoint, which is this: it's SQL, but without the agonizing relational pain. Yup, under the hood beats good ol' SQL Server. That means SharePoint is all about lists." He also found a past article I wrote dreaming about wikis and SharePoint truly coming together. Anyone game???