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Because of (a movie on) Microsofts cool new projects SeaDragon{.} and PhotoSynth{.} (which doesn’t seem to run from behind the firewall over here), I found the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference website{.}. There are some pretty impressive talks to be found there. And some are plain hilarious. There’s one I enjoyed a lot: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ talk “After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead{.}“. In this talk he compares the internet hype to the 1849 Gold Rush, but goes even further by using more analogies to explain the current state of the internet. Have a look around the TED website, and see if there’s something for you…

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I must say, it looks nicer than the first beta (having a Windows Vista-proof UI), but that’s not all… Some of the features that were added are pretty darn cool (auto-ping on post, table editing) or just plain good (use the same window for multiple posts, finally!). I am missing the spelling checker though… My first feeling: this is a pretty big step ahead for Windows Live Writer.

I signed up at technorati recently. Technorati uses ping to get the info from blogs. And BloggingAbout.NET (Community Server) supports that. Or it should… Some posts just don’t show up over there! I’ve searched a little, and saw other people were having trouble with this too. I’ll see if I can find anything and if I do, I’ll forward it to our community administrator.

The past weeks have been busy for me, but especially in the evenings, with the musical I played in and all that… During the day, I had some spare time every now and again, and I wasted most of that on my Xbox 360. … loving it 😉 …

I used to think we (people working in software development) were far behind when it came to testing. Due to a few experiences over hte last few weeks this has changed… In waterfall projects, testing is at the end of the process, causing it to be the first thing to go when time gets short. In agile methods, test is evenly divided throughout the process. This combined with the popularity of agile methods make that test is getting more and more mature in software development. We all know we should test (although we do not always act upon the things we know), and we’re constantly trying to find ways to optimize our entire process. We are ahead of our times, I tell you.

The Visual Studio servicing page is updated: VS 2005 SP1 will ship Q3 of this year. This date seems to have has slipped before, but at least it gives us an estimated time of shipping.

Jan Schreuder blogged about it earlier, and the buzz around Sandcastle is growing…

Brenton House posted about Sandcastle last friday, stating that it might have been the day Sandcastle would be released. Unfortunately it wasn’t, so the waiting does not stop yet. It even looks like we might be waiting a little longer:

Since we upgraded to Community Server, visitors are now able to rate posts. This way you can let the bloggers here at bloggingabout.net know what you think about the things they post. Give it a go!

View the interview Channel 9 had with Microsoft’s CEO: Steve Ballmer. The interview in short:

_Why does Microsoft care about developers?
01:11 Why does Microsoft have an evangelism team?
01:48 What is your call to action for developers right now?
02:44 Microsoft is a leader in transparency and blogging. Why did you allow blogging?
03:38 Time for some tough questions. On the blogs there are those that say that Microsoft doesn’t innovate, can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?
05:42 Coming up with tough questions for you is hard. If you were in my position what tough questions would you ask Microsoft’s CEO?
07:22 Since a lot of Microsoft employees watch Channel 9, what would you say to all the Microsoft employees around the world?
08:48 What do you want to be remembered as?

This Microsoft sites makes it possible to enable ClearType fonts in Windwos XP from a web interface (using Internet Explorer). Neat! There’s a powertoy available also…

ClearType is a special way of displaying fonts that makes fonts stand out more on LCD screens. It’s almost as if you’re looking at a piece of paper with the words printed on it. Click here for more information on ClearType.