I’ve been using Beta-1 of Microsoft’s An­ti­Spy­ware for the last year. Beta-2 is finally out, and it’s now known as Defender.

Paul Thurrot has a favorable review.

Download Defender.

I’ve been hanging out on the dasBlog developers’ mailing list for the last couple of months, and I’ve made some minor con­tri­bu­tions to the code.

I sent the following email to the developers’ list last night.

My wife has decided to start a blog for Team Ireland in the 2006 Knitting Olympics, and she asked me to install dasBlog on her site. I decided that this was an excellent op­por­tu­ni­ty to do some usability testing on the in­stal­la­tion in­struc­tions for dasBlog. I asked her to try installing dasBlog, while I watched. I promised that I would bail her out if she got mired too deeply.

Emma has worked as a black-box software tester for …continue.

I installed dasBlog at Emma’s The Wheel site, so that she and the other knitters in Team Ireland can blog during the 2006 Knitting Olympics. What an ordeal that was! But that’s a post for another time. (It’s not working yet, due to per­mis­sions issues that require the in­ter­ven­tion of support at our hosting site.)

I decided today to create a favicon for The Wheel, based on the logo that I drew last year with Inkscape.

A favicon is a 16x16 icon which shows up in the tab in a tabbed browser, such as FireFox or IE with MSN Search. For example, the little gvr icon that shows up if you’re reading this on …continue.

I consider myself to be an expert WinDbg user, when it comes to debugging unmanaged x86 code. I haven’t used WinDbg much on managed code, and when I did, I found it quite painful.

Via Scott Guthrie’s blog, I discovered Tess Ferrandez’s blog. Tess is an escalation engineer in PSS who spe­cial­izes in ASP.NET and a WinDbg virtuoso. Scott has a list of her best posts. Mind-blowing stuff, but not for the faint of heart.

I blogged before about KeePass, a free password manager utility. A few minutes ago, I added the 200th entry to my password database, when I registered to download VMware Server.

200 entries! At one point or another, I’ve registered on a hell of a lot of websites. I also use KeePass to keep track of credit card numbers, software reg­is­tra­tion keys, and so on. KeePass not only lets me use distinct, strong passwords for each site, but it also lets me remember which sites I’ve registered on. Some sites want me to use my email address; others prefer an al­phanu­mer­ic username.

One friend reliably informs me that KeePass runs just fine under …continue.

Via Amer­i­ca­Blog, it’s ` Brokeback to the Future <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfOD­SPIY­w­pQ>`_.

Back in October, I joined Atlas Solutions as a senior software engineer. The company just held its first "partner summit", to educate some of our key partners on the kind of work we’re doing and new de­vel­op­ments. An attendee blogged it. I’m working on video on demand, the stuff that Scott Ferris talked about.

I saw some of the pre­sen­ta­tions being rehearsed last week, but a lot of this is stuff that I’ve never seen before. I come from a software background, after all, not an ad­ver­tis­ing background.

18 Ways to be a Good Developer, inspired by 20 Ways to be a Good User.

The Onion interviews Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report, politics, and improv.

This ap­pli­ca­tion to join the Republican National Committee arrived in the mail the other day. Hell hasn’t frozen over yet, so I won’t be joining the Republican party.

I don’t know how the RNC came up with my name, though I got another so­lic­i­ta­tion from them a few years ago. Usually, I get so­lic­i­ta­tions from the Dems and from a variety of pro­gres­sive causes, but then I have a track record of supporting them.

The previous owner of our house, Harry Korrell, is a Republican lawyer. He was a member of Dino Rossi’s team when Rossi was trying to overturn the last gu­ber­na­to­r­i­al election in Washington state. Feh!