Misc

Microsoft has made a beta version of Microsoft Expression Web available. It’s a big download: the web page says it’s over 195MB! I’m kinda curious about this but there’s not enough information on the web page to warrant downloading and installing it so if anyone’s got any information, drop me an email (tony !at! tonys-links).

Microsoft has made XML Notepad 2006 available. It’s billed as a browser and editor for XML documents.

Just heard about Microsoft’s PowerShell (you can download therelease candidate from that page, too). It’s a new scripting language/environment based on .NET that tries to do what Unix has had inherent in it since day 1 — link commands together and provide an easy-to-use, coherent and powerful scripting environment. I don’t know how many of you know about WSH (Windows Scripting Host) but that’s been around for a long time but it’s beena bit difficult to use. PowerShell looks to be more powerful but I don’t know that it’s gonna do it for them.Let’s face it, if you design it from the ground up for modularity, like Unix, it’s difficult to beat.

Today the San Jose Mercury News has this article on Fabrik, a company which the Mercury News bills as “A YouTube for Adults” (see My Fabrik). Interesting idea but, for the life of me, I don’t get it. Maybe I don’t know enough about it yet but it seems that Yahoo’s photo service as well as a lot of other free ones give you the same control. Email me if you understand what I don’t.

In this post, Scoble posted this link to a Windows Live Spaces page that has links to 150 cool downloads from Microsoft. Like what? Well, Calculator Plus, a great calculator replacement that can do binary, hex and octal arithmetic, unit conversions and so on; FolderShare a Windows Live Service in beta that allow one to share files across computers, over the Internet; My Font Tool which one can use to convert handwriting to a font and a whole bunch (147, to be exact) of other tools.

Microsoft maintains a bunch of converters and viewers for the Office suite. You can see the complete list here No Project viewer, though.

I’m hosted at 1&1 Internet. They’re pretty big over in Europe and when they launched here in the states they gave away a really serious hosting package, including SSH access, a ton of utilities, MySQL databases, CGI, Perl, PHP and a lot of other stuff, all free for 3 years. Of course, being the cheap b*stard that I am, I snapped it right up. Well, the 3 years is nearly up and I’m happy with their services (you can’t beat $5.99 for private domain registration) so I’m thinking about upgrading my service and actually paying someone to host me.

So, this is a heads-up. If I decide to upgrade, it’ll probably be more or less on a whim and you’ll have short notice. The site should only be down for a few days, maybe less, but I’ve got to pull all the data off because upgrading means they actually change where my stuff is located and they don’t move the site. It’s up to me and, to keep everything consistent, I’ll pull the site down, backup the data, do the upgrade and restore it all.

Fair warning.

I’ve been lax in my posting. Busy busy busy at work and at home but that’s no excuse. Thanks for being so patient. I can’t promise I’ll post more often but I will promise I’ll try.

I’ve got a couple of posts backed up. There’s a new version of my favorite IMAP client for the Pocket PC, QMail3, I’ve (re)discovered how to fix a configuration problem with it, a new software ROM update for my T-Mobile MDA, I’m moving one of my domains from Lux Scientiae to Fastmail.fm and, well, a few others.

So, without further ado …

Geocoder will convert any U.S. address into its longitude and lattitude. Course, another, graphical way to do this is to locate the address on Google Maps and find the link on the page labelled “Link to this page”. Contained in that URL is your longitude and lattitude with the lattitude and longitude coming after “ll=” in the URL. They’re comma separated. First is lattitude and next is longitude. You may have to magnify the map or click elsewhere on the map to get the link URL to contain the coordinates.

VMWare has released VMware Server, a free VM environment that runs on Windows or Linux. If differs from VMware Player in that you can create VMs as opposed to just running them. Download from this link. Pre-configured virtual machines complete with a configured operating system (aka “appliances”) are available here including the most recent Ubuntu (from this link) and CentOS (from this link on LinuxTracker.org) as a torrent.