Alessandro Piana Bianco

...and Powerpoint? - Bob DeAmbra

Steve, you really should try Google Chrome! Much faster than Firefox. - Mike Reynolds

@Mike It's not on Macs yet. - Steve Rubel via IM

Includes a free blog, promotional support and more. - Steve Rubel via Bookmarklet

Sounds like every social network is bowing to the great gods of Google these days. Smart! - Steve Rubel via Bookmarklet

"Sorry, an unexpected condition has occurred which is preventing Google Reader from fulfilling the request." is what I get - Brian Sullivan

@abacab Same - Steve Rubel

Looks like it is not just Twitter doing the fail whale today - Ian D. Nock via twhirl

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. - Alan Dean

Following a note on this blogpage about Powershell for needed for the Azure Services Training Kit, I decided to check it out : And yes the dowload page states you need PowerShell for this, so I downloaded this Kit and did a DIR -REC on the directory for .PS1 files - Alan Dean

One of the more infrastructure oriented PDC sessions was "Under the Hood - Inside the Windows Azure Hosting Environment". Skip forward to around 43 minutes into the presentation, where Chuck Lenzmeier goes into the deployment model used within the Azure cloud (you can stop watching at around 48 minutes). Conceptually, this is _exactly_ the deployment model I and ppl like Lance Berc envisage for ESXi. Rather than put that base VHD onto local USB devices ala ESXi, Microsoft PXE boot a Windows PE "maintenance os", drop a common base image onto the endpoint, dynamically build a personality (offline) as a differencing disk (ie linked clone), drop that down to the endpoint, and then boot straight off the differencing disk VHD (booting directly off VHD's is a _very_ cool feature of Win7 / Server 2008 R2). I'm glad even Microsoft recognise the massive benefits of this approach - no installation, rapid rollback, etc. - Alan Dean

Last week was hot in international scenario on software development. The SEI (Software Engineering Institute) recently published a report entitled " CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!", which addresses the integration between the ideas and practices of the CMMI with the ideas and practices of Agile as something possible in software development projects. According to the document, which counted on participation of some famous agilists as David Anderson, the focus of this initiative is: "More dialogue would be healthy and beneficial for users, the paradigms, and the broader community." - Alan Dean

One of the biggest problems about this year's PDC is the sheer volume of new stuff that has been unleashed upon us. Some clickbaiters like Joe Wilcox are in "Bash Microsoft" mode and are calling the Azure platform "vaporware" (yes, despite the fact that we've been able to actually build AND DEPLOY Azure apps since Tuesday), but a lot of people have genuine concerns like "What's the difference between all these new cloud stacks?!?" That's a perfectly valid question and so the first comparison I'm going to address here is Live Mesh and Windows Azure. - Alan Dean

I suspect I am going through a similar dilemma to you at the moment. I want a new Powerbook, this will allow me to do all my work on the train while commute. But a netbook is so much cheaper and smaller, but won't allow me to use the likes of CS3/4 for my other work. Smartphone's come in somewhere else . . . - Ed Richardson

the iPhone-powered laptop might be what you are looking for: http://www.gizmag.com/the-olo-... - vijay

smartphones are great for creating when you're not at your computer (ie. when you're in the real world) - William Stewart

I needed a conference room scheduler that prevented duplicate assignments, in SharePoint 2007, to replace a classic ASP application that depended upon a different authentication model than we were planning to use in our SharePoint upgrade. I also wanted to remove anything specific to our building layout from the existing conference room scheduler, so it could be applied to other resources. - Alan Dean

There are different kinds of HTTP caches that are useful for different kinds of things. I want to talk about gateway caches — or, “reverse proxy caches” — and consider their effects on modern, dynamic web application design. - Alan Dean

When it comes to drinking, it seems, no state keeps pace with Wisconsin. This state, long famous for its breweries, has led the nation in binge drinking in every year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began its surveys on the problem more than a decade ago. - Josh Young

"Obama collected both Spider-man and Conan the Barbarian comics; he actually wanted to be a comic artist when he grew up. He owns all seven Harry Potter books. Wired says he's a Star Trek fan" - Steve Rubel via Bookmarklet

George H. Bush was clearly a nerd. He may not have known many sci-fi references or collected comic books, but the man just screamed NERD every time her spoke. - Occasional Headbanger

This is fantastic...a president kind of like me. At least many people can relate to him. - John-David Lusan

Nice overview of tools used as well as environment. - Kevin C. Tofel

"Security officials fear a ‘spectacular’ during the transition period" - Steve Rubel via Bookmarklet

API released an executive summary of what happened at the 11/13/08 closed-door meeting. GREAT LIST OF NEWSPAPER EXECUTIVES! - Josh Young

Rupert Murdoch at heart is a traditional newspaperman. But he sees the wood for the trees. In the third program of the 2008 Boyer Lectures, Mr Murdoch says, newspapers will thrive in the 21st century if proprietors fully comprehend what it means to be alive in the era of information. - Josh Young