Both Outlook 2007 and IE7 feature vastly improved RSS capabilities over their predecessors, and there are already some cool add-ons to help leverage this.

What would be awesome for RSS feed support - to actually make life better for me - is having Outlook 2007 and IE7 cross-aware.

A scenario... I subscribe to an RSS feed (say for TheRegister.co.uk) in IE7, and also in Outlook. First of all I'd hope they'd be smart enough to share data and not double-dip to download the same stuff twice. Don't ask me why I want it in both places, just keep it tidy for me and don't use too many resources okay!

If I read an item in IE7, I'd love the platform to mark it as read in Outlook. And vice-versa. Then... and this would be really cool... if I read the referenced article directly via the browser... mark it read in both IE7 and Outlook because I don't need to check it again (unless I choose to flag as 'unread' somehow!)

That's integration and information overload management

Update: After installing IE7 (final release) and OL2007B2TR it looks like the two do share their RSS feed information... but they don't seem that smart at keeping the 'read/un-read' stuff synchronised. But it shows promise...

Both Outlook 2007 and IE7 feature vastly improved RSS capabilities over their predecessors, and there are already some cool add-ons to help leverage this.

What would be awesome for RSS feed support - to actually make life better for me - is having Outlook 2007 and IE7 cross-aware.

A scenario... I subscribe to an RSS feed (say for TheRegister.co.uk) in IE7, and also in Outlook. First of all I'd hope they'd be smart enough to share data and not double-dip to download the same stuff twice. Don't ask me why I want it in both places, just keep it tidy for me and don't use too many resources okay!

If I read an item in IE7, I'd love the platform to mark it as read in Outlook. And vice-versa. Then... and this would be really cool... if I read the referenced article directly via the browser... mark it read in both IE7 and Outlook because I don't need to check it again (unless I choose to flag as 'unread' somehow!)

That's integration and information overload management

Update: After installing IE7 (final release) and OL2007B2TR it looks like the two do share their RSS feed information... but they don't seem that smart at keeping the 'read/un-read' stuff synchronised. But it shows promise...

According to (now debunked) legend Bill Gates once said that 640K would be enough for anyone. Well, I for one am glad he didn't really mean that because now my laptop is running with 1GB of RAM.... but it's still not enough!

As RAM prices have dropped and processors have got faster it seems software has been pushing the envelope faster and further and hardware just can't keep up.

I got my current laptop about 18 months ago. It came with a standard 512MB RAM which I immediately doubled - I use my laptop for developing with IIS/ASP and SQL (and sometimes Apache and PHP).

Now I don't push my machine that much. I tend to have Outlook running, a music player, remote desktop connection to my development server, messenger, IE and Firefox, my editor/debugger (sometimes Visual Studio, sometimes Notepad), the usual services (including IIS and SQL) and anti-virus/anti-phishing stuff.

And 1GB is these days no-where near enough. SQL with one database active is using over 1.5GB of virtual storage. Outlook and the SQL Server 2005 Workbench uses almost half a gig each, with the MS Search Indexer (used by Outlook 2007) coming in with a further 300meg.

Couple the thrashing while paging applications in and out of memory with the wasted CPU cycles we have to spend keeping the machine safe my poor little laptop is getting stressed.... but talking to Sony and a number of 3rd party memory vendors the VGN-T27GP can't support more than a total of 1GB (the internal 512MB plus the same sized extension).

While it's easy to be down on the hardware vendors for not thinking ahead it didn't see critical a year and a half ago to be able to stuff in more than 1GB. 512MB had been okay for the preceding machine running a similar mix (SQL Server 2000 not 2005 being the biggest difference) but it's still pretty annoying. I want the horsepower now, but I don't want to splash out on a new machine until the expected crop of Vista optimised boxes appear.

One side effect is that I'm watching how greedy apps are with RAM these days and being quite harsh on the offenders. iTunes 7 required a huge jump in resources over version 6... for no apparent gain, so it's been relegated to loading my iPod while WMP11 Beta is now my day to day media player (no downsides there apart from the current playing song doesn't appear in my Messenger!) and I've started running MaxMem again to let me force apps to tidy their act up.

Makes me think all developers should have to test on really clogged up old machines before releasing their product just to make sure it does still work for us without rolling hardware budgets

According to (now debunked) legend Bill Gates once said that 640K would be enough for anyone. Well, I for one am glad he didn't really mean that because now my laptop is running with 1GB of RAM.... but it's still not enough!

As RAM prices have dropped and processors have got faster it seems software has been pushing the envelope faster and further and hardware just can't keep up.

I got my current laptop about 18 months ago. It came with a standard 512MB RAM which I immediately doubled - I use my laptop for developing with IIS/ASP and SQL (and sometimes Apache and PHP).

Now I don't push my machine that much. I tend to have Outlook running, a music player, remote desktop connection to my development server, messenger, IE and Firefox, my editor/debugger (sometimes Visual Studio, sometimes Notepad), the usual services (including IIS and SQL) and anti-virus/anti-phishing stuff.

And 1GB is these days no-where near enough. SQL with one database active is using over 1.5GB of virtual storage. Outlook and the SQL Server 2005 Workbench uses almost half a gig each, with the MS Search Indexer (used by Outlook 2007) coming in with a further 300meg.

Couple the thrashing while paging applications in and out of memory with the wasted CPU cycles we have to spend keeping the machine safe my poor little laptop is getting stressed.... but talking to Sony and a number of 3rd party memory vendors the VGN-T27GP can't support more than a total of 1GB (the internal 512MB plus the same sized extension).

While it's easy to be down on the hardware vendors for not thinking ahead it didn't see critical a year and a half ago to be able to stuff in more than 1GB. 512MB had been okay for the preceding machine running a similar mix (SQL Server 2000 not 2005 being the biggest difference) but it's still pretty annoying. I want the horsepower now, but I don't want to splash out on a new machine until the expected crop of Vista optimised boxes appear.

One side effect is that I'm watching how greedy apps are with RAM these days and being quite harsh on the offenders. iTunes 7 required a huge jump in resources over version 6... for no apparent gain, so it's been relegated to loading my iPod while WMP11 Beta is now my day to day media player (no downsides there apart from the current playing song doesn't appear in my Messenger!) and I've started running MaxMem again to let me force apps to tidy their act up.

Makes me think all developers should have to test on really clogged up old machines before releasing their product just to make sure it does still work for us without rolling hardware budgets

One thing that bugs me is that out of the box MCE (Windows Media Centre Edition, or Media Center Edition depending on what your spell-check likes!) only supported two tuners. Even though the hardware may well be capable of recording 4 HD Digital streams concurrently the powers that be say we can't do that unless we're willing to dive into the registry and get our hands really dirty.

I've been looking to add more tuners for a while simply to avoid the problem of running out if there are two consecutive shows on one channel that you want to record while grabbing something from another channel that overlaps with the overlap on the other channel (that you have to allow because most Free-to-air networks in Australia can't actually hit their published timetables more than one show in a dozen!)

Well... the (pretty much) one click solution is now here! This very simple to use utility adds those extra tuners for you (as long as you've set up the first one manually) and it's pretty painless.

It's only beta at the moment so read the warnings, take the backups and.... dive in!

One thing that bugs me is that out of the box MCE (Windows Media Centre Edition, or Media Center Edition depending on what your spell-check likes!) only supported two tuners. Even though the hardware may well be capable of recording 4 HD Digital streams concurrently the powers that be say we can't do that unless we're willing to dive into the registry and get our hands really dirty.

I've been looking to add more tuners for a while simply to avoid the problem of running out if there are two consecutive shows on one channel that you want to record while grabbing something from another channel that overlaps with the overlap on the other channel (that you have to allow because most Free-to-air networks in Australia can't actually hit their published timetables more than one show in a dozen!)

Well... the (pretty much) one click solution is now here! This very simple to use utility adds those extra tuners for you (as long as you've set up the first one manually) and it's pretty painless.

It's only beta at the moment so read the warnings, take the backups and.... dive in!

When I'm developing pages that have a lot of JavaScript in, I love Firefox. Ignoring all the hype about why it's better than Internet Explorer it does have one really cool, out of the box debugging tool - the JavaScript Console. It makes tracking problems down so easy. Sure it's a two step process (find the offending error message in the console log, and then look in the source viewer to find the actual line - sometimes a tricky thing when the page is dynamically generated).

But all is not lost in IE. Far from it. Most people when they want to debug JavaScript in IE complain that the only way to do it is to go and buy a copy of Visual Studio. Well, sure, you can do that if you want. But as anyone who's used it to try and debug one typo in a page it can be overkill. Luckily the answer lies in the free (and very small download) MS Script Debugger.

It's integrated with IE (including the latest IE7 betas and release candidate) - when you get a JavaScript error reported on the page just hit "yes" to debug and get taken to the offending line nicely highlit in a source viewer (and if you want to check the source at any time the debugger adds a new item to the "view" menu).

The other toy that makes developing and debugging (JavaScript, HTML, CSS and graphics) in IE a pleasure is the new developers toolbar. This little add-on for IE7 comes with a whole host of goodies from on-screen rulers, a fully featured DOM inspector, the ability to disable browser functions (eg JavaScript or CSS), site level cookie control, highlighting (and detailed information) for any element you might need to examine and even a handy resizer to fit common screen sizes to see how things look.

As a developer currently working on an image,CSS and JavaScript heavy site these tools are invaluable in helping me to deliver what the designer and client want. Give them a quick try and see what you think....

When I'm developing pages that have a lot of JavaScript in, I love Firefox. Ignoring all the hype about why it's better than Internet Explorer it does have one really cool, out of the box debugging tool - the JavaScript Console. It makes tracking problems down so easy. Sure it's a two step process (find the offending error message in the console log, and then look in the source viewer to find the actual line - sometimes a tricky thing when the page is dynamically generated).

But all is not lost in IE. Far from it. Most people when they want to debug JavaScript in IE complain that the only way to do it is to go and buy a copy of Visual Studio. Well, sure, you can do that if you want. But as anyone who's used it to try and debug one typo in a page it can be overkill. Luckily the answer lies in the free (and very small download) MS Script Debugger.

It's integrated with IE (including the latest IE7 betas and release candidate) - when you get a JavaScript error reported on the page just hit "yes" to debug and get taken to the offending line nicely highlit in a source viewer (and if you want to check the source at any time the debugger adds a new item to the "view" menu).

The other toy that makes developing and debugging (JavaScript, HTML, CSS and graphics) in IE a pleasure is the new developers toolbar. This little add-on for IE7 comes with a whole host of goodies from on-screen rulers, a fully featured DOM inspector, the ability to disable browser functions (eg JavaScript or CSS), site level cookie control, highlighting (and detailed information) for any element you might need to examine and even a handy resizer to fit common screen sizes to see how things look.

As a developer currently working on an image,CSS and JavaScript heavy site these tools are invaluable in helping me to deliver what the designer and client want. Give them a quick try and see what you think....

The world through a childs eyes

Sep 18, 2006 - 8 Photos

As you can imagine we watched with hearts in our mouths expecting some horror to ensue but luckily no damage occured - and the pictures were well framed and composed!

When we got back from the reception Rhiannon was still very excited about the idea of taking photos - but most dismissive of our 'normal' camera... she wanted one that looked "professional"!

So a very rapid shopping trip ensued to try and find a digital SLR look-alike that was light and easy enough for her to use (and in the right price bracket for me not to have kittens every time she took it out). The result was a Kodak z650 - 10x optical zoom, a shroud to protect the lens assembly, a bunch of pre-defined exposure modes in a case that, while bulkier than a lot of the digital camera offerings, met the requirements we'd had laid down for us!

So, how has she done? Well... while nothing to rival Jimmy Olsen just yet, it's probably only a matter of time (I speak as a doting father of course) but we just uploaded a random selection from the first hundred shots.

The world through a childs eyes

Sep 18, 2006 - 8 Photos

As you can imagine we watched with hearts in our mouths expecting some horror to ensue but luckily no damage occured - and the pictures were well framed and composed!

When we got back from the reception Rhiannon was still very excited about the idea of taking photos - but most dismissive of our 'normal' camera... she wanted one that looked "professional"!

So a very rapid shopping trip ensued to try and find a digital SLR look-alike that was light and easy enough for her to use (and in the right price bracket for me not to have kittens every time she took it out). The result was a Kodak z650 - 10x optical zoom, a shroud to protect the lens assembly, a bunch of pre-defined exposure modes in a case that, while bulkier than a lot of the digital camera offerings, met the requirements we'd had laid down for us!

So, how has she done? Well... while nothing to rival Jimmy Olsen just yet, it's probably only a matter of time (I speak as a doting father of course) but we just uploaded a random selection from the first hundred shots.