What will those crazy folks at Apple think of next?

Charles Petzold’s book, Applications = Code + Markup - received some critical press for not being very pretty. And it’s true that there’s a lot of text and code listings but (and as you’ll see below), he was methodical. I recently wanted to upgrade a Windows Live Writer plug-in I’d written to use the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) – instead of WinForms and a custom UI library. However my first attempt to compile the application as a Class Library resulted in the following error…

Yet another great feature of IIS7  - declarative static content cache settings. It took a little detective work to find the settings for this feature – including a helpful post from Jörg Jooss.

Whew – well after a tough few months I’ve finally completed the coursework towards my masters degree in Information Security - taught by the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway,  (via the University of London External System). The online syllabus is available from the external system and the ISG also provides an overview of the programme here. In addition to the syllabus and ISG’s introduction - I thought that a personal summary might be useful for those considering the programme.

As per the syllabus – there are four compulsory modules, two optional modules and a final project. A module is really a course, composed of roughly ten units, and lasts the full academic year – from October to the final exam in May.  Here’s a description of the compulsory modules (accurate as of 2008/09 academic year) along with my two chosen optional modules.

Well I figured since the RC was generally available – I’d test the upgrade process from Windows Vista to Windows 7. I chose my ThinkPad T61p as the victim. This is my fully loaded portable dev environment including BitLocker encrypted volumes - and I was a little sceptical at first. A new OS usually means re-paving the machine, but I thought I’d try the upgrade and see how it went.

Speechless really. I’m not often lost for words – but this presentation by Patrick Dixon of Siemens leaves me speechless. Thanks to RFIDs on the Brain from Boing Boing (and Douglas Rushkoff via ‘Joe’).

I’d previously created a compression processor for dynamic content – using this excellent post for QValues by Dave Transom. Also just just discovered this post on creating an action filter for compression by Kazi Manzur Rashid.

So combining the two and we have: