Microsoft released version 1.0 of their AJAX framework named ASP.NET AJAX (fka Atlas) to the web. You can read the official announcement on Scott Guthrie's blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/01/23/asp-net-ajax-1-0-released.aspx. 

As Scott explains in his blog the actual code along with samples, documents, and videos can be downloaded from http://ajax.asp.net.

As I was picking up my bag late last night at the airport I was noticing all of the junk that was left on the baggage carousel. Some of it was candy, odd bits of paper, and what looked like an elementary school student's homework. Among the odd items were at least 3 luggage tags with a person's name, address, and phone number. I got to thinking about my own bags that have the same information on them. I do it because I want the airline to be able to get my bag back to me when they loose it. And if you think they won't loose your bag all I can say is you are either the luckiest person in the world or have not traveled enough. I don't mind putting that information on the bag because it is all public information available on the Internet and countless editions of phone books.

I have been thinking about identity a little lately and I am planning on submitting a session on it for TechEd. One thing that is very interesting for me is how free some people are with their information. About 10 years ago I was complaining to a co-worker about how many web sites were starting to require an e-mail address to download trial versions of their software. He suggested that I open a Hotmail account for them. I did that and I have been putting all that junk mail into the account and signing into it occasionally to just make sure that I keep the account and to clean it out. Over the years I have noticed that I am not the only one who uses "my" e-mail account. Of course my wife uses it also but I also have some other "friends" who have decided to use it.

One of these people lives back east. I know they have a girl who is about 15 years old and is active in a swim team. I have figured this out from the e-mails that come for this girl and her parents. At first I tried responding to the sender telling them that they had the wrong address but they keep sending them. One of the senders has also been kind enough to include his address and cell phone number.

I also have 2 other friends. One who is sending their Delta Skymiles e-mail to me and the other who is sending his American Airlines account e-mail. In both of these cases if I decided to be malicious I could go in and request a password reset. Since the new password would be sent to me I could change it to whatever I want and then transfer their miles, request an award ticket, or even change their mailing address to somewhere else. Since I have not way of getting in touch with these people other than changing the password on their account and getting a physical address I am just hoping that they sometime have an interaction with the airline that will help them to correct their e-mail address.

I realize that just having a name and an address is not really enough to start identity theft (or more accurately identity fraud) on that person it is still a start and I could probably start targeting them off that information and figure out if they live in an affluent area or more details about their lives.

I guess maybe I am a little bit paranoid but as I am prone to say "better safe than sorry". If you want to become my friend and send all your personal e-mail into my account so I can blog about you as well please feel free to contact me and I will make sure to publicly berate you some time in the future.

I have been a little silent lately (I may be in danger of ruining my New Year's resolution of blogging twice a week or more in 2007) because I have been busy and the hotel I am staying in has had spotty wireless connections. What I wanted to talk about on this post is my new cell phone.

I went into the store and told them that I needed a phone without a camera. The nice lady there looked at me like I had 2 heads. I had to explain that I sometimes go to secure locations where a camera is not allowed. Unfortunately those same locations are the ones where I don't have a permanent land line and they tend to be far away from anything else so it is the perfect scenario for when you would *need* a cell phone if you had car trouble or just to check in and say that you are heading home in the middle of a storm and that your family should not worry.

I have service through Cingular and they only had 2 models in the store that didn't have a camera. One was a Blackberry and the other was the Nokia E62. On the whole I have liked the phone but I have some things I don't like. So here is my list of what I like and don't like:

Like:

• Screen: The screen is fairly large and bright. I have set the background as a picture of my children that was taken with my wife's camera phone (she doesn't have the same restriction) and it is easy to see even with the appointment and to-do information overlaid on it.
• Phone: This is a lot better phone than the LG one that it is replacing. To be fair the LG was the free model but it was hard to hear a lot of conversations where I haven't had a problem with this one.
• Form Factor: I have a blue tooth head set but I have also used my phone with it up to my ear and I like that the phone is small enough to be comfortable holding but also large enough that I can cradle it between my shoulder and ear when I need to jot down a quick note. I have also found that it does fit in my pocket when I don't want to wear it on my belt.
• Keyboard: At first I didn't think I would like the QWERTY keyboard but I have found that it is a lot faster to enter data and easier to figure out than the old phone where I would have to press the same key several times to cycle through the letters it represented.

Don't Like:

• Synchronization: For some reason when I synchronize with Outlook it will pull down appointments but when I go into view the details (notes in Outlook) they aren't there. If I add a new one it will replace it in both the phone and Outlook. That is not good for things like conference calls where the phone number is in the details instead of the location.
• Symbian OS: I was really hoping for a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone so I could continue to play around with mobile phone development. Unfortunately they all have a camera in them. I have no idea how to program for the Symbian OS and quite frankly I doubt that I will ever have the time.
• Belt Clip: I got the Cingular belt clip for free and twice I have had the whole thing come off my belt. Once was when I was picking up my backpack with the laptop in it and bumped the phone. The other was when I was getting out of my car. I think the seat belt caught on it but I am not sure. In both cases the phone didn't take a hard fall but it was kind of disappointing that it doesn't stay on better, especially considering the cost for the phone.

All in all I would have to say that I am satisfied with the phone. I don't think it has the cool factor that the BlackJack (the phone I really wanted) has but then again I have never really thought of a phone as a fashion accessory. That is one of the many reasons I will not be rushing out to get the iPhone (if Cisco doesn't stop it).

So far I have done all of my Vista beta testing using the ultimate edition but I finally decided to install and work with the Home Premium Edition. I am assuming that this will be the version loaded on most machines sold after the general availablity on the 30th of this month so I wanted to see what it would look like. The big project I tried out was creating a movie and display it. My wife works with the children aged 18 months - 12 years old in our church. She had lots of pictures taken from various activities that they had throughout the year and wanted to put them together as a movie and show them on the 30th. Of course that meant that I was responsible for contacting all the people who had taken pictures, getting them together, organizing them, and then making the movie.

I started off by setting up the machine. I installed the OS and then set up another user who is not an administrator to do all the work. I wanted to see what the end user experience would be like. Just to make things more interesting I turned on the parental controls for that user as well. I set them kind of strict just to see if they would get in the way of my video editing. I knew I wouldn't get any bad pictures so what I was really interested to see was if I would be forced to rate the pictures I was looking at or if I would get a lot of prompts.
Overall I was very pleased with the experience. I was able to preview and work with all of the pictures. I only ran into the parental controls one time when I clicked on some music and was told that I would have to provide an adiminstrator password to play the song. What I really wanted to do was download the song so I cancelled out and used the context menu to download the song instead.
I was impressed with Movie Maker. I hadn't spent a lot of time making home movies before and I found it really easy to use. I especially liked the auto movie feature where I could select a bunch of pictures and then have it make them into a movie segment with a title, trailer, and random transitions between the pictures. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't do it for clips that would end up being less than 30 seconds (10 pictures in my case) in length. I guess they figured I could do it myself but I could tell where I was choosing the transitions because mine all seemed to be the same and not as random as the ones they generated.

All in all I think that Vista Home Premium will be a good replacement for the XP Home Edition we are running now and I will probably end up buying a machine around the first of February with it installed. I will continue to play with it until then trying to find anything that will break in my home network. One thing that I am really liking is the User Account Control. It is annoying but less so than my current situation where I have to run a batch file (makemeadmin.bat) that I got from Aaron Margosis' blog to go and do administrative tasks since I am not an administrator. Now the OS just prompts me when I need to have elevated privileges and I don't have to worry about going and doing something first.

Here it is the first day of 2007 and the new year is full of promise. As I stated last year I have given up on making predictions (at least in public) about what the new year will bring. I am still looking forward to another great year. With MIX07, TechEd, and PDC along with the local launch events for Live, Office, Vista, and Exchange and all the user group presentations I am sure this year will be a busy one for me. I look forward to learning and discovering new things and doing my best to share them with you, my loyal readers.

May 2007 be a happy and prosperous year for you as well.

I have been missing out on a lot of blogs lately. It is not the usual excuse off not enough time but instead it appears that my "software" is not working. I have tried several different programs for reading blogs but for one reason or another have abandoned most of them. The ones that integrate with Outlook have held my attention the longest but even then I have always had problems with them and given up on them. Here is my wish list for the perfect reader:

1. Work with software that I am already using (Outlook, IE, etc.). I really don't care as long as I don't have to open a separate program to get the information.
2. Show me a view with subject and the first few words. There are blogs that I always read just because I know the person posting them or because they have always had good information. There are others that I scan. I also subscribe to a few that I mostly don't read but they sometimes have some gems in them so I want to see what is posted and make a decision on whether or not to read it.
3. Allow me to mark items for follow up. If I read a particularly good post I might want to refer to it later or do what the author suggests. I want to be able to find those posts quickly and act on them.
4. Allow me to customize when I see new items. I don't really need to check every hour, once a day is usually fine with me.
5. Allow me to categorize blogs. Referring back to item 2 I like to have "folders" for always read, sometimes read, scan, etc.

I don't think I am being that demanding in what I want. I thought I had found the perfect solution in squeet. With squeet I could ask it to go out and scan the blogs I am interested in and e-mail me the posts. I liked it because it met my first 4 criteria. I could see the items in Outlook where I got the title and with the reading pane could see a few lines to quickly decide whether the rest of the article was worth reading or not. I could flag items for follow up and even use different colored flags for different meanings. I could also use Outlook rules to dump the e-mail into different folders if I wanted to.

So why this post? Well over the last few weeks the mail delivery has been lacking. I have missed some posts, others have been delivered several days late, and all the time the page that shows my account doesn't have any indication that there is an error. I will still stay subscribed to squeet while I look for something I like better but I have about given up on them. Maybe it is time to try IE 7 and see if I like it's RSS handling. I might also look into using one of the many SharePoint add-ins to see what they are like. If you have a favorite reader that meets my requirements I would love to hear about it. Please post a comment or drop me an e-mail.

I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas. At this time of year my thoughts
turn to family and friends and I am very grateful for each and every one
that has touched my life this year. I wish you all the best at this time of
year and hope that the love of our Savior will be with all of us. My heart
goes out to the men and women in the armed services and I pray that peace
will prevail and they will be able to return home.