You might know I am a fan of Rory's. His new colleague Charles Torre shows him around in the Channel 9 video titled Rory Meets Da Team (announced on Rory's blog here).

You learn all about his OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder; he doesn't shake hands) and you get to meet a lot of Microsoftees.

Via Larry Osterman's blog I found the new sounds that will play in the RTM builds of Windows Vista. Up till now those have been kept super-secret. Now the secret is out on James Senior's blog. Go listen here.

Microsoft has released Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP. Go get it here.

I have used several beta versions of Windows Media Player 11 and those were already working better than WMP 10. I especially like the new interface and much improved media library.

It's official. Since today, I am a resident (*) of Amsterdam. For my readers outside of Europe(do I have any?): Amsterdam is not the capital of Denmark, it's the capital of the Netherlands ;)

This morning I got the keys to my new apartment after the transfer of ownership at the notary. This afternoon I went to the city hall of Stadsdeel Zeeburg to change my residential address from Zeist to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is the city where I studied physics for six years. It's the city where I first met my ex-boyfriend. It's the city where I first... well, let's not get into that ;)

I have fond memories of this city. However, I never lived in Amsterdam before. So I am really happy to move there.

(*) Well, I do not live full-time in Amsterdam yet. I still have my appartment in Zeist as well. At the end of next week my stuff will be moved and I will move too.

Since I don't feel like packing my moving boxes yet, I am trying out IE 7.0 RTM for Windows XP SP2 in a Virtual PC.

Installation took about 5 minutes including a nag screen about running Windows Update first, which I had already done, and validating the Windows installation (WGA). After that I compared some features of IE7 and Mozilla Firefox.

IE7 vs Firefox

Tabbed browsing

I mainly use Firefox for browsing since I have become addicted to tabbed browsing. I don't like the default tabbed browsing experience in Firefox so I have tweaked it with the Tab Mix Plus extension.

How customizable is the tabbed browsing in IE7? Somewhat, but not as much as in Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus extension. This is the settings screen in IE7:

I won't post a screenshot of the Tab Mix Plus settings because it has six tabs worth of tweaks and twiddles. Is Tab Mix Plus suitable for the average user? Probably not, but I am not an average user.

Points I like about tabbed browsing in IE7:

• The tab bar clearly shows what the active tab is.
• The quick tabs feature showing a thumbnail view of all tabs on a single page.
• A dropdown which shows the titles of all tabs, allowing you to quickly choose a tab.

Points I dislike about tabbed browsing in IE7:

• You can't close the last open tab. When I am done browsing for a moment, I like to have a big white open space instead of the last page I looked at.
• No way to undo closing a tab.
• No way to duplicate a tab. I regularly use this to fork my browsing history. In Firefox the duplicate tab inherits the browsing history of the original tab. In one tab I can move back and navigate in another direction.
• You can't change the default behavior where a page should be opened if you type in a URL in the address bar. It always opens in the current tab, unless you press ALT + ENTER.
• You have to switch to a tab before a close button appears by which you can close it.

RSS

One of the features in IE7 that rocks is the RSS and Atom support. It gives you a very nice view of an RSS feed with several options for sorting and filtering:

Security

One of the major areas of improvement in IE7 over IE6 is security. IE7 still supports ActiveX and Firefox doesn't. This probably means that Firefox remains less vulnerable.

On Windows Vista, it's a whole different ball game between IE7 and Firefox. IE7 can run in Protected Mode. This mitigates a whole slew of possible security vulnerabilities.

Firefox has its own set of security problems. That's why I run Firefox without administrative privileges on XP even though I am logged on as an administrator. I do this using the Drop My Rights tool. One of the things this tool does is to remove the administrative privileges and membership of the Administrators group from the security token of the process. This way malicious code injected into the Firefox process cannot write to system folders or the Program Files folder. It does have some side-effects. For example, when Firefox starts a Windows Media Player process, this process inherits the security settings of the Firefox process. WMP doesn't behave well with such low privileges. I have to remember to open up a WMP window before launching an mms:// link from Firefox.

Nevertheless malicious code injected into the Firefox process can still wreck My Documents folder, since it does run under my user account and that folder is owned by me. IE7 running in protected mode on Vista cannot do that since the user profile folder is virtualized.

Conclusion

Of course, IE 7.0 is a much improved browser over IE 6.0 SP2. But Microsoft hasn't won me over yet, so I will probably continue to use Firefox. At least on Windows XP.

[Updated 2006-10-19: IE7 does allow you to rearrange tabs by dragging-and-dropping.]

Internet Explorer 7 was released to manufactering (RTM-ed) by Microsoft yesterday. IE7 can be downloaded from the IE7 site on microsoft.com. The download for Windows XP SP2 is 14.8 MB in size and was digitally signed by Microsoft on October 17, 2006.

I am still debating whether to install it or not on my main OS because I am a bit worried about web site compatibility. A lot of web sites probably delayed updating their site for IE7 (if needed) until the inevitable hit. So it might be better to wait a little till enough other people have hit those sites with IE7 and complained to the site owners. I guess I will probably try it out in a Virtual PC before installing it on my host OS.

Don't be confused by the version number of the IE7 installer executable: the version number of the download is 6.2.29.0. Here are some version numbers of the included components:

Linking to pictures on Flickr

Now that I got some pictures up on Flickr, it is time to try out the Flickr4Writer that RJ blogged about.

This morning I delayed going to work because I witnessed one of the most beautiful sunrises I ever saw from my old apartment in Zeist. I had to take some pictures and uploaded them straight away. You can view the entire set on Flickr.

By the way, you can still buy this magnificent view as I haven't sold my current appartment yet. Next Friday I will get the key to my new apartment in Amsterdam in this building:

Vista Media Center

And finally to put some technical content into this post: I have been busy with front-end development lately. We finished a new version of Rabobank TV. No new functionality, just support for new set-top boxes. I cannot disclose which ones yet. I started to really dig into Windows Presentation Foundation and started reading Petzold's Applications = Code + Markup.

I've tried to wrap my head around why Microsoft is unleashing yet another markup language onto the world: Media Center Markup Language (MCML). It allows you to create flashy applications for Windows Vista Media Center. The Media Center UI uses this markup itself, so you can create the same effects that you see in the Windows Media Center shell. That will enable you to create a much richer user experience than you can create with a Hosted HTML Application like Rabobank TV.

However, Rabobank TV must work on a slew of different STBs that have nowhere near the horsepower of a media center. I have seen STBs that take 5 seconds to do a page transition between two HTML pages that takes 0.5s in Windows Media Center.

MCML is so close to WPF that it begs the question why it exists. The answer is that it was created and used in a product long before WPF. It just wasn't exposed in previous versions of Windows Media Center. Moreover MCML can be remoted to Media Center Extenders like the Xbox 360. The extender will render the MCML. WPF (XBAP) applications and Hosted HTML Applications cannot really be remoted to extenders. For WPF and Hosted HTML Applications, Media Center will send 5 FPS of screenshots to your extender. More details in this Channel9 thread.

Will it be worth investing time in learning MCML? Microsoft has said that no MCML design tools will be released. You will have to resort to handcoding XML. Creating WPF applications with Expression Interactive Designer and the "Cider" design tools will certainly be easier.

I guess that it all depends on how succesful Vista Media Center and extenders like the Xbox 360 will be at penetrating the living room. Vista Media Center will be included in Vista Home Premium Edition and Vista Ultimate Edition. Home Basic users will be able to upgrade their Windows edition online without needing a reinstall. So the market potential is bigger than that for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

Thanks to Matthijs I found a new time-consuming hobby: uploading my pictures to Flickr.

I took some 400 photographs with my Canon EOS 20D during my holiday to the South of France in September 2006. During this vacation I was already being asked by one of the group members if I would put my photos online. At that time I didn't know where to store my Gigabytes of images. Matthijs told me that with a Flickr Pro account you can upload 2 GB a month without any limit on the total amount of storage you consume.

After some experimentation with tagging and uploading some of my pictures to Matthijs' Flickr account, I decided it was worth the effort and money ($24.95 a year).

But I did not want to be locked into Flickr forever. Once you add your metadata through the Flickr interface you are screwed. Flickr does not embed this data into your pictures. So if you want to take your pictures elsewhere, you loose the Flickr metadata. Fortunately, Flickr supports importing metadata that is embedded into your JPEG images. So the better option is to add the metadata to the images themselves before uploading them to Flickr. And that's what I did.

One of the great features of Flickr is the map view that shows you where you have taken your pictures. Provided you have geotagged your images of course. These are the keyword tags that I used for my pictures.

These are the tools I use for this hobby:

• Windows Explorer. To copy, view and rotate (lossless JPEG operation) my images
• Adobe Photoshop CS2. To enhance my images: cropping, rotation, enhancing shadows and highlights, do lens corrections (like remove vignetting, perspective correction, remove distortion).
• Panorama Tools with PTAssembler and related utilities. For stitching my images to create panorama views.
• Google Earth. To view the locations where I took my pictures.
• Panorado Flyer. This is a Windows Shell add-in that allows me to easily geotag one or more images by selecting a location in Google Earth. Also lets Google Earth navigate to the location of a geotagged image.
• PixVue. This is a shell add-in that allows me to easily add and edit IPTC and XMP metadata to my JPEGs. Makes keyword tagging very easy.
• Enable Flickr to import geo-info embedded in the EXIF data.
• Flickr Uploadr. Since I add all meta-data to my images, I just have to drag-and-drop my images from the Windows Explorer onto the Flickr Uploadr and press Upload.

RJ has also gotten the hang of geotagging his Flickr images. He has a cool Flickr badge on his blog. I'll have to nag Dennis about allowing the inclusion of script tags on my blog in Community Server. Right now, if I paste the Flickr badge code in my blog settings the script tags are escaped and output as plain text ;(

Source: http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/TRA/TRA_000873_1780/

A recent picture of the planet Mars has made its way on the Internet. It was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on October 3, 2006.

This HiRISE image shows "Victoria Crater," an impact crater at Meridiani Planum, near the equator of Mars.

There are high-resolution versions (up to 4045x5085 pixels) of this picture available. What's amazing is that the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity can be seen in this image, at roughly the "ten o'clock" position along the rim of the crater. Even its track marks are visible

I don't know if the image was Photoshopped, but it sure looks pretty.

Through Scott Hanselman's blog I found Google code search.

Tonight I was working on a new version of my RollingFileTraceListener (not yet available). This triggered me to see if Google could find the code of my current version 0.5.2.0. And yes it does! Cool!!

They must have been secretly indexing ZIP files for a while. It even lets you look inside my ZIP file.

Today I started using the September 2006 CTP of Visual Studio Codename "Orcas".

Microsoft has started to distribute the "Orcas" CTPs as Virtual PC images which are based on a common Windows Server 2003 base image. The downloads are pretty large: 1.13 GB for the self-extracting EXE of the base image and 3.6 GB for the self-extracting EXE for the Orcas differencing disk. After extraction the numbers are 2.72 GB for the base image VHD and 9.27 GB for the Orcas VHD.

I extracted these files at home to a portable LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini hard-disk and transported them to work. My portable hard-disk is formatted as an EXT2 partition. The LaCie drive supports the NTFS format only as readonly when it is connected through Ethernet instead of through USB. I still want to able to use the drive as network-attached storage, so NTFS is not suitable for my drive. The drive does fully support FAT32, but FAT32 cannot store files bigger than 4GB. So FAT32 is not suitable either.

Windows XP does not natively support external drives formatted as EXT2 because it is a Linux format. Thankfully this can be fixed by the free-ware Ext2 Installable File System For Windows (Ext2fs).

Virtual PC 2004 SP1 doesn't seem to like accessing large files on an external EXT2 partition. I got some weird errors in the past when I tried booting a Virtual PC stored in that way. However, Virtual Server 2005 R2 (also available for free) works fine so I am using that instead.

If you look at the about box of Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" you can notice some things having the potential of causing incredible version confusion:

The "Orcas" Virtual PC has the following .NET Framework versions installed: 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5.

Notice the inconsistency in the version numbering scheme. Why is it "v3.0" and "v3.5.60905"?! Previous feedback about naming inconsistencies hasn't had much effect. Also note:

Why is it Windows Workflow Foundation and just the acronym WPF?!

There is no support for .NET 3.0 in this "Orcas" CTP: there are no templates and designers for .NET 3.0 components like WPF, WCF and WF. Even though Microsoft has released these as the Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0 ("Fidalgo").

The "Orcas" image is very large, but there is no Windows SDK installed. I think you are out of luck if you would try installing the Windows SDK for .NET 3.0 development and "Fidalgo": the build number for the RC1 of the .NET Framework 3.0 is 4324. This "Orcas" CTP contains the older build 4310.

"Orcas" is meant to target .NET 3.5, yet the about box says it is for .NET 2.0. "Orcas" still has the same major and minor version number 8.0 as Visual Studio 2005. It has the new C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 compilers and IntelliSense, but the installed products are still listed as Visual C# 2005 and Visual Basic 2005.

A version of LINQ is included in the System.Core DLL in the GAC. The file version number is 2.0.60905.0 and the assembly version number is 2.0.0.0. This makes it seem as though LINQ is part of .NET 2.0 instead of .NET 3.5. Fortunately it is placed in the Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5.60905 folder. Here is the content of that folder:

I couldn't find an other way to add a reference to the System.Core assembly to a Visual Studio project other than by manually adding a reference this DLL by browsing to this directory. These are the main namespaces in the System.Core assembly:

.NET 3.5 as released in this "Orcas" CTP is far from complete. Things that have been released as CTPs like LINQ designers, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, ASP.NET AJAX (fka "Atlas"), BLINQ and ADO.NET "vNext" will eventually be integrated into the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, but they are nowhere to be found in this CTP.

Which begs the question: Microsoft, what's the point of releasing this "Orcas" CTP when there are so many things missing?