Stand, High On The Mountain. Lone Wolf appears, standing By The Pond. Reach out.. Too soon. Not yet. Be patient. He will come, He always comes. Travel along the Canyon River, perform the Tribal Dance and experiencing inner peace, joy and wonder for the world around you. Go forth to Echo Canyon, and sleep. Wait until you hear the Morning Call. Lone Wolf will come. Cross the Black Mesa, until you reach Awakening. He will be there for you, waiting, patient as always. 

To enable the context menu item "Delete" for IronPython projects, grab the source and edit/add the following lines:

 

Bookeen has just released a new version of the firmware of their CyBook device (v1.1). Check out http://www.bookeen.com/support/ebook-support.aspx for more information (requires login).

There was a recent fall-out over the blocking of *youtube.com on the Messenger service. I doubt this was ultimately the result of Microsoft wanting to promot it's MessengerTV service, though, as some conspiracy theorists may have you believe.

 

Although I've worked at the Messenger Server team (I'll use that name for simplicity reasons) before, I have never heard of a so called partner handling the blocked URLs. Things change, of course, so they might have changed this over the past year. I can also think of valid business reasons for this move: there are companies out there who simply have more knowledge about these nasty URLs, quick-spreading trojans, virusses, and such, and the team in question may simply want to shift its focus back to developing new features for Messenger instead of putting considerable man-power into a single feature which consists (mostly) of adding new URLs and removing some out-dated ones.

 

It does make me doubt the reliability and quality control of said partner. Such f-ups definitely make the Messenger service as a whole look bad, especially when communities like Slashdot get wind of it ... of course, Microsoft bashing is the #1 favorite past-time over there, but still. Other valid URLs like ebuddy.com are also still blocked, despite questions from the public and eBuddy themselves to unblock the domain. This is where another question kicks in: if YouTube can be unblocked in a few hours, then why is there (presumably) so much red tape and beaurocracy surrounding other domains for it take weeks instead?

 

Of course, this all assumes the "SPIM Filter" has a legimate reason for existance in the first place. I think it's a good first step, but it definitely needs work.. starting a year ago (remember, the "feature" has been active for a few years now).

 

What do you think? Should Microsoft remove the filter completely? Or should it be replaced with a different way of blocking malicious URLs? Do you think it should be intergrated with the Phising filter used by Internet Explorer?

Don't get me wrong, I'm still extremely happy with my Zune, and the software it comes with. Heck, the XNA 3.0 CTP was released this week, and now I have games on my Zune. Yay! (Although most games I tried still crash.. I guess that's what you get for using experimental software).

 

There's just one minor detail about the recently released version 2.5 of the Zune software... it includes the "Now Playing" feature for Messenger. Yeah, great work boys! Obviously my whole Zune project has suffered a bit of a setback, and to be honest, now that they added the feature, it has obviously become less of a priority for me to finish my own stuff... I do have other stuff to do!

 

Ah well, it was great while it lasted. I might release it some day, or I might release the source in a few days. We'll see.

 

(Appologies for the lack of links to the CTP, previous blog posts and what not, but I'm too lazy right now to add them.)

1. A programmer with a soldering iron;

2. A manager who codes;

3. A user who gets "ideas".