I just came across the best guide I have ever seen on how to write a good bug... Reporting bugs - a how-to guide

this is a must read for anyone working with support or doing any sort of testing!

Google have built this really just for the voyeur in everyone... For me it has been really fun, checking out all the places I loved in San Francisco.

I just spotted this great sight outside the Westin on Taylor st.. Yeah ok, ignore Victoria Secret, just look up to the left... Yep, that is the Australian Flag!

Nice work Google!

I am so glad someone put this in writing!

Phil has a link to a larger version on his blog

I often use Self Signed SSL certs for testing to make sure that my SSL code is all good. Normally it is a bit of a pain but in the case of vista it is MUCH EASER (I know, shock horror!)

Check out Scott's blog post entitled Tip/Trick: Enabling SSL on IIS 7.0 Using Self-Signed Certificates

It shouldn't take you more than two minutes now!

I am not normally one to post about great flash games but when Frank Arr twittered about Desktop Tower Defense, I had a few seconds to spare so I thought I would have a look.

...

after about five minutes I realized that I would not put this down unless I stopped right now! So I decided to check it out infront of the telly later....

...

Well there goes three hours of my life - yes the TV was on but I wasn't watching it! I was cursing the creeps that kept coming wave after wave.. Especially those flying waves!!

Anyway, enough rambling - just a warning, do not play this game!

Don't try this at work! It seems that watching a DVD is not something Microsoft thought you would want to do at work.

Ok, so I don't tend to watch DVDs at work, in fact I can't seem to think of a time that I have ever done this but I have however watched a DVD on my work laptop in a hotel room when I am on the road.

Today, when I went to watch a DVD in bed (yes, it was a lazy afternoon and it was cold!) I have no TV in the bedroom so I grabbed a laptop (there are three in the house), I happened to grab my new vista laptop as it has the longest battery life, the others are older and suffer the dreaded laptop battery fade.

In goes the DVD and up pops windows media player - all good so far. And then a warning pops up telling me I don't have a codec for it. Now, this is not new to me, divx comes to mind but not for DVDs on a supposedly advanced OS.

So I follow the link to the MS support site that informs me that "If you are running the Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise you might need to install a compatible DVD decoder before playing a DVD" and then helpfully gives me a link to purchase a DVD decoder. Among my options, I can upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate.

Great... ok, time to grab the mac and long power cord...

Well I guess I can finaly talk about some of the work I have been doing since I left RedBalloon as Microsoft have just posted case studies about them both.

The first is a Silverlight application that we built for the Orlando Magic.

We were working with our team in Orlando to see if it could be done. When a new technology come out, it is good to give it a whirl,so we did... Read Microsoft's case study about the Orlando Magic

and the second is a WPF/WCF App for the World Olympian Alliance. As WPF has been around for a while longer than Silverlight, this was a bit easier. We worked with our team in Amsterdam to come up with a sweet little desktop app that puts a huge chunk of community tools in one spot. Read Microsoft's Case study about World Olympian Alliance

So that is the first few months of the year... Now it is working on SSPN, a flex and flash app which I am sure I will talk about more later on this year...

Why is it that the DTD for the cross-domain policy file doesn't contain a definition for the 'to-ports' attribute when it is clearly recommended in the Flex 2 docs??

Surly it is not too hard to add to add one little snippet to the DTD??

Doesn't take much, and then my nice IDE (that understands such things as DTDs) would not constantly warn me that the attribute is not declared.

I know, it is a small thing but it is the only warning in my entire app! It would be nice if it would just go away...

A while ago, I started posting about SEO how to get more people to your blog but it tapered off, for two main reasons. 1. I got busy with work and other stuff 2. I felt like a fraud, I don't do SEO for a living, I just know what I would do to tweak my site.

Kieran from BWired called me out and said that maybe I was doing more to get myself in Google than I mentioned in my post and he is right, I do a whole heap of different things to help keep my SEO high even when I have not blogged in a while.

The simplest thing you can do, is to proactively feed Google information about your site. They have even made this easy for you by creating Google SiteMaps. Now, this is not as hard as it may seem at first glance. There is a very cool XML file that you can assemble that will tell Google all about absolutely everything on your site but if you are looking for quick and dirty SEO for your blog then just stick your RSS feed in as your sitemap and whamo, your job is done. Google now knows every time you make a new post.

The next thing to do is to verify that you own the site by either uploading a file to the site (they will give you the name of the specific file that they want you to use or you can add a meta-tag to the header of your web page. Either way, now Google trusts you and will report on exactly what it know about your site. If your site is anything like mine, this will tell you loads of good news (and a little bad news) that you can use to help tweak your site.