Unbelievable. Of course I had been warned about the amount of rain in Seattle before moving here. And figuring I had lived in South Florida for 6 years, I thought little else could top the frequent tropical rainstorms and floodings that I had experienced there. In Seattle it is not necesarily the amount of rain but it is this constant drizzle and grey, overcast skies that leads people to complain about the weather here. It really doesn't bother me too much.

It hasn't been cold enough for that rain to turn into snow yet, but it may happen tonight...temperatures are expected to fall so we may get a few inches of snow overnight... As of December 19th, 2005 it has not stopped raining and today marks the 26th day of consecutive rainfall. The record is 33 days and we are on the verge of breaking it...

Read more: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/...

Many moons have passed since I wrote my last entry and, of course, I can say I have been very busy, but that would just be an excuse.... I am going to (try) start writing again on an even more regular basis than I used to; also, because I have been writing mostly technical articles in the past mostly geared towards fellow developers, I feel I am leaving a lot out about other topics.

This blog is, after all, a personal blog about me and my thoughts and, although a geek at heart, I have opinions about other things other than geekstuff (believe it or not...).

For those few who do look for technical entries, don't panic...there will be plenty of it as usual... Enough said, let's see if it's true...

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, that's why I like cheat sheets.

They are quick references that feature the most commonly forgotten things on a specific topic. You can print them out and hang them on your wall, or just keep them handy in your bookmarks for quick reference.

Here are over 30 cheatsheets that developers might find useful...

Read more: http://www.petefreitag.com/...

Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded.

Read more: http://accent.gmu.edu/...

Google Maps (maps.google.com) is, without question, a very cool tool and very cleverly designed. Now that Google has recently added a feature that allows you to view a satellite view of the area in focus and exposed the application's API, we are seeing some impressive implementations of visualizing maps.

This particular one, allows you to superset a transparent "streetmap" over the satellite view.

Read more: http://www.kokogiak.com/...

A recent article by CNet hints that Microsoft is building software, code-named Atlas, that provides developers with tools designed to ease creation of AJAX-style applications. "Developers can use the Atlas software through Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 development tools and the Web development framework ASP.Net 2.0, both of which are expected to ship in November." But....then there is this comment from the folks at MSDN product feedback in reply to a suggestion of officially adding AJAX support to Whidbey/ASP.NET 2.0: "Thank you for your suggestion. AJAX is defininitely gaining attention and is something that the team has given thought to.

Considering where we are in the product cycle, I hope you'll understand that it wouldn't be possible to do this in Whidbey but we'll evaluate the suggestion for a future release" So, what is it? Will the AJAX support be a separate piece that somehow will still work with Visual Studio 2005 to create ASP.NET 2.0 applications?

Read more: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/...

This site lists free online computer science books and lecture notes, all of which are freely and legally available over the Internet. All the books listed on this site are available for free, as they are hosted on websites that belong to the authors or the publishers.

These authors publish their books for free to give you a chance to review their books, to get as much good information distributed as possible. So, if you like what you read online, you can always support the authors by buying the paperback at your local or online bookstores.

Read more: FreeTechBooks.com

On occasions I have to look for a particular filetype or need to filter out search results from my searches with Google and end up probably missing what I was looking for. I may not be writing my search query specific enough.

Of course I know there are some more operators besides the common ones, but didn't know exactly which. Nancy Blachman from The Google Guide has written a cheatsheet with the advanced operators to improve accuracy and speed in your searches with Google. A nice site overall with many other Google features...

Read more: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html 

I came across this large image gallery of general transportation mishaps. Mostly military and commercial aviation.

Some impressive, some very dumb...many painful. Like popcorn, I am sure you you won't be able to see just one image and won't stop till you've seen them all, but well worth.

Check it out.

Read more: http://www.micom.net/oops/

Personalized Google, a page with the same ol' search box, but with the addition of your personal selection of news stories (XML feeds). Although Microsoft is lightyears ahead with its implementation of my.msn.comwhich offers similar, but more complex features, it seems that they may want to go toe-to-toe with Google on this one.

I don't recall exactly how, but I stumbled upon this experimental search/XML feed news aggregator by Microsoft that uses Asynchroneous Javascript to refresh, collapse, expand and move the headline around. It is the same technology used by Google in maps.google.com that has proven quite efficient and robust and the site sure does look like it will do the same as Personalized Google...search and aggregate news feeds. You can fully customize the page with your own feeds.

Try it and I think you'll be impressed. Again, it is sort of in an experimental phase and I do not know what Microsoft is planning for it, but it certainly looks promising...and so does the fight that is brewing...

Read more: http://www.start.com/1/

It has been a while since I last posted and have been doing a lot of traveling lately, but I think the travel will be a bit less in the coming months.

In any case, I flew a couple of long flights to Amsterdam and Sydney and was lucky enough to receive decent to excellent seats. Seattle - Sydney alone was more than 18 hours alltogether and a good seat makes a big difference. Yep, even in coach class there are some good seats. If you want to find out which seats to ask for and which to avoid at all cost, check out SeatGuru.com.

They also have a mobile version for your mobile device so you can see what seat you are getting when they assign you seat 16C at the counter.

Read more: http://www.seatguru.com/

So, I have finally unpacked, started my job, sold my former house and settled in (somewhat). I am very excited about where I am at; I love the neighborhood, weather and environment.

The weather has been spectacular, allthough I have been told this winter has been an extraordinary pleasant winter. The mountain landscape is breathtaking and the drive to work relatively short and scenic.

I am very happy with my new job, the truly excellent team I am working with and the projects scheduled for this year.

The city of Snoqualmie is famous for its falls, which is only about 1 mile from my new house. The town is about 20 miles from bellevue and 25 miles from Seattle. Nicely located: far away from the downtowns, but still nearby should I need a downtown.

Anyways, this post is just to announce that I survived the moving process and am recovering nicely. I will be able to answer my emails again and will be working on some new experiments pretty soon.

Read more: http://www.sridge.com/

Ever wondered what coding standards are used at Microsoft?

Brad Abrams has posted Microsoft's own internal coding guidelines.

The guide and the posted comments are an interesting read.

Read more: Brad Abrams Blog

It has been a hectic few weeks and that is all part, of course, of the moving process. I have had more stress than I wanted to, but I hope it will be soon over. Tomorrow morning the moving truck comes to pickup all the stuff and drive it more than 3500 miles in a North Westerly direction towards Seattle.

I am really looking forward to this change and I will be back when I receive the things and have moved in...

I think I will miss South Florida somewhat, but right now I am really not thinking about it (I probably will during freezing nights and Nordic winter storms).

In any case, if I don't answer your email promptly , I am offline for the next week or so, probably worrying about closing dates, installing home utilities and the moving insurance I should have taken...

In this experiment I show how to take an URL of a regular image and then return a manipulated image with the looks of a polaroid picture. In other words, it requires retrieving and loading the image provided in the textbox into memory, convert the text provided in the textbox into a graphic, load a background image into memory and then putting it all together. Finally, rotate the finished image in memory and return to the browser as a binary stream.

All this on the fly...

Read more: http://www.miguelmoreno.net/...

World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data to experience Earth terrain (or any planet with the data) in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there. Virtually visit anyplace in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara.

The download of this phenomenal software is free, but is quite large at around 250Mb. You will also need a fast computer with plenty of memory and compatible 3D graphics acceleration. If that wasn't enough, you must also have broadband (I would not try this with anything less than that). The software allows you to set the detail of resolution. The whole planet can bee seen with a resolution detail of 7 meters (1 pixel == 7 square meters), whereas all of the US can be seen with 1 meter resolution. Some urban areas like Washington D.C., Fort Worth, Seattle and Orlando have a (color) resolution of .25 meters! That means that you can pinpoint a person walking on a sidewalk.

Download here: http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/ or check out the unofficial enthusiast website with user-submitted captures of interesting sites of our planet.

Not sure how I got to this page, but if you are stuck with ASP.NET or simply need to reference a particular topic, check out this large, large list of ASP.NET articles. There simply has GOT to be something to help you out.

The ASP.NET website is a large community site where you can find tons of information on anything regarding this popular technology.

There is also a page for quickstart tutorials that I keep bookmarked as well.

Read more: http://www.asp.net/Modules/MoreArticles.aspx

Have you ever thought about striking out on your own in consulting? This excellent, three-part article from Jonathan Goodyear outlines his experiences with going independent, and will hopefully help you get there too.

The first step is determining whether independent consulting is for you.

Read this three-part article to find out.

part I, Assessing Your Gumption...
part II, Marketing Yourself...
part III, Breaking Away...

Read more: AngryCoder.com

I rarely write about anything off-topic, but this requires a post...

"After reading a story in the NYT, Jim's wife Heidi came up with a method to fight back against the obnoxious cell phone users that we all have to deal with in stores, restaurants, trains and pretty much everywhere else.

That's right. We're tired of having to listen to your loud, obnoxious conversations. We don't care about your new haircut or what "he" might have said to you the night before. (We couldn't believe it either!) It doesn't interest us in the least whether or not you are going to attend the company Christmas party or when you need to pick up your ugly kids from soccer practice. No. We don't want to hear it.

We're fighting back..."

Read more: http://www.coudal.com/ or download the forms here

I thought I knew most of the keyboard shortcuts that my operating system provides me. What other shortcuts are there besides control-X (cut), control-C (copy) and control-V(paste)? Yes, there is control-Z (undo) and a few others, but that is pretty much it (so I thought...).

It appears there is a long, long list of quite useful keyboard shortcuts that I will now have to remember. This article describes them in detail.

Read more: http://support.microsoft.com/...