We get up early so that you don't have to.

The Daily Grind 392

By Mike Gunderloy
Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Sorry for the late Grind today...between software issues and recalcitrant toddlers it's not been a great morning.

Software

Spam Bully 2.0 - The commercial spam filter for Outlook that I was using before I switched to SpamBayes. I might have to switch back just for the pretty graphs.
Exchanger XML Editor 2.0 - Multi-platform XML editor that now includes XSLT debugging, WSDL analysis, XML signatures, and more. 85 euro shareware. (via Sonu Kapoor)

SPS 3000 Scanner - My latest new hardware toy, a barcode scanner sleeve for my iPaq 5550. After downloading 5MB of drivers it works perfectly, and seems quite well integrated. I love it when things just work.
Virtual Keyboard - And here's the next thing I want to get. I hadn't realized that the laser-based palmtop keyboards were actually shipping.

The Code Generation Network has a new interview with yours truly, as I further flog my latest book.
Rebuttal to Ken Brown - If you're a Microsoft-centric developer, you may not have been following the controversy surrounding Ken Brown's forthcoming book, in which he apparently argues that Linux was plagiarized rather than designed by Linus Torvalds. The book is being funded by the Alexis de Toqueville Institute, whose sources of cash are murky but apparently include Microsoft. Anyhow, this rebuttal comes from one of Brown's primary sources and basically calls him a stupid liar who is clearly grinding an ax.
Microsoft J2EE & .NET Interoperability Toolkit - eBook and sample code.

A minor correction to yesterday's rant: somehow I got it into my head that Compaq had eaten HP instead of the other way around. The Jornada, of course, is an HP product, not a Compaq one. Well, I never claimed to be able to tell a tail from a dog. I've gone back and fixed up the previous entry. Some other folks have also had comments on the state of tech support in response: James Avery mentions the decline in Dell tech support, Aaron Junod takes a much calmer look at a whole constellation of customer service issues (he's right, it's not fair to single out HP as the villain here), and John Armitage is doing battle with United. It used to be that if a big company pissed you off, you could tell your dozen nearest friends. Now you can tell a few million people over the Internet. I don't think customer service has caught up with this change.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.