The Daily Grind 542

By Mike Gunderloy
Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Another book is at last manuscript-complete, which means I can get back to catching up on other things. Like this.

Software

PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Released - A major upgrade to this open source database, including a native Windows port. (via Gadgetopia)
Altova DiffDog 2005 - New diff/merge utility from the XMLSPY folks. I took a quick look over at the Developer Central blog this morning.
newtelligence dasBlog Community Edition 1.7.5016.1 RELEASED! - Lots of improvements in this blogging software thanks largely to Omar Shahine and Scott Hanselman.
Scriptomatic 2.0 - Big improvements for the utility that automatically generates WMI scripts. Now supports Perl, Python, and JScript as well as the original VBScript.

User Choice, Customization, and Confusion - Some thoughts on application design from yours truly.
Nofollow in Firefox - How to alter your user stylesheet to display tags with the new rel="nofollow" attribute differently. I don't actually think this is going to be the silver bullet to stop comment spam that many in the blogging community are creaming themselves over, but it's worth a try.
Setting the Stage - (Warning! Link to Word document!) - Turns out that there is a transcript for at least the first episode of the Designing .NET Class Libraries series that I mentioned yesterday. I'm not sure requiring one to open the video to get the link to the download is really the best possible UI design. (thanks to Colin Coller for the tip)
More details on code behind v2 - Fritz Onion explains the current plan for how ASP.NET 2.0 will split things up into partial classes. I'm with those who find this needlessly complex and not worth changing the current model for.
Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS - New E-book that looks reasonably interesting. $39.95. (via Alex Barnett)

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