Sort of a note to myself. I was on an e-mail thread last week with some people who couldn't play a video because they didn't have the appropriate codecs installed. This download should get a WMP installation up to date:

Codec Installation Package
This package can be used as an alternative to automatically downloading Windows Media Codecs, or to correct problems experienced with previously-downloaded codecs.

This went live Friday, but we didn't have time to get it headlined. Dino Esposito wrote a nice article for Kent and me that discusses some of the security features of ASP.NET. As usual with Dino, this is great stuff:

Take Advantage of ASP.NET Built-in Features to Fend Off Web Attacks
Dino summarizes the most common types of Web attacks and describes how Web developers can use built-in features of ASP.NET to increase security.

It seems like we just finished last season. :) Oh well, it was nice to get outside today, even if it was raining a bit.

I'm having a bit of trouble with the InfoPath SimpleBlogger tool I mentioned the other day. I'm having a problem with the time stamp on the postings. Maybe I missed something when I first ran the template? In any case, I really like using this tool for blog entries.

The funny thing about using this Moleskine to take some of my notes... I've become a much better note taker in OneNote. Here's what I think is going on: I don't write a ton of stuff in the Moleskine. I usually write "To Do:" and then I add a date and a list of stuff I need to do for the day. The Moleskine usually stays at my desk and I write things in it when I feel like it. I also check off stuff that I do on my To Do list. So this little notebook is what's replacing my post-it notes and assorted other pieces of paper when I need to write something down quickly.

OneNote, on the other hand, is my power application for capturing important, work-related information. This week I spent about 11 hours in meetings. I could probably fill a notebook every couple of weeks and what I would have at the end of a quarter is a beautiful stack of expensive little notebooks that I would never be able to find any information in. (And my little Moleskines deserve better than that.) So I'm finding that I'm using my OneNote for the larger meetings and I'm using my Moleskine for very small meetings where a laptop might be a bit of a distraction. If the information from the small meeting is something I need for later, or if I need to send out minutes, I type the notes into OneNote and I send them out directly from there.

So here's the breakdown as I experience it:

Moleskine - Small, convenient, personal, creative, beautiful, relaxing, analog, un-plugged OneNote - Powerful, effecient, organized, searchable, archivable, e-mailable, digital

YMMV :)

In answer to Steve's question about the best pen for a Moleskine, I was going to mention these great pigment pens that I used to get in the scrapbooking section of the hobby stores. (The idea being that pigment will last forever, where the dye in inks eventually fade.) Well, I actually found a pen that I like better and the price is really good. It's a Sanford uni-ball ONYX fine point. The ink is very dark and it dries very quickly. It looks like they have many varieties on the web site. I'm just using the cheap ones.

Scriptomatic is a very cool and useful utility that lets you generate all sorts of useful WMI scripts. This version lets you gen your scripts in VB, JScript, Python, and Perl. Give it a go here:

Scriptomatic 2.0
A completely new version of the famous Scriptomatic, the utility that writes WMI scripts for you. (And, in the process, teaches you the fundamental concepts behind writing WMI scripts for yourself.) Unlike its predecessor, Scriptomatic 2.0 isn’t limited to writing just VBScript scripts; instead, Scriptomatic 2.0 can write scripts in Perl, Python, or JScript as well. In addition, Scriptomatic 2.0 gives you a host of new output formats to use when running scripts, including saving data as plain-text, as a stand-alone Web page, or even as XML. Scriptomatic 2.0 handles arrays, it converts dates to a more readable format, and it works with all the WMI classes on your computer; on top of all that, it also writes scripts that can be run against multiple machines.

This is a self-extracting exe. Change the path to somewhere you can find the contents (like c:\scriptomatic) when you run it. Be sure to check out the read_me.doc file. It's very entertaining. :)