One of the features I was looking for, is the LINQ to XML capability of the .NET Framework 3.5. In [1] you find an overall introduction it this topic.

[1] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb308960.aspx

While charging an iPod on a Windows Vista system without having iTunes installed, you might face the issue that the iPod is not willing to play any music as long as it is charging. Therefore, simply choose Safely Remove Hardware from the Vista task tray.

There you select Generic volume and click Stop. In the second dialog do the same, select Generic volume and click Stop.

After a few seconds your iPod will re-start and awaiting your commands while it is still charging.

Windows Live Writer [1] is finally available.

[1] http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Being my favorite feed reader, RSS Bandit [1] seems to have a quite cool feature to share your feed list among multiple computers. Simply got to Tools / Options / Remote Storage and select dasBlog from the Protocol drop-down list.

dasBlog_7D2F/image3.png" atomicselection="true">dasBlog_7D2F/image_thumb3.png" width="320" border="0">

Therefore, you have to enable the Edit Web Service on your blog configuration.

dasBlog_7D2F/image9.png" width="320" border="0"> 

If did so, but actually nothing happened. The Edit Web Service URL seems to be right, activated and RSS Bandit does not provide any error message. Looks like some more digging is necessary...

[1] http://www.rssbandit.org/

I was told, Ivan Herman [1] is on of the exceptional speakers for RDF. So one of the "must reads" for RDF is his tutorial [2] [pdf] held at the WWW 2006 and another tutorial [3] available wt the W3C page. Of course I should not forget to mention the RDF Primer [4]. Finally, I was pointed to the SemWeb C# RDF Library [5] by Joshua Tauberer [6].

[1] http://ivanherman.wordpress.com/
[2] http://www.research.att.com/~chen/...
[3] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/Presentations/RDFTutorial/
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
[5] http://razor.occams.info/code/semweb/
[6] http://razor.occams.info/

The current issue of Communications of the ACM features an interesting article about the philosophies behind the two approaches covering components and services [1]. Both topics have been major parts of my studies in computer science and it's definitely worth thinking about since too often decisions about these kinds of architectures and which to choose are made on hypes rather than on facts.

[1] http://portal.acm.org/...

Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to the science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and how they are related [1].

If you start to dig a bit you'll realize a couple disillusioning facts:

The Web Ontology Language is there for quite a while. But there is no significant impact on Web Engineering, yet. RDF and thus OWL is not designed to be read by humans. But OWL is not supported out of the box, e.g. in the .NET framework. To design ontologies you would need an editor, but all you can find is Protégé [2]. Protégé is not bad at all, but the Protégé OWL documentation [3] roughly four years old. The only elaborate documentation on OWL is the W3C recommendation [4].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-guide-20040210/#Introduction
[2] http://protege.stanford.edu/
[3] http://www.co-ode.org/resources/tutorials/ProtegeOWLTutorial.pdf
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-guide-20040210/

Last week I took of a week to finish a couple of personal things, therefore nothing really interesting happened so far. There is a Windows Sidebar Refresh [1], which cold be worth a look. Reading Scott Hanselman's Reading to Be a Better Developer [2] I think about introducing a daily code-review hour. In fact I completely support that you become only a good coder if you read really a lot of code. Writing code is hard, reading it should hard, too. Really? Matthias had some thought on comments in source code [3] which is directly linked to writing code. Something to pick up later on.

Back to normal...

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/...
[2] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/...
[3] http://unmaintainable.wordpress.com/...

I already had some thoughts on designing "good" user interfaces [1] before even if you are not a designer. Now, I just found the SSW Rules to Better Interfaces [2] with a couple of interesting statements also to think about.

[1] http://blog.aheil.de/2007/04/27/WPFAndTheVistaUserExperience.aspx
[2] http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Standards/Rules/RulesToBetterInterfaces.aspx

... in Windows Vista to be fixed by KB 938979 [1] and KB 938194 [2] if you can't wait for Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979
[2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194