Just singed up for another Web-based  social network, lifetime address book application [1].

[1] http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/

After I got several requests, I decided finally to join Facebook [1]. I am looking forward to investigating how to hook up information from Facebook within other (Web 2.0) applications.

[1] http://www.facebook.com/...

If you are going to un-install Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 due to the installation of  the final version, you should have a look at [1] to make sure you haven't missed anything during this procedure.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2007/11/20/how-to-uninstall-vs-2008-beta-2-before-installing-the-final-version-of-vs-2008.aspx

After switching from WEP to WPA2 (shame on my it took so long), of course I had to update several XP and Vista machines. However, the 360 made most trouble since I used a D-Link 700AP before which was configured as a wireless bridge. Since I run a Linksys WRT54GS as gateway, it seemed to be the easiest way to get a second device of the same kind to be set up as wireless bridge being flashed with an alternative firmware. However, I realized that there is a endless number of devices in this series [1]. After getting the device I had to figure out, the new device is version 7. Due to an change in the manufacturer firmware, the ROM size of the device was continuously reduced. At this time I thought about the fact, getting a WRT54G (which is the old hardware factor and Linux based) might have been the better choice. Now I simply replaced the existing device with version 4 with the new one. and the old one providing 4 MB of RAM became the wireless gateway.

There are a couple of alternative firmware projects for the WRT54GS. After reading though a couple of posts in various forums, it seemed that OpenWrt [2] is the best choice. In addition, X-Wrt [3] seemed to be suitable for easy setup. During the setup of OpenWrt I encountered several problems ending up in my router being bricked. So I had to recover the device using TFTP [4] and the original firmware [5].

After several failures and digging a bit more I found more and much better documentation on DD-WRT [6] including documentation for setting up wireless bridges [7]. While v23 does only support WPA2-mixed mode, I switched over to v24 RC4 which finally supports WAP2 Personal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrt54g
[2] http://openwrt.org/
[3] http://x-wrt.org/
[4] http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Recover_from_a_Bad_Flash
[5] http://www-de.linksys.com/...
[6] http://www.dd-wrt.com/
[7] http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge#WPA-Personal

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/...