It seems that my blog doesn't please everyone. I recently received a threatening package in the mail, as a blatant attempt to stop me from publicising my frank and open opinions. Sorry Scoble, but it looks like blogging isn't all good.

[I have documented the ensuing investigation here]

Exhibit 1: The Suspect Package, supposedly originating from 'The Looneys.Com World Headquarters.'

Exhibit 2: Suspect Contents of the Suspect Package

Exhibit 3: White Pearlescent Inner Package

Exhibit 3a: Ominous Green Message On White Inner Package. Handwriting experts chilling transliteration: "Thank you! Jason Looney." (believed to be the Jason Looney). Handwriting analysis indicates dangerous psychopathic ruminations.

Exhibit 3b: Curious Numbering: "9". Referred to as 'The Looney Code', this curious message has not yet been unraveled.

Exhibit 4: Brown Cylinder located inside white wrapping

Exhibit 4a: Isometric view of the brown cylnder. Note irregular sides, and some apparent 'melting' of brown material.

Exhibit 5: Introduction of expert tools for performing dissection and materials analysis. Accompanied by 'beverage-like' analysis tool.

Exhibit 6: Investigator notes that at this moment, the suspicious material begins to dissappear

Exhibit 7: Within moments, the suspicious material has completely vanished. Investigation concludes.

Background reading: Jason Looney has caused widespread fear and panic already using his notorious 'snackcakes for links' terror campaign, in which he punished online-publishers for mentioning his website, by sending them threatening snack-cake packages through the mail. It is believed that the incident described above, is the most recent examples of his villainous techniques.

Editor's note: I for one will not be silenced by Jason Looney's predictable scare tactics. I will continue to mention his name, and to send links to his website, without fear of further retributions. I won't back down, even if he instigates a 'box of Krispy Kreme donuts for links' program. His methods must be exposed. Such threats will only make me stronger in my resolve for complete and incorruptible journalistic integrity.

Last blog entry for the year i reckon. list of things i haven't released:

• quicklaunch and tasktray sharing meme
• cubicle back care, ten tips
• w3scg to be completed and 'launched'
• owner draw combo -- the full gamut
• asp.net hosted shell applciation
• 'kingShark' -- the ajax command line language
• forgiveness -- the pre-xsl parser language
• tixInBoxes -- the ajaxian wiki form engine
• skunkWorks -- overview
• exercise/social
• human versus computer
• modified online Game Of Life for two players

Summary of Year

• Changed job.

  Old job went bad. New job goes great. Kept friends at old job, didn't burn bridges: best of both worlds.

• Almost no holidays

  (still, did get to: Fraser Island, Hervey Bay, Bunya Mountains, Stanthorpe, Peregian Beach, Gold Coast, Melbourne et al.)

• favourite code:

  a software license validation webservice, and a reflection-based optimistic concurrency clash resolver

• unexpected wins:

  inclusion in best of software writing and winning larkware comp with timeSnapper

My mother complains every year that christmas has lost its true meaning. It's buried in the brightlights and the capitalism.

Last night I drove past a house where the christmas lights had been arranged into the name 'Jesus' and I thought that this was a particularly clever idea.

I went home and did the same thing, arranging my christmas lights so they said, simply 'Leon'. With a name like Jesus, i figure that guy must have been Spanish. A creative lot, your spaniards: look at Gaudi.

This is the beauty of Christmas: a time to just forget about all the world's problems and focus on yourself for once.

Ahhh. Hope that makes mum happy.

And if you haven't yet seen that "amazing christmas lights display set to music" that's doing the rounds, here's a link to it and another.

Someone over at microsoft's script central is in a festive mood, using puns in the titles of all the articles.

Did you know it takes fifteen muscles to laugh, but it only takes three muscles to groan?

MSH is an interesting thing... but if you haven't had time to read about it, don't worry. You are not inadequate.

found via the Daily Grind. (If you are a programmer, and you are on the internet every day, and you don't read the daily grind every day ... then maybe you are inadequate after all ;-) )

TimeSnapper now supports multiple monitors!

Atli and I have released the new version (1.6) which also has a bunch of other funky new features.

Multi Monitors was by far the most requested feature, and Atli was already working on it before we released the first version.

There's a groovy new TimeBar control, that lets you see your entire day's activity at a glance.

And a handy archiving feature to help you keep TimeSnapper under control.

The next wave of features are already in development, as the project rollicks along. If you have any suggestions, flames or ideas, drop by the TimeSnapper Google Group and tell us your thoughts.

Okay you sick bast*rd, microsoft, why are you trying to make me buy things?

The audacity of this one just floored me.

A "Shop for music online" button turned up inside windows explorer, where I was expecting to find the "Make a new folder" button.

On closer inspection, the tenuous excuse microsoft have for showing me this button: One of the subfolders contains a three kilobyte file called "ping.wav".

Ah, anyway: I see the future now...

Microsoft will eventually give away their operating system for free.

Absolutely free. Gratis. Not one dime. Oh -- just two small "features" you can't disable:

1. Digital rights management that stops all tinkering with the OS
2. Contextual ads absolutely everywhere.

Clippy will be a laughable and funny guy compared with the monsters of contextual intrusion that MS will release in this forthcoming monster.

WHo am I kidding? I'd still use it. And you probably would too. Maybe I should start tinkering with ReactOS.

So here's my contextual ad:

Check out TimeSnapper, a cool new tool we've built that helps you monitor the way you really work. You will be shocked.

How long should it take to give an overview of your product? Some people say five seconds, some people say twenty seconds.

DataObjects.NET have revolutionated the elevator pitch: they're going to give you an overview in just two to fours hours!

Here's the content from their Overview page:

Uh, yeh guys. I want to spend 4 hours reading through an animated (god help me!) powerpoint presentation.... infact, thanks to NADD, i lost interest before i even got to the word PowerPoint. Next product!

Intellisense is most useful when you know what the member name "starts" with. But what about when you know that the term contains a term... but you're not sure what the actual word is. The Intellisearch search box will cure that: enter a search term and it will highlight any terms that include that sequence of characters.

And I don't want you monkeys to go jumpin up and down saying 'Oh you should check out ReSharper' or leaping to conclusions saying 'CodeRush already does that!' because I don't think they do.

(okay, coderush has this navigation feature that is similar, but never mind that, sparky)

And as for that damn resharper, as brilliant as it is (and yes it's very brilliant) it's just far too sloooowwww on big projects. We've purchased it here but now we mostly turned it off. (One resilient developer continues to persevere with it.

Advertainment! Do you need to monitor your own computer use?

Check out TimeSnapper, a cool new tool we've built that takes screenshots of everything you do, all week long, and plays them back like a movie. It's light on memory and cheap on hard drive space. It's free for personal use and makes timesheets a snap. New version with multi monitor support arrives soon!

I use the Janus GridEx Grid control every day. And they have thousands and thousands of properties. You get lost looking through them.

What I'd like to see is a little textbox at the top of the "Control Designer" form (the form that lists these thousands of properties). Whatever you type in this text box is searched for and highlighted amongst the property names and values.

Aww i can't explain this good. Check out the screen shot I mocked up:

Damn this would save me some time. And everyone else who works with complex property pages.

(by the way, i think 'Findability precedes Usability' is a quote from Peter Morville. I am certain that it is available as a bumper sticker from Confusability [a usability blog])

Advertainment! Do you need to spy on someone monitor your own computer use? Check out TimeSnapper, a cool new tool we've built that takes screenshots of everything you do, all week long, and plays them back like a movie. It's light on memory and cheap on hard drive space. It's free for personal use and makes timesheets a snap.