A Blog for Graymad

Shawn Morrissey's suggestion that the PDC organizers provide a comments RSS feed from the PDC sessions reminded me of one shortcoming of the online evaluation forms provided for this year's PDC. There was only one text field, and it was earmarked for a specific question. I would've really liked for them to provide a general comments field, so that attendees could provide whatever freeform feedback they thought was important. It's great for me as a speaker to see these kinds of comments, as they tend to be much more helpful than numeric averages, good or bad.

Shawn Morrissey apparently isn't very impressed with the quality of blogging from this year's PDC.

So, far, I'm fairly favorably impressed with the Motorola MPx200 SmartPhone. Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell whether that's an accurate impression because, thanks to some incredibly poor decision making on the part of AT&T, I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO TEST MAKING PHONE CALLS WITH IT!!!

Doug's mostly right when he says:

Since one of the attendees at my PDC pre-con asked about this, I thought I'd pass it along. I've updated the sample code from my ASP.NET Overview pre-con session to add the necessary code for performing authentication when sending mail using an SMTP server that requires authentication (and requiring authentication for your SMTP server is a Good Thing®).

If you run a mail server, it's important that you understand the concept of relaying. If you don't understand this concept, it's very likely that you will end up with an open relay, which will ultimately result in your mail domain being blacklisted once spammers find your server and start using it to send tons of UCE.

According to the Gematriculator, the PDC (based on the PDC web site) is 58% good and 42% evil. Microsoft itself (based on an analysis of Microsoft.com) is 73% good. Wonder what that says about Longhorn? :-)

No, it's not .NET, but it's the next best thing...a cool new Windows-powered gadget. It's in the process of charging up, but the first impression is that the screen is much nicer than I'd anticipated. It will be interesting to see how my wife likes using it (it's her phone), but she already loves how it looks.