Interested in all this AJAX business?  You should really check out JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).  Here's an article discussing the pros and cons of 3 different AJAX return formats: The AJAX response: XML, HTML, or JSON?

David Mohundro (aka "MO") set up his blog over the weekend: http://www.mohundro.com/blog.  Everyone say hello to David.

Under "Configuration" > "Appearance Settings" in dasBlog, there is a neat little option called "Use Post Title for Permalink."  This sounds like a good idea, right?  I thought so, so I turned it on.  Cool... it gets rid of that GUID-looking mess in your URLs when people (you) link to your site.  Life is good.  I updated my links to reflect their new descriptive URLs, but then I thought "I wonder how it handles non-alpha/numeric characters", so tried clicking on an example titled "Control-click + Taskbar = Awesome!".  Guess what!  "Page not found".  Bummer.  I just got done changing all my links back

Until the windows world is completely managed (never), .NET devs are going to have to get their heads wrapped around unmanaged resource cleanup.  Here are some good resources to get you started:

• Joe Duffy: Never write a finalizer again (well, almost never)
• Joe Duffy: Dispose, Finalization, and Resource Management
• Shawn Farkas: SafeHandle

In addition, Francesco Balena has posted a pattern that avoids most of the complexity of the disposable pattern.  For more, see his post.

A remind to anyone with a Hitachi Deskstar T7K250:

If you're expecting 3.0Gb/s performance, remember that you're not going to get it until you turn it on.  The drive ships in compatibility mode (1.5Gb/s) since some systems don't support 3.0.  Here the link to the utility that allows you to enable 3.0:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm