Check it out Yes, it's reconditioned, but for $20, who cares? I'm really not sure what's going on over at Overstock.com, but they have four SCSI drives (9-36.5GB) for $36 or less.

Fire up your "must install on new development machine" list and get ready to add something else. Matt pointed me to an amazing little Visual Studio add-in called GhostDoc that produces amazingly accurate starter documentation for type members. Simply put the cursor on the member, press the hotkey and change the result, if required. A demo...

I've been using SpamArrest for about ten months and I'm still "lovin' it"[1]. I've written about my happiness a couple other times, and it keeps getting better. They've processed 32,080 emails and only three spam (out of 10,934) have made it to my inbox. Not too shabby. Giddiness aside, the latest cause for joy is that they now offer a...

Drinking buddy Matt is having a naming contest for one of his utils, WebDeploy. Win fabulous prizes and live forever (in the About box).

I've been a very happy Earthlink/Mindspring customer for years -- until today. My service has been down for 19 hours and I tried calling for help twice. Both times I didn't talk to the tech support guys for more than a minute. I had no idea what they were saying. I believe they were speaking English, but some dialect that I just can't...

While at Subway buying a carbalicious footlong sub this afternoon, I noticed a bag of carb-friendly Doritos. Diet fads are always good for a quick chuckle and these Doritos didn't disappoint. 1/2 the fat, 1/2 the carbs, etc. But wait, there's more! Oops, I mean less. The bag weighed in at one ounce. That's 40+% less than the other bag. Net...

I just noticed that my DSL connection is running at 300+ kB/s -- I'd never gone over 160 before. Now I feel like I need to find big things to download (I've already grabbed the VS2k5 beta), much like I feel I need to print things when I get a new printer, download fancy game demos when I get a new video card, etc. Thanks, Earthlink!  

A sign of things to come. From the VS Express install notes: Windows XP SP2 Issue: On a computer running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the Web download will fail, as the firewall is enabled by default. Workaround: Disable the firewall and check to make sure the Proxy settings are enabled. This can be checked by opening Internet Explorer. On...

It must be salary survey time -- I've seen a bunch roll through my inbox lately. Enterprise Systems Magazine has a section for “Programmer/Analysts” in theirs and lists the following “programming environments“, with salaries from highest to lowest: Mainframe XML C/C++ COBOL Java VB XML? People are still listing...

Bad-Ass MC Jon Galloway commented that he has a "friend" that isn't familiar with the differences between Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I've only used Virtual Server for a few hours, but rather than do some research for the facts, I'll tell you what I think I know. Random points of interest: They use the same file format, so you can...

I've used VirtualPC and VMWare for quite a while now, but just today got an OS running on Virtual Server. There's nothing like a disposable box, and we needed it: SharePoint “trashed” a multi-use server and today trashed the Virtual Server[1]. No worries, though, just make another! (Or, as will be the practice moving forward,...

Today's news of the new Team features in VS 2005 are certainly compelling, but the most important feature has yet to be disclosed (AFAIK): Is Microsoft using the new source control? If not, will they when it's more mature (before RTM)? It's no secret that products that aren't dogfooded aren't as good as they could be. VSS is a prime example of...

Martin Fowler has updated his IsAgileForAll bliki entry with a pointer to a fellow that should know: He teaches a class that uses both.

Excellent!  Read all about it. One great feature is the “generic test”, which lets you run an external app as a test. This should help cut-over time from existing apps like NUnit to the new framework. Update: Jesse Ezell points to a bunch of screen-capture demos showing off the new features of VS 2005, including three test...

Getting the type of a parameter passed by value via reflection is simple; however, if the parameter is a ref or out, the story's a bit different. For example, a ref or out DateTime parameter's type is actually DateTime&, which is not the same as DateTime and type equality comparisons will fail. Luckily for us, the solution is easy. Instead...