This Old Code

Since I am still working on my blog about what I did for my winter break I thought I would share a couple items that I noticed in this morning.

Alfred Thompson's Blog talks about an issue I think of whenever I hear Spec documentation is being designed without customer involvement. And I found Scott Gu's announcement that the new Yahoo Messenger is build with WPF and .net rather interesting.

I picked up this issue from Mike Walker blog  where he reports that the US Secret Service is calling the ATM system unsafe after reading this post and the original report from Bob Sullivan's blog.  It Basically amounts the the fact that researchers that work for an Israeli computer security company have released a report in how the ATM network can be compromised in order to reveal PIN numbers.  ATM PIN's are essentially decrypted and encrypted on every network hop so if one machine is compromised it becomes simple to crack the PIN's encryption. And apparently this is some thing the Russian Mob is very interested in.  The Israely company release this report after being dismayed with the American Banks lack of action(Banks were informed of this security flaw in the ATM protocol 2 months before the release of the report.)

If you haven't seen it yet you might want to check out MSN radios new player powered by Pandora basically it will create a unique play list of music based on a song or artist you give it.  I have been playing with it for that past few days its been pretty cool.

Apologies to Mark Miller for a comment I left on his blog

Centro much like Small business server(code named cougar) is a bundle of several Microsoft technologies namely Longhorn(Vista server) Exchange Server 2007.  but targeted at business with 250 ish computers so larger then a small business but not an Enterprise.  Check out The SBS and Centro Community Lead Blog For Microsoft's explanation.

I am starting getting excited about WPF/E  finally there will need to deal with Flash just XAML. It runs on Windows and Mac plus IE, FireFox and Safari.  I don't see Opera in the list, we'll see.

Check out Microsoft's WPF/E Referances.  You can down load it from here.

Some  blogs of interest Joe Stegman’s “WPF/E” tales and Mike Harsh's Blog

Are we living in fear of our online world?

In regards to Quicken and Money are they really the only two Financial Management programs out there? Is there another simpler player?

The news in the tech mortgage industry consistently disappoints me.

Beware the answers are out there, you may just not like it.