Jesse Ezell Blog

The IT Crowd

So, you really liked The IT Crowd when you downloaded the first episode. But, to your dismay the channel4 site now restricts downloads to only UK visitors? You're in luck, because Google video has all the episodes just waiting for you to download:

If you haven't seen the show, you should definately check it out. It is a riot.

Flash 8 Specs in QA

Here is the latest news from JD:

"Update: I've seen the document itself, and it has passed through legal and into QA testing. Text is about 300 pages. One change this time is that the license agreement is embedded within the document itself... in the past there have been problems with direct-linking to the download (bypassing the licensing agreement), and people copying files for those who haven't read the terms-of-use... this version requires Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) 6.0 or above to complete the in-document license agreement"

300 pages puts it about 100 pages longer than the current spec, so either they bumped up the font size or line spacing, or there is quite a bit of new content in there

Vista a Day Late

Looks like the next Vista CTP is coming on Feb 22 instead of today:

[1] http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1928820,00.asp

Stallman

Windows Mobile 5.0 + EVDO = Mmmmm

SWF 8 Specs Still Incoming

JD is still working on getting the updated SWF specs out to the public. Seems to be some hang-up with the legal team still, but here is the latest related news from Emmy (via JD):

Eggheads and the Sales Team

Thanks to Graham Elliott for passing this one along:

Flex 2 Free

So, Adobe has announced that they will be making Flex 2 available free. A lot of this probably has to do with the fact that Laszlo has been free for quite some time now:

It doesn't include the Flex Builder IDE (that should be somewhere under $1000) or the Enterprise Flex Server (you can use low level MSDE like version for free), but the decision to offer the framework at no cost is significant nonetheless. This means that the door is open for both 3rd party SWF generation tools to make use for the Flex framework and 3rd party server products to take the place of the Flex server. Keep an eye out, because I'm sure there are going to be some people that are smart enough to take advantage of this.

Windows RSS Platform

"Hello, Walter from the land of IE Program Managers here. You might have seen or read about the RSS functionality in the user interface of IE7 Beta 2 Preview. There is a bit more to it then just letting users subscribe and read feeds from the IE7 user interface. The RSS functionality in IE7 is "powered" by the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform API encapsulates 3 main components: Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store.

The RSS functionality in IE7 is built on top of these components. While we previously announced that the Windows RSS Platform would be available for Windows Vista, we are extremely pleased to announce that the Windows RSS Platform will also be available as part of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP 64-bit.

The Windows RSS Platform is available to any application. The idea is that applications can utilize the Windows RSS Platform to become RSS enabled without having to re-implement basic RSS building blocks. This can significantly reduce the time and effort application developers have to invest in order to integrate RSS into their programs."

IE7 Still Randomly Hangs