Some free ebooks from oreilly

Its not a comprehensive list, but oreilly has decided to open out some of their books. link.

Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some
people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or
subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a
particular open copyright. Maybe the book was written collectively by a
particular community, as in the case of our Community Press books.

On the whole I think this is a good idea. There are books I definitely want to read
1. Linux Device Drivers (both 2nd and 3rd editions)
2. Unix Text Processing
and to a lesser extent
3. Version Control using Subversion

Setting up a blog using Sharepoint

Sharepoint is great. It makes collaboration within and across teams really easy. I use it all the time at work. It takes a bit of effort to create a personal page on sharepoint though. Here's what I did.
1. Created a new site with my name
2. Modified the main page with only announcements and a contacts widget.
3. I added only myself to the contacts in the site and changed the display to Newspaper type.
4. The announcements widget automatically act like a blog!!!

Now that BillG ....

.... is leaving out come the ancedotes. Joel has a great one where he talks about his experience as a Program Manager of Excel. Apparently he was responsible for Visual Basic integration with Excel and had to go through a review with Bill Gates. link.

Webdav and box.net

Systems Boy has an excellent post on publishing ical calendars on the net using box.net. link.

Going further, I tried to find some tools that use webdav. One option is to use tcl vfs. However, this is pretty useless if one is behind a corporate firewall. Next I found a tool called cadaver. Again this doesn't have proxy support.

In the end hunting around, I found that IE itself supports webdav. The only thing is that they don't call it webdav. Instead they call it webfolders! Believe it or not this info comes from mozilla.

So here is what to do if you want to have a 1 GB of storage space on the net.
1. signup with box.net
2. start IE and do file->open "http://www.box.net/dav". Check the option for webfolders
3. Voila!! Now you can store/retrieve files from box.net!!

Give Maintenance its due

Coding Horror has a post about software maintenance. link.