So, life has a way of becoming interesting in chunks. I am sure the two subscribers to my RSS feed have probably left reading my blog a long while ago... :) Anyway, I have in the last couple of years, lost about 30lbs, worked with Java and J2EE and .NET and Ruby and some of Groovy and even some of Rails. All in all, as I said in the beginning, life has been interesting. Hopefully, I can begin to post more but, then again, I might not.

I have been busy with vacation (went to India for a month with a stop over at London), came back, deemed an "architect", got immersed in architechy work. Anyway, I am having a blast with the new role with SharePoint, J2EE, portals et al. Its fun. So, I decided to find myself a new blog post editor since w:blogger was no longer cutting it and it did not work very well for editing some stuff. So, I found " Windows Live Writer Beta ". Sweet, and it works with Community server too. I love it. The really

Here is a great way of implementing your next project. http://www.waterfall2006.com is conference at Niagara falls. Make sure that you pay attention to all course excerpts.

If you are one of those people who likes Firefox and starts IE only to test a page or two, There is a really neat extension at http://ietab.mozdev.org/ . IETab creates an embedded IE browser window within Firefox. You can just Right-click and select "view in IETab" to get it to be rendered by IE engine instead of gecko.

I got one of these when I went to PDC. Its one of those things that has basically removed all need for carrying zaurus , iPod and a Motorola phone in my pocket. I love it. I do have one issue with it though. It seems like it needs a soft-reset every few days. Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me, I wonder. Oh, I have telepottyphobia since I got this phone.

By getting Microsoft award for customer excellence , I am joining the illustrious crowd that includes Wallace McClure , Frans Bouma , Anand Narayanaswamy and Sam Gentile . When I saw the email initially, it looked too much like a phishing scheme. Then I thought, If a guy knows enough about me to know that I play with VS.NET 2005, respect Soma and like Microsoft more or less, I should hand him my personal details. :) Of course, I did a googled on it and found that it actually is a real award. Well

Voo2dotray has been updated by Robbie Coleman with many cleanups and enhancements. You can read more about it and download it here . Thank you Rob. Also, Shimon has posted his comments on this. It makes me proud to see that something I hacked together is actually usable :)

I found from Sam Gentile's blog about Martin Fowlers updated " The new methodology " article. Its an excellent read. It provides very good measures for going agile or not. If you are uncertain about agile, make sure you read " Should you go agile? " section. Quote: "The first step is to find suitable projects to try agile methods out with. Since agile methods are so fundamentally people-oriented, it's essential that you start with a team that wants to try and work in an agile way. Not just is a reluctant

Scott, in his usual style, has a blog entry regarding unhandled exceptions in ASP.NET 2.0. The gist of it is that if you have secondary threads in your ASP.NET app and you let an exception leak through, you are going to kill the asp.net worker process. That means, you better handle any exceptions that might arise from the secondary thread. Read more about it here: http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2005/12/14/2618.aspx BTW: This is applicable only to the secondary threads. If you are have unhandled

I ditched my attempts at using Zoundry for editing my msmvps.com posts. That and blogjet and other blog editors failed miserably for this. But, I found CSBlogger which works like a charm. Thank god! I cannot bear to edit stuff on web pages. I tend to get too distracted with them. But this is beautiful.