A colleague of mine has taken the noble and, simultaneously, entertaining opportunity to shave his head in support of cancer funding and research. He is currently working with the St. Baldrick's Foundation, which is an established non profit 501c organization that helps volunteers and donors see see how much fun it can be to support a serious cause. Young cancer patients and survivors see how many people care. And researchers see St. Baldrick's funds helping to find cures!

I have made a donation. Please make yours!

When crashes occur in the Windows XP environment there has always been this aggravating error reporting popup that allows you to decide to send this information to Microsoft. As a good Windows citizen I chose to send reports zealously ... anything to help keep my operating system of choice as stable as possible. After about the 30th time I realized that this was not something that I wanted to do every time.

I recently got this updated popup message that informed me that they have been storing my error. Now this should be noted as a marked improvement, because I generally do not want to send reports while I am dealing with a crash of any kind.

I was then hopeful that it would contain an option to always send the report and stop asking me every single time ... no luck ... I am just going to opt to Never send these reports and transform my self into an unresponsive citizen of the Windows world.

I have been a fan of the ieHTTPHeaders (v1.6) application for a couple of years now, it has been my HTTP sniffer of choice and has helped me debug a myriad of issues! I realized today, quite by accident, that there was a significant update late last year.

The two obvious (and maybe only) updates include the ability to filter your results by Content Type and HTTP Status code. This kind of filtering is critical, just go to any content rich website, like nba.com, and you will be inundated with a series of responses that you will probably have to copy to notepad just to complete an effective search.

Download here. This is nice ... very nice!

There are a great set of troubleshooting labs for .NET, seven in all, over at Tess' blog. It deals with different troubleshooting scenarios and provides step by step instructions for dealing with each of them. They do not take very long to set up and go through, and it really helps identify some of the core debugging issues.

Tess is a Microsoft employee who has been blogging about .NET debugging for years and she really has a great talent for troubleshooting.

I am taking a much more active look at the mobile\smart phone scene. I have been very happy with the quality of service provided by Alltel, however, I purchased the cheapest phone  I could at the time (text is painful, no camera, no IM, no blue tooth) and so I am way behind the technology curve. Our contract is up soon and we are eager to get a much better phone. I am eyeing the HTC Touch which seems to provide all the cool things I need with the exception of WiFi, apparently they dropped WiFi when they converted it from a GSM to CDMA model ;(

As this is a Windows Mobile Device I should be able to upgrade to the newest version (6.1) which was announced officially today. The main update that I am interested in seeing is the full Silverlight support which I saw a brief demo of during this years Mix.

According to the press release Microsoft has updated IE Mobile to support Adobe's Flash and H.264 streaming, which will make it possible for Windows Mobile devices to act more like regular browsers (iPhone nailed this concept out the gates). WM 6.1 will also make it easier to view full screen Web pages.

I understand nothing is really free, and in fact the cost of this Java runtime update would probably be staggering in terms of total man hours to produce. I am forced to wonder how much Google pay Sun to bootstrap an additional installation into the process? what is that cost?

I love the irony of an installation that has a popup screen that I cannot stop, advertising its own ability to 'Block annoying pop-up ads' ;)