Tag2Find

I haven't used this app yet, but the review on  TechCrunch looks very promising.  I signed up for the beta on their website, and expect (hope?) to hear back from them soon.

Other than the name (which I truly dislike), this looks to be a very valuable product.  I would gladly embrace the concept of tagging any object (be it email, file, calendar entry, etc.)  I kind of do something similar with categories in Outlook (for mail, contact, and calendar items).

I believe the real win here is to take a product like Tag2Find and have it utilize the native containers as opposed to keeping all the metadata in a separate db.  There are inherit pros and cons to this, but overall I like the concept of storing my tags in the keywords field of my Word document - not to mention products like Windows Search and Google Desktop could index off it as well.  For all I know, this thing does this now.  Until they email me an invite, I can only guess.. (hint, hint)

Join tag2find Beta

Get your SPF on!

So who woulda thunk that Microsoft would have a very slick SPF Record Setup Wizard up on their site.

If you're not familiar with SPF, or Sender Policy Framework for long, then give a quick read to this article on MSExchange.org.  Basically, SPF is a kludge of the DNS to try and provide authentication for where email is allowed to come from on a per domain basis.  Why is this ineffective, because I can buy my own domain name as a spammer (myspamname.com), send email from that domain (imaspammer@myspamname.com), and tell the world that the servers I'm spamming from are legit. :sigh:

I'd still recommend that any of you that own your own domain names setup your SPF entries to (help) ensure that your mail gets through.  I've used Google's GMail as a nice test bed for my SPF implementations as it is fast and will easily show you the full mail headers (including the SPF headers).

The 50 Worst REAL Video Game Names Of All Time

Thanks to the guys at GameRevolution.com who assembled the more than mildly amusing 50 Worst Video Game Names Of All Time.  Good for a 5 minute detour out of your busy  hectic  boring day.

This could easily be a picture of me...

So this little three year old kid wants a SpongeBob SquarePants doll, and decides to get one however he can.  Two minutes later his grandmother can't find him - oh wait, he's in the machine.  The picture here is priceless.  Good times.

The real bitch here is that he didn't get the damn doll.  At least not for lack of trying.  I'm assuming they gave him something, they just didn't have a SpongeBob doll (and Elmo wasn't cutting it). 

Running DOS on Vista?

So I was asked today if DOS would run on Vista, as both a consultant and staff IT manager stated that it would not.  My gut was to say "Yes, of course it will run," but I wanted to make sure my gut wasn't lying to me.  So here's how I wasted an hour of my day:

Microsoft says:

Q: Will my MS-DOS applications continue to run under Windows Vista without modification?
A: Yes, they will.

Great, thanks a lot Redmond.  But still, that’s a good start.  Since there will be two flavors of Vista architecture, 32-bit and 64-bit - and as I have heard rumors that there will not be an included cmd emulator (DOS emulator) in the 64-bit version (and I could see this being true, but I do not believe that MS will turn its back on DOS apps, not yet at least) I've worked up some options.

1. Stay on XP/2000.  XP Pro was released on 12/31/2001 (here), and their policy is 10 years of support (here) which keeps you fine until the start of 2012.
2. Move to Vista and run dosbox.  dosbox has been used by gamers to run old dos games for quite sometime, and works on Vista.  The guys at ExtremeTech did a write-up on it back in May 2006, and the only issues they found then were with graphics drivers (that legacy, non-gaming DOS apps wouldn’t require in most all cases).
3. Move to Vista and run DOS in a VMWare (corp site) or Microsoft Virtual PC environment. Most thorough compatibility chart evar, here.
4. Use one of the numerous other virtual machines that supports DOS.

That’s about as thorough of an analysis as I could pull off in less than 60 minutes of wasted time I don't have.  Looks like both their consultant and the staff IT guy are falling a bit short  a bit off the mark  mental midgets.