Mad Props!

Here's a little one-liner to list out your all your Internet Explorer favorites:

gci $env:userprofile\favorites -rec -inc *.url |
    ? {select-string -inp $_ -quiet "^URL=http"} |
    select @{Name="Name"; Expression={[IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($_.FullName)}},
        @{Name="URL"; Expression={get-content $_ | ? {$_ -match "^URL=http"} | % {$_.Substring(4)}}}

Keith Hill has just announced the official 1.0 release of the PowerShell Community Extensions. This is a collection of handy cmdlets and functions for Windows PowerShell, and includes my provider for the Windows RSS Platform common feed store (which gives you a "feed:" drive on Vista, or if you have IE7 or Outlook 2007 installed).

Go grab it!

On this week's .NET Rocks, Richard Campbell made a really interesting comment. I believe he was quoting someone else, but the transcript's not up yet so I can't quote him directly. Instead, I'll paraphrase:

If your developers are silent, they're not being productive. Developers love to talk about their work. If they're being productive, you won't be able to shut 'em up.

I thought that was really insightful. Unfortunately, astute readers of Mabsterama will notice that my blog has been pretty quite for the past fortnight or so. Hmmm.

There's a nice restaurant in Albury called The Lounge. Sal and I go there every month or two - they have nice meals and great cakes for dessert.

Anyway, we went down there on Saturday night, and were greeted with a handwritten whiteboard sign out the front:

Emerse Your Sences

Wow. Three words, two errors. Really obvious errors, too.

Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't write "you're" to round out the trifekta.

As signwriters, those guys make really good restaurateurs.

Wow - madprops.org just had its 100th member sign up!

One hundred members might not sound like a lot, but when you consider that the whole site only consists of about four blogs and a few forums devoted entirely to Comicster, 100 is actually a pretty impressive figure.

Here's to the next 100! May they visit often and click on Google ads like maniacs!

This week's Veronica Mars had a reference to a character named P. Pitrelli who walked off a roof.

Coincidence?

On Friday, as part of a work social event, I tried golf for the first time. To be honest, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but that's probably because my 'team' (we played in teams of four) included our support manager Paul, who is actually pretty good at the game. I can see why golf is as popular as it is, but at the same time it seems like such a waste maintaining these huge expanses of greens when we live in a country that's struck by drought. I guess our priorities are a bit skewed.

Saturday night Sal and I took in The Prestige, which is the first of the "big three" movies that I've been waiting for (the other two being The Illusionist and The Fountain). The movies aren't related in any way, but I've kind of logically grouped them in my mind for some reason. Anyway, The Prestige totally lived up to the hype - a fantastic genre-defying film. Go see it. Now.

Steve Clayton posted last night about the availability of Microsoft's new Zune Software. This is the program that ships with their new Zune audio/video device (although I'm a little confused as to why they needed a whole new product instead of just using Windows Media Player).

Anyway, I had a look at the software's web page, and noticed that it supports QuickTime formats. Intrigued, I downloaded the software and installed it. Sure enough, I was able to play .mov files in a Windows-Media-Player-like environment!

So ...

Dear Microsoft,

Since you appear to have developed a codec for QuickTime video formats and AAC music files, can you please, please, please make it available to use in Windows Media Player?

I currently own an iPod, so I know I'll never truly be free of iTunes, but if you could find it in your heart to give me a QuickTime codec for Windows Media Player then I can at least sleep safe in the knowledge that I'll never have to run that crappy QuickTime Player ever, ever again.

Yours,
Matt

The official "RTW" (release to web) version of Windows PowerShell is now available! Check out the Windows PowerShell Team Blog for more details and download links.

This release is actually identical to the RC2 release, except with a new installer and licence agreement. The guys obviously did such a good job with RC2 that nothing needed to change. My FeedStoreProvider still works just fine without being recompiled or anything.

Well done, guys!

Paul Stovell has discovered that Windows Presentation Foundation uses its own font-smoothing algorithm rather than ClearType, and from the screenshots he has posted it's clearly (pardon the pun) inferior. (Hope you don't mind if I steal your image, Paul!)

This is a bit of a worry. ClearType makes text much more readable on most displays (particularly if you've customized it using the ClearType Tuner). It's a big step backwards if your whiz-bang WPF applications have blurry text compared to WinForms.