The Mailowl Scrolls

“Microsoft is challenging developers worldwide to create conversational robots, or BOTs, for MSN® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger. The most original, useful robots collect $40,000 in total prizes.”

This is one of the more interesting competitions Microsoft has run, the Invasion of the Robots Contest, and I’m very excited to see that it’s open to the [...]

If you do nothing else with your bandwidth this month at least download the “Who Is the Dick on My Site?” talk from the Emerging Technology Conference and watch the most amazing presentation I’ve ever seen.
Besides being a good overall view for the Microsoft’s CardSpace technology, Dick Hardt’s presentation is inspiring to anyone who’s taken [...]

I’ve blogged before about Prehysteria, a web based management game, and I’m happy to announce that this morning they’ve gone live with an open Beta which means everyone can now play!

Dion and Evan, the 2 creators of the game, have worked hard in the Alpha testing phase fixing bugs, adding new features like building structures, [...]

It’s one of those things where you don’t want to read other people’s experiences and try things for yourself.

The reason my BlackJack demo has come to a grind halt is because I was running on a Trial Version of Visual Studio 2005 and it expired. Because I’m off site and far from work, it’s [...]

Isn’t funny how the world turns? First Hilton mentions One Red Paperclip (a whacked out site where a guy is looking for trade for a house by starting with a trade for one red paperclip) and then I met someone who’s housemate has started the same thing but with One Matchstick!

Reading through the trade [...]

Yet another codename from the Microsoft camp; this was mentioned at a presentation at Dev Days 2006 and initially it threw me. I thought the next version of Visual Studio was “Orcas”.

But as it turns out, “Cider” is just the codename for the visual designer for Windows Presentation Foundation in the next Visual Studio [...]

So you’ve attended (or soon to attend if you’re in Cape Town) Dev Days 2006 and you got to see some of the exciting stuff coming out of Microsoft called WinFX. But now you’ve logged onto the website to download the stuff and you see it’s over 1GB!!! How are you going to [...]

You know, you get a very different experience when you attend these large events as a speaker or a sponsor. For one, you generally don’t get to go to all the sessions and two, you don’t qualify for any of the prizes. On the flip side the lunches are a lot nicer (and [...]

You know, the fire alarm just went off in our building and the only action that was taken was that my manager closed her office door so it wouldn’t disturb her phone call.

It’s truly scary that the safety alarm is seen as nothing more than an irritation and the procedures for keeping people alive is [...]

Aargh, I’m so far behind on my blogging! Honestly I don’t know how the likes of Julie Lerman and Robert Scoble manage to write 10 posts a day, when I barely main to get one out a week.

Nevertheless I need to tell you that the third issue of Dev.Mag (a free online South [...]