A couple times a month, I get a Plaxo email from someone asking me to fill in my current contact information -- usually from someone I worked with in the past and with whom I haven't really stayed in touch. Plaxo is a service that lets you manage your contacts (as well as calendar, tasks, etc) and tries to ensure that your contact details stay up to date. It also lets you sync your data, via Outlook, across multiple machines. I can see that the contact-updater might be helpful these days, with email address and phone numbers constantly changing.

So every once in a while, someone (usually a former colleague) who uses Plaxo wants to update my contact details. That's great and they obviously had to have reasonably current details so that Plaxo could even get the update-request sent to me.

Here's what I don't like -- when I get an email from their service, it's an HTML form that I have to submit... back to Plaxo. In filling out the form, I also have all sorts of opt-in, tell-me-more-about-your-service options for Plaxo.

Do I really need to be added to yet another marketing list somewhere, just so that a former colleague has my current contact details? Up to now, I've deleted them when I get them. If you want to reach me and have my contact details, use those contact details to do it. I'm not all that hard to find.

So... am I missing some key piece with Plaxo? Am I being overly paranoid about having to fill out an online form just so that someone who's contacted me before can contact me again?

Eric Sink's blog has a new entry discussing the planned features for Vault 3.0. There are a few things on this list that I really like:

• Email notifications
• Improvements to DiffMerge
• Integration with their "new bug-tracking product, Dragnet".

... I like how he slipped that last one in the list. Given how happy we've been with Vault at work, I'd love to get some details on "Dragnet". Nothing of substance has been mentioned in their support forums, so I guess we wait.

We're currently using the open-source BugTracker.NET, which isn't bad... but having true source-control/issue-tracking integration would rock.

After doing a bunch of searching on CodeProject, I decided to see if there was a search plugin for Firefox that worked on that site. I couldn't find it, so I figured "how hard can it be?" and created my own. I'm not completely certain that it's as great as it could be, but for a first effort it seems to be working just fine.

To use it, download this file and then place the codeproject.* files into your "searchplugins" directory (under the Firefox program directory). Once you do, you should have "CodeProject" listed in your search engines, along with the little CodeProject mascot.

I'll submit it to the Mozilla project before long, but figured it can't hurt to get it out there and get some feedback. On this page, they mention that their turnaround time for making these available is sometimes a few weeks.

You can edit the .src file in a text editor to change the options used by CodeProject when you search. Let me know if you find any improvements or problems... enjoy!

It's been a couple/few weeks now since the version 1.0 Preview Release of Firefox was released. This weekend, I decided to look into it and see whether the various extensions I'm using had been updated.

Flashblock (blocks Flash/Shockwave media from loading/playing until I want it to)

Googlebar (the Google Toolbar for Firefox)

IEView (because not every site works outside of IE -- though there are ways to improve that!)

ChromEdit (Easy access to the customization files for Firefox)

Web Developer (A ton of developer-oriented tools)

Tabbrowser Extensions (customize the way those tabs look/behave)

All are installed and seem to be working fine on my laptop now... time to update my main dev machine, I guess. This blog entry will be my handy bookmark when I need to download/update these things. :)

Darrell Norton posted this snippet for Firefox on his blog and it works like a champ. MSDN pages that list code used to look like this in Firefox:

After adding the snippet below to userContent.css, it looks like this:

Here's the snippet to add to userContent.css. As Darrell mentions, using ChromeEdit is by far the best way to customize the Firefox customization files. Even finding them can be a trick at first...

/* Microsoft MSDN code stylesheet */
pre
{
   white-space: pre !important;
}

Sweet tip... thanks, Darrell!

Rob Howard's company, Telligent Systems, is looking for a professional services automation solution.

Scratch one vendor from the list.

Darwin in the business world... the response from the vendor is condescending, spelling/grammar errors, and vehemently anti-Microsoft. The latter point may not be a big deal by itself, but you'd think a Director of Sales would look up a prospect's web site... and maybe look at the "About" page. The first sentence:

Telligent is a solutions company with unique expertise and knowledge of the Microsoft Platform.

I've been subscribed to some Netflix RSS feeds for about a week now. Overall, it's not bad but I had to scale back what I was pulling into FeedDemon. I started with my queue, my recommendations, the Top 100, and the New Releases. The latter two are public feeds for everyone, while the two former feeds are specific to my account. My feelings on them have been:

Queue -- I've found this to be pointless and removed it from FD. RSS is great when I want to be notified that some content somewhere has changed. But when Michelle and I are the only ones changing that content (the queue itself), I don't see much point. Ditto for the "Recent Rental Activity" feed.

Recommendations -- This one is useful in that it puts some titles in front of me that I might no otherwise find. Overall, I find Netflix's recommendations engine to not be as accurate for me as Amazon's or the Suggestions engine in Tivo. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems that Netflix often recommends films that simply have the same actors/actresses as movies I've recently rated. If I'm a DeNiro or Coppola fan, chances are pretty good I already know about their movies...

Top 100 -- This one isn't bad either. It hasn't changed much and I'm not sure how often they recalculate their Top 100, but it's interesting to know what's getting a lot of requests.

New Releases -- I had to unsubscribe from this feed. Amazon's "New Releases" for DVDs (and Music, for that matter) highlights the new stuff that's likely to be of interest to many people. You can then drill down further to see the more obscure releases. The problem with this feed is that it's just a firehose of new releases. Bizarre documentaries, how-to and self-improvement titles, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like independent movies and some of the non-mainstream stuff... but when I'm reading my news in FD, I don't want to sift through 50-60 new titles every day on the off chance that I'll find one or two that seem interesting.

I've listened in on parts of the new Windows Forms series of webcasts, called "Soup to Nuts". They're well presented and the whole webcast deliver They've been fairly basic so far, but the sessions are organized to get more advanced as the series progresses. It seems that the .NET world was initially so focused on ASP.NET and web services, while good Winforms resources were relatively scarce. That's definitely changed, but a strong tutorial series like this is a welcome addition to the resource pool.

As an aside, the whole "webcast" experience has really improved over the last year or two. With the current MSFT webcasts, the streaming seems very stable and it's becoming less of a one-way experience -- you can respond to questions/polls from the presenter, submit questions for the presenter, send requests to speed up/slow down, and so on. Pretty cool.