Anith Gopal

Why I do Time Tracking , by Swaroop C H.

The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To a Point) . A fair summary view of financial goings-on, with a bit of preaching at the end

I was on Tekzilla Episode 92 , interviewed by the lovely Veronica Belmont .

I was talking to some coworkers today about the scenarios for Forms Auth and Windows Auth in line of business applications.    We were having a debate about which was more common. As you might guess at Microsoft we are an all windows shop, so just about all our line of business applications use Windows auth, and I gotta say it is pretty nice not to have to remember a bunch of user names and passwords.   But I wonder if that is so common across the industry.. and even for companies that do use Windows Auth, I imagine there are scenarios where Forms auth is still important.  One place this manifests itself is in the project templates  for things like ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET WebForms, Silverlight, etc.  Should we be wiring these up to support Forms Auth by default (with a log inregister controls) or Windows Auth where those are not needed?

We’ve had a few folks write to the IEBlog asking ” How can I disable the little blue accelerator icon that appears when text is selected in a HTML page? “         For end users, the answer is straightforward: Click Tools > Internet Options > Advanced , and untick Display Accelerator button on selection inside the “Browsing” section of the list.  After doing so, the Accelerator icon will no longer appear in pages when you select text. Policy junkies can set a DWORD named SelectionActivityButtonDisable  with value 1 under  HKLMSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftInternet ExplorerServices to prevent users from changing the setting. While disabling the icon is straightforward for end-users, there’s no easy way for web developers to do so.  This stands in contrast to the “opt-out” mechanisms provided by some other legacy   features , which offered web developers the ability to disable certain end-user conveniences as desired.  When considering whether we should offer a mechanism for sites to “opt-out” of Accelerators, we were presented with an interesting tradeoff– should websites be allowed to disable features the user wants to use

We get asked on a pretty regular basis, how do you determine what features are added into the next release of Microsoft Dynamics GP? Or, do even look at the suggestions I post out on CustomerSource or PartnerSource

I had the opportunity to visit Necker Island and hang with some great folks including Sir Richard Branson , these pics are a collection of a day on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands.

I have some cool news: On Sunday the day after WordCamp San Francisco we’re going to host a WordPress developer day at the Automattic office on Pier 38.

If you haven’t heard of P2 yet, check out this quick video: Almost everyone at Automattic is a blogger, but for the first couple of years of the company we didn’t blog much internally. Everything happened over IRC, Skype, and email

PHPPowerPoint 0.1.0 was released last week, as an open-source PHP API for generating PPTX files, much like the PHPExcel API for XLSX files.  Maarten Balliauw has a blog post with more information, download links, and sample code. A new post at OpenXMLDeveloper.org covers the Simple OOXML Library , a set of classes that sit on top of the Open XML SDK to help developers create word-processing documents and spreadsheets quickly with minimal programming required.  The abstractions of this library make it possible to be immediately productive with Open XML even if you haven’t studied the details of the spec yet

To find out more follow the link: Microsoft Web Platform

This week, in a remarkable speech to the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama laid out a bold vision for America to maintain its global lead in innovation .  In his remarks, the President said, “Scientific innovation offers us a chance to achieve prosperity.  It has offered us benefits that have improved our health and our lives—improvements we take too easily for granted.” I could not agree more that America can’t take innovation for granted.  One of the most important ways we can ensure continued U.S. scientific leadership is to make needed reforms to our patent system.  I had the honor of testifying today at a hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in favor of the Patent Reform Act of 2009 (HR 1260).  My basic message was this:  At a time when we must do everything possible to stimulate economic growth and job creation, the flaws in our patent law drain resources away from research and job creation, and toward unjustified patent suits.  The longer we wait to address these widely acknowledged problems, the more we will sap the innovation and job creation potential of the tech industry