Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects.

There has been a lot of news blogged from this conference over the last few days.

I have summarised and provided links for the main things from my perspective as it affects me, our business and our clients. Some of this stuff wont impact our clients for several years, but its nice to be able to see glimpses of the future.

Live Mesh

Live Mesh shifted from Tech Preview to Beta in the last few days as we indicated a few days ago it would. However there was lots of good stuff talked about the mesh platform at PDC. Some of these links are about the new features in Beta and some are blogs from PDC.

From Sarah Perez:

I have written before at length about the stupidity of the government in attempting to filter the internet against pornography, or illegal content or in fact anything at all.

The subject of internet filtering and censorship has raised its ugly head here in Australia again. The internet and media has been buzzing in the last few days with the Rudd government’s minister for Telecommunications Stephen Conroy announcing mandatory internet filters.

This article from ZDNet with interviews from the leaders of three of Australia's largest internet service providers - Telstra Media's Justin Milne, iiNet's Michael Malone and Internode's Simon Hackett - summarises the technical legal and ethical arguments the best I have read so far.

More yummy cheese tasting reviews after the responses to the last cheese post.

LuLu – the blue cheese was from your request.

The King Island Dairy Roaring forties Blue cheese has a quite sharp taste, your definitely not overpowering. I have been eating this in sandwiches. Not crumbly yet not soft, sort of in between – a very nice smooth texture.

Here is the last lot of totally unrelated cool tools I have found.

The Coolest Tool I have found in a while is MCEBuddy.

MCEBuddy takes your LARGE Windows Media Center television recording (and other video) files and makes them small saving you disk space.  It also removes commercials and converts your recordings into formats that are usable on other systems and handheld devices.  It does all of this automatically with a minimum of fuss and little or no technical knowledge required.

This tool just works – it is awesome!