Photographer Matt Brandon was posting a worried blog entry about the future outlook of transporting valuable goods in airplanes. Think expensive photo equipment or laptops. Being forced to put these items into checked baggage usually equates with certain theft or damage.

Readers of Matt's blog quickly pointed out there are goods treated with care in todays's air travel: firearms. For domestic US flights, TSA regulations mandate these to be packed into a locked container.

So here's the punchline: Otherwise harmless "starter pistols" (those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets) do not require registration in the US, but are treated as "weapons" for airline purposes. One reader claims he is checking in his photo equipment along with such a starter pistol sind 2001 in one hard case - with excellent result. He claims it's very unlikely airlines can afford to "loose" guns. Too bad this won't work outside domestic US.

So, when are we going to see valuable/fragile checked goods as a standard airline service?

Kevin has updated his sample collection so it compiles and runs nicely under .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 (both on Windows Vista RC1 and Windows XP). You find a number of cool new controls like the animated graph control(above)...

...as well as the demo audiences favorites (the animated Kevin button) and...

...reworked classics like the tile panel, featuring smooth animated transitions. Check this out if you need really good examples on how to write your own WPF controls.

Based on a British technology called ElekTex fabric, finally we have the rollable keyboard, made of electroconductive cloth. It's wireless, it has drivers for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 (PocketPC and Smartphone), and at just £68.95 it seems reasonable priced for a bluetooth gadget.

The catch? You can pre-order it, but it will not ship for at least another 4 weeks.

Office B2TR is a huge improvement in terms speed and memory consumption. In fact, running on Windows Vista RC1 the combination of Office B2TR and Vista RC1 performs as well as XP on my 1GB RAM Toshiba Tecra M4 laptop. E.g., just running Outlook, task manager reports a total of 470-500MB of memory in use, even with Aero Glass enabled. The memory penalty when enabling Glass is totally gone in RC1.

Office presents a cleaned up Ribbon and a zillion little fixes and improvements over Beta 2. XPS and PDF export, however, is gone from the base package, you have to install the plugins already available for XPS export and PDF export.

This is really the first combination of Office and Vista Beta that beats running XP. Users of those 100+ Million Windows Vista PCs to be shipped in 2007 (according to IDC's crystal ball) will like it.

ATI: Catalyst Beta Driver for Windows Vista RC1

NVidia: ForceWare Release 95 Version: 96.33

Note: Both links point to drivers for Windows Vista RC1 (Build 5600) and above.

If you create and submit a file converter to XAML, you can win one of three Dell XPS M1710 laptops.

Here's the catch: It must be one of the following file formats, and you must submit your entry by October 29th.

Valid 2D input formats are: Adobe® Flash® (.SWF), Adobe Photoshop® (.PSD), or Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG).

Valid 3D input formats are: Autodesk® 3ds Max® (.3DS, .MAX), Autodesk AutoCAD® (.DXF), Microsoft DirectX® (.X), Autodesk/Alias® Wavefront® (.OBJ).

Your converter has to support at least one of the above file formats, chosen by the WPF developer community as the most popular input formats.

The file converter can be a standalone app or a plug-in, GUI or command line, and it must be freely available (source code is NOT required).

For more details, go to the Contest page on netfx3.com

On the machines I am using, performance (compared to XP on the same PC) varies wildly. My private desktop machine, a Dell 8300 Desktop with 2GB RAM, purchased in 2003, really shines. (Subjective) performance is noticeable better than XP.

I'm using two laptops, an Acer Ferrari (2GB RAM, X700 Video card) and a Toshiba M4 (1GB RAM, GeForce Go 6200). The Acer machines performs about as good on Vista as on XP, while the M4 was running noticeable slower compared to XP.

Important disclaimer: all performance statements reflect purely my personal observations. Keep also in mind that improvements in future Vista builds, drivers and or course firmware may totally change the situation before Windows Vista ships.

Obvious Choices

So, how to speed up the Thoshiba laptop? The obvious first choice would be to add memory, the second choice would be to change the hard drive. Quite a lot of colleagues swapped the low-RPM drives in their laptops (even in brand new ones) against 7200RPM drives with 8 or 16MB cache and reported huge performance improvements.

On small PCs, less is more

Since I did not want to modify the (company owned) laptop hardware, what are other tweaking options? Looking at resource usage (ResourceMonitor is a vast improvement over TaskManager) it is easy to spot features too resource- hungry for the Tecra M4 laptop.

Disabling Transparency in Aero Glass provides a huge relief in terms of memory and CPU. However, giving up Glass altogether and switching from "Windows Vista Aero" to "Windows Vista Basic" made the real difference. Even when running Office 2007 Beta and Visual Studio 2005 at the same time, the machine now performs at least as fast as on XP.

One more option I am using is ReadyBoost, improving performance by adding a USB Stick:

ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost is a simple way to speed up an existing PC by adding a USB Stick (or, in some machines, adding a SD Memory card). What ReadyBoost does, is caching portions of the pagefile on a USB Stick. (With flash prices going down, 2GB USB sticks are around for 40€ apiece, so this might be a great excuse to buy one)

People have argues that Disk transfer rates exceed Flash Memory transfer rates - which is true. However, random reads from Flash can be as much as 10x faster than random reads from your disk.

Still, you Flash memory/USB stick, USB controller etc. must provide a reasonable transfer rate for random reads. The only real way to find out, is benchmark random reads, and this is what Windows Vista does automatically.

Selecting a USB stick, and doing a right click/properties, you can select ReadyBoost and enable/disable it. Windows Vista will create a ReadyBoost cache file. This file will be used for small, random reads to the pagefile. A recommendation for the ReadyBoost cache is 1:1 (ReadyBoost:System Memory) for smaller machines, going up to 2.5:1 for bigger machines. There can be only one ReadyBoost file on a machine, and the ReadyBoost file can never be larger than 4GB.

ReadyBoost will improve things when the machine comes under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, in this case the PC will be noticeable more responsive. Even more details on ReadyBoost can be found in Tom Archer's Weblog.

The XML based formats can be identified by breaking up the extension as follows:

Office 2007 will use the XML based format, Office Open XML as default. However, there is a second new Zip-Container based format: XLSB contains binary .BIN files instead of XML files.

So, why yet another new format? Both XML and binary formats will support all features of Excel 2007 without exception. However, if you create insane large sheets, loading (and parsing) XML will take some time you can avoid by using XLSB.

So, what is "insane large"? Office 2007 increases the sheet size limits in dramatic ways:

Instead of 256 columns, you can now have 16384.
Instead of 64k rows, you can now have 1 Million rows in a sheet. These files may grow real large, and XLSB will load them faster than XLSX. (Once loaded, there will be no difference)

More Excel file format insides and new increased limits can be found on the Excel team blog.

The good News: Mr. .NET Rocks Carl Franklin will be there talking about RSS and also covering how to write efficient, multithreaded WinForms applications, utilizing all those multi-core CPU goodness. .NET Rocks will also do a Live show with a prominent guest (stay tuned for more) Don't miss it!

Oh yes, the Ticket: .NET Rocks will give away one complete Tech·Ed: Developers package (flight, hotel, Tech·Ed tickets). Look here for the contest, it can't miss it.

That's no longer true. In fact, today we can tell you're a scotch terrier, live north of London, enjoy chewing up your owner's shoes (including brand preference), crave for that special dog food, and have that odd obsession for Perdita from 101 Dalmatians.

Not convinced? These days the AOL search/privacy breach is a top news story.

Earlier this month, AOL posted "anonymized" data containing 20 Million search requests by some 250000+ individual users, collected of 3 months in 2006. While this may have been done with good intentions (to foster search engine research), the result is disastrous.

The data contains a numeric ID for individual users, the original search query string, the result clicked/followed (including ranking) and a timestamp. Most users do not disable/clear cookies for search engines, so you get a pretty interesting profile of their interests.

Worse, people tend to look up their names, related names, search for self-related data and web sites. Data mining these results will not only show trends, but may also expose private details. The original data set, roughly 0.4GB of compressed data is available from an endless list of mirrors by now and will never ever go away. Worse, the data can be queried online on a number of sites.

Software companies such a Microsoft have implemented privacy policies and have privacy statements by now. In fact, these will continue to evolve over the years to come, and be a crucial factor for consumer trust. User feedback is helping to shape software design, the privacy dialog in Windows Media player is a prime example.

Not so obvious: your hardware needs a defined level of privacy as well.

Examples: My laser printer includes near-invisible forensic watermarks (including serial number) on every page printed. Unless disabled, it transmits toner usage data to the manufacturer. Another one: My networked media center extender for audio playback queries the manufacturer home page at every startup (using it's serial number).

Most of these activities are harmless by itself, but combined they provide an increasingly complete picture.

Not convinced? Ever shopped books online? I do. Look what you can do to mine Amazon Wish lists (they are public by default).

The challenge: make it obvious what information is collected, how it could be used, and present users an easy way to opt in or out. Personalization is a great feature as long as you are in control.