ZDNet.com.au has a fairly good article on 64bit architecture and what it means for the average punter.

If you’re planning to invest in new computers, it’s worth considering whether to make the move to 64-bit technology. Does the extra scalability justify the expense?

Most of the article is dedicated to describing what 64 bit is and why it’s good and will soon take over the world, but the most useful bit I think is the last section:

Should you upgrade now?
If this technology is out there, and the industry is moving towards a 64-bit takeover, does that mean you should buy only 64-bit computers as you add new systems or replace old ones? The answer is (as is so often the case): it depends.

They go on to give a fairly good strategy for how to upgrade, and conclude that in the end, office workstations really don’t need to bother, yet. 

tags: 64Bit, CPU, ZDNet, Hardware

Nick Bradbury has released the latest version of FeedDemon, managing to yet again improve performance, along with some bug fixes & other enhancements.

Get it while it’s hot

tags: Nick Bradbury, FeedDemon, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers

Since I started working with .NET about 6 months ago, I’ve been subscribing to a growing list of MS/.NET related blogs (OPML available here). They’re mostly very good, with useful, technical articles on how to do a myriad of different things with .NET & other MS technologies. However, one thing I’ve noticed is a distinct lack of snark. Seriously, is the .NET development blogosphere completely populated with nice, agreeable people? Where is the ESR of .NET? Even when disagreeing with people, there seems to be a ‘Just the facts mam’ philosophy, where issues are addressed calmly & without emotion.

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Update: This is now redundant as the new release of FeedDemon detects Live Writer as a blogging client natively.

Microsoft have released a beta of their new blogging client ap, Windows Live Writer.  Haacked likes it, as does Hanselman, even if it does look a lot lke BlogJet.  For myself, I think it’s great, especially as, while it was designed for Spaces, it works with pretty much any blogging system.

The only annoying thing about it is that, unlike BlogJet, if you setup an ‘Blog this News Item’ command in FeedDemon to point to the writer executable, it doesn’t pick up the content from FeedDemon.  This is a pain, and hopefully will be fixed in a later release.  But if not Nick has said he will be sorting this out in the next release. Until then, I’ve got a little application that will act as a proxy between FeedDemon & Live Writer.

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Yesterday the covers came off the newest site I’ve been working on: Andrew’s P.A. Hire. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to do a site from scratch, so I’ve genuinely enjoyed this project. Andrew’s been doing sound & lighting for bands, entertainers and conferences around Sydney & all over Australia for ages, but only recently decided to get an online presence.

The site itself is driven by a slightly hacked version of Wordpress to display the pages and VaamYob’s great Custom Contact plugin. Wordpress makes for a very easy to customise CMS by using the static pages rather than the blog posts to create the content. Then the template system allows for complete control over the site’s design & layout.

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