Folks with the PDC build of Longhorn might wanna check out Robert Wlodarczyk playing around with images in Avalon. He gives away the source and binaries so you can learn from his efforts.

Mary Jo Foley: it's not all about Linux.

"Windows is cool again, thanks to all the excitement around Longhorn."

She also points to the new Services for Unix that was released this week.

Robert McLaws also is raving about Tasklines, an add-on for Outlook 2003. I'll have to check this out. My task lists are getting longer lately.

Robert McLaws asks for help on how to fund a popular community site (Longhorn blogs). This is a common problem. It'll probably become a problem at some point for my blog. A year ago I only had a few hundred visitors a day. Yesterday I had 5400. In another year?

And Longhorn blogs had a lot more visits than I've been getting. Whew.

I'd rather the community figure this out, by the way, rather than Microsoft fund it. Why? Because that'll give the community a stronger voice and more independence (let's be honest, when you get money from any company, there are usually strings attached, and even if they aren't evil strings, there will be the perception that there are strings there). As of today Microsoft hasn't given a dollar to Longhorn blogs.

This isn't just a Microsoft issue, either. All companies have this issue if they have communities of users on the Web. So, this makes for an interesting discussion topic for all of us.

My traffic has doubled here lately. Yesterday had 5400 people show up. Welcome to all my new readers. You can see my referer page over to the right, so you can see who's pointing the most traffic to me.

Larry Larsen has been "painting" with his Tablet PC. I wish I were talented like that. I'll try to get him to talk about the software and technique he uses.