I have switched away from using Outlook once again for variety of reasons - as part of my latest attempts to reduce complexity and increase security (more on that later) and went back to Thunderbird/Web based email systems on all Windows machines. Conversion of address books was piece of cake this time, thanks to Plaxo which I use to synchronize Mac and Windows based systems. Nonetheless, I got curious what format does Thunderbird use for address book and this way I have discovered the awkward Mork file format.

Today's extension is from the area of - surprise surprise - security and privacy. I guess I am getting slightly paranoid from all the security related stuff I am listening to. But I promise I will switch back to "standard" TWIT, MacBreak and Windows Weekly to compensate the security heavy topics. But it certainly true that the more you are aware of what is technically possible, the more hostile Internet you will see .

I have worked through my listening to the Security Now! podcasts up to middle October now (more specifically up to here) and one remark from Steve Gibson forced me to think very hard: how today's hard drives encounter hundreds of read errors a day (actually Leo said "hundreds a minute"), but thanks to ECC process and dynamic reallocation of sectors, this is invisible to the user, because: " .... if a file is damaged because of a bad sector, it can recover that data by recovering the data, either moving it or kind of reformatting the sector underneath it to make it readable again .

It is now about 1 year since official release of C# 2.0 and .NET framework 2.0. The next version of C# language - the C# 3.0 seems to get more and more attention - in blogs, official channels and MSDN. There is lot of excitement and big expectations - but I have nagging feeling that the general direction of the C# development is not necessary an improvement. The main new features of the C# 3.

It's been almost 5 months now since I started to use Mac OS-X. During these months, I became very comfortable in the new environment and albeit I do not consider being a power user, I can do all I need with my Macbook and use it daily. Today I found out that yet another from my friends got a Mac. Great news, Thomas - hope you will enjoy your Macbook Pro as much as myself, Gabo and many others.