For all my fantasy-loving friends who consider reading in Czech or Polish too inconvenient: the first book of the grand master Andrzej Sapkowski in English is out. It is book of short stories about Geralt, the Hexer (or Witcher if you want), who is the main character of the 5-book saga with the same name. You can get it on Amazon.

Yes, such nice tool really exists and it's name is Remember the Milk. At first sight, RTM is not extremely visually appealing, but very nice and very usable Ajax application. After some time using it, you may better appreciate the "less is more" design. The offline access is thanks to Google Gears magic. Just flip the small green arrow (which will download your data to local cache) and voila - you can go offline, keep editing or adding tasks - your changes will be remembered.

I have been pretty quiet during last month. Few reasons why, none of them business related. The summer is not the season where people in our industry are incredibly busy - that's what winter is for ... and end of March, government fiscal year end ;-). We had family visit - my two nephews were staying with us for few weeks. So instead of blogging, I was spending evenings with them and weekends as a tour guide around Ottawa's attractions.

Once upon a time, there was an application named Democracy Player. A really neat one, capable of downloading videos from internet and playing them in multiple formats. It even can download YouTube videos. For some reason, the Democracy Player name was replaced with a new name. My name. The Democracy Player will be know as Miro. I have not discovered why this name was chosen, or if it means something. Maybe the guys responsible for it had similar thoughts as my parents over 40 years ago :-).

It's been over 10 months since we have started to seriously use virtualization and run Windows inside virtual machine to ease installation and configuration pain. It starting first as convenient measure of isolation two different development environments (.NET 1.1 based and .NET 2.0 based) and avoid "crosspolination" in the data analytics project. At that time, my expectations what would be the limits of what you can or cannot do in virtual environment were mostly around performance, responsiveness and device support (USB especially).