1) Bruce Schneier Bruce is author of several excellent books on cryptography, from very easy, thriller like read to a classic work Applied Cryptograhy (highly recommended). The blog goes back to 2004 and is fascinating read. 2) Paul Thurrott Paul is the Windows guy from Windows Weekly podcast (recommended) who also runs the Winsupersite . He is one of the few people who focus on Microsoft technology and still keep balanced, fair view of the affairs.

How to extend the life of the Vista trial period to 120 days: Technically, if you try to use Ultimate Edition (which is legally allowed to use in VM) nothing really can prevent an unscrupulous user to keep using Vista for free - for the price of re-installing the VM every 120 days ... Few Mac goodies: Adium is out in version 1.0 - get it here - more details on http://adiumx.

Back in stone age when most information available was actually printed on paper in forms of magazines and books , people experiencing the information overload invented techniques of speed reading to deal with it. It worked - mostly. Nowadays, we have most of the content coming to you through the browser window. Even if you can still speed read the web page, you can get even more speed advantage and quickly sort out the interesting content from the fluff by using the magic of news feeds, RSS, Atom and wonderful free tool Google Reader.

However I like the Web applications, the fact is that as soon as you do not have connectivity, they are of very little use. Well - maybe not for long. The Dojo Offline Toolkit makes promise that sounds almost too good to be true: Imagine a version of GMail with a “Work Offline” button on the left-hand side of the screen. When pressed, GMail downloads 100 of your most recent emails into Dojo Offline, including pieces of it’s user-interface.

In software industry there are no annual awards and recognitions of achievements that would resemble the Annual Academy Awards of the movie industry. Various magazines, publishers and companies do present theirs yearly list of Best Products, but they are often biased and seldom representative. The one list that stands apart and that in my opinion comes closest the Oscar is Jolt Awards published by used-to-be one of the best magazines for professional programmers - Dr Dobbs Journal.