Monday Morning Potpourri

After a busy week and a busier weekend, I came in early today to get a jump start on the week. Here are a few interesting things I found in my RSS feeds while sipping that first cup of coffee from the delicious Starbucks machine down the hall ...

Jensen Harris has a great post on the Recently Used Documents functionality in the 2007 Microsoft Office System. I love the way this works now! More items in the list, it's easy to distinguish identically named documents in different locations (is it me? I fought with this all the time in Office 2003), and a simple pushpin mechanism for making a document stay on the list.

Patrick Tisseghem covers some of the interesting details of how one can avoid TABLE elements in SharePoint pages. The TABLE is giving way to the DIV in web design, for a variety of reasons including ease of maintenance, flexibility of presentation, and non-text readers. If you've converted a web site from table-based layout to DIV-based layout that takes full advantage of CSS (or you're planning to do so "real soon now"), the links from Patrick's post make for interesting reading.

A few more odds and ends: Jeff Atwood's take on The power of "View Source" and how it has contributed to Javascript's popularity is good stuff, Blake Handler's Ultimate List of Free Office Software from Microsoft is a handy one-stop reference for free downloads, and I sure agree with Omar Shahine when he says "Too many people wrote about Writer today for me to link to any of them." So I'll just link to him. Check out Writer, it's a great example of a simple, focused tool that does one thing well: create and post blog entries.

Finally, my good friend Don Campbell points out that Google is providing free Wifi service to Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus. What's the world coming to?

Speaking of strange bedfellows, last week I demonstrated a Linux/Java/Tomcat/Apache application to folks from Apple, Novell, IBM and others, right here on the Redmond campus, as part of the Ecma TC45 meetings we hosted over in Building 20. The application creates an Open XML word-processing document on the fly, based on user's entries, without running a single line of Microsoft code or using any Microsoft products or APIs. Lots more on that application soon ...