• While my blog was down last week, I finally finished Gears of War. I played thru on hardcore, but had to throttle back to casual to beat the last boss. I’d like to try and finish on hardcore, but I’ve moved on to Dead Rising – another game from last year I never had time to finish. I’m almost done the main play mode, though I understand there are other play modes that get unlocked when you finish it.
  • I’m forbidden from buying any new games before Christmas, so Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed and The Orange Box will have to wait. My next game will either be Blue Dragon, which a friend let me borrow, or R6:Vegas, yet another (but the last) game from last year I never got time to play.
  • I’ll skip the “giving thanks” jokes and point out that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 have shipped.  Soma has the announcement and both Scott Guthrie and Sam Gentile summarize what’s new. The Express editions are available from the new Express Developer Center. The VS SDK doesn’t appear to be released yet, but I’m sure it will be along in due course.
  • Speaking of VS SDK, CoDe Magazine did an entire issue on VS Extensibility which you can read online or download as PDF.
  • Nick Malik took a bunch of heat back in June for what some thought was a redefinition of Mort, one of the Developer Division personas. Now Paul Vick thinks it’s time to retire the Mort persona, primarily because of the negative connotation the name carries. His suggestion for a replacement is Ben (as in Franklin). And did you notice how similar Paul’s description of Mort is to what Nick described? I’d say some folks owe Nick an apology.
  • I said Friday I was going to take a closer look @ OpenID and OAuth. There’s an intro to OpenID on their wiki and Sam Ruby’s OpenID for non-SuperUsers seems to be the canonical source on implementing OpenID on your own blog. Frankly, reading the OpenID intro reminded me a lot of WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile. Does OpenID have the equivalent of an “active” mode?
  • Likewise, the Beginner’s Guide to OAuth series of posts by Eran Hammer-Lahav is a good intro to OAuth. The phrase “Jane notices she is now at a Faji page by looking at the browser URL” from the protocol walkthru makes me worry that OAuth is vulnerable to phishing. Having one of the OAuth authors call phishing victims careless and wishing for Karl Rove to “scare people into being more careful and smarter about what they do online” makes me think my fears are well grounded. I’m thinking maybe OAuth and OpenID aren’t quite ready to nail down WS-*’s coffin.
  • In researching OpenID, I came across this presentation hosted on SlideShare. I had never seen SlideShare before – it’s kinda like YouTube for presentations. Sharing basic presentations is kinda lame – there doesn’t appear to be any animation support, so the slides are basically pictures. However, they also support “slidecasting” where you sync slides to an audio file hosted elsewhere. That I like. I have a bunch of old decks + audio, maybe I’ll stick them up there.