I was deeply disappointed to discover, that .NET framework 2.0 didn’t contain XQuery implementation. Apparently, it was included in one of the earlier beta releases, but then was dropped by Microsoft in favour of the forthcoming LINQ project - some sort of blend between C# and Oracle’s Pro*C (probably much prettier than the latter).

I can’t say I buy their explanation on why it was done or their proposition to use XSLT as an alternative. Nonetheless, here I am, wishing to use XQuery in C# and .NET in general and without an implementation from Redmond.

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 has been released. To be honest, I don’t understand why the changes required a whole SP - the list is very short and doesn’t look all that important. Maybe the release notes are incomplete?

I tried to find manuals for Electrolux kitchen appliances in my new house. I was pleasantly surprised to find all of them on the manufacturer’s web site , with a search interface.

The web site has new look - share your comments!

The official build of Fedora Core 6 doesn’t include Firefox version 2, rather the outdated 1.5. Fortunately, a French RPM repository seems to fill the gap.

Apparently, you can also get Firefox 2 from the development branch of Fedora - simply run

yum -y --enablerepo=development update firefox

and it will install the fox.

To elaborate, this entry in the Fedora Project Wiki briefly explains, why there is no official Firefox 2 RPM build for Fedora 6 and gives a few other alternatives.

So, what is the software that I hate the most? The list could be long, but some applications are internal to places where I worked and are unknown to the rest of the world. From the familiar to an average Internet user things I can mention:

• Picasa - I already wrote about my feelings toward this bastrad child of Google
• Windows Media Player - I think its interface is not suitable for music playing and it consumes too much CPU time.
• Outlook Mail - it is really beyond me, why they cannot create a decent tree-like view of letter threads. Even their own Outlook Express can do it. I wish I could use something else at work
• Lotus Notes - this most ridiculous piece of garbage has found its way onto corporate workstations only due to IBM’s powerful marketing. It’s unusable even on modern machines - both from GUI and performance points of view
• Java (I can imagine huge virtual tomatoes thrown in my direction) - I still don’t understand why Sun cannot have neither proper performance nor normal graphics for GUIs. There are quite a few nice frameworks and libraries in Java, and I myself have made good living from programming it, but it doesn’t cause me to like the language and its current implementation anyway

To be continued, for sure…

At last, there is a downloadable beta of the Macromedia (now Adobe?) flash player 9 for Linux. For quite a long time release of the Linux version was lagging behind the Windows. Many popular web sites utilized features from the newer versions, and such sites were unusable on Linux.

Download the new plugin from here .

Property-related indexes are falling on LSE, according to an article in Financial Times. Many analytics mention in their comments, that current property prices in the UK are “unrealistic”. Maybe they have been talking about it for long enough to actually cause price drop in the end.

I have just installed AcdSee - and I can tell you it is way better than Google’s Picasa. Starting with the simple thing - full screen viewing, and down to the proper interface and all the rest. Picasa looks like a quick hack compared to the slick and polished feeling, provided by AcdSee, and the functionality of the later is very good as well. It will take me some time to get used to it, but I already enjoy the experience.

I am testing Drupal 5 beta. A lot of useful modules have not been upgraded yet, but using this page I was able to upgrade manually a few of them, including Google Search, Quicktags, Pathfilter and a few others.